Doesn't find new innovative ways of taming the branching narrative game design hydra, but executes the style at a very high level of craftsmanship. The competing voices residing in the player character's head, growing more or less dominant depending on your skill distribution, are Disco's most clever idea, but they do ultimately reveal themselves to be a bit of an infinity mirror: in an organic playthrough, you can never gauge how cavernous these mechanics truly are and are forced to accept whatever cards you're dealt. My signature, most-developed skill (11 points) was Drama, and yet its actual presence in the conversations I experienced felt very muted, and the negative side effects the game teases for when you've developed a skill too far (in Drama's case, intense paranoia,) never manifested in my playthrough.

Disco also relies on many of the narrative/progression contrivances you'd expect: what revealed itself to be the murder case's crucial lead is something I discovered incredibly early into the story, yet you're not actually allowed to follow up on it until a specific late-game event trigger. In my playthrough it was extra bizarre in that I was told about this lead again by a different character, which then prompted the ability to further investigate, as if I hadn't already found the necessary clue myself fifteen hours earlier.

All of this adds up in a way where my actual agency in the plot is incredibly opaque, which in turn makes it difficult for me to fully invest myself in the experience. Yes, the stats and dice rolls literally matter in that they have direct, observable, mechanical effects, but it's hard to gauge how exactly they matter to me when the corresponding outcomes are ultimately still scripted and often somewhat unpredictable. It's hard to know how to feel when a skill check passes or fails because the outcome ultimately wasn't up to me: to put it uncharitably, rather than fully participating in and shaping the story, I'm sorta pressing buttons and seeing what happens.

Where Disco succeeds is in crafting situations that aren't necessarily "morally grey," as if that were the most compelling thing a CRPG could do -- the game is explicit about its leftist, socialist values and thankfully never succumbs to wishy-washy centrist mush -- but instead test your ability to remain resolute in your beliefs while also being sensitive and empathetic toward the world around you. It's a game that encourages you to embrace those voices in your head and not be afraid to be a little embarrassing or off-putting if it ultimately means doing the right thing. Don't let these fascists cramp your style!!

Quite possibly the most unhinged game I've ever played.

