I’m never gonna say no to more Shin Megami Tensei. Soul Hackers was a pretty decent spin-off for Sega Saturn (actually a spin-off of another spin-off called Devil Summoner). It never got localized until an improved port for 3DS, which I had some fun with. Not the best of SMT, but decent enough.

I was pretty excited to see a new one, but I was really confused at the lack of a Switch version. So I grabbed it on PC. It was pretty clear it would be a bit different from the previous one.

So let’s go, see if it’s fun!

Developer and Publisher: Atlus
Release date: August 26, 2022
Platforms: PC, PS4, Xbone, PS5, Xbox X/S (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Console-style RPG

Review

So the story! Some weird sentient supercomputer called Aion (the origin and location of it is vague and makes no sense story-wise) uses its great computing power to find out at the world is about to end it creates 2 almost-human robots, Ringo and Figue, complete with their own unique personalities, to go into the world and prevent the end of the world. Their main goal is to protect 2 key people who are apparently instrumental to saving the world. Onda, a scientist, and Arrow, a member of Yatagarasu, one of the big groups of devil summoners. Figue happens upon Onda’s lab right after he already died, and Ringo, after discussing that with Figue through comms, happens to be right next to Arrow’s dead body. Nice job Aion. Ringo knows she needs Arrow to save the world, so she performs a Soul Hack to reattach his soul to his body and, as such, bringing him back to life (which even heals his fatal wounds). Ringo finds out they need to find Covenants, these 5 spiritual… things… They attach themselves to humans and can be used to attain great power, but also to end the world. They must prevent the Phantom Society from gathering all 5, though the great predictive power of Aion is pretty weak and they fuck up with 2 of the other Covenant holders, Milady (who is found dead not long after Arrow’s dead body) and Saizo (also found dead). Milady and Saizo are both also soul hacked back to life, and they join in the battle to fight Iron Mask and his bodyguard-looking dude.

The game isn’t quite as story-focused as I expected. Figue and Ringo aren’t humans, but get to learn about humanity and develop actually very nicely, but the other characters I’d say are pretty under-written. Arrow gets a bit of backstory but doesn’t really change at all even after a big twist. Milady gets a few good moments but is fairly underused, and Saizo is just happy to be there. There’s a couple twists here and there, that aren’t really foreshadowed at all. There’s a few enemies in the final dungeon that you’re supposed to be a bit scared of, but they’re literally never mentioned until you actually fight them. Like, you hear about Grand Executioners minutes before you fight one, or there’s this one guy that’s just meant to be stronger than you who’s just… there… It’s just really weird worldbuilding. Oh and there’s a couple small plot holes, specifically to do with the time Ringo meets Arrow (like, how did she not hear him getting killed literal meters away, and there’s something else that I won’t mention because of spoilers).

Don’t really have much to say about the game technically. The graphics look really nice stylistically, but with a 5800X and a 3080, I shouldn’t see Switch-style anti-aliasing on the models (Switch doesn’t really DO anti-aliasing), and there’s some weird blurriness to a lot of the environment textures, some with a faux film grain effect for some reason (which film grain isn’t much of a thing for the rest of the game). I was running the game at ~350fps the whole time, so yeah, no problem there. The consoles likely all have no issue running it at 60fps. I really wonder what in here was so demanding that Atlus decided not to make a Switch version. Xenoblade 3 looks considerably more impressive than Soul Hackers 2, especially with the hardware at play here. It certainly gives the impression of a game made in the PS3 era, with the lack of a world to explore and the game always taking place in small enclosed areas.

The localization is generally not bad, surprisingly. There’s some moments that are pretty awful, like anything related to the first boss, who is a rapper. He does some fun japanese rap stuff in japanese of course with a slight over-the-top attitude, but in the localization some of the lines are WAY off, and instead of mocking him using rapper lines like she does in japanese, Ringo uses a stale internet meme. But yeah, most of the time, what is being said in japanese is what is being translated in english.  I’m kinda surprised honestly. There is one part where hell is referenced in japanese but not in the english translation, and I’m sure if I dug a bit I’d find a bunch of smaller annoying things, but it’s not like Xenoblade 3 where literally every line was fucked entirely. I will continue saying that localizers need to make sure they’re more accurate to the japanese version more than they are now, and shouldn’t be inserting bullshit and memes in the localized versions.

In my Xenoblade 3 review, I mentioned that Xenoblade was a more classic-style JRPG, while Soul Hackers 2 would be an example of a “modern” JRPG. The big thing that differentiates them is the overall game flow. Rather than a world to explore, this is the Persona style, where the world is a set of options in a menu, the non-dungeon areas are very small and empty, and there’s a couple shops to go to. The NPCs in the town areas have basically nothing to say unless you have quests that involves talking to people. So the other selections in the area menu are Aion (which… I have no idea where it is but people can go in there… it features dungeons to power up your characters), the safehouse (to heal and eat food) and the few dungeons. Some of the dungeon themes are re-used which is a bit meh, but the dungeons themselves are fine.

