Nobody sets out to make a mediocre game.

Soul Hackers 2 is the most quintessentially "B-team" game, for better and for worse. On one hand, this afforded the team the freedom to push the envelope, and on the other it meant hamstringing them with few resources, a tight deadline, and almost no budget. Soul Hackers 2 was sent out to die, and considering how poorly it has been performing, I genuinely worry this might spook Atlus from making future attempts at reviving long dormant side series.

That about sums up my thoughts on Soul Hackers 2, so if you want to bail now I won't blame you. But I paid my money, and I played this game for sixty hours, so I'm going to get into the weeds on this one.

Soul Hackers 2 ditches the press-turn battle system that has been the mechanical bedrock of Shin Megami Tensei since Nocturne way back on the Playstation 2. A bold choice considering how tired and true it is. In its place is the Sabbath system, or "stacks," wherein striking weaknesses adds demons to an all-out attack that caps off your party's turn. These sabbaths can be further augmented by skills that allow you to build additional stacks when striking weaknesses, abilities that let you alter the conditions under which stacks are accumulated, or by adding modifiers to sabbaths that allow your party to heal or inflict status ailments.

While I do find this system to be surprisingly dynamic, it feels a little underbaked as well. Enemies cannot initiate their own sabbaths, so having your weaknesses exploited comes with little consequence, and enemies seem to be more spongy so as to prevent you from steamrolling every single encounter. Though it's not perfect, I do appreciate Soul Hackers 2 for attempting to do something fresh when the franchise has become so mechanically stagnant.

It is then a little bizarre how regressive the dungeons feel. They straight up look like something out of Persona 4, both in layout and graphical fidelity. I don't mind dungeon crawling - hell, I enjoy the SNES Shin Megami Tenseis, but Persona 5's carefully considered dungeons and Shin Megami Tensei V's open areas makes Soul Hackers 2 feel positively antiquated by comparison. Lazily designed teleporter puzzles are about as much as you get for variety, and of the eight main dungeons, six flip assets with each other.

You can take odd jobs between story missions, though it's almost impressive how little variety there is between them. You'll largely be running variants of the same six or so errands over and over again, though you only get about three or four at a time so they're easy enough to knock out. You can also explore The Axis, a massive maze that wants very badly to be The Labyrinth of Amala, but (much like the rest of the dungeons) is just the same bland looking corridors repeated over and over and over and over again. Amala at least looked more grotesque and organic the further in you explored, with increasingly complex puzzles and dangerous hazards making each trek more harrowing than the last. Unfortunately, if you want some of the best character upgrades in the game, you need to make repeated trips to the Axis. Put a podcast on, get comfortable, you're going to be there a while.

You can also now send your demons out on "recon," which happens automatically whenever you enter a dungeon. You can find your demons scattered about as you explore, and speaking to them will reward you with cash, crafting materials, items, or the ability to negotiate with new demons. That's right, you cannot negotiate in battle. Instead, you have to hope that you chance upon one of your demons and then randomly speak with a new demon you may or may not already have. To be fair, I never failed a negotiation, but this system also makes it really dependent on luck if you'll even have a shot at a demon you want. Of course you can always fuse demons to get something more desirable, although even this feels lackluster as fusion has been stripped down to its bare essentials.

I suppose the last thing worth noting is the story. It's fine. The writing is very iffy for the first few hours. I think the Persona games are very good at getting you to care about characters right away, but I found the main cast of Soul Hackers 2 unlikable until I spent a good amount of time with them. This is probably due in part to them behaving so abrasively towards each other and having very little context to their backstories for quite some time. However, as the hours have marched on I found that I like this dynamic quite a bit. You (as Ringo, the protagonist) form a party with three other characters who seem to align broadly with "law," "chaos," and "neutrality." It's only natural that these people and their wildly different ideologies would be at each others throats, and indeed if it weren't for Ringo the entire group would fall apart immediately. I like that. I like a cast of characters who share common goals but under any other circumstance would be enemies, I think it's fun. It's a good thing too, because the main plot of Soul Hackers 2 isn't anything to write home about.

A lot has been said about Soul Hackers 2's graphics and performance, and for that I'd just suggest watching Digital Foundry's teardown for an idea of what to expect. Soul Hackers 2 is certainly going for a capital-A ~Aesthetic~, but its low fidelity works against it at every possible turn. It also runs like garbage. The PS5 seems to come out on top with this one, but I found load times to be bizarrely long and frequent (this can be solved by setting tips on the loading screen to advance with a button press, for some reason), a little hitchy in places, and experienced random brief instances of the graphics suddenly blurring.

In the wake of Soul Hackers 2 selling so poorly, I've seen a lot of people beat the drum that it should've come out on the Switch, arguing that SMTV ran just fine, and so would Soul Hackers 2. Sure, maybe it would've sold a few more copies, but with the Xbox One S barely being able to lock down 16fps in some areas I'd really have to wonder if it'd be a particularly good way to play. Shin Megami Tensei V had a budget, it had a long development cycle, and it had the full care and attention of Atlus. Every problem with Soul Hackers 2 from the execution of its mechanics to its dismal performance is attributable to Atlus needing to make their Q3 revenue spreadsheets look a little bit better. No matter what system you play it on and regardless of its technical performance, Soul Hackers 2 cannot escape mediocrity.

What a shame. At least it has a good battle theme.