Soul Hackers 2 review: stylish JRPG tells more than it shows

digitaltrends.com:

I found my third dead body about five hours into Soul Hackers 2. After 30 hours, I’ll find out that corpses and plot twists are nothing to be surprised about.

Aion, the supercomputer version of God, foresees the end of the world. It creates Ringo and Figue, two humanoid representations of its consciousness, to stop this impending apocalypse. Unfortunately, they arrive too late to save their targets: genius scientist Ichiro Ondo and demon summoner Arrow. That’s where the game’s titular Soul Hacking comes in. Bring back the soul and apparently the body revives with it. Ringo ends up reviving three people who agree to fight together for the sake of their own goals. Who’ll really win in the end, though?

Soul Hackers 2 seems like it has everything it needs to succeed as a JRPG filled with sci-fi intrigue. However, it speeds past the stakes and character arcs in service of an anticlimactic race to the finish. Thankfully, its finely crafted turn-based combat and progression make an otherwise stale story easy to digest.

Like other Atlus JRPGs, Soul Hackers 2 duplicates the Shin Megami Tensei formula while meaningfully building on it. Recruit demons, fight with them, and fuse them into stronger allies. Once in battle, players need to carefully use type advantages and turn economy to wipe enemies out as quickly as possible or survive a brutal battle. One misstep can be the difference between getting bodied by a full team of demons or knocking them all out with a multi-hit finishing move.

Soul Hackers 2 has a knack for making every action feel like it’s worth something.

Soul Hackers 2 uses this same formula to an extent with notable iteration. It brings back the Shin Megami Tensei mechanic where the demons can be fused together to