Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner – Soul Hackers is a very odd game. I really enjoyed it don’t get me wrong, but there’s certain things about it that make my opinion of it not fully certain. I’m at least somewhat familiar with MegaTen, I’ve played SMT4, SMT5, and multiple Persona titles this year alone. I may be wrong, but since I played the 3DS remake, this may be the oldest MegaTen game I’ve played. That may just be why this game feels more unfamiliar, while I’m confident that the 3DS remake features Quality of Life changes, it’s still more in line with older MegaTens than the newer ones.
I love the aesthetic and setting of Soul Hackers. I love sort of futuristic, cyber-punk settings, and combining that with the pre-existing aesthetics of an SMT title is really cool. It’s heightened even further by how the environments of the game are presented. A tile based dungeon crawler where each floor and dungeon is a bit of a maze. Strange Journey is already one of my favorite SMTs, and I’m glad to have finally played another MegaTen with a similar presentation. Also combining this all with the fact that the game is about being a hacker, and the internet as a whole, it’s just super cool.
The characters and story of the game are also really interesting. The character writing is probably one first things that hooked me about the game. While it took a little bit for the story to get going, the dynamics between the members of the Spookies was strong from the getgo. Especially when Nemissa is introduced, that dynamic gets even stronger. I wish the game’s plot was somewhat better though. The last third of the game had a really strong story, but the first two thirds didn’t have as much. That’s not to say the story’s bad though, as I still enjoyed my time with it.
Combat itself is really interesting when looking at Soul Hackers though, and that’s where a lot of my actual thoughts are. Theres a lot that I really like about the game’s combat, but at the same time there’s things that I’m rather conflicted on. One of the first big things that I had to get accustomed to was the fact that demons cannot level up in this game. As I’ve only played later SMTs, I’m used to demons leveling up, though at a different rate from the player character. In Soul Hackers however, demons cannot level up at all, which means there’s a higher necessity to fuse demons. Fusing demons is fun as normal, however talking and recruiting demons is a bit harder than what I’m used to. Demons were really picky about choices, and it’s easy to make a demon stop wanting to speak with it, meaning you’ll have to encounter another of that type of demon to try again. While not necessarily bad, and honestly pretty good design with how the demons should act, I wish it was a bit easier to know how to respond. Typically it felt random whether or not a response was good, and I’d see different results to the same response, even if I’m talking to the same demon.
Demon personalities are another interesting aspect of battle. Each demon you can use has their own personality, and those personalities determine what they would prefer to do in a battle. For example, Wild Demons would prefer to use physical attacks, while say, Kind demons prefer healing or supporting allies. These personalities go hand-in-hand with a trust meter, which raises or lowers depending on if you let a demon use their preferred action. The lower the meter is, the more likely they’ll be to disobey if you tell them to act in an un-preferred way, and if the bar is low enough, they’ll just choose to leave your party. Yet again this is another mechanic that I’m somewhat conflicted on. Thinking about it from a design standpoint, this is a really cool mechanic. It personifies the demons you have in battle, making them more than just the actions that they can do, and creating personalities for them. Where my confliction comes in is honestly just based off of circumstance. Demons always seemed to disobey at the most inopportune time, even if their trust meter was nearing the maximum. I honestly think even just showing the percentage of how likely they are to disobey would remove this confliction I have, and that’s really it.
There was also this chip mechanic that I ended up barely using. I filled out my slots for it, but it ultimately didn’t really impact gameplay as much. It probably would if I tried to do more demon negotiation, but it ended up not mattering as much as I thought it would. I think the reason why I didn’t engage with it much was that there were only 5 slots, and you could never upgrade to increase how many slots you had, so I didn’t have a whole lot of space to experiment with.
And one of the biggest frustrations with the game is how unnecessarily cruel it feels at times. Soul Hackers is another example of one of my biggest pet peeves in a videogame, that being dying sends you back to the title screen, and you lose all of your unsaved progress. It’s especially worse in a game like Soul Hackers especially, where no matter what if the player character dies, it’s an immediate game over, regardless of if any of your other characters are alive. It’s a really cruel combination, but I don’t think any part of this necessarily needs to change. What I think does need to change however is the placement of save rooms. For nearly all of the dungeons in the game, there’s seemingly ever 1, maybe 2 save rooms per dungeon, and that feels way too little. I think even just adding a sort of mid-point save room would solve the problem, as sometimes you can be in a dungeon for way over an hour, and still not find a new save room. There is a chip that allows you to save anywhere, but it costs 2 slots for some reason, and it really felt like a waste of space.