I went in expecting a simple 2D Action RPG that'd be short but sweet as it was mostly made by one guy... turns out this is a +50 hour RPG that took 14 years to complete with one of the most insane stories I've experienced in quite a while that kept going on and on and on. I got to several points where I'm like "I believe I see the end of this massive tunnel... oh no wait there's still more." Yeah I think that phrase describes Astlibra Revision perfectly, there's always more.
Where to begin... lets start with the visuals. Most of the environments and backgrounds are these edited public domain photos and materials. It gives a strange tone to the setting of the game, as I'll be starring in the background and its very obvious that these textures of this cave are just actual photos of cliffs and rocks. Some of the enemies are like this... I think. It's hard to tell with some of them, but I'm pretty sure the dev used real photos for the penguins you fight at the snowy mountain. Its a bizarre style that straddles the line between being low-budgeted and stylistic. Its funny how this made me pay attention more to the backgrounds, trying to discern what are photos and what were originally made assets. A lot of monsters and bosses are original, and to its credit there's a lot of interesting designs that show a often-treaded but no less bombastic style of medieval fantasy.
Though speaking of designs, if you aren't privy to "anime" designs or tropes then parts of this game will be hard to stomach. You fight a loooot of giant women with huge breasts which is one thing, but the story also has "classic scenes" like the hot spring visit, or the scene where a woman has to wear something very skimpy because of a big misunderstanding, or the "N-not like I like you, idiot!" and so forth. I really hate talking about this stuff, but it be remiss of me to not give a heads-up. To be fair this game took 14 years to make. I can't vouch what was changed during all that time, but standards of art change just as much as the technology we use to play games. What's seen as fine at some point is seen as "trashy" later in time, even if some of this was always the latter to begin with. It's not unlike how the infamous Duke Nukem Forever was a mess of old mechanics and set pieces that felt immediately dated when it came out since it took so long to be "finished", only that the differences is that they are, thankfully, fleeting moments in this marathon of a game. You aren't going to go on a road trip without having to drive around some potholes, but I wouldn't argue with you if you said they should've patched those holes up.
Dwelling on these misgivings wouldn't be fair as it ignores the entire plot and boy howdy what a roller coaster it is. It involves a lot of time travel with the protagonist able to prevent disasters and fixing many a tragedy by traveling into the past. That's putting the time travel mechanic as simply as I can, but they take every advantage they can with it. Nearly anytime I wonder "What would happen if they did this?" they'd actually explore that possibility in due time. Does it always make sense? I don't know. Time travel isn't real so who the hell knows. I was admittedly smiling and nodding a lot of times when some unforeseen consequence unfolds, or a new rule of this temporal manipulation rears its ugly head. I was always like "I'm hear for it!" I'm also glad that some of my fleeting thoughts on the motivations and goals of this diverse cast gets explored in many ways. The protagonist, for example, is searching for his childhood friend that he lost eight years ago. And without spoiling it I had certain thoughts about this dynamic that I'm happy to say that the author did explore, and rather thoroughly at that. Some of the craziest reveals need to be seen firsthand, it goes places.
I don't wish to delve too much into the nitty gritty of the plot, so what do you even do in this game? I listened to a podcast that gave this game a near perfect descriptor, "It's like if Vampire Survivors had actual structure and a plot". This game is all about that progression and dopamine. You can place stat points into any stat you want, but re-speccing is easy, free, and even encouraged. Every armor, shield, and weapon have a experience bar that, when filled, will reward with either a skill or a skill slot in order to use said skills. Skills do, in fact, have a massive impact on how you play, so you're encourage to use as many weapons and armor as you can. Enemies drop materials in order to buy equipment, as well as "Force" that's used on this massive skill tree. The skill tree is mostly for permanent stat ups and the rare treasure, but it also gives access to the magic spells that have a wide variety of effects. Importantly, MP is only gained by attacking enemies, and it will decrease by itself if you idle for too long which encourages an aggressive playstyle. In exchange casting a spell will grant brief invulnerability, so you can blast through a wave of enemy bullets with good timing. Further increasing aggression is a combo counter that rewards several bonuses the more hits you rack up in quick succession, so don't stand around for too long. The flexibility in how you play your character is perhaps the strongest point of this game. I've had many instances where instead of grinding for better overall stats when I hit a brick wall, I changed my stats and equipment that made the bosses much easier to deal with. One of the most memorable moments I had was with this one secret boss that I fought way sooner then I should've. Unluckily for me it was a DPS check, meaning if I didn't deal enough damage in a short enough time then it was a instant-death. It was straight up impossible to pass the DPS check at my current level. Luckily I had a skill where my damage was multiplied threefold, but as a consequence I died in one hit. I could then pair that up with a skill where you can take one hit for free per battle, and I essentially was playing Ghost n' Goblins for the whole fight. Felt amazing when my crazy plan actually worked... after many deaths.
The Vampire Survivors comparison comes from how explosive fighting can get. You can reach a point in power where you can kill anything with your 30 foot sword and your giant dragon summon, as your enemies erupt into gold and force confetti. These sessions can be a relaxing background game to play, but not the most enthralling if you're going for every achievement. I didn't get all of them, about 90% or so. It is a good sign from me when I go out of my way to get achievements in your game, but I'd be lying if I said I got that much more out of the game for getting them. This can be a very grindy game, almost never required if you want to see the end of the game but there is some great and exciting content that'll be way harder if you go in ill-prepared. I did do a lot of grinding just because I wanted to do it, so take that for what you will.
One thing that caught me by surprised are the many puzzles in this game. It's not always a straight shot to the chapter boss, you'll have to do some thinking and inventory management to progress. Sometimes the path towards progression can seem borderline cryptic, but there's usually a NPC nearby that can provide hints and guidance to what to do (sometimes you'll need to talk to the same person more then once). Oh by "inventory management", I mean that this game will rarely use a item automatically from your inventory. You have to manually open up your items and use the specific item needed. I kinda liked it actually. It made me feel smarter solving even the more basic puzzles since it was up to me to figure out what I needed to do, but maybe it could've used keys automatically at least.

