Soul Hackers 2 review – demonic cyberpunk
The latest Shin Megami Tensei spin-off has been given a Persona style makeover but what exactly is Soul Hackers 2 a sequel to?
If you’re wondering whatever happened to the first Soul Hackers, it was released 25 years ago on the Sega Saturn and never outside of Japan. There was a 3DS remaster back in 2012, which did eventually make it to Europe, but even for the convoluted Shin Megami Tensei series this is a deep cut. The good news is that the game’s history doesn’t really matter and you can happily treat Soul Hackers 2 as a standalone game. Although its not quite as unique as that makes it sound…
The original Soul Hackers was part of the Devil Summoner sub-franchise, one of the many spin-offs from Megami Tensei (MegaTen to its friends) that also includes Persona. There’s little consistency about what constitutes a Devil Summoner title and so far it’s included the two Soul Hackers games, the two Raidou Kuzunoha titles (which are action games rather than being turn-based), and the first entry, which was inspired by noir detective fiction.
In gameplay terms, Soul Hackers is the most straightforward of all the titles, with its main gimmick being story-based, as it’s set in the mid-21st century rather than the modern day. But while the details are different, the central plot, of two factions of devil summoners fighting with and against downloadable demons in order to prevent the destruction of all humankind, is familiar territory for MegaTen in general.
The breakout success of Persona has had the unfortunate tendency to homogenise the previously more experimental MegaTen spin-offs, and so it’s no surprise to find that Soul Hackers 2 has a very similar style of anime presentation to Persona.
The set-up is certainly unusual though,
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