After playing this game again for the first time in two or three years I was surprised at how different my vision of this game ended up becoming by the end of it. When people talk about the "glory days" or "golden age" of Atlus games they tend to refer to the PS2 era consisting of Nocturne, DDS1 and DDS2, and also the Raidou duology. Sometimes people consider persona 3 and 4 to be a part of this era but they've been remastered and reworked a few times each now so I feel like they've transcended the PS2 era since they're both still relevant and both just got a brand new physical release announced. I always felt like the more Atlus progressed into their arguably as prominent 3DS era, they lost a bit of their original magic they had previously around the DDS era. It could have been a change of visual style with Masayuki Doi making the vast majority of new character art for the mainline series, along with shigenori soejima's art style changing to something that's (I feel) less unique. Both Doi and Soejima, in my opinion, have a more consistent track record of great art compared to kaneko but that's besides the point. This game came out in 2008 for the PS2, which to me is crazy because the jump from PS2 to PS3 was pretty huge. Hard to believe this game came out in the same year as like metal gear solid 4. This game really feels like it's way older than it actually is, and re-uses so many assets from the first game it left me feeling sometimes like i wasn't even playing a sequel, more so like an FES or a Royal version of Raidou 1 which caused me to unfortunately lose interest in the story much earlier than i would've liked. This is sort of where Persona started to have a bigger influence on Shin Megami Tensei as a whole. Even looking at the box arts for these two games you can tell that the second game's art was made much more ''palatable'' for a more mainstream audience. Even throughout the story there's brief but weirdly important scenes that involve picking a hypothetical love interest which really felt like it was ripped right from something like persona 4 because of how out of place it felt (in comparison to the first raidou, and the other ps2 smt games aside from P3 and P4). The music also felt like it took a bit of a hit. Re-using most of the music from raidou 1, raidou 2 boasts a much less extensive list of original songs, made even shorter if you don't count remixes. The songs in this game sound a lot like the ones from Persona 3, and even more so, Persona 4. The same guitar tone, the same trumpets that get really annoying after a while, etc. People say that Shoji Meguro got really burned out because of the constant pressure to make new music for a new megaten/persona game like literally every year or so at this point so a lot of songs blend together after DDS (which even he claims to be his most creative work). Besides the Art and music, the game plays pretty solid for the most part since it's building off of the bones of the last game, which itself was a little too simple for my liking. Now Raidou can roll and use special movies. Ammo is now infinite which is nice, but i rarely find myself using it, even with the elemental bullet spells, which brings me to my next point. This game has a lot of mechanics that go pretty much unused because you just don't need to use them. I bet most players didn't even know that blocking, and tapping X right in front of an enemy would roll you behind them like in wind waker, but i'm pretty sure they never explain it to you in game, and if they do, you won't ever really need to use it other than to feel cool. For the ladder half of the game you'll be so good on MAG, the primary mana resource of this game, that you'll be able to spam super high-level piercing spells that hit more than once to obliterate anything. Keep in mind that in my playthrough i only ever did 2 of the optional side quests and grinded only once for a super long fusion chain late-game towards the 25 hour mark. The game is way too easy for me and I'm glad they added a hard mode in the form of King difficulty, since it's something that me and my friends really wish they would've added to DDS since it's absent exclusively in those games. The only part of the main story that I found difficult were the fiends. Some may say that they're side content but they can literally interrupt the main story of the game whenever the moon phase hits 'New' and force you into a fight with them sort of like the riders from nocturne camping outside the terminals. Fighting them requires a moderate level of strategy and good MAG management to make sure you don't waste any by missing, since the riders like to teleport a lot. In my playthrough, I was able to kill every fiend including the Raidou clone a few times, since he can respawn unlike the others that stay dead for the remainder of the chapter. This game follows the SMT trope of having your decisions make an impact on your moral alignment and by extension, the ending of the game. While the 3 main endings in the game are for the most part, pretty similar minus