Even at times I kinda wished this game knew when to end properly, I can't deny the amount of effort and passion that was put into this game. It feels like someone wanted to include everything they love into one game, and despite some iffiness here or there, it manages to put itself together far more eloquently then you'd expect. You'll be in for the long haul, but it'll be a unforgettable adventure unlike many.

...What do you mean there's going to be DLC?! This game is already 50 hours long!!

Taking notes from the Tokusatsu flavor of Japanese capeshit, Hideki Kamiya didn’t just want to blow the roof off of his last superhero game, he wanted to blast a hole in the ozone layer and cruise on the border the farthest reaches of the cosmos. He’s never been content with just shooting for the stars, but this title more than any other feels like the truest expression of what he’s wanted to achieve with his games. Having a massive team of action game legends and publisher money from Nintendo all but ensured that the final product would come out with a Platinum-like sheen of creative polish, but as far as I can tell, The Wonderful 101 still managed to impress almost anyone who gave it the time of day in a way nobody was really expecting. There’s a reason the game is still, generally speaking, regarded as one of the highlights of the Wii U. In 2020, it even managed to conjure over $1.5 million in an effort to port it to modern platforms, absolutely crushing the goals set by its Kickstarter.

Naturally, it crashed and burned on release.

The game bombed hard. I don’t envy the position of trying to market the damn thing to general consumers, but on top of the comparatively-niche appeal of the action genre and an aesthetic that repulsed many who laid eyes on it, The Wonderful 101 also didn’t make the experience of getting into it very easy. It wasn’t universally panned by critics or anything - in fact it reviewed pretty well considering how low its sales were - but it’s fair to say most people didn’t get it. Speaking personally, it took me multiple attempts on two different platforms to get past the on-ramp, and even beyond that point it took some time to really click with me.

It’s a real shame having so many of its players bounce off the experience before they can even experience a fraction of what it had to offer, but I almost don’t blame them, at least in retrospect. It's a title that gives out what you put in, possibly more than any other game I’ve ever played. Not everyone is gonna be willing to sit down and give something this mechanically-abrasive a chance, especially if it wears the façade of being nothing but a kid friendly Nintendo romp. Late-teens dudebros aren’t gonna give it their attention, and It probably isn’t a game for grandma either, I get it. Having said that, I don't want this piece to scare anyone off from the game, far from it. If you’ve read this far you surely care about or are interested in the game in some regard (or have played the game before, in which case this specific passage isn’t super important (or just like hearing reading what I have to say ❤)), so if you haven’t closed the tab yet, hear me out:

I don’t generally like picking my absolute favorite things, it's way easier to just provide a list of things I love than to comfortably settle down with one thing, but this is kinda the exception. Without question, if you asked me what my favorite game is, the answer would be an easy one. The Wonderful 101 has it all for me: a colorful cast of characters, a gameplay loop I can’t find anywhere else, indulgent yet tasteful callbacks to the history of the medium of games, a heartfelt story, a campaign that never loses its luster, and a finale I can only describe as legendary. It’s the complete package. Some games may do individual things better, but no game does it all with quite as much fanfare. I unabashedly love it, and I want as many people as possible to give it a fair chance (or two), just as I did. The best things in life don’t come without hardships, after all.

Video games, especially those in 3D spaces, have often struggled to consistently convey critical information to the player when it's most often needed, and it's easy to see why. How do you give the player enough time to react to something coming into frame in a fast paced platformer or a racer? How do you differentiate a hole in the ground from being a safe drop or an instant death trap? Many potential issues can be alleviated through smart signposting and subtle signals to the player, but it feels like action games in particular have struggled with cameras more than most genres. All too often it's extremely challenging to keep everything in focus with multiple enemies on your ass while grinding against the terrain to navigate the field, and that's before you take into account a camera that might not play nicely with the level geometry and act in unpredictable ways. Thankfully, this isn’t an unsolved issue in certain corners of the genre.