Some dungeons have puzzles, such as gates that alternate between opening and closing when you pass through an open one, some have teleporters, some have water currents you can change the flow of, some are just a lot of alternate paths. One thing you do in dungeons almost from the start is send out your demons to do recon. Basically this is a replacement for having treasure chests. One of your demons will be hanging around a random spot, with an icon over their head. It will provide something different based on the icon. Healing, materials, sidequest-related items (some of them aren’t for sidequests but they just open up a conversation at the bar) and you can recruit demons. Rather than negotiating with demons during battle, they come up this way. Sometimes one of your demons pops up in a previously-empty spot after a battle, so fighting increases odds of getting demons. When you get one of these, it’s negotiating time… Negotiating is extremely simplified compared to other SMT games, unfortunately. The demon will ask for one thing, and if you give it, they join. Any effect that makes negotiations “easier” will just be the demon asking for something less rare. Of course, a demon won’t join you if their level is lower than them. And if a demon has stars around their icon, that usually denotes rarity (which is especially true for materials). An interesting thing of course is that, since there’s no chests, that means going back into a dungeon means your demons are gonna be doing their thing even if you revisit a dungeon.

Combat is fairly standard. Just one minor problem the characters in battle stand in the order: Saizo, Arrow, Ringo, Milady. But the icons at the bottom on the screen (with the HP and MP and portraits) are ordered Ringo, Arrow, Milady, Saizo. A completely different order other than Arrow. This certainly adds a bit of unneeded confusion. Anyways, you start combat by seeing enemy icons in the dungeon. Red is normal enemies, grey is strong enemies and gold is rare enemies that give good items to sell for lots of money. You can hit these icons with your sword, which knocks down red and gold enemies. The grey ones just get pushed back and will start running at you again. They ARE very strong though and not really worth fighting. Turns are team-based, so you get a turn, then the enemy. So the speed stat is actually fairly pointless as far as determining order of action since your characters will all do something before the enemies anyways (though that’s not the only use of the agility stat so whatever).

This does not use the Push Turn system you frequently see in SMT games. Instead this uses the Stack system. When hitting an enemy’s weakness, this summons your currently-equipped demon (or one in storage in some cases). The more demons you stack, the better the effect. Once your turn ends, if you have demons stacked, you launch a Sabbath, which essentially is a big attack that hits all enemies. Some demons might have special sabbath abilities, so if you have demons with those, you’ll be able to select which ability to launch (it can be healing based on damage, extra damage, MP drain, stealing items and money). As you power up, you may get additional ways to add to stacks, such as crits, or more stacks for certain elements and such. As for you, if you get hit for your weakness, you just get more damage, there’s no additional effect, or “counter-stacks” or anything like that. Also hitting a resisted element doesn’t affect you negatively like the Push Turn system did, you just deal less damage (or it’s blocked, or reflected).

You actions in battle are pretty straightforward. Items, guarding, running away and skills. Skills are based on which demon you have equipped to the character, plus a standard attack from the character’s weapon (Saizo and Arrow have gun attacks, Ringo and Milady have melee attacks). There’s an “Assist” options if you don’t want to think, which will just select what the game thinks is the optimal choice as far as weaknesses and such. Don’t use it, it’s dumb. Also there’s something called Commander Skills. You get those from one of the shops, they’re special skills which have a certain amount of turns for cooldown. These can be used on any characters’ turn, as long as Ringo is alive. They can allow to switch demons during battle, resist status effects, boost defense, give more actions, and my favorite is the one that gives extra stacks when you attack during a turn. You can only use one commander skill per turn. And there’s also some “auto commander skills” that may or may not activate during a fight when your team’s turn starts.

Not much else to mention about combat, as anything else would be more about preparation. You basically try to hit weaknesses (which you get under the enemy when you target them, if you found them previously… otherwise you get) to get good stacks to deal good damage, and use commander skills at the right time, sometimes to switch demons to adapt for certain enemies that your current lineup might not be built to deal with. It’s pretty fun combat overall.

So there’s a few shops you get to interact with. You get access to most of them pretty quickly.

Tatara (best girl FYI) runs the COMP store, basically a place where you upgrade the characters’ weapons. Upgrades can be stat increases, or new passive effects such as ways to get more stacks or increased crits or higher damage with certain conditions and such. Each upgrade costs money, but also materials. There’s always some kind of base material, usually gotten from your demon recons (or killing bosses), and materials from killing demons. This is also where you unlock commander skills.

