Soul Hackers 2
Finished this. I really enjoyed it! Definitely recommended.
Cards on the table, the game got some mixed reviews when it first came out in 2022. And it's definitely true that the game bears hallmarks of "Ran out of money, shoved what we had out the door" in parts, but that's not always a fatal flaw. I'd like to point out that some of the criticisms were mitigated with a QoL patch, akin to the version of Bravely Default we got in the US. Biggest is a free dash button for zooming around dungeons, but also being able to warp directly into stores from the overworld menu and a combat speed-up button for if basic physicals are sufficient to finish. (Actually, checking a speedrun, apparently the speedup can be used in regular non-autobattle too and I just uh missed it the entire game.) But yeah, it's better now vs. release. The other disclaimer is to avoid the DLC for the game - apparently it just hands you level 80 demons for free and messes up demon compendium searches by offering these as Fusion-fodder.
Okay, SH2. Rather than involving high schoolers yet again, this tells a realistic, grounded tale about attractive anime 20-somethings with superpowers engaged in a shadow war of secret societies. No, seriously, I'm high schooled out, I really want a game with adult protagonists to succeed and hope Atlus doesn't get the wrong message from the game's apparent weak sales. (Although who am I kidding, I bet it really did relate to weaker sales, especially in Japan which seems to just love high schoolers.) And while the plot certainly has its issues, it's still compelling and good. I can write an essay on it nitpicking parts, but the good kind of essay in that I want to engage with the game, not the bad kind of "this sucks."
Anyway some people are carrying around 1/5 of a magical nuclear bomb in their soul, and someone bad seems to be trying to collect all 5. The sentient Internet calculates the world will end soon and decides to sleeve up two demigodesses to go into the world to stop this, using Soul Hacking to mess with the other team's plans. Works for me! Even has built-in handy excuses for why anything human-shaped gets souls & magic and why Our Heroine can be incredibly powerful at some things, but not at others.
To stave the essay off, some bullet points to keep it short & readable...
Good:
* Characters - Well most of them. The full team is charming and I liked them. The only standout sorta miss is Arrow, who is.. he's fine. He's fine. But he's the character who is a wanna-be shonen hero who could have been the main character. Ends up on the bland side. But sometimes you need a Marge Simpson to let the other characters bounce off him, so he still works as setup for the rest. Also, the voice actors all did pretty good jobs.
* The soundtrack is great. I saw some people complaining about this, too, but this is bonkers. This is one of my favorite SMT soundtracks they ever put out. Loved it.
* Vibe: The suspiciously-always-nighttime cityscapes in the towns section are nailed perfectly. We don't get to see the full city because this is a game and it keeps exploration from blowing up tons of time a la Trails, but what's there is enough to efficiently get a sense of life. And just to prove we're not highschoolers, the way the cast meets up is over drinks! I don't even drink myself but I'll take it.
* Quality of Life: Especially with the 1.02 patch, there's some nice quality of life features. Lots of speedup in quickly navigating dungeons & the town. The game tells you what your dialogue options will do to your relationship levels in advance (so no need to FAQ this). Since you control humans, not demons, the characters all have nice distinctive dialogue which warn you when you're about to do something stupid like attack into a null'd element. If you're searching for a specific demon to fight, you can mark it in the enemies list, and it'll show you which formations include it so you can get its drop faster. Same with quest encounters - if you've accepted a quest to kill 5 Jack Frosts or whatever, it'll mark encounters that progress a quest. The enemies list will show a full drop list for each enemy, too. Most sidequests aren't missable, and the few that are give you a warning.
* Opening movie - I think this is where all the budget went. The opening movie is great. Gets all the characters introduced & themes communicated magnificently.
Sorta bad, but actually fine:
* The game is reputed to not be a great as a sequel to Soul Hackers 1. But I say screw it. It's a good game on its own and it's fine to take a series in new directions. I think cyberpunk with Gnostic techno-spirtualism of an awakened Internet is a great fit for SMT. Also, some people complained about not actually summoning demons, but screw that. I'd rather have a human party in battle talking with each other rather than a bunch of plotless dumb demons and the allies inexplicably chilling on the sidelines.
* The dungeon layout is extremely bland - just simple corridors to run down. They obviously ran out of money on the dungeon design team so threw together the average "industrial warehouse" and "underground tunnel" pack. (At least the final dungeon is kinda cool looking.) You know how in Shadow Hearts 1 (a different SH) they tried to pad the length of dungeons to disguise that some of them were only 2-4 screens long by making you run back and forth? Yeah, that's back. You get told a few times to run through a dungeon you already beat looking for a drop, or to backtrack through a dungeon you beat looking for a fight or character for a quest. Bleh. But you know what, I'll actually take this over the much more detailed areas of SMTV. I don't actually care that much about the dungeons - I want the combat gameplay. Simple, but unchanging (no P4 rando-layouts) layouts keep the focus where I'd rather it be. I don't actually want to play a crappy Super Mario 64 "jump around on boxes" ripoff in my JRPG, just send me through my bland tunnel on second thought. It'd have been lovely if they'd had more money for more backgrounds, but oh well; all in all, this may have unintentionally been addition by subtraction.
