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.

An SMT clone I greatly appreciate that has hit-or-miss execution. If you're a diehard SMT fan I'd recommend at least trying the game out. There's a lot to talk about so I'll just place my thoughts in bullet point form.

- Getting this out of the way immediately; dungeons are way too big. We're talking sizes that rival the final dungeons in any regular dungeon-crawler. Even indoor towns happen to be absurdly massive and are a slog to get through. The encounter rate is thankfully pretty low and escaping has a high chance of success. This can still be a huge deal-breaker for some.
- The gameplay itself is unique and has some interesting benefits to it but not without its flaws. You don't have leveling up or any traditional item stores but instead "energy" which you get from killing enemies. You use energy to level up your protagonist and heroine's stats, upgrade your weapons and produce all your items and resources whenever you want. Scavenging for items was more rewarding since they were more rare. Developing your characters in a more free-form fashion was also fun to do, although is nowhere near as extensive as in other JRPGs at the time. The balancing is surprisingly good, or as good as it can be, at least until the last third of the game where your characters become so overpowered and at so little cost that there's no longer any real challenge to be had.
- The narrative itself isn't much to write home about, but the individual set pieces and the world building that wraps it all around is all fantastic stuff. There's a decent amount of one-on-one conversations with ordinary people doing their best to stay alive in a demonic apocalypse. You end up travelling to different regions in Japan in different periods and all of them are very distinctive and memorable. Some of the more stand out moments include going to Kyoto to stop a demon parade (with appropriately themed enemies) by travelling across the city to beat up and take the limbs of some dismembered monster for shits and giggles. You also end up in Kyuushuu to find dinosaur people hanging out in a village who have a serious Dinosaur Death Cult Problem™. It reminded me a lot of Megami Tensei 2 specifically but maybe slightly more eccentric in places.
- Really, the entire middle-portion of the game is a fun time and is easily the highlight of the experience. Its one hell of a wild ride and I can't appreciate the insanity enough.
- Most of the music is just there to fill the atmosphere. Some tracks are obnoxious and most are re-used and looped way too often. Some select tracks are great and wonderfully complement the tone of the game, but these are probably like 3 or 4 total.
- The creature and character designs are all phenomenal and ooze with personality. The game uses a mix of pixel art, scanned illustrations and handcrafted sculptures for the wide variety of characters you encounter in the game. They're all fantastic and distinct and seeing what next creature I'd be fighting ended up being a huge draw for me in the game. I didn't actually know this going in, but both Katsuya Terada and Yasuhi Nirasawa worked on the designs. Nirasawa himself greatly contributed to a bunch of tokusatsu shows, video games and ironically SMT itself, later on. He's severely underappreciated as an artist.
-The closing dungeons of the game were an absolute chore, enemies can't hurt you in any significant way but by having large health pools they increase the sheer slog of going through the already massive dungeons.
-The final boss had a unique gimmick to it I haven't seen in a traditional JRPG before, but the ending itself is slightly underwhelming. For all the foreshadowing with the Ooparts and a certain disembodied head, I felt a bit underwhelmed.

Its a neat game that I wish was just a bit more polished.