Play Log: Soul Hackers 2

I’ve been lamenting the fact that I don’t have good notes for games that I’ve been playing, which means when I share a game on The Worst Community Report, I end up unable to properly articulate my thoughts. I’m sure the more I talk about things, the more I will feel confident as I speak critically. However, in an effort to speed up this process and flex my critic’s muscle, I’ve decided to start writing play logs for myself and publishing them. Not every game will get a log, and they may not always be in a nice, easy to read format. They may not even make sense outside of the context of my own brain. I do hope they are useful or enjoyable somewhat, though.

Soul Hackers 2 is a JRPG from Atlus released in 2022. I’m playing it on PC. Soul Hackers as a series is a sequel to the 1997 Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers for the Sega Saturn, which got updated ports for PSX and 3DS later on. I always misremember the original Soul Hackers as a GBA game. Soul Hackers is technically a sequel to the original Devil Summoner from 1995, though the Devil Summoner series splits into Soul Hackers, which is the JRPG style branch and the Raidou games, which are the action combat version. Raidou’s first game recently got a remaster for modern platforms.

I started Soul Hackers 2 about a week and a half ago. I picked it up mostly because it was reasonably cheap and because it was SMT-related, I figured I’d like whatever Push Turn varient it was sporting. I’ve never played any of the other Devil Summoner games extensively, so this series is more or less new to me, though I do really like Persona, another SMT spinoff. Since I started, I’ve played maybe six hours or so. Not enought to truly dig in yet, but enough to be introduced to much of the main cast.

First, the characters. I enjoy the cast a fair bit. I don’t have a great idea of how Saizo and Arrow are going to be long term, but I do really enjoy Milady, Figue, and especially Ringo. The protagonists of the Persona games do have some personality, especially if you read and carefully consider your dialogue choices, but Ringo contrasts signficantly with the Persona MCs. She has a lot more personality straight from the jump.

Something I find really interesting about the characters and the story is that Figue and Ringo, the two AI leads are specifically not robots, but they aren’t completely human either. That said, Aion, the system that birthed them, decided that beings with souls were what was needed most to ensure the success of their mission. A purely logical being wouldn’t perform the Soul Hacks Ringo does to restore the other characters to life. Ringo’s curiosity and sense of humor help me stay attached to her a lot.

The mechanics are both simpler and more complex than Persona. Gone is Push Turn, replaced by a standard battle system, and the number of damage types is also reduced. That said, the Sabbath system that replaces Push Turn and weakness exploitation feels great to use and does a lot of similar things to Push Turn, where you are encouraged to exploit weaknesses, but spread the damage out among the various enemies in each encounter. The COMP and Soul Skill systems give each character a sense of a build even though they all have the ability to use any Demon you like (as long as there are no duplicates)

The relationship building feels lighter than Persona, but it also feels less missable. The skills you get from the relationships also seem very very very good, so I’ll be interested to see how they shake out. I love when a game gives you broken abilities on purpose and this seems to be aligned in the same direction.