Totally slop of the century and to date the most boring and uninspired Atlus RPG. Persona 3 was already the worst game in the franchise with the shitty story and cringe writing. It's full of stuff that's just never explained, as well as stuff that just makes no sense that you are just kind of expected to go along with it and not question it. Normally I don't like to nitpick stories of games I play but lots of people like to slob on this game's knob regarding it's narrative and characters and story beats and whatnot which I just can't get behind imo. I think that out of all the annoying and edgy slop that Katsura Hashino pumps out every time Atlus makes an important game, this is EASILY his worst, even worse than the nothingburger that was Nocturne's story. This game being an Atlus game automatically makes it better than most of the anime slop coming out these days like Tales of Arise and Fire Emblem something.... but I'm not rocking with dating high schoolers anymore like when i was 14 and i know you aren't FORCED to, but it's much harder to avoid in this game, like you can't finish a social link with any woman in the game without being given the option to date them or without them saying some shit like "I love you....something-kun" like hellllll nah I am not trying to go to prison over playing mid... I just find it uncomfortable and cringe whenever they write a forced love confession scene, typical weirdo beach episode or "ahh you pervert!!" hot spring scene into the game. It's messed up man. I am no longer this game's target audience and while that is okay, I am just upset that Atlus can get away with all of this weirdo bullshit and that Persona's strongest soldiers are allowed within 500 feet of any school. And this is just scratching the surface but I'm not really going to get into it. It's boring and way too similar to the original in like every bad way. I got it on gamepass tho so idc i'm cooling...

Low key katsura hashino should never be allowed to write another game ever again. Every character is either edgelord cringe "philosophical" slop or just an anime stereotype in everything he ever writes. This game is still sick because the fighting is really fun and the dungeons get pretty creative but sometimes feel a bit too labyrinthian and copy-pasted around. This game's shortcomings lie mostly in the boring but all around pretty unobtrusive story that you can mash through easily enough to get back to the fun part. I also think that the game funnels you into using certain demons and has other demons be rpetty much useless or fusion fodder which kind of sucks, so you'll be seeing the same demons over and over in your party between playthroughs unlike something like pokemon where you usually have a lot of freedom in how you structure your team. It's also pretty much mandatory that demi fiend is a physical character which i find annoying. They still do this shit in SMT5 where you're at a huge disadvantage if you chose to do a magic build over physical which is annoying and vice versa in SMT4. End of the day this game is not relevant anymore and they won't fix this stuff cause it won't get remade. Maybe if there was more going on dates with high schoolers and cool awesome nippon defender warrior ramen side quests it would get more attention but it's probably better if they leave it.

This game did Octopath traveler way before it's biggest fan's parents met. I played both this version and the DS version and I prefer the DS version in some ways, i also prefer the PS1 version in others. That's why the play time is 60 hours and not the average 30 since I've played this game twice. Dragon Quest IV is easily the best NES RPG that came out and while in my opinion still not as good as V, which came out a few years later, It's somehow still just as modern and only slightly harder to go back to because of some weird story instances where the place you're meant to go isn't super clear, but other than that it's such a classic. The music is goated, the characters are super cool and the dungeons are pretty fun too just like in V. I like that this game features more human characters where V has you controlling monsters for a large portion of the game. Though the story is definitely more simplistic than V in certain ways, the way they intertwine is still interesting. Especially since you don't even really play as the hero on the box until the last third and a half or so.

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.

Rockstar and other game devs (mostly the western kind) tend to do this really fucking stupid thing where they make things as realistic as possible only for it to backfire and not only look stupid but also slow everything down for no reason. The whole "games are becoming more like movies" thing is becoming more real over the years for sure and i don't really care since my favourite game series' will likely remain unaffected. For example arthur morgan presses triangle to get on his horse and he's standing at the wrong angle for the animation to occur, so he awkwardly autonomously shifts into the exact position to "seamlessly" shift into the animation for getting on the horse. The whole exchange takes like 6 seconds and looks jarring and stupid as fuck. Why? What's the need to make this game feel like real life when other shit, like taking ten bullets and waiting the pain out behind a rock in about ten seconds is totally in the game too. Metal Gear Solid V and Ghost of Tsushima both have horses and are both also photorealistic and look great but neither of them have this stupid transition animation that happens so often for every little thing in red dead 2. The running in this game also feels super slow and weird to control cause arthur MUST make a full turn just as he would had he been a real person even though he's not. This makes the game incredibly hard to control with a keyboard and while i didn't play it this way i know people who have and it annoyed them. These little things add up and make doing anything that isn't SPECIFICALLY INTENDED by the devs either literally impossible or extremely jarring and sluggish cause everything has a stupid 3 second long animation. Aside from that, i think this game was probably the best written game i've played. The best voice acting too. This story is seriously something to experience for yourself if you haven't been spoiled yet. probably my favourite rockstar game, even though it's close with GTAIV.

Across every platform I've played this game on i think my favourite is probably PS2, or the Maniax Chronicles version with raidou since i like him more than dante. I've beaten this game a ton of times and each time I find myself noticing more and more that bugs me with it. it use to be my favourite of all time but i think that's gotta be DDS1 and DDS2 tied now. Nocturne is still my favourite mainline SMT game without a doubt but it's definitely flawed in the sense that the game is difficult to navigate without some sort of guide or previous SMT knowledge. I also find that the game's limited number of viable demons has each play through feeling similar to the last. later games mostly fix this issue with i think SMTV being the best in that aspect overall (might be the only thing that game is the best at) but honestly nocturne is still one of my favourite games of all time because of the way it plays and sounds and looks. It really resonates with me.

This game is really fun, but I have to say I was pretty lost on most of the story and just let myself zone out whenever some crazy shit was happening on-screen. That said, I remember the whole thing like I beat it yesterday. The music was great, the characters are funny and unique. Usually i find the Suda51 games like silver case and no more heroes 1 and 2 to be pretty overrated (while still okay in my opinion) this game is just as good as they say. Even on PS2 with long load times and frame drops it's still good, so buy that version if you don't have a PC and don't want to pay the gamecube tax.

This is a classic case of internet brainwashing and broken telephone for 10 years. Playing TOTK really bummed me out so playing this game felt really nice. I love the art style and the music is definitely the best in the series imo. The boss fights are also over-hated with koloktos being my all time favourite zelda boss. Honestly don't listen to any opinion about this game, make your own and i guarantee you will like it. I hope the weird hate boner for this game goes away kind of like how it did for MM.

My first play through was casual but the second was much more in depth, i fought almost every optional boss in the game minus Huang-Long. This and the second game are probably the peak of megaten on the PS2. Even though nocturne and DDS1 were only a year or two apart, nocturne feels 15 years older in comparison. It's a really interesting creative work that doesn't get the attention it deserves for some reason when I would say that it's more palatable for modern RPG or JRPG players these days than nocturne, which got a "full" HD remaster not so long ago. You can absolutely power though every dungeon in this game and solve every puzzle yourself without a guide, when in noctutne it just confuses me how anybody was supposed to figure half of them out in the first place. This game is probably tied with the second one for my favourite game of all time and I'd love to be able to play it in actual HD some day.