Soul Hackers 2

不推荐任何人购买

[b]Preface:[/b] I'm only slightly acquainted with Shin Megami Tensei (SMT) series/spin-offs and have only played the Persona games. Also, I have no experience with Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers (DS:SH) which this game is supposedly a sequel of. Soul Hackers 2 (SH2) is a watered-down SMT RPG that is less punishing, more simplified and features a different set of combat mechanics. While its simplification will raise eyebrows with SMT veterans, I think it's actually a good thing - not everything needs to be laborious or difficult. I'm happy to say that despite its many shortcomings, I've thoroughly enjoyed SH2 and am happy there's no Social Links like in classic Persona 1 (P1) days. In terms of gameplay, SH2 heavily simplifies the SMT formula by centering the dungeon experience around a system called Demon Recon. When you traverse a dungeon, you automatically send out your demons to recon the map. And when you later encounter said demons on the map, they will reward you with heals, money/items found, or recommend a random demon to join your party (i.e., they're basically your HR department now). What this boils down to is that there are no chests, and no demon negotiation; you can choose whether to accept the demon to join, as long as you can offer up what it wants (though sometimes it can also come with no strings attached). Something that I find rather disappointing is that demons in this game appear to have been heavily normalized. For e.g., Yoshitsune does not have his staple Hassou Toubi and instead has generic skills. Also, demons can only have up to max 6 skills which limits fusion creativity, some skills are gone and some notable ones got nerfed. If anything, this would be my biggest gripe with the game. On the plus side, demons in SH2 can be equipped by any character, allowing for very comprehensive character/party customization. Where SH2 is less punishing comes from its changes to combat rules. In SMT and Persona series, you have the Press Turn and One More risk/reward system (respectively) which grants an extra turn for hitting an enemy weakness or scoring a critical hit. In SH2, there are no such system and instead you get what is called the Sabbath which is a single heavy attack (at the end of the party turn) which scales according to the no. of stacks. You build up stacks by hitting the weakness of the enemy and later on in the game, you can also learn skills that enable you to gain a stack by scoring criticals and other conditions. In SMT/Persona, the system is fair as it applies to both you and the enemies. However, in SH2, only your party can use Sabbath attack and not the enemies; thereby making it less punishing than SMT/Persona titles. How the game maintains the difficulty when traversing dungeon is by introducing the Risky Enemy mechanic which is a type of encounter where enemies are always about 10 levels higher (relative to you). They offer far better experience points and rewards, but are also very hard to take down (depending on the difficulty you play on). Personally, I don't really like this mechanic as I think it's overtuned and laborious even on Normal difficulty. I pretty much escape all risky encounters except until I start grinding to level 99 (on Easy mode) because it's necessary for the experience points. The game can still be fairly challenging and you can switch difficulty at any time outside combat. A Very Hard difficulty is also available as free DLC if you like torture. Overall, I like the gameplay of SH2 and I'm glad that there's no calendar system like in Persona series nor loyalty/alignment system like in SMT, allowing me to freely do what I want. The Sabbath system, despite sounding shallow, is visceral and gets more fun the more upgrades you acquire. I enjoyed most of the dungeons except later floors of the Soul Matrix, which are frustrating because they are entirely made up of random teleporters as puzzles. There's a fair amount of replayability given that NG+ allows you to choose what gets carried over. Certain materials are also limited in quantity per playthrough so it's not possible to get everything in only one playthrough. Also, it's not possible to experience all content either as the last floors of the Soul Matrix requires 200 soul points. In terms of story, SH2 has a decent plot, but unfortunately, doesn't have the equivalent storytelling and world-building to make it great. There are certain aspects of it that don't feel believable, emotional scenes fail to elicit emotions and the humour mostly doesn't work. I think an easier analogy is that it's like a show with too little run time to flesh out its story, i.e., undercooked and rushed. Most of the time, I don't feel the stake or urgency of the situation; and I'd personally prefer if it had a darker and more sombre tone. It's a shame because the game has pretty good voice-acting, both in English and Japanese, with voices that fit the characters very well. I think the Japanese does a better job at conveying the nuances of the characters, the tones in the English dub often feels slightly off. The hangout events are kinda meh for me, and it would've been better if they were fully voice-acted. In the end, I can't say I have much attachment to the cast at all, but I have to agree with pretty much everyone else that Ringo makes a good protagonist. Regardless, I feel the overall story execution is average [u]at worst[/u]. One thing I do appreciate about the storytelling is that it's straight to the point and doesn't try to pad it out by regurgitating information. In terms of presentation, I liked the overall art direction but I think I prefer ambience of P1 and DS:SH which I feel SH2 is too chill. One obvious shortcoming in this area is that the character animations in cutscenes feel rather janky and somewhat lacking in production value. During combat, animations look good, and I especially love how the scene changes when demons join the Sabbath stacks. The UI is a good implementation of minimalistic design and is highly usable, though it sometimes lack sort/filter options in some areas that would make sense. As for the music, it's fitting but feels like it lacks coherence and I found it to be rather forgettable. There's one battle theme I liked, Battle of Devil Summoners, which I heard on Youtube (in some video guide) and cannot for the life of me remember whether it was even in the game! Really, I think this theme should've been the default battle theme. The dungeons do look pretty bland and it's a common valid complaint from many others - it didn't hurt my enjoyment but should be emphasized. As for performance, the game runs great on my RTX 4060 at max settings with no frame drops. I noticed that the game has an alt-tabbing issue that could sometimes cause your game to freeze up, and so I always save before doing that - it's somewhat annoying when looking up guides and fusion charts. Another thing I noticed is that, if you set the Loading Screen Tips configuration option to "Hide", you can entirely elimitate loading time if you don't care about reading the tips anymore. In conclusion, SH2 was a pretty fun game for me and I strongly recommend it. It's not lengthy and I've been able to 100% it in 2 playthroughs, obtaining every single upgrade in the game. SH2 does show promise as Atlus' 3rd major pillar franchise if they could refine the gameplay and add more polish. I liked SH2 because if offers the demon fusion gameplay with reasonable difficulty and no hassle. However, I recommend only getting it on a huge discount (got my standard edition at 80% off) because this game came with an outrageously high asking price. As much as I like the game, I don't think it has nearly enough content nor production value to warrant that pricing, not to mention, dodgy practices like day one DLCs.

🏆 Soul Hackers 2 [For me to award a gold cup review 🏆 The game must be decent, as I consider a lot of different factors.]

Not the best or deepest Atlus game. Combat is much simpler than most of there other offerings and the story, while not bad, isn't standout great either. Still found myself drawn to a fun cast of characters and that was enough to keep me going all the way to the end. While I wasn't blown away by the end I wasn't left feeling dissatisfied. All in all a decent 6/10, if you can pick it up on a sale and you're already a fan of other Atlus games I wouldn't call it a stretch to say you'll find something to like here. It helps that it's not a super long game so it doesn't over stay it's welcome.

bom

17h通关，几乎没打灵魂矩阵，也靠dlc提高了不少体验 上上个玩的是33，两者相同点是迷宫都很烦。不过33系统很糟，灵魂骇客系统几乎没什么不满的地方（毕竟也更新过了），就是迷宫技能还是得主动使用，使用起来非常麻烦 看了结局后许多都和解了，总体还是有及格分 有点纠结要不要白金，倒不是怕玩吐，但怕白金后反而拉低了对本作的评价。 PS：37h白金追记，我再次和解了，打出了8分

Its pretty fun if youre into turn based Games and love the SMT and Persona series its not as long and I highly recommend playing it with increased Game Speed as it is pretty slow without IMO