I know almost nobody is going to be watching this video in 2024, much less on the site proper, so I'm sure this is addressing nobody, but I just played this game myself after completely missing it 2 years ago and wanted to share some thoughts since general consensus on it was kind of middling at release.
Just up front, this is very clearly a game developed by an Atlus C-team, with far fewer resources devoted to it than their top tier titles. This becomes apparent rather quickly a few hours in when you gain access to the Soul Matrix and the first few dungeons. So if you're coming into this game thinking it might be on the level of depth and/or detail of Persona 5, or P3 Reload, don't. You're just setting yourself up for disappointment.
However, if you're someone who's down for a more modest project, especially one with a lot of style and creativity to make up for it, then you'll like Soul Hackers 2. I bought this game based almost exclusively on being shown Ringo's design by a friend on discord and going "Wow, the vibes here are immaculate." And that remained true for my entire playthrough; sure the dungeon designs are pretty drab but all the town areas and shop menus, the battle animations, the music, all just... it's vibes, man. Going in with the knowledge that it wasn't some amazing 10/10 must play masterpiece, I was more than fine with seeing it as it is, which is a flawed but still cool as hell RPG.
I really got attached to the main quintet and even for as basic as the progression of the main plot is, I was invested for all of it. It's a little slow to get going, but I mean, most RPGs are. The writing is great and has a lot of charm to it, especially for the bar hangout chats. The voice acting for the story stuff and all the battle quips is excellent (which they mostly talked over in this QL).
Also, a lot of the smaller QoL/technical issues Jan and Michael (and a lot of reviews/videos made on release) bring up are things like how slow Ringo moves around, or not being able to skip cutscenes. Anybody looking into this game after the fact should be aware a LOT of these issues were patched post-release, so Ringo now has a sprint toggle, you can skip cutscenes, etc.
This is probably the most "subjective 10/10, objective 7.5/10" game I've ever played. I really loved my time with it. I hope more people go back and give it a chance.
When they talked about "surviving and living with your past/how that affects you going forward" and stuff like that as being a more interesting way to go than simply dying as a resolution to a character arc, for whatever reason, the first thing I thought of was Megalo Box. A show very much made as a sendup and homage to Ashita no Joe, a classic boxing manga/anime, where Joe, the protagonist, famously dies at the end. The entirety of Season 1 of Megalo Box is littered with red flags about how the main character (who's a nameless slum resident that adopts the name Joe) is heading straight to the grave with the path he's taking. They couldn't be more heavy handed with it. It even has Bebop-esque text at the end of each episode, with several of them saying "Not Dead Yet..." or "Still Not Dead..." or something along those lines. Yet, at the end of it, Joe doesn't die. It's not exactly a happy ending, but it's so much more optimistic than the series had been leading you to believe it was going to be.
Cut to the beginning of season 2: Joe's lost contact with everyone he knew from season 1, is addicted to really low quality painkillers, is boxing on an underground circuit to no fans (after reaching the height of the sport in season 1) and is in general just a complete disaster. The first few episodes are about getting him back to a place where he can go back and face the people he left behind and resolve everything that happened between seasons, and I really loved it how it handled "life moves on" as a theme. Season 1 of Megalo Box is... fine. It's got a fun mini-arc in the middle about a former student of Joe's current second, but the main thrust of the plot at the start and end is a little middling, and felt kind of rushed. But season 2 wouldn't be nearly as good as it is if season 1 didn't happen and if it didn't end the way it did.
Anyway, Cowboy Bebop is great. It's basically Spike's season 2, in the best way.
no clue why he wouldn't turn into a Vampire, other than just claiming Hamon (even though Straizo did become one so meh)
After Joseph beat Straizo he started using his breathing technique to channel hamon through his body, which killed him. He wasn't using it as a vampire because of that. Joseph would likely have no problem just flexing his hamon muscle and expelling whatever vampiric influence lingers in the blood. Also, it took a little while for Vanilla Ice to actually fully turn into one, remember. He was resurrected but it wasn't until midway through the fight with Polnareff and Iggy that he began to show traits of vampirism, when Polnareff was hitting him with stuff that should have killed him but didn't, like the sword through the mouth.
