Soul Hackers 2 or soul hackin on heaven's door

King of Posters
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This game comes out next month!

I’ve seen very little advertisement or build up to this game in the West, especially compared to SMT V’s lead up or even just the Persona anniversary events.

Speaking of which, at Anime Expo 2022, there was a Soul Hackers themed food truck that nobody knew about because Atlus never mentioned it, meanwhile there was a Persona 5 themed food truck literally a foot next to it that had a line that was dozens of people long.

Anyway, in Japan they’ve been doing daily videos leading up to the launch similar to how they did it for SMT V where they introduced a new demon per video.

Here’s an English translated playlist of them:

Feels like a waste that they’re not dubbing or at least translating these officially? Because they at least give a clue to the characters of the game or even give us a reason to care. Like this video is actually kind of cute?

Anyway, my general thoughts on the game is: I am very disappointed they called it Soul Hackers 2 while retaining none of the visual elements of the original, and they also dumped the cool Native American inspiration as far as I can tell? Like in interviews, they said they deliberately wanted to break away from the first game even though their character designer totally delivered Kaneko-inspired designs in their first passes, and that just breaks my heart.

I’m sure the game will be really good and interesting! It’ll probably really tie into the Devil Summoner universe for all I know! But my first impression of the game from all its advertising and messaging was very “why make a sequel that has seemingly nothing to do with the original rather than making a new game franchise or a spinoff?” But people like sequels so I can understand.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that if Raidou shows up as an EX Boss again, game of the year. Unless they erase his black upper lip again, then there’ll be hell to pay, atlus you cowards stop erasing the KANEKO BLACK UPPER LIP

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Also never forget Soul Hackers 2 was announced to the world live with this live-action stage play fight with no context on who they are, what’s going on, whether SH2 was a game or a play or drama or anything

I watched this live and I was so so so so confused

I mean, in a few years I’ll probably look back on this and think: “wow, that was really neat and unique and cool!” but at the time, everyone was like WTF is this and nobody had any idea until after this fight was over and the announcers talked for like 20 minutes and then Atlus USA dropped a game reveal trailer out of nowhere on Twitter instead.

Also I remember having a big distaste in my mouth when the first thing they did after showing off Soul Hackers 2 footage with nothing connected to the original Soul Hackers was announcing Persona 5 outfit DLC, like seriously you guys did you forget what fuckin franchise this was what the fuck

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yeah i’m a little unsure about this one. i’ll watch the videos you’ve posted when i can, but the trailers had such Tokyo Mirage vibes, it’s hard to feel like this won’t be as underwhelming as that one. at the end of the day, i like anything MegaTen. like some MT is better than none, but Soul Hackers has such a special place in my heart, so my feelings are very, very mixed with this one.

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It’s weird because Soul Hackers has never been more relevant just in terms of how prescient it was about the dumb metaverse shit going on today, and yet the game they’re showing seems completely removed from that.

Is this how it felt to be a Persona fan before 3?

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sort of but i was excited for 3. maybe felt more that way post 3 when i understood we weren’t going back

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Hmm from my memory, P3 was released right after Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga, during the golden era of modern Atlus, so it felt nice to see a sequel to the Persona series headed in a new direction. It was also released only 6 years after Eternal Punishment, so it felt timely and it was exciting to think of where it could go. I remember having reservations about Soejima being lead character artist, but since it was an entirely new art direction in general, and Raidou was coming out soon with Kaneko art direction, I was fine with the change.

Meanwhile, Soul Hackers 2 is 9 years after the 3DS port and 15 years after the original Saturn version, so nobody except old fans remembers what a Soul Hackers is. I kinda wish they just made it a new Devil Summoner game or spinoff instead if they’re going to be this divorced from the source. But at the same time, they could be taking it to a cool new direction and I’ll love it and I’m just being a crank right now.

Oh yeah, totally this.

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Yes. Except, this feels worse. With Persona 3, I didn’t feel immediate disgust the way I did when Soul Hackers “2” was revealed. This is so far from what Soul Hackers was there is no reason to call this “Soul Hackers” other than to cash in on a cool-sounding name. Fans of Soul Hackers when Soul Hackers was relevant are in their 30s and 40s now and, I would presume, not part of the demographic that this god-awful, lazy budget anime-look would appeal to, so clearly they can’t be banking on people being like, “yo I’m going to get this because it’s called Soul Hackers”.

Atlus has been creatively bankrupt for at least a decade at this point, though, so it’s not like it was a surprise unlike Atlus back in 2005. Digital Devil Saga was probably the last interesting thing Atlus released, unfortunately.

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I really haven’t seen anything interesting to latch on to here. We probably wouldn’t have looked at this game twice if it wasn’t tied to The Brand.

Mainline SMT and Persona have managed well, but the PS3-era JRPG extinction event has not been kind on the Megaten spinoffs.
It feels like the success of the Switch would have been a good opportunity to release a smaller more interesting project like Devil Survivor or Strange Journey were, but ah well

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Willing to give this the benefit of the doubt until it’s out. The (maybe sole) redeeming feature of modern megaten is a focus on feeling modern and in vogue which I’m glad they’re doing with this over a lazy retread of capturing their glory days like SMTV threatened to be. The original, itself a wild departure from the OG devil summoner it’s a sequel to had its fair share of good ideas (predicting the commercialisation of the internet) and bad (‘vision quests’ a series low point) and given the amount of that team involve in this I’ll either enjoy seeing how their idea’s have developed in the past 25 years or laugh at them. Everyone wins.

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In deep Devil Summoner lore, I learned that JP fans suspect Madam Ginko is actually Raidou?

Because devil summoners live a long life and body swap pretty frequently in DS’s world and other details in the video. Also they share the same JP VA, Tomokazu Sugita, which is incredible, why would they rob that from us in the English dub

From Megaten wikia:

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Here’s art of Madame Ginko
From Devil Summoner:
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From Soul Hackers:

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From Soul Hackers 2:
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SH2 design looks sick but the fade out’s designed as though it’ll ask me to subscribe to the new york times at the end.

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I started playing this last night!

I fell asleep an hour in because the exposition was so bad and the only action I got to do was run through one room.

I wish everyone in the game would just shut the fuck up and let me play a fucking video game!!! Tempted to just fast forward through all the dialogue just to be able to do something

It’s pretty though. Impressed they were able to do this all in Unity.

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that was the finishing blow I needed to stop caring about this game

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The writing in this reminds me way more of the first game than I imagined (positive and negative)

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??? its 2022…

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Really enjoying this so far

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BETTER CALL SAUL HACKERS

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The pacing and exposition is so long and drawn out, I’m still falling asleep. I wish the characters only said 20% of what they actually say and let players infer the rest. There’s literally no mystery because they explain every single detail and then re-explain it a minute later. I don’t remember if the original was this bad, but SMTV definitely wasn’t.

Also the action feels really bad? Like pressing buttons and seeing actions in battle feels sloppy and not-snappy? How did they devolve so much from SMTV or P5?? Maybe it’s the PS5 being an input laggy piece of junk, or maybe it’s the animations being slow combined with the sound not syncing or feeling impactful? I’m really in shock at how bad it feels compared to prior Megaten games. Like even the 3DS SMT IV felt snappier in comparison?

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Got an incredible hangout event with your two party members talking about how they dont put much thought into what they wear while they’re dressed like this

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