* There's some "Phoenix Wright" plot twists in this game. I pick that series because it has some cool plot twists for the player to discover, but that often reaaaaally should have come out sooner, and the fact they didn't implies everyone else who knew the situation better was catastrophically rolling 2s on their Perception checks. Repeatedly. This isn't a huge deal ultimately, it's a game, but kinda wish they'd tried a little harder. Hell, this is a setting with magic, just straight-up use that as an excuse if you must for hard-to-justify twists.
* The randoms are kinda easy. Not much to say here, but the only way they'll be hard is if you're underlevel, but you won't stay underlevel for long if you're taking encounters. It's fine, but a little surprising for SMT - especially since that unlike SMTV, main character death isn't game over, so they could afford to make randoms scarier if they wanted.
Bad
* For whatever silly reason, since it's so easy to escape encounters, the game designers decided they should encourage you to take encounters another way. Other than all the backtracking, the big one is that enemies have unique drops. All of them. And then all of these unique drops are used to buy upgrades to your character's COMP, their weapon. Failing to farm enough drops from each enemy may also block later upgrades, too. The good news is that Ringo gets an equipment later that increases the rate of item drops, but still, meh. I don't mind this as a limiting factor for rare consumable items, but it's a real feel-bad to miss out on core character abilities because you accidentally skipped the one floor where one demon spawns. It's not super well-balanced either - there's one tiny dungeon that's easily completable in 15 minutes, but I only realized hours later it contained like 4 different enemies that don't spawn elsewhere that I hadn't farmed their unique drops. Makes the game much grinder than it needs to be.
* As a corollary to the above, lots of the sidequests are uninspiring. Again, having some "kill 5 goblins" quest is fine as a simple intro to get the player to understand how the quest system works, but please stop giving those quests after the first 10% of the game. One of the sidequests has a nameless dude tell you he wants vengeance for a character you killed much earlier and that he's summoned a bunch of super-powerful creatures… in the abandoned dungeon nobody cares about. You clean them up, they're just regular encounters with buffed levels. He says "Oh no, I'm going to go into a corner and die now because I used up too much energy summoning them." Come on, game, you can do better. (To be clear plenty of sidequests are fine, but too many are of the uninteresting variety IMO.)
* Gameplay-wise, level is the god stat. This isn't new for SMT, I think a similar / same formula was used in SMTV, but you gained levels a lot slower there. It's still mildly annoying since it means that there's a narrow level range where boss fights are "interesting", and they're extremely difficult underlevel, and curbstomps if you're overlevel. My vague guess is this was a decades-ago reaction to SMT3 Nocturne where a bad build + not knowing the system could just get stuck, while players who knew what was up could smash stuff at low levels. So amp up the power of level. I don't mind letting you grind your way out of trouble, but I also want to feel like a strategic badass who fused the right demons for the job, not somebody who just made the number go up.
* There aren't enough characters. The amount of characters in the "town" areas is about right, but there needed to be more named characters in the main plot. I imagine it's something similar to the modern Phoenix Wright issue above - they didn't want to make more 3D models, and didn't want clones of existing generics I guess? Idk. In particular, there's a backstory event with an unnamed assistant, and yeah, they just inexplicably stay unnamed. We meet 4 named Yatagarsu members and 5 named Phantom Society members. That just isn't enough. I get you don't want player's brains to explode, but just throw some names around for speculation, if nothing else. Given that one of the most popular SMTs, P4, has a major character who is introduced as seemingly a nameless nobody, it's totally okay to add at least SOME more background characters.
* This gets into mild spoiler territory, but there's one particularly jarring point where they obviously ran out of money and have an "insert escape sequence / cutscene here" which is instead fade-to-black + "Whew we made it!". There's also a scene with squicky consequences if taken seriously, but I kinda don't think it should be and is another artifact of "budget" + "used the wrong model for a character." There's also one oddity of motivation involving a certain character being apparently considered a much nicer, purer person by the narrative than they were built up as, but so it goes. Finally, there's... a hanging plot point? A sequel hook? Probably just a plot hole left in the game. A character points it out at one point but the topic is never returned to, so who knows.
* Yatagarsu is just a mid-level demon in this game of no special importance. But you named an entire secret society after them! If any game ever deserved to make Yatagarsu a named special high level demon, it'd be this one. You don't even see any Yatagarasu members using Yatagarasu!
* I didn't get the DLC, but allegedly the demons DLC totally breaks the balance of the game, so don't buy it. (Like, there's "get a nice boost" and there's "delete target game" - you apparently get like level 88 demons for free. Wat.)
Okay, that's enough for now. Maybe I'll write more later, but this is already super-long.
