Soul Hackers 2

TL;DR: Ultimately, it's an okay game that very much needed more work done on the design, especially dungeon design. I kind of want to recommend it but in all honesty, if you're in it just for the story, you'll probably have a better time if you just watch the cutscenes on YouTube or something and thus skip the intensely tedious dungeon sections, so I'm giving it thumbs down despite enjoying combat for the most part. If you're here for the game's take on SMT combat, grab a guide to help you navigate through the slog that's the worst dungeons. Going in blind will only give you headaches. Full review: I went in knowing this game had been criticized for its dungeon design and oh boy, that criticism sure didn't prepare me properly for just how intensely tedious the dungeons could be. I thought SMTV's dungeons were bad but this game easily does worse. Especially Soul Matrix and the DLC dungeon were such a massive pain of tediousness that I only completed the game out of pure spite (with the help of some online maps because holy smokes the later floors of Soul Matrix are a massive pain to navigate). The overworld enemies were a joke with how easy they were to avoid by default (not to mention the skills you can get later in the game that add to that). The demon fusion was also the lamest I've seen so far in the franchise (granted, I'm only properly acquainted with them in SMT 3 & 5 and Persona 5), as recruiting demons relies on random chance with demon recon and the compendium prices tend to be prohibitively expensive if you don't use the DLC that makes grinding for money more trivial. Being limited to just 6 moves per demon (plus a few rare/expensive pieces of equipment that I assume give you extra skills (I didn't acquire any so IDK if that's how it works)) also made for a less rewarding fusion and combat experience. The story and audiovisual side are good; the story actually managed to deliver a plot twist that I didn't see coming, which I appreciate. The characters that I didn't vibe with all that much grew on me over time (especially as they also grew as characters), although Figue did get rather shafted in my opinion since she was somewhat sidelined in her support role, so we didn't see so much substantial stuff about her in comparison to the rest of the main cast. And speaking of Figue? The navigator is the most redundant AND obnoxious thing I've seen in a while; not only do the enemies have a sound effect when they spawn, they also have a sound effect to signal aggroing, making the navigator's warnings entirely needless. And with how often enemies keep spawning by default, you're constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY, listening to useless noise from the navigator (unless you mod it to be silent, which apparently is possible). I took my headphones off during a grind and put music on from another device to make it more bearable. As for difficulty, at least on Normal it wasn't particularly hard aside from the BS side quest mini bosses with insane DPS checks that my okay-ish team builds kept failing despite being a bunch of levels above the side quest's "ideal level" (those BS side quest mini bosses are the reason why this game is just about impossible to complete blind especially without dying because stumbling upon that DPS check screws you over). The game throws items (healing items and others - except what you're looking for COMP upgrades when you're actively looking) at you like candy, so I was constantly hitting the limit with some of the low-limit items especially since most of the game is fairly easy to brute force with just exploiting weaknesses and tossing a buff or debuff when I happened to remember to use them, which meant I hardly made use of a majority of my items (especially in comparison to how many of them I got). As for combat, aside from the limitations on skills, I enjoyed it; the stack mechanic and Sabbath skills were fun to use and definitely one of the strong points of the game. The COMP upgrades were cool too. Mistiques, on the other hand? Eh. I just threw some that, at a glance, looked like they made sense on the team and forgot about them. Going into (most) bosses blind also made it easy to forget them since if I had the wrong elemental setup, I wasn't going to be making use of them anyway since I'd have to switch demons out mid-battle because I couldn't be bothered to Alt+F4 and redo my team before retrying. In a nutshell: Pros: + The story and characters + The audiovisual side is neat + It's a small thing but I very much like that going to the title actually takes me straight to the title screen instead of going to all the logos and stuff BEFORE the title screen + I like the stack mechanic and Sabbaths + The COMP upgrade system is cool (except when you're missing specific items for them and the demons that drop them just won't drop them) - Skippable credits, even on NG! Neat! Cons: - The worst of the dungeons are so intensely tedious that my motivation to complete this game was pure spite - The navigator mechanic is both redundant AND obnoxious - Minor pet peeve: WHY doesn't opening up the path to a new floor in Soul Matrix automatically take me to that floor? If I'm opening the path, I want to use it (and even if I didn't, activating the next floor's entrance teleporter for later would be a nice little time-saver). - Figue got kinda shafted with screentime and stuff (her having a supporting role sure made it easy for the writers to sideline her) - The demon fusion is the lamest I've seen so far - A bit too easy, both with combat and avoiding enemies (and getting items to the point where it's easy to hit the item limit unless you spam-use them). IDK if Hard would've been a better choice of difficulty for me, but it still wouldn't have helped with the super easy enemy-avoiding - Those BS side quest mini bosses with their utterly BS "ideal levels". You have to have a tailor-made team to hit the DPS the boss wants at the so-called ideal level (and bear in mind, fusing demons is prohibitively expensive unless you use DLC to grind money and/or level-up items or just happen to have what you need on hand). Otherwise, prepare to be supposedly quite overleveled for them. Overall, I don't regret completing this game, but I sure as hell won't be playing this ever again (unless I specifically want to suffer from tedium for some reason).