A bit like with my previous test on Sword and Fairy, today I'm going to present to you a little-known license in Spanish because it has not yet crossed the borders of Japan. Soul Hacker comes from the Megami Tensei license and is published by ATLUS. I'm talking about ATLUS because it's started to be quite well known among us in recent years thanks in particular to the RPG Persona series. After several adaptations in the years 2000/2010, the publisher returns to the charge with a new opus of the latter.
Soul Hackers 2 is normally the sequel to the first game of the same name. Not having played the first one, I will not be able to tell you all the story that happens there. In this new opus, an artificial entity very close to humanity discovers, thanks to calculations and a kind of prescience, that the end of humanity is very close. To try to solve this problem, she creates two near-human-form entities Ringo and Fig. If you control Ringo throughout the game as the main character, you should know that the second character is not left out in the game's story.
The human world in this game is not like the everyday one. Even if the majority of humans do not see it, there is a world connected to that of humans filled with monsters and especially demons. Certain humans, whether good or bad, are called Devil Summoners and have the ability to use demons to perform actions in the human world. As a being apart of these two worlds, you do not have the innate faculty to do so, but you have been entrusted with a weapon (COMP) which can equip demons to use their powers. However, the main peculiarity of your character is not related to the demon, but to the fact that she can hack human souls (hence the name of the game) to bring a human back to life if he died there. a short time ago. It is not a skill that you can use as such, but rather a component of the story allowing you to recruit fellow travelers.
Without going too much into the details of the story, you will navigate in a city quite close to Tokyo and very futuristic in appearance to investigate the events calculated by the entity that created you. As the story progresses, you will meet new characters, some of whom may accompany you. As in any RPG, each character is unique in its characteristics, but it will also be necessary to evolve him and his demons to make the most of them. Each character can equip different items to increase some of their characteristics. This equipment, as in any RPG, can be found in combat or by buying them from merchants.
I will maybe insist but the demons are really one of the pillars of the game. Each of your characters can equip themselves with one of these to use their power affiliated with an element. These demons will also level up with each fight and gain skills up to a certain point. It takes about ten fights for a demon to reach its maximum rank. Since these demons are affiliated with an element, they become a mandatory mechanic to understand and analyze to deal extra damage to enemies.
Let's talk about the fights in the game, these are only turn-based without initiative however. Your characters do their actions and the enemies afterwards. Each of the characters can either perform a normal attack, or a magic attack linked in particular to the demons with which you have equipped it. Each opposing character may have one or more weaknesses on these elements which, on the one hand will inflict more damage on said attack, but on the other hand will above all increase the combo counter of the turn. At the end of your game turn and before enemies attack you, Ringo will perform an attack on all enemies whose damage will be proportional to the number of combos in the turn.
Even though the maps are quite linear, they are populated with enough enemies or NPCs to be interesting. It will be possible for you in the neutral zones of the game to buy all sorts of things to improve your team, but above all to recover secondary quests which will also allow you to earn items or money for example. They are not mandatory to advance in the story, but still well advised to develop your team in an interesting way. The quests aren't complicated per se, but you won't have a marker on your map for exactly where to go, just a fairly brief explanation and the name of the map where the monster/NPC might be.
The universe of the game is very marked by the futuristic aspect in which the game evolves. As in the Persona game, everything is extremely colorized in a certain way to accentuate the immersion and the attachment that one could feel for the characters. Whether it's the main or secondary characters, we learn a lot about them and their state of mind in relation to the mission that you have been entrusted with. The Soul Hacking mechanics that Ringo has also makes it easier to learn more from the first meetings with the characters to find out who they are and what could have happened in their lives (within a certain limit).
On the music side, you won't be disappointed with soundtracks of impressive quality that immerse you even more in the universe in which you evolve. The passages in the cutscenes or during certain phases show that the subject has been more than mastered by the team in charge of this sector. It's nice to have a bit of everything as a style of music and not just an electro/quirky style sticking to futuristic/cybernetic universes.
Also not knowing the license as a whole, I was pleasantly surprised with what I could see in Soul Hackers 2. The theme speaks to me a lot, I really liked the way the title plays both on the futuristic side of its universe and on the scriptwriting aspects concerning these characters, in particular those related to the hack of the soul which allows you to learn more about the characters who will cross your path.
Even if I haven't finished my adventure yet, I can only recommend this game, especially if you really liked the Persona series or games like Dragon Quest, for example. The game is available on all living room platforms as well as PC.
