An enjoyable game albeit one with the caveat that you will be frustrated by its mechanics at times.
Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers was first released 16 years ago but never made it across from Japan, meaning this is the first chance to play the game in English and while it’s had some visual touches and a couple of more modern additions such as full voice acting, from all accounts the game itself is virtually unchanged. This is a huge credit to the original developers as it still holds up as a very good game; albeit one with a number of frustrating and occasionally outright infuriating issues.
For those who've never played Shin Megami Tensei game, at its core is a combat system that plays out like any turn based JRPG albeit one with a heavy focus on type advantage; enemies and allies will have weaknesses or resistances to a variety of spell types, ranging from taking double or half damage, to reflecting or absorbing damage from certain types of spells. As a result, much of the combat is about exploiting your enemies weaknesses while protecting your own and makes initial enemy encounters challenging while reducing the difficulty of subsequent encounters with the same enemy.
Your starting party of two just won’t cut it alone and convincing demons to join your cause by begging, cajoling and giving gifts is fundamental aspect of SMT games and Soul Hackers is no exception. Each demon has a level that corresponds to your character, but does not gain experience or level up so in order to match the growth of the two human characters you must be proactive about constantly fusing demons into stronger ones, convincing new demons to join your cause or more ideally, both. Each demon has particular tastes and some won’t even talk to you if you don’t have the right equipment and with the penalty for offending varying between them simply up and leaving to their party getting free attacks against you, it’s a risky prospect that you’ll find yourself both loving and hating on a regular basis, and I mean that in the best way possible.
Even if they’re recruited to your cause Demons still won’t always follow your instructions; each personality type which dictates its preference for doing battle; order them to do things they don’t like will drop their loyalty, even if it’s beneficial for your team and vice versa for ordering them to do things they prefer to do. However once a certain level of loyalty is reached they’ll follow you commands without question so it becomes a task of getting them to max loyalty as quickly as possible. Aside from battling, the other way to increase loyalty is to ply them with alcohol and gifts in order to increase their loyalty, though this gets expensive very quickly 1. Again it sounds more annoying in theory than it is in practice as it’s simple to pick up and rewards the player for paying attention to your demon type.
On top of this is a moon phase cycle, with the phases of the moon slowly changing as you move around and causing demons to react differently; some will be stronger or weaker, easier or harder to talk, more or less aggressive etc. This may sound annoying to manage, and for the most part it is however it only has a minor impact on the game and I was fine playing through the game basically ignoring this mechanic – occasionally you’ll be blindsided by an enemy but that’s the extent of it really.
Adding yet another layer of complexity and depth to the game is magnetite. All money in Soul Hackers flows from magnetite, winning battles rewards you with experience, magnetite and sometimes items – never money and in order to get the cold hard cash required to purchase equipment and items for your human characters you must trade in magnetite. However, magnetite is a valuable commodity in of itself as your demons need it to survive – each demon having an associated magnetite usage for each step you take Obviously this means that having multiple demons summoned (you can have up to 4 demons plus your two human characters always present) rapidly increases the amount of magnetite used per step and summoning the demons to your party has a fairly large cost associated. Running out of magnetite leads to your demons deserting you and quite likely, an imminent death so it needs to be managed rather carefully.
While that may sound tedious, it’s actually really engaging and interesting as a concept as balancing your magnetite forces you to make hard decisions about what items you buy, as well as what demons you use. Furthermore, it leads to an interesting circular relationship; you need to keep fighting enemies to keep your magnetite flowing in so you can keep your demons summoned so you can safely fight enemies and thus introduces a whole other layer of decision making; weaken your party, increasing your chances of dying but making a higher net magnetite profit, or having a strong party with little risk of losing but know you’re not gaining much (if any) magnetite over the course of the dungeon which then ties into other mechanics and elements of the game.
I say this as a concept however because in practice I found that once I was past the first few dungeons, magnetite wasn't really an issue; I couldn't walk around with 4 demons the whole time but I could generally purchase the most powerful items when available without ever really feeling under any pressure because of it, especially since once you get a handle on the mechanics you generally don’t require more than one demon outside of boss battles and so don’t need to use magnetite much for demons anyway.
These mechanics interacting with each makes for an incredibly compelling experience that while having a steep learning curve is incredibly rewarding and engaging when they start playing off each other and you learn how to manipulate it to your advantage. Unfortunately, much of the onus of learning is on the player as the game does a generally poor job of explaining these mechanics to you. The personalities that dictate loyalty for example are explained by an NPC that is easy to skip over if you’re not careful, isn’t recorded anywhere else in game and can’t be accessed again once you leave that floor of the mission.
Other mechanics, such as the moon cycle system are forgettable as they’re only mentioned in passing, and while the recruiting mechanics are explained in a reasonable amount of detail, they suffer from a similar lack of other in-game reference points; hard figures are given for what the best kind of offerings to each demon are, but without a way to look it up in game it’s quickly forgotten, making demon recruiting a guessing game which, although it can make the game more interesting at times, generally leads to frustration that could have easily been avoided.
The game has some other issues; some puzzles are frustratingly complex in ways outside of the game environment itself; the most heinous example being the Museum level fairly in the game which won’t let you progress unless you can successfully answer 5 questions about the 12 signs of the constellation. The information is all presented in game however with 12 different signs, each having multiple pieces of information on them it was a frustrating experience of memorization that eventually just resulted in trial and error guessing and felt completely out of place in the game.
An even larger issue and one that really holds the game back for me personally is that your player character’s death results in game over. This in of itself is not really an issue and in general terms I actually like the mechanic (and admittedly it’s been a staple in previous Shin Megami Tensei games) as it does do a good job of increasing tension for the player. Unfortunately, as the game progresses your party will frequently encounter random enemies that cast low-hit chance instant death spells which predictably leads to a large number of incredibly frustrating deaths that are completely outside the player’s control. In one particularly frustrating dungeon, I encountered NPCs between 10 and 20 levels lower than my characters, at a much higher encounter rate than other dungeons and came in packs of 5-6, all casting instant death spells. That section alone leads to double digit random deaths and put me on the brink of not continuing through the game.
Without spoiling anything, the game’s story is remarkably engaging and the themes remain relevant today; an always connected city was still relatively far fetched in the 90’s but is very much a reality today and the story is more enough to propel you through the more frustrating dungeons even though it does come across quite clunky at times (as does most video game writing from the 90’s, or today really). The main characters are brilliantly realized, in particular Hitomi; your girlfriend who’s possessed by the demon Nemissa, who starts out as a fairly forced device for driving the narrative forward but quickly becomes one of the more interesting elements of the story and the interactions between Hitomi and Nemissa became one of the highlights of the game for me.
While far from perfect, Soul Hackers is a very enjoyable game with the caveat that you will be frustrated by its mechanics at times. The game took me around 50 hours to complete as someone who’s had experience in SMT games before; if you’re new to their games it will likely last you even longer and while it doesn’t seem to add much replay ability, it’s still great value for money in that sense.
I should also mention that Soul Hackers takes up a considerable amount of space thanks to its full voice acting; nearly 15,000 Nintendo “Blocks” (Around 1.8gb in real measurements), which is around three times the size of any other 3DS game I’ve installed so far so if you’re planning on buying it from the eShop, you may need to make some space on your card.
If you’re in the US and looking for a JRPG fix then this game is definitely for you, however with SMTIV releasing almost exactly a month from now, you may be better served waiting for that since it does seem to be a better game.
European readers, I would say the same thing but sadly a release date for SMTIV hasn’t been announced; Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers doesn’t release their until September so you have plenty of time to wait and see if SMTIV is better before you need to make a decision between the two.