I just can't. After ten hours I don't feel enough of a drive to keep playing. For me the Xenoblade games are bad examples of maximalist design at this point. Creating quality not by elegant subtraction but by addition of more and more systems and dimensions of complexity to the point of legitimately feeling like parody of itself to me.

I could stand Xenoblade 3 for longer than the first one due to an interesting story hook and early development, but my god the sheer spam of new systems, menues, and mechanics truly made my head hurt, killing any drive to play further - hearing how much more is to come, hailed as a positive aspect. This made me realize that the series is definitively not for me, despite my best efforts which greatly disappoints me because of the excitement seemingly everyone else has for the franchise and my absolute adoration of Xenogears and the hope of some DNA of that transfering over.

The baseline combat is so clunky and uninteresting to me that I can't stomach pushing through that for 90 more hours, not even starting on the incredibly annoying line repetitions and dull environments fully covered in ever respawning loot and enemies. I read that that this makes the game feel alive and dynamic while it did the complete opposite for me feeling like a wasteland entirely populated by procedurally generated content. As a level designer the terrain navigation truly shocked me with how clunky and unpolished it is. You constantly run into slopes you are expected to awkwardly jump your way up while other ledges are not accessible to you while being only slightly above your jump height, adding to the feeling of procedural generation, lacking the affordances and clean communication of intentional level design.

This is all pretty much rambling about how this game just isn't for me in the end, recognizing that it's obviously not a bad game, it's just rare that a game in a genre I usually really enjoy so completely goes against anything I value in games and I am envious of everyone able to fall in love with the games in this series, I wish I was one of them.

At its core Soul Hackers 2 is a distinctly mid budget JRPG title and it comes with all the benefits and flaws you would expect from that.

Starting with the flaws, the only one that really bothered me was its dungeon design. Only the final one really vibed with me aesthetically and they all feature very corridory like design where it's easy to imagine it being like an old school first person dungeon. Unfortunately I'm not big on those kind of dungeons but I did appreciate the puzzle aspects (though the warp panel hell in the later Soul Matrix areas definitely tested my patience) I don't think these dungeons are outright bad, just not my preference in terms of design.

Onto the positives and once again, Atlus knocks it out of the park with art direction and character designs. The menus look great with a purple colour scheme and triangular digital matrix style designs all over. Ringo is such a standout character design with a bold yellow colour scheme and the digital triangles on her jacket. The digital aesthetic tickles my brainworms in all the right ways, with low health enemies having digital green patches show up on them, like it appeals to my tastes in such a good way.

The characters themselves are probably the strongest point. It's rare to have a female protagonist, who speaks, in an adult cast in Atlus games so a lot of this is like a breath of fresh air. Almost like the team were allowed to experiment freely because of the smaller nature of the title and it paid off well. Seeing characters blow off steam at a bar after a mission, struggle with a broken relationship, struggle long time friends taking different paths in their life, it all makes for such a nice change from the usual teenagers in high school stuff we usually get. Like it's just nice seeing a group of characters head back to a run down apartment and chill out with take out meals.
The main party is also just a set 4 characters plus one on dungeon navigation so the game also has a chance to allow all these characters to grow together, struggle together, and support each other without the game having to be like "oh hey, here's a new party member, we gotta focus on introducing them and forget everyone else!" It's nice to have new faces freshen up your party sure, but there is something to appreciate with a fixed party approach too.

The other main benefit of being mid budget means there is no room for excess fluff. The main story runs around 30-40 hours, doesn't waste time with filler, lets you choose to explore additional character depth with hangout events and the Soul Matrix dungeon, and it all flows really nicely. It's just really nice having a JRPG that's just tightly focused on its main story and doesn't end up eating 100s of hours of your life. I can appreciate those super long JRPGs sure but it's nice to have a balance of shorter classics too.

Soul Hackers 2 is a fantastic way to explore an old series and see if it can grow with a new audience. It nails so much with its story, its characters, and aesthetic while falling a little short in dungeon design. I love that Atlus is using the success of the Persona series to take an opportunity to explore some of their back catalogue and revive some series and I can only hope they continue to do so

Soul Hackers 2 seems like it’s been the victim of a lot of negative sentiment. People calling it bland, saying it’s missing the heart of something like a Persona game (a criticism also levied against SMT V), and really criticising the hell out of the dungeon design. I can see why people might be dissatisfied with this game, even in those parts specifically, but I certainly don’t get why there’s such vitriol around a game that at worst these people are calling… bland?

