Quick Look: Soul Hackers 2

This game looks and sounds exactly what I would want to play when it is on sale for like $40 bucks or less. Budget SMT games are always up my alley.

Thank you anime experts. This just makes me more excited for Persona 5 on PC.

Not my kind of game and genre but that combo of Jan & Michael was awesome and very interesting, I love people nerding out over stuff they like.

My one thing about this is that Soul Hackers 1 went places, maaaaaaan.

SH2 feels like its 1/3 Persona, 1/3 Megaten, and 1/3 Devil Summoners but its kinda like how Michael put it, its not been increasingly exciting and crazy, it just "is" as in "another of those if you're jonesing for another of those".

Needs more cannabalism, ripped from the headlines Japanese social ills, Hitler, or Vision Quests to "punch it up".

You can't watch an anime without explicit content.

I hadn't notices "DAT A$$" until you kept constantly bringing it up.

I don't care.

So if the dungeons are super repetitive and boring and the story is not interesting...what is even the point to play the game?

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.