Kamiya has proven time and time again that he knows how to create encounters that feel simultaneously frantic yet completely fair, and while his most consistent quality in this regard is his ability to design a large pool of enemies with extremely clear audio and visual tells, he also employs subtle tricks in all of his games to hold the combat together. Devil May Cry makes the level geometry transparent if it obfuscates the player's view of the action, Viewtiful Joe simplifies the chaos by playing on a 2D plane like an old-school beat-em-up while still keeping the intricacies of a fully fleshed out action game, and Bayonetta prevents most enemies from being able to attack from beyond the camera's point of view. All of these systems go a long way towards addressing potential issues with focusing on everything at once, but for my money, no game has presented a solution as bold and creative as the one found in The Wonderful 101.

Locking the camera to an isometric perspective is one of the game's many design decisions that not only keeps the action legible at all times amidst the madness, but threads every element of gameplay together seamlessly while calling into question many of the standards set by games made before and after it, though I'm getting a little ahead of myself. As I mentioned before, action games are quick to become tense scrambles where you can not only lose mental control of the field, but literally struggle to control the camera and your character in the heat of the moment. Even in Bayonetta, a game I adore for the way it handles enemies in relation to its camera system, it's still very possible for it to get caught on a random part of the level and disorient the player. Given the chaos on screen in 101, it could have been extremely easy for this issue to rear its ugly head again, but thanks to the camera this is almost never an issue. Since you don't have to put physical and mental attention on camera control, it frees up the body and mind to focus on every other part of the game at once, so long as you have the fortitude to get past the initial hurdle of learning the mechanics and understanding how to read the field (a task that doesn’t take an entire playthrough to accomplish like some may have have led on).

At an initial glance the game might be hard to read, but upon further inspection you’ll quickly realize that the bright colors and zany designs only exist to assist the readability of moment-to-moment encounters, everything stands out against each other and the environments so well that you’ll never find yourself wondering what's going on once you know what you’re looking at. What may first be perceived as an overly-busy aesthetic that only exists to appeal to a younger demographic quickly justifies itself as an essential part of the play experience. It's a very freeing feeling to have such a common issue in the medium disappear so elegantly here, and while I’m not saying all cameras need to copy The Wonderful 101, any mediocre camera system stands out to me way more now that I’ve seen what can happen if you play with conventions even just a little bit.

This would probably be nothing more than a cool quirk if the action didn’t keep you on your toes, so thankfully the amazing enemy design keeps the game from ever feeling too bland. Nearly every member of the game's massive roster of enemies and bosses plays with arena control in interesting ways and almost always asks the player to juggle multiple conflicting tasks at once, something I crave in games such as this. For instance, you may have your focus on a tank that goes down quickly to a slow, heavy weapon, but other enemies might be quick enough to get hits in while you’re trying to take down a massive threat (it sounds simple, but exemplary enemy design isn’t the standard in action games it really should be).The top-down view also gives some breathing room for the level designers to make the arenas themselves treacherous in creative ways, helping to create encounters where even fighting basic mobs can be a stressful task. Very few encounters lose their appeal for me as a result, and for a title that runs far longer than the average action game, that's no small feat.

These factors individually are more than enough to set the combat way beyond the quality of most action games, and there are plenty of tertiary elements to the experience that make the campaign one of the best in the entire medium (way more than what I could reasonably fit into the scope of this review), but in my eyes, the golden thread that truly unites every element together beautifully and morphs the game into a masterpiece of action game design for me is the Wonder Liner.

Weapon switching is one of those mechanics that is always appreciated in an action game, but seldom implemented in a way that does anything more than give the player more tools to fight with. That last point might sound like an odd criticism to make, especially since we’ve seen what can happen if action games don’t implement some form of instant weapon switching, but it’s generally not something that’s interesting to execute on its own. While I wouldn’t say it dumbs down action games that utilize this system - the skill required to play them usually falls on decision making more than executing the moves themselves after all - it’s just an element to the genre that hasn’t seen much questioning or evolution since it started to make its way into titles that necessitated it. The act of switching itself doesn’t add nuance to a game, ”...it simply prohibits one set of moves, and enables a different set of moves.”. Rather than just settling on a button to cycle weapons, 101 takes a more creative approach.

