{"id":35942,"date":"2022-08-05T03:41:41","date_gmt":"2022-08-05T03:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/preview-soul-hackers-2-balances-challenge-and-story\/"},"modified":"2022-08-05T03:41:41","modified_gmt":"2022-08-05T03:41:41","slug":"preview-soul-hackers-2-balances-challenge-and-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/preview-soul-hackers-2-balances-challenge-and-story\/","title":{"rendered":"Preview: Soul Hackers 2 Balances Challenge and Story"},"content":{"rendered":"
From my time with its early hours, Soul Hackers 2<\/i> feels like the logical accumulation of the many lessons that Atlus learned with its recent SMT<\/i>-related games. The majority of the game still consists of dungeon crawling. However, having three human party members with their own goals and distinct personalities hooks players hoping for a substantial story. Meanwhile, the difficulty and general structure of the game’s progression can endear it to fans of classic SMT<\/i> games.<\/p>\n
The gist of the story is that Ringo and Figue are artificial humans that AION created. AION is essentially a super-computer that has predicted the end of the world. To stop it, it creates Ringo and Figue and sends them to the human world. Once there, Ringo uses Soul Hack to revive Arrow, Milady, and Saizo. All three of them are Devil Summoners that Ringo believes are instrumental in stopping the apocalypse.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In combat and gameplay, the three humans also help to keep players engaged. I am not a fan of aimless dungeon crawling. However, as the Soul Matrix unlocked more information on the pasts of my enigmatic allies, it became less a chore and more an extension of the main story, a new way to get to know my people. All four members often talk to each other in battle. The exchanges range in tone, from encouraging and rebuking tones. While it can get old hearing the same lines over and over, it was still an engaging form of background noise. Milady and Arrow’s occasional cat-and-dog spats over enemy weaknesses were also amusing.<\/p>\n
As for the difficulty of the game, it is accessible enough to not be immediately overwhelming. However, it has a bit of a learning curve for those who are not used to SMT<\/em> and its iterations. Indeed, as someone who was more of a persona<\/em> fan, and whose exposure to \u201cclassic\u201d SMT<\/em> difficulty amounts a few hours of nocturne<\/i>, my army of demons was sorely lacking. It took me a while to start to focus more on creating specialized demons rather than sweepers, as well as keep track of what I already had in my arsenal. Granted, the game is rather forgiving. You will seldom have trouble with the random mobs, and the game’s autosave before boss fights means you probably will not have to redo any progress even if you lose.<\/p>\n\n
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