the death of one character changing to another dependant on the route. I ended up getting the neutral ending which is pretty cool since I usually get either law or chaos in the other games, or TDE in nocturne since it's the most fun. Overall, the gameplay loop of Raidou 2 isn't as fun as something like Nocturne with the more prominent emphasis on demon fusion and the Kalpas, or DDS and the mantras and expanding your skill tree. I maybe went through 3 or 4 party cycles in Raidou 2, and never once felt like i needed to fuse to power myself up, it was just to explore the compendium and see more of the more niche Devil Summoner demons you don't see too often in mainline. I saw some demons in this playthrough that I'd never seen before which was super cool. My one problem with the demons is that the ones that are probably the most optimal to use can be found as wild demons in the current or next major area, which makes them feel less unique, and also makes the compendium feel a bit smaller. Speaking of gameplay loop, the dungeons are probably some of the most forgettable in the series. I've played this game twice now and still couldn't recall a single name of any dungeon despite reading a guide while playing, which I must say, isn't always necessary. It also doesn't really help that the dungeons are interspersed between probably some of the driest dialogue from the driest characters introduced in a megaten game. Worse than the reasons in Nocturne. Nagi and Geirin are both that trope where characters say a certain thing over and over like how Teddie P4 always makes a bear pun, Nagi and Geirin both say "bounds of my conjecture" or "theoretically" in almost every second sentence without fail. It's not okay this time cause Tedddie P4 tbh was more of a comic relief character but i can't really feel bad for these young sheldon sounding ass characters when either one is going through it. The one character I can say that i really enjoyed watching was Narumi. He was my favourite character in 1 and probably still in 2. He's just a good guy that isn't just comic relief like a lot of people think of him as. Another big problem with the dialogue is that none of it is voice acted, which is okay i guess considering this game was probably a lower-budget title but this game is practically begging for a Nocturne HD treatment. DDS was somehow lucky enough to get okay voice acting 4 years before and considering how that game performed I'm assuming they didn't wanna risk it again, which is understandable. It's just that this game has lots of scenes where stuff is being explained to you over these ugly looking 3D models that bob up and down and express like one of 4 emotions. I know it probably sounds like i am hard core shitting on this game, but I just think that this game and the Raidou world and characters are so slept on. The whole way through this game I couldn't help but think how great this game would've been had it released on Xbox360 or PS3. Catherine and Persona 5 both had a release that generation and they did really well in sales i'm pretty sure. Granted, Catherine is like the biggest clickbait of the video game world but it's still worth mentioning. Seeing the ever-mediocre persona 5 strikers get the megaten action game of the decade release really upsets me now that I can imagine a world where Raidou or even just the SMT franchise got int instead. Raidou being able to run around a fully 3d environment instead of those 240p pre-rendered backgrounds at full 60fps with a proper skill tree and great boss fights would have easily cemented Devil Summoner as a pillar title for Atlus, but instead they had completely and utterly ruined their chance with the embarrassingly lame soul hackers 2. This game set out to create an action game out of PS2 megaten and i think when you put it that way, it definitely succeeds, since both the bad and good carried over mostly from Nocturne and DDS and even Persona 3 and 4. Raidou is probably one of the more interesting Megaten protagonists and the lore behind the Kuzunoha family is really interesting especially after having played Soul hackers and persona 2 a few years back, you can see how it all ties together. This game is definitely more polished than Raidou 1, and overall a better game that improves on most of what raidou 1 needed to fix, like having only one demon at a time, but for me, it doesn't quite hit the mark that DDS did, and I'm not remotely satisfied with the dormant status of this series/character and I'm so extremely confused at how Atlus was moving in the right direction for the most part but completely dropped the ball on this guy. If it were on 10 i'd probably give it a really solid 7, and maybe I'm biased cause I love Raidou and megaten but I generally enjoyed this game start to finish. It just doen't help that it was bogged down so hard by the previous gen's specs since if had just been given more time to break free from the mediocrity of it's predecessor and define itself as a true successor, i could easily see Raidou 2 as a 10/10 action RPG in another life.