For me though, this is anything but bland. It’s not as “loud” as a Persona game in tone or style, but why would it be? Persona games are about 15 year olds. The stories they tell are great and thematically deep, don’t get me wrong, but they’re stories starring children. Soul Hackers 2 stars adults. Adults who’re caught up in something between a gang war and a JRPG plot, who’ve internalized the hate and pain that conflict has brought, and mostly seem built out of coping mechanisms.

For example, you’ve got Arrow, my personal favorite of the main cast. He seems pretty standard for like, a game of this style, an everyman who doesn’t seem off-putting, and I get why that comes across as bland to people, but to me he just seems tired. Tired in a way that he doesn’t complain about, or even acknowledge, because it’s just part of life for him. They’re not drawn, but you can almost feel the bags under his eyes in the way he talks, the words he chooses. And that is infinitely more compelling as a character beat to me than anything from Persona 3-5.

The rest of the cast feels equally mature and understated, even the seemingly loud Saizo, who’s built himself out of noir stereotypes to cover up an unobtainable desire for peace and tranquility, and an idealism to rival any shounen protagonist. Those things don’t fly in the fairly grounded world of Soul Hackers though, lacking the adventuresome nature of Persona and (most of) the philosophical musings of SMT proper. So he builds walls of sarcasm and wittiness to protect himself.

It all feels pretty true to life I think, and the game takes itself rather seriously as well (outside of one joke character in the introduction). There’s a huge focus on not just the philosophical ideal of what it means to “be human”, but on people and the choices they’ve made, the compassion they’ve shown and to whom it was shown to.

Beyond that, I also really loved the dungeon crawling. I don’t think any game since Nocturne has really captured the old school maze-style of classic SMT in full 3D so well, nor has any made it so accessible. The couple of reused themes for dungeons are a little disappointing, but the themes themselves are just as understated-yet-vibey as the rest of the game. If you’ve played Tokyo Mirage Sessions, the dungeon crawling and combat here are heavily based that game, and I think this game is a much more successful use of those mechanics.

That’s pretty much what the whole game is. Just small character moments and dungeon crawling, and if you like the characters and the old-skool-ness of it all, I don’t think you’ll have any issues here at all. Just don’t forget about the side quests if you want the true ending, yeah? Though the non-true ending is really really good regardless, ending on a nice unresolved note (delivered via monologue) like a true noir film would.

I can totally get why this game's divisive for it's budget issues and pretty straight-forward gameplay; it makes it feel more like a modern port of a Vita game than a 2022 release, if anything.

But to me? That's a great thing. Everything else about it - it's cast, worldbuilding, setting and writing - is just so damn good. It takes a little while to really get going, but I had an absolute blast, and I hope people don't let other opinions deter them from trying the game out completely.

It makes up for it's flaws more than well enough - so if you're able to put up with those nearly as well as I am, there's plenty to appreciate here.

Pretty good. The story, though derivative of Shonen anime, in particular Neon Genesis Evangelion, the plot is still enjoyable. The characters range from mediocre and nonsubstantial to genuinely enjoyable and rather humorous. The plot also establishes higher stakes by making you save all of your potential party members from certain death, as well as showing that unlike the first game, where the conflict was contained to a single city, this game's conflict is on a global scale. This game took the good but flawed combat of its predecessor and buffed out some of the kinks, such as creating a more balanced difficulty curb and keeping physical skills useful throughout the entire adventure, as opposed to them being outclassed by magic skills in the first game.

The visuals are on par with the original, as is the soundtrack, though some may prefer the electric guitars of devil survivor one to the synth waves of devil survivor two.

Over all, the reason I'm not giving this game a five star rating is because it could have benefitted from receiving a port to personal computers or the Nintendo switch so that the presentation wouldn't be held back by the limitations of the Nintendo Dual Screen.

[GOLDEN WILDFIRE]

Whenever I killed an enemy as Holst, I said to myself, "I think that enemy got the point!"

Also, when you give Hilda a command in battle, I can't be the only one who hears her say "Don't worry, I won't fuck up!"