[Emulated on PCSX2]
Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon is the sequel to the first Raidou game and fourth entry in Devil Summoner series. Despite loving Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army I found this game to be quite disappointing, both as a standalone game and a sequel.
Despite being a sequel, King Abaddon does not respect the original game. Kaya’s gone (apparently moved?), a certain character I won’t name is revived just to be a note-taker which totally defeats their death in the original, the cast from the original game get no more development and it feels like they are there because it being a sequel demands it (some are even reduced to mere comedy relief such as tae’s entire character being fainting since she faints every scene she appears in). King abaddon also tries really hard not to reference the previous game’s plot to the point the shopkeeper doesn’t even remember you which makes me question why they even made a sequel in the first place.
Story-wise I did not like this game at all. Story fell out all over the place without a clear idea of what it wanted to say and would dwell on certain plot points way too long that I was waiting for it to be over. I really do wish they would have brought back the original writer because it really shows that they didn’t work on this one (they probably didn’t even plan for a sequel considering how soulless army wrapped up its story perfectly). One big addition I was not a fan of is “alignments”, a staple of the SMT series that made its first and only appearance in the devil summoner series with this game. While they can be well implemented, king abaddon does a terrible job with it by awkwardly inserting philosophical questions into casual conversations which really took me out of the game. What's even stranger is that none of these choices matter - no matter which alignment you choose the ending will be the same with the only major difference switching the deaths of two characters. Content-wise they’re also almost identical with at most swapping out a mini-boss or two (final dungeon and final boss remain the same). With how poorly they’re implemented along with how they don’t even change anything makes me question why they were even added in the first place, to appeal to SMT fans I guess?
As for the gameplay, I was not a fan of it in this game. While raidou can dodge (which is a great addition), Atlus had no idea how to balance this out and their solution was to make every single enemy constantly teleport across the screen (which makes fights really tedious like a game of whac-a-mole). Guns have also become completely useless with the removal of elemental bullets and just letting the player have access to unlimited bullets. Unlike the first game, fights take an extremely long time to escape from making it more viable to just kill the enemies. Another change I was not a fan of was the MAG rework, giving all your demons a shared MP pool. The biggest issue with this is that, unlike the first game where you were encouraged to swap out demons when they ran out of mp, you can pretty much just use the same two demons the entire fight and when you run out of MAG fights become very frustrating (looking at the final boss). While I suppose it's not too big of a deal some mechanics such as combo attacks and sword fusion are missing from this game which was a bit of a letdown. With that all said, one of my biggest issues with king abaddon is boss reuse, the prime offender being the soldier bugs which are reused and reskinned throughout the entire game even up to the final chapter (appearing a total of 13 times) making the game feel extremely repetitive.
While I’ve said a lot of negatives, King Abaddon does make some changes I like. Gone is the tedious fusion where you had to grind to make loyalty to fuse, gone are the random encounters in towns, gone is having to go all the way back to konnou-ya just to fuse and heal. King abaddon also allows the player to use two demons at once and offers more control options such as hiding them (making them invincible while holding a button but they can not take action during this) and being able to teleport them to you. Fusion is also more robust with nice additions such as demons leaving notes when fused and the ability to pass on passive skills. Negotiations are also great, possibly one of the bests in megaten with demons having their own conversations if they recognize each other and being able to use your demons to help you out when negotiations are not going well. Demons leaving sad notes when fused was also such a wonderful way to make them feel alive and broke my heart every time.
Presentation-wise the game oddly feels a lot lower budget with lower quality prerendered cutscenes and a lot less. One of the funniest scenes is when a cow gets kidnapped by a bug and just flies into the flat background (it looks so bad). The redone models for characters such as raidou and tae also look noticeably worse.
While I personally did not enjoy it and have a lot of complaints about it I still believe it's a good game in its own right and worth giving a shot especially if you’re a fan of the series. I just wish this game wasn’t so disappointing for me because I really wanted to love it.
Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon is the sequel to the first Raidou game and fourth entry in Devil Summoner series. Despite loving Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army I found this game to be quite disappointing, both as a standalone game and a sequel.
Despite being a sequel, King Abaddon does not respect the original game. Kaya’s gone (apparently moved?), a certain character I won’t name is revived just to be a note-taker which totally defeats their death in the original, the cast from the original game get no more development and it feels like they are there because it being a sequel demands it (some are even reduced to mere comedy relief such as tae’s entire character being fainting since she faints every scene she appears in). King abaddon also tries really hard not to reference the previous game’s plot to the point the shopkeeper doesn’t even remember you which makes me question why they even made a sequel in the first place.
Story-wise I did not like this game at all. Story fell out all over the place without a clear idea of what it wanted to say and would dwell on certain plot points way too long that I was waiting for it to be over. I really do wish they would have brought back the original writer because it really shows that they didn’t work on this one (they probably didn’t even plan for a sequel considering how soulless army wrapped up its story perfectly). One big addition I was not a fan of is “alignments”, a staple of the SMT series that made its first and only appearance in the devil summoner series with this game. While they can be well implemented, king abaddon does a terrible job with it by awkwardly inserting philosophical questions into casual conversations which really took me out of the game. What's even stranger is that none of these choices matter - no matter which alignment you choose the ending will be the same with the only major difference switching the deaths of two characters. Content-wise they’re also almost identical with at most swapping out a mini-boss or two (final dungeon and final boss remain the same). With how poorly they’re implemented along with how they don’t even change anything makes me question why they were even added in the first place, to appeal to SMT fans I guess?
As for the gameplay, I was not a fan of it in this game. While raidou can dodge (which is a great addition), Atlus had no idea how to balance this out and their solution was to make every single enemy constantly teleport across the screen (which makes fights really tedious like a game of whac-a-mole). Guns have also become completely useless with the removal of elemental bullets and just letting the player have access to unlimited bullets. Unlike the first game, fights take an extremely long time to escape from making it more viable to just kill the enemies. Another change I was not a fan of was the MAG rework, giving all your demons a shared MP pool. The biggest issue with this is that, unlike the first game where you were encouraged to swap out demons when they ran out of mp, you can pretty much just use the same two demons the entire fight and when you run out of MAG fights become very frustrating (looking at the final boss). While I suppose it's not too big of a deal some mechanics such as combo attacks and sword fusion are missing from this game which was a bit of a letdown. With that all said, one of my biggest issues with king abaddon is boss reuse, the prime offender being the soldier bugs which are reused and reskinned throughout the entire game even up to the final chapter (appearing a total of 13 times) making the game feel extremely repetitive.
While I’ve said a lot of negatives, King Abaddon does make some changes I like. Gone is the tedious fusion where you had to grind to make loyalty to fuse, gone are the random encounters in towns, gone is having to go all the way back to konnou-ya just to fuse and heal. King abaddon also allows the player to use two demons at once and offers more control options such as hiding them (making them invincible while holding a button but they can not take action during this) and being able to teleport them to you. Fusion is also more robust with nice additions such as demons leaving notes when fused and the ability to pass on passive skills. Negotiations are also great, possibly one of the bests in megaten with demons having their own conversations if they recognize each other and being able to use your demons to help you out when negotiations are not going well. Demons leaving sad notes when fused was also such a wonderful way to make them feel alive and broke my heart every time.
Presentation-wise the game oddly feels a lot lower budget with lower quality prerendered cutscenes and a lot less. One of the funniest scenes is when a cow gets kidnapped by a bug and just flies into the flat background (it looks so bad). The redone models for characters such as raidou and tae also look noticeably worse.
While I personally did not enjoy it and have a lot of complaints about it I still believe it's a good game in its own right and worth giving a shot especially if you’re a fan of the series. I just wish this game wasn’t so disappointing for me because I really wanted to love it.