Your squad of 100 Wonderful Ones is not just flooding the screen to flex the technical ability of a game console that was outdated before it even hit shelves, but is a key element to combat. They aren't just there to facilitate your massive arsenal of weapons, they are your arsenal of weapons.

Using the right analog stick, you draw out commands that signal your team to morph into different massive weapons, whether it be a circle for a fist, a straight line for a sword, or a squiggly line for a whip. It's like if you did a QCF motion in Street Fighter but instead of throwing out a hadouken, Ryu pulled out a gun. They really get creative with your arsenal and I’d hate to spoil it all here, but every weapon manages to not only fill out an interesting tactical role in combat, but also feels completely different to use as a result of the drawing system. This is already a lot to wrap your head around on your first playthrough, and this is before you consider what implications every other mechanic has on this one. If the game had the exact same combat mechanics with a traditional camera system, it wouldn't really work without further disconnecting the liner from the game world in some way (drawing on the lens of the camera or specific flat parts of the environment are common ways of addressing drawing mechanics in other games). It’s possible another system could also work here, but what I love about the solution presented in The Wonderful 101 is that it ties these otherworldly mechanics directly into the game seamlessly. You aren't just issuing vague commands for your team to follow, you're literally drawing out the shapes with a chain made of your heroes.

Even past the surface level details that the game absolutely excels at, this has massive ramifications on the flow of combat. Because the liner is a literal object in the world of the game, it's possible for enemy encounters to directly challenge your ability to draw each shape with efficiency. In a vacuum you may be good at drawing guns and hammers, but can you do it quickly in the heat of the moment? Or if a spiked enemy is blocking your path, can you draw the whip consistently in a different direction to not lose your team members? In a game like Devil May Cry it can feel like action and evasion are totally separate pieces of the combat, as it’s way easier to take your turn and juggle an enemy into oblivion, but not here. Enemies and stage hazards aren't just obstacles in moments of defense while you catch your bearings, but also during offense while you frantically try to get out different weapons and keep your advantage. Launching and comboing a stunned enemy is also a pretty involved task here, requiring a special stun state and your own ability to swap around weapons quickly, so unless you have a really strong grasp of the game you probably won’t be in a spot where danger is more than just a few feet away. It’s some really brilliant stuff.

Understandably, this is where The Wonderful 101 lost a lot of players. It asks so much of the player at the start compared to its contemporaries, but speaking personally for a second, pushing past the hump and "getting it" was easily one of the most satisfying feelings I've had in any game. If you keep at it and don't let losses discourage you, eventually you'll reach a level of mastery where you don't even have to think about how you'll be able to get the shapes out. It's very similar to the learning experience of learning a fighting game character's moveset, different motions may feel alien at first, but give it some practice and it'll quickly become 2nd nature. That may be why I was willing to stick with the system and give the game a chance - I'm not exactly a stranger to fighting games - but I don't believe the genre is required reading to enjoy this game on any level. After all, it probably has the most forgiving continue system I've ever seen (arguably to a fault in some regards) so you'll never find yourself grazing up against an insurmountable challenge on your first playthrough like you might in a different action game. The story is also just an absolute blast, so even if you haven't found your sea legs yet with the controls, you'll surely forget about any bumps in the road after you slice through a skyscraper that's just been thrown at you with a sword made out of human beings, or picked up a giant [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] everything around you only to see a massive [REDACTED] open up in [REDACTED].

Now, in any game with ambitions as lofty as those found in The Wonderful 101, cracks are bound to show eventually. There are plenty of tiny criticisms I've accrued after two years of playing the game (A few that have jumped out to me being that it doesn’t mix as many enemy types in combat as I’d like, or how you aren’t able to utilize motion inputs like stinger and rising into multi-unite) but nothing that outright ruined the game for me. Having said that, the thing that leaves me scratching my head the most is the progression system.

