Little ambition, in a sea of good ideas

Soul Hackers 2 is not the direct sequel to the original game: Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers, it is it's own thing entirely. While tackling some of core themes like literally "Soul Hacking" people. If you ever played a mainline SMT or two you will also notice both games won't have much in common with each other in terms of story or characters or even the setting. What I'm getting at is that you don't really have to play the first game to enjoy this one.

SMT is known for thoughtful, simple to tackle and hard to master combat. Is it any good here? It's really simplified, compared to what the games have been building up to.

After hitting an enemy weakness, you'll activate what is called Sabbath. Sabbath attacks stack ups the demons you have in your team once you hit an enemy weakness one by one to deal extra damage at the end of your party's turn. It's a good twist on the already proven to be great Press Turn System from mainline games.

Thing is, Sabbath is not much more complex that you may think. The extra spicy detail is that a demon can perform an extra action while on Sabbath if it learns a specific attack. Say, it can deal already extra damage to the Sabbath attack, steal an item from the enemy, recover energy to the party and so on. It's tied to one demon's ability and honestly that limits a lot what you can do with this system. Every demon should've had an extra effect by default or to be customizable through the game in a Sabbath attack. And this game loves customization, we'll get in depth into that soon.

The story in this game is serviceable, save the world from destruction type of deal. You are Ringo, a emissary from Aion, a super intelligent being and you will be also accompanied by Figue, a friend of sorts. Both have the mission to search for an entity known as Iron Mask and just stop him. Along the way, in one of the first hours you'll meet two individuals: Arrow and Milady, both killed in action. Ringo decides the best course of action will be to "Soul Hack" these two individuals and bring them to life again and help her searching for Iron Mask, which wants to destroy the world. Both Arrow and Milady belong to different factions that have different views on the world and are currently on war, there's is Yatagarasu and the Phantom Society. After meeting them you'll encounter a third member, Saizo a freelancer demon summoner which got involved into this faction war. After reuniting with all the members the main story starts to unfold. It's a cool setup, everyone is tied with Iron Mask directly or indirectly so the story doesn't have to constantly remind us who is this guy exacly, it remains a mystery. These three individual will make up your party, alongside your demons of course. Everyone in your group had an afflicted past, problems and answers that never were resolve before dying, you can go in depth with those stories in what are called "Soul Matrix" a dungeon set in the soul of one of your parterns. Talking about dungeons.

We hit a low in this one. The dungeons in Soul Hackers 2 are simple and not interesting to explore. I would be lying if I said I enjoyed the little variation of dungeons in this title, I didn't. It loves to waste your time with long hallways that can or not lead to nothing, dead ends basically with a very basic linear structure and very little to explore in general. To top of that you'll have a navigator called Mimi, a little bird creature that is suppossed to help with enemy detection on dungeons. But it doesn't, in this game there are not random encounters and enemies can spawn in front of you and you'll have plenty of time to react and either escape or slash them since they are really slow. And exploration is even easier thanks to that, you can just slash enemies outside combat and never had to fight one. But keep in mind you'll still need to level up so there is no real sense of danger in this game when it comes to exploration. Mimi, the bird creature will never shut up and you'll be constantly hearing it when approaching an enemy or even when not. It just makes the exploration aspect absolutely more miserable than it already is. Soul Matrix as I previously mention is a dungeon inside one of your mates soul. This lets you equip them with better unique skills or upgrades, may be passive upgrades or active skills. This is where customization comes into play. One of the better aspects in this game is the customization, to your party to be exact. Upgrades can be found in a shop or in the Soul Matrix though it doesn't apply to Ringo.

The shop will sell you the upgrades as long as you have the materials to produce it. These materials can be found throughout the dungeons thanks to your demons. Forgot to mention, after selecting a dungeon to explore Ringo will automatically sent demons to explore the area for you for materials and such. This is what's known as "Demon Scout", this also where Demon Negotiation comes into play, and weirdly enough it's outside of combat.
Back to the upgrades. You can build a character basically the way you want with this system with elemental perks. Want Ringo to go for a Elelctric build? Sure. Saizo force? Yeah. Make everyone master fire attacks? Of course. Though the strategy always remains in being as diverse as possible. Instant kill attacks are not present in this game, so if you ever planned to make a quick kill build to farm for exp. I'm sorry to dissapoint you. This, mixed with Demon Fusion creates a great sense of freedom.

The presentation in this game is good. Nothing outstanding or horrendous. Though you can feel the team didn't had the budget or probably time to polish most of the aspects of presentation. Janky animation, weird or bland textures and unstable performance. Some zones are way more detailed than other, this created a huge unbalance visually speaking. The dungeons themselves, the worst aspect of the game are dull looking at while the main two cities in this game shine with details. Music is quiet while on dungeons, almost unnoticeable but the combat music ain't bad at all.

So in conclusion. Is it worth your time? No, I don't think it is. Even if you are a massive MegaTen preacher. Mainly because you already have RPGs from Atlus that made some aspects miles better than this game. Want a character story driven game? Play Persona. Want to focus on gameplay alone with an ambiguous story? Play Shin Megami Tensei. Want the classic dungeon feeling? Just play the original Soul Hackers. No wonder this game flopped, it tries to be everything while not wanting to be ambitious and tie everything in a way that feels cohesive. It doesn't have a clear identity.