This review contains spoilers
Boring. Uninspired. Derivative. Soulless.
There's occasional good ideas present but the presentation and gameplay of the game undermines anything good it has going for it. Some examples:
The Soul Matrix is a boring dungeon that the game wants you go through to unlock your party member's special abilities and learn more about their personal histories. Every floor looks like the same uninspired sci-fi slop as the one before it. Rather than being one long linear dungeon, it is split into three sections each with their own levels equivalent in difficulty to each other. Because of the pacing of the game, you end up running past all the enemies of the previous floors you didn't do just to fight the mini-boss you are now over-leveled for. The cutscenes you do get as a reward only marginally expand on previous scenes and are consequentially neat but unremarkable. They are predictable and uninteresting.
Continuing this train of thought, the "Vision Quests" miss the appeal of what the initial Vision Quests had from the previous games. Of which, highlighted previously unseen characters, great music, solid foreshadowing to later dungeons and even choices that have consequences on events later in the game. The Vision Quests in Soul Hackers 2 have none of this. They are inconsequential and repetitive.
All the demons are derived from previous SMT games with few to no new additions.
Characters and ideas return from previous Devil Summoner entries but are underwhelming and unrecognizable at worst. Kyouji and Rei may not have had a significant role in Soul Hackers but they still left an impression and it was exciting seeing what happened to them after the first game. I guess Victor's new design is fantastic and his role in the narrative is appropriate but he's the exception and not the rule.
Sabbath is not an fun mechanic. They could have expanded or polished up on the row system from the previous Devil Summoner games or stuck with press-turn but instead "extra damage" is the novel mechanic of the game. It does not affect your strategy or decision making to the extent either of the previous two mechanics do nor is it even a novel idea.
This is the only SMT game I dropped halfway through. I do not like this game.
There's occasional good ideas present but the presentation and gameplay of the game undermines anything good it has going for it. Some examples:
The Soul Matrix is a boring dungeon that the game wants you go through to unlock your party member's special abilities and learn more about their personal histories. Every floor looks like the same uninspired sci-fi slop as the one before it. Rather than being one long linear dungeon, it is split into three sections each with their own levels equivalent in difficulty to each other. Because of the pacing of the game, you end up running past all the enemies of the previous floors you didn't do just to fight the mini-boss you are now over-leveled for. The cutscenes you do get as a reward only marginally expand on previous scenes and are consequentially neat but unremarkable. They are predictable and uninteresting.
Continuing this train of thought, the "Vision Quests" miss the appeal of what the initial Vision Quests had from the previous games. Of which, highlighted previously unseen characters, great music, solid foreshadowing to later dungeons and even choices that have consequences on events later in the game. The Vision Quests in Soul Hackers 2 have none of this. They are inconsequential and repetitive.
All the demons are derived from previous SMT games with few to no new additions.
Characters and ideas return from previous Devil Summoner entries but are underwhelming and unrecognizable at worst. Kyouji and Rei may not have had a significant role in Soul Hackers but they still left an impression and it was exciting seeing what happened to them after the first game. I guess Victor's new design is fantastic and his role in the narrative is appropriate but he's the exception and not the rule.
Sabbath is not an fun mechanic. They could have expanded or polished up on the row system from the previous Devil Summoner games or stuck with press-turn but instead "extra damage" is the novel mechanic of the game. It does not affect your strategy or decision making to the extent either of the previous two mechanics do nor is it even a novel idea.
This is the only SMT game I dropped halfway through. I do not like this game.
SerphOX
4 months ago