A pervasive thought I see in discussion around the game is that your toolkit at the start feels extremely limited compared to other action protags. There’s a few reasons why this could be (not least of which being the need to gradually ease players into its systems at the start without overwhelming them too much) but I will concede that it makes starting a new save after unlocking everything a bit more frustrating than it needs to be. While I appreciate how insane it is that every single Wonderful One levels up individually while still contributing to one massive level up system, it takes far too long to unlock certain key abilities that would show off the combat's potential far more quickly. There's really no reason why you shouldn't be able to buy key moves like stinger, rising, and cyclone with O-Parts and Wonderful Credit Cards, or god forbid offer a cheat code to level up your squad to unlock other upgrades sooner on subsequent save files. It doesn't help that this bizarre progression system is tied to a game where every weapon is so limited on its own, relatively speaking. Even just compared to Kamiya's last big action game Bayonetta, dial combos have been completely removed leaving just one main combo and a few extra moves for each of the game's massive spread of weapons (the whole experience of the game justifies this I feel, but on paper it really does seem rather limiting).

Beyond the design of the base game itself, the remaster on modern systems has also seen some bizarre changes and frustrating bugs, but despite what a certain Nintendo-adjacent YouTuber who didn’t play more than 30 minutes of the game would tell you, these actually have nothing to do with the peripheral you use to control the game. Some genuinely great changes like further tutorializaion on your basic block and dodge are nearly canceled out by old standard moves requiring an unlock, specific enemy interactions not getting fixed from the original game or getting messed up in the new version, and a massive list of bugs and glitches that keeps growing by the patch with official support that feels deafeningly silent at the moment. I’d still recommend the remaster over the Wii U version for the boost in performance alone, but for the past two years it’s been exceedingly frustrating to tack a “but” to many of my statements while recommending it to certain people. Even though many of its biggest issues aren’t something a new player will experience on a first playthrough, it’s still something that’s hard for me to ignore when discussing the game.

But…

I don’t care. Despite every issue I’ve mentioned or omitted, despite how weird of a thing it is to get into, and despite knowing deep down in my greasy heart that this isn’t something that everyone will be able to latch onto, I just don’t care. I love this too much to care. Everything comes together to make an experience so impactful that those small hardships feel like they were never there to begin with. The mini-games act simultaneously as cute callbacks to other games as well as being genuinely fun little skill checks in their own right, it’s still one of the funniest games out there from the written jokes to the visual gags throughout the game, it has the greatest quick-time event of all time with no contest, even the story feels really sharp and thoughtful. It really is the ultimate “greater than the sum of its parts” affair to me. You have no idea how refreshing it is to play something as full of life as this when the actual world we’re currently living in just feels like a shithole nightmare that exclusively beats down on those forced to participate. It truly feels like this game has more love for the joys of life than any other. It feels like it actually loves itself. And that's what it’s all about, right?

If The Wonderful 101 has taught me anything, it’s that it takes teamwork and perseverance to push through hardships in life. You never know what will be thrown your way, how you’ll push through it, or who you’ll have to push through with. But with the combined forces of everyone’s strength, it genuinely feels like even the impossible is possible. It’s not just about closing your eyes to the darkness and looking back to your childhood where you could ignore the evils of the world, it’s about learning how to grow together and push beyond what holds us back, both collectively and individually. Sometimes it will be difficult, and it may be hard to want to keep going, but it’ll be worth it in the end. It’s all about seeing the good in life and lifting up those around us so they can do the same. Sometimes it’s nice to be reminded of that.

Soul Hackers 2 is an endurance marathon of a video game that left me with an shockingly profound case of Stockholm Syndrome.

I gave 76 hours of my life that I will never get back to trudge through the most abysmal dungeons in any video game that I've ever played, a remarkably bland story, mostly unlikable characters, and I don't even know if I'm upset.

This game has so few redeemable qualities in regards to the time it requires out of the player, it is downright impressive.

Soul Hackers 2 is an affront to the adult human. Time is not respected. Sanity is not respected. Intellect is not respected. The hypothetical of watching the entirety of One Piece is a resoundingly better use of time.