That being said though, I did enjoy Soul Hackers. I definitely think the game is a bit flawed, but I really liked what I experienced, it feels unique compared to the other MegaTen games I’ve played. Though if the game gets another remake, I think it should have a couple more Quality of Life changes to make the game as good as it should be. I do wonder now, since I’ve succeeded in playing this game, is it possible for me to handle the other older MegaTen games?
I love the aesthetic and setting of Soul Hackers. I love sort of futuristic, cyber-punk settings, and combining that with the pre-existing aesthetics of an SMT title is really cool. It’s heightened even further by how the environments of the game are presented. A tile based dungeon crawler where each floor and dungeon is a bit of a maze. Strange Journey is already one of my favorite SMTs, and I’m glad to have finally played another MegaTen with a similar presentation. Also combining this all with the fact that the game is about being a hacker, and the internet as a whole, it’s just super cool.
The characters and story of the game are also really interesting. The character writing is probably one first things that hooked me about the game. While it took a little bit for the story to get going, the dynamics between the members of the Spookies was strong from the getgo. Especially when Nemissa is introduced, that dynamic gets even stronger. I wish the game’s plot was somewhat better though. The last third of the game had a really strong story, but the first two thirds didn’t have as much. That’s not to say the story’s bad though, as I still enjoyed my time with it.
Combat itself is really interesting when looking at Soul Hackers though, and that’s where a lot of my actual thoughts are. Theres a lot that I really like about the game’s combat, but at the same time there’s things that I’m rather conflicted on. One of the first big things that I had to get accustomed to was the fact that demons cannot level up in this game. As I’ve only played later SMTs, I’m used to demons leveling up, though at a different rate from the player character. In Soul Hackers however, demons cannot level up at all, which means there’s a higher necessity to fuse demons. Fusing demons is fun as normal, however talking and recruiting demons is a bit harder than what I’m used to. Demons were really picky about choices, and it’s easy to make a demon stop wanting to speak with it, meaning you’ll have to encounter another of that type of demon to try again. While not necessarily bad, and honestly pretty good design with how the demons should act, I wish it was a bit easier to know how to respond. Typically it felt random whether or not a response was good, and I’d see different results to the same response, even if I’m talking to the same demon.
Demon personalities are another interesting aspect of battle. Each demon you can use has their own personality, and those personalities determine what they would prefer to do in a battle. For example, Wild Demons would prefer to use physical attacks, while say, Kind demons prefer healing or supporting allies. These personalities go hand-in-hand with a trust meter, which raises or lowers depending on if you let a demon use their preferred action. The lower the meter is, the more likely they’ll be to disobey if you tell them to act in an un-preferred way, and if the bar is low enough, they’ll just choose to leave your party. Yet again this is another mechanic that I’m somewhat conflicted on. Thinking about it from a design standpoint, this is a really cool mechanic. It personifies the demons you have in battle, making them more than just the actions that they can do, and creating personalities for them. Where my confliction comes in is honestly just based off of circumstance. Demons always seemed to disobey at the most inopportune time, even if their trust meter was nearing the maximum. I honestly think even just showing the percentage of how likely they are to disobey would remove this confliction I have, and that’s really it.
There was also this chip mechanic that I ended up barely using. I filled out my slots for it, but it ultimately didn’t really impact gameplay as much. It probably would if I tried to do more demon negotiation, but it ended up not mattering as much as I thought it would. I think the reason why I didn’t engage with it much was that there were only 5 slots, and you could never upgrade to increase how many slots you had, so I didn’t have a whole lot of space to experiment with.
And one of the biggest frustrations with the game is how unnecessarily cruel it feels at times. Soul Hackers is another example of one of my biggest pet peeves in a videogame, that being dying sends you back to the title screen, and you lose all of your unsaved progress. It’s especially worse in a game like Soul Hackers especially, where no matter what if the player character dies, it’s an immediate game over, regardless of if any of your other characters are alive. It’s a really cruel combination, but I don’t think any part of this necessarily needs to change. What I think does need to change however is the placement of save rooms. For nearly all of the dungeons in the game, there’s seemingly ever 1, maybe 2 save rooms per dungeon, and that feels way too little. I think even just adding a sort of mid-point save room would solve the problem, as sometimes you can be in a dungeon for way over an hour, and still not find a new save room. There is a chip that allows you to save anywhere, but it costs 2 slots for some reason, and it really felt like a waste of space.
That being said though, I did enjoy Soul Hackers. I definitely think the game is a bit flawed, but I really liked what I experienced, it feels unique compared to the other MegaTen games I’ve played. Though if the game gets another remake, I think it should have a couple more Quality of Life changes to make the game as good as it should be. I do wonder now, since I’ve succeeded in playing this game, is it possible for me to handle the other older MegaTen games?