There’s 3 item stores. There one that just sells stuff for money but it’s pretty basic, cheap stuff (still useful especially early on). There’s one that sells accessories, also for money. The other sells what I’d say are better items (this is where you can get stuff like revival beads and bead chains, for example), but these require specific items (both from demon recons and from killing demons) to buy, so that shop is a bit rougher to use at first.

You can fuse demons, because this is SMT. This functions much like it does in usual SMT fare. Choose 2 demons and get a new one, with some of the skills transfering from the “parents”. You can add demons you previously found to your compendium, so if you use them in fusions or delete them from your team, you can get them back for money, or use them for fusions even if you don’t currently have them in your roster, which is very nice. I always prefer using the Search Fusion option, which basically just shows you all the possible fusions you can do, but you can also filter for demons that might have specific types of attacks or resistances.

And there’s Club Cretaceous, this is the place that gives you sidequests. Sidequests are the usual fair. There’s not too much “just talk to X person” quests, it’s mostly killing demons and finding objects. Yay? I’d say a lot of the rewards for quests are kinda meh.

How you power up your characters is fairly straightforward. Mainly, you level up when you get EXP. Fun! There’s no selecting stats when leveling like in other SMT games, so the stat boosts I think are pre-determined for each character. You equip one demon per character, which means fusion is super important as you progress (and, demons also level up independently of the characters, though they get less EXP if they’re not equipped). You can equip one accessory per character, which increases your base defense, alongside probably having buffs and nerfs to certain stats. You can equip Mistiques (you can have I think up to 3 slots for these) which are these kinda gems you get when a demon learns all his innate skills (and then randomly when they level up otherwise). Those generally power up skills of specific elements. They can give a percentage of extra power, a lowering of MP cost, extra power at the cost of MP cost being higher.

Another power up method is the Soul Matrix. These are dungeons you can go into for the characters that Ringo soul hacked. There’s demons in there, for regular leveling up, as well as Demon Recon allowing you to get materials and demons. But, more importantly, there’s stairs you can fix. Fixing the stairs requires enough friendship with the character (which you get from hanging out at the bar and from dialogue choices). Sometimes you’ll get boss fights after the stairs, sometimes just progression through the dungeon. But what you always get from the stairs is power-ups, which are actually kinda similar to the power-ups you can get at the COMP store. When you select a skill, it will show you what skills will unlock next time you fix a set of stairs for that character, so you can plan ahead. Sometimes a choice you might not like can open up a more interesting skill for next time. Ringo also gets some of these upgrades, though I’m not exactly sure how that works (she doesn’t have her own dungeon).

Guess before I finish that I’ll talk about a few notes I took as I was playing. Fairly minor problems, but problems nonetheless. Walking doesn’t work well. You don’t have a run feature, any walking starts slow and ramps up to a run that is still a bit slow. If you stop moving, Ringo takes ~9 extra steps before stopping. It’s really weird. If you talk to someone while running, you’ll keep running anyways for those 9 steps. If you enter a door while running, you’ll keep moving after coming out the door (sometimes in weird directions, I’ve had her moonwalk a few times). There’s one case where I talked to a demon and kept walking, but I started pushing the demon while the conversation was going. I ended up placing the demon in a spot where I couldn’t talk to it anymore, so I had to change floors in the dungeon and come back to have that demon reload in a spot I could talk to it. Weird! How do you fuck up walking like this? Another thing that doesn’t work is the zoomed-in minimap. You’re meant to be able to move it around with the d-pad. Moving it left and down works. Up and right doesn’t. Weird! Also I noticed the display resolution messes up when you game over and return to the title screen, which causes really strange issues if you play in borderless window mode. Very strange. There’s also a few times (usually when I’d alt-tab out into the game, but not always) where the game would show 2 framerate/temperature counters through MSI Afterburner’s on-screen display, telling me there may have been something else running on top of the game. Not sure what that may have been, there’s nothing in the task manager, so might have just been a weird glitch with MSI Afterburner… I hope that’s all it is.

Overall

I had fun with this game. The combat is pretty fun, the leveling up is pretty simple but allows for lots of customization, and hey, there’s some battles that actually killed me, in large contrast to Xenoblade 3. The only note here is that I recommend not using the Original Flame cheat item, this allows you to come back to life with full HP if you die. It’s dumb, just say no and restart the battle.

The story is a bit under-written, though it has some interesting moments, but I’m okay with a game that focuses more on gameplay than just spending hours reading shit in-between actual gameplay.

This game gets a mild recommendation from me. I had fun with it, but I think people would be more interested in Xenoblade.