Little about this experience in retrospect could be described by the four letter use of diction in the English language that is the word: good.

Usually I would write a long form review, as I do with most of my plays, for games that I have a generally strong positive/negative reaction to, but Soul Hackers 2 drained enough out of me, Dracula would be proud.

I liked Tokyo Mirage Sessions, but no game should have the player ever, in a modicum of occurrences, say "I would rather play Tokyo Mirage Sessions."

Seriously, I have never complained about a game I've played this much, for this long, and had that come up in my review. I am mellow, I am very mild-mannered, but Soul Hackers 2 had me considering donning a purple jacket, some clown makeup, and changing my legal name, that my lovely mother and father gave to me, to Arthur Fleck, also known in the DCComic Universe as The Joker.

Speaking of Joker, man do I miss Persona. This is an SMT game through and through, that should've been a sign to me. I knew it was SMT, and I kinda like SMT, but I don't Liiiiiiiiiike SMT.

I pledge to play video games that respect my time a little more.

The genuine pros of this game, is that the hub vistas that you revisit are quite beautiful and the game design of the environments (minus the dungeons) is great. The character design, minus Arrow, is awesome and some of the better that I've seen in the JRPG space recently. Ringo, Figue, Milady, Nana, and Saizo all had great and unique designs that were candy to the eye and played to their respective characters. Speaking of the (main) characters, they were pretty good actually. Though they were sort of juvenile in their approach
to the tentative apocalypse that would lead to the death of all humanity, they were fun to listen to talk and hang out in the downtimes.

The shop menus and art style was very well done too. The presentation of Soul Hackers 2 was the lone spotlight in a sea of begrudgingly depressing and miserable decisions.

I can't recommend you play this game, unless you have a lot of free time, and not the will to enjoy a good game.

This has legitimately numbed my approach to video games, I'm hoping in a sort of shell-shocked fashion that I will get over. I hope the next game I play, has some redeeming quality that makes me smile or interested in what I'm interacting with, Soul Hackers 2 may be a paradigm shift in the way I approach games. I hope one day, that the spark that Elden Ring brought will return, because playing Soul Hackers 2 is the complete antithesis of everything I enjoy.

The more I think about the plot, the more I want to go out into the country of the state I live in and lie in a field of grass so that I can forget how poor it is.

Saizo really was a great character though, I just wanted to let that be known.

There's something amusing about seeing a lot of big fans of Persona 5 in my circle rag on Persona 4 constantly when, in reality, the core issues of both of their stories are near-identical. They both have very formulaic story structures that wear out their welcome by the time they do start shaking things up, they have fairly weak casts that are severely underwritten past their initial arcs, and they're both very non-committal or even contradictory with presenting their main themes. If this is the case, then why do I view Persona 4 in a somewhat more positive light while Persona 5 gets worse for me as time goes on, despite the fact that the lowest lows of 4 are far worse than 5’s? Well, not only does Persona 4 have its own unique strengths that 5 fails to capture, but these direct parallels in shortcomings give me the impression that Atlus learned practically nothing from the shortcomings of 4 after a near-decade, aside from slightly getting the memo that homophobia might not actually be that funny. (Emphasis on slightly)

The main cast is probably the worst out of any modern Persona cast. Not to say that they’re all irredeemably terrible, but they just become incredibly flat once their specific arc is concluded, which makes it even more damning when characters like Haru don’t even have that to their name with how poorly implemented Morgana’s arc is. It doesn’t really take long for them to neatly slot into their respective archetypes without branching out much beyond them. Ann probably gets this the worst, she doesn’t really get to go beyond being “the girl” of the group when she had so much going on during Kamoshida’s arc. I think a better approach would’ve been to limit the cast just to the initial trio. Their dynamic in the early game is very strong and could totally carry a whole game on its own. Yusuke felt pretty out of place once he fully joined the Phantom Thieves, and the sidelining of growth for each party member becomes very apparent once Makoto joins. I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to say it would work, with how often the series tries to push a “main trio” of their parties. Even Persona 4 directly did it, when it arguably started off with more of a quartet than a trio. I don’t know how it would affect the rest of the game, but what I do know is that the characters do need a lot more than they get, especially in a series that prides itself on interpersonal relationships like Persona does.