@topcyclist: The Emperor is probably a better stand than Sex Pistols, just because by and large Part 3's stands are a lot more basic and simple in concept, whereas the specificity and weirdness of later parts' abilities makes a lot of them "weaker" in the traditional sense, but lead to the users having more creative application. However, Hol Horse probably loses (or more likely forfeits and runs away from) that fight because he's a coward and lacks Mista's DETERMINAZIONE
Im in the middle of the episode so maybe they correct themselves at some point but I feel like it really needs to be pointed out: Hol Horse's stand ABSOLUTELY allows him to control the bullets he fires. This was one of the first things established about him in The Emperor & The.Hanged Man
That was a good summary of where pro wrestling is at. I wish someone had been watching New Japan enough to talk about it but I too can't bring myself to watch it on a regular basis without storylines. Jan seems to have at least started watching G1 and with Alex back in the GBEast office he will have too.
Looking forward to the next episode, hopefully in 3-5 weeks?
It's kind of a misconception that New Japan doesn't have storylines. They present the product much more heavily as a sport, but all that means is storylines evolve out of matches rather than "you spilled coffee on me backstage so I beat you up, now we're fighting on Sunday." The storylines are more subtle and you don't get 20 minute promos in the ring to advance them, but they're still there.
Yeah but in the G1 specifically?
Honestly? Yes! The G1 pretty much sets up the rest of the year until Wrestle Kingdom. Champions who get pinned during tournaments defend their titles over the fall and early winter, so for example if Tetsuya Naito (IC Champ) loses to Juice Robinson, Naito will defend his title against Robinson in either the semi-main or main event of one of the fall tours, like Destruction, King of Pro Wrestling, or Power Struggle. Hell just in tonight's show there was a ton of story happening:
KENTA beat Hiroshi Tanahashi in their singles match on night 3 and on night 4 they tagged together with some Young Lions in the undercard, and the whole time during this one they refused to tag each other and pushed each other out of the way when one of their other two partners would come over for a tag. Jay White's first 3 opponents are from Chaos, the faction he betrayed last year, and is on track to go 0-3 against them after losing to Goto and Ishii. He made it extremely personal with Goto in particular, who got the feelgood win after being repeatedly humiliated by White earlier in the year. Takashi Iizuka, a veteran who'd years ago turned into an uncontrollable madman, retired back in February after a fun storyline with Tenzan, another veteran, but left his signature weapon, an iron glove, in the ring as he wandered off into the darkness of the arena. Fellow Suzuki-gun teammate Taichi picked up the glove and has been carrying it in a bag to the ring ever since, the implication being that there's a spirit of madness inhabiting it that corrupted Iizuka a decade ago. Taichi hasn't used it once since picking it up until about an hour ago in his G1 match with Tetsuya Naito, and it got him the win.
So yeah sorry for the tl;dr but New Japan is literally what saved my interest in wrestling so I'm kind of passionate about it. It's a bit disheartening when you hear people dismiss it because of reasons that aren't actually true like "it has no characters or storylines" in favor of continuing to watch and complain about the terrible product WWE puts into the world.
That was a good summary of where pro wrestling is at. I wish someone had been watching New Japan enough to talk about it but I too can't bring myself to watch it on a regular basis without storylines. Jan seems to have at least started watching G1 and with Alex back in the GBEast office he will have too.
Looking forward to the next episode, hopefully in 3-5 weeks?
It's kind of a misconception that New Japan doesn't have storylines. They present the product much more heavily as a sport, but all that means is storylines evolve out of matches rather than "you spilled coffee on me backstage so I beat you up, now we're fighting on Sunday." The storylines are more subtle and you don't get 20 minute promos in the ring to advance them, but they're still there.
I don't expect a ton of New Japan talk since the guys only ever talked briefly about it once or twice a year around Wrestle Kingdom and G1 time, and this podcast's revival seems entirely based on AEW being a thing, but I think it's worth mentioning to anybody who may be interested that NJPW is still on a hot streak in terms of amazing wrestling. Losing The Elite may have hurt some of the western interest in the product but the G1 Climax just started and it has maybe the most stacked list of participants in history and looks to be genuinely fucking incredible, so if you can't wait for October to watch some Actual Good Wrestling maybe give New Japan a shot.
Tshngo's comments