I don’t see myself as someone that’s too harsh regarding the “Show don’t tell” critique. I like a good chunk of media that are very in your face about their messages and themes. The point where I do feel it’s right to make that critique is when it feels like a piece of media is talking down to me, which is absolutely the case with Persona 5. It never trusts the player to come to their own conclusions about what they’re being presented, so it feels the need to spell the meaning behind every interaction out in meticulous detail so that a 3 year old can keep up with it. For example, there’s a reoccurring puzzle throughout the Pyramid of Wrath, (Which is my least favorite stretch of the whole game for a myriad of reasons that I don’t intend to go into) where you put together hieroglyphs that depict parts of the palace ruler’s past, and their relationship with a close family member. I thought it was a cool way to let the player piece together the trauma that they endured, especially with how that comes together with the palace’s boss, but every single time you clear one, the characters explain exactly what it means and tell you exactly how to feel. It’s really frustrating when it feels like it has to spell out every single interaction in the entire game. I feel like you could shave off 10 hours from the game just by giving it a tighter script, it’s unnecessary bloat that does nothing but dampen the storytelling. It’s even more baffling that it has this approach when ultimately, it doesn’t really have anything to say until the Royal arc hits. It’s trying to tackle much more grandiose themes of society and rebellion, but it always feels like it’s only putting a single toe into an incredibly deep pool. Let me be clear, I don’t need the PTs to start picking apart every aspect of each corrupt system in the nation. I feel like too many critiques go down that route, especially since it does place more of an emphasis on personal conflict. But even so, it could do a lot better with acknowledging it than the “All’s well that ends well, right?” approach we’re given. That’s honestly my biggest problem with the modern series. It’s so non-commital with presenting these potentially interesting ideas that the stick it’s hitting the issues it tackles seems to be more like a damp pool noodle.

As I’m writing this, I’m noticing a major pattern between each of this game’s aspects. I really like everything about it on paper. The general theme of rebellion that has sparks throughout the whole game, that’s cool! Too bad the ways it explores that theme are pretty paper-thin, even with the social links that usually thrive with conveying themes just as well as if not better than the main plot. Having social links teach you more specific abilities to use throughout the game for a sense of growth, that’s cool! Too bad that the way they’re balanced makes them range from practically meaningless to game-breakingly powerful. Every single addition to the game’s combat, the baton passes, the guns, all of that is cool! Too bad none of the game is balanced around it and it makes even a normal playthrough one where you’re stupidly overpowered. I think this is why Persona 5 fails for me in ways that the other games in the series don’t quite as much. As much as 3 and 4 had their low points and downsides, both of those did have consistent strengths that they were able to bring out exceptionally well. For every great and fresh idea that P5 has that isn’t strictly related to its presentation, there’s something else that ends up completely undercutting it.

In a way, that’s why despite how fun it can be to dunk on Atlus and this game, I don’t like the distaste that I have for it. It does have some genuinely fascinating ideas, I can see a spark of something truly spectacular trapped inside of this. The Royal arc proves this, it’s a fantastic piece of work that’s only weaknesses are the foundation that it’s built upon. If Atlus really is capable of being a tour de force in video game storytelling and can capitalize on the strengths of Royal’s writing, then Persona 6 could be the first game in the series that I really like without any caveats. All I need is proof that modern Atlus has that bite in its narratives, which it’s mostly consistently proven to not have over this decade. I want to believe that Atlus can pull through, and bring us one last surprise…

(Also maybe don’t have a prominent party member that plays into every single autism stereotype in the book at maximum capacity with the core point being “ooh she’s such a quirky gamer girl!” Cool? Cool.)

"You must always remember that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing."

I really appreciate how simple, yet in-depth the exploration is, comparing it to other metroidvania like games and its map it feels much more simple to navigate and never too tedious as well. The atmosphere, music and animations are smooth as hell too, I can see myself playing this again in the future honestly.

Damn good game definitely worthy of being a classic.