Welcome Guest [Log In] [Register]


Welcome to the PGRF gaming community! Everyone here is very friendly, so don't hesitate to say hi and engage in some video game discussion with all of us! From retro to modern, there's no discrimination here. If you have any questions, feel free to ask the moderators and administrators! Have fun.

Registration is simple, fast, and completely free!
Join our community!




Username:   Password:
Add Reply
SMT: Soul Hackers (3DS / Saturn); Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers
Topic Started: Sep 1 2014, 11:43 PM (367 Views)
pestro
Member Avatar
Level 7
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
I figured that I'd follow the same format as last time.

Posted Image


Time to beat: ~30h (including all side-quests but not the Endgame content)


Pros:


+ Outstanding storyline! I was captivated from start to finish and I was constantly wondering what was going to happen next. The game is also filled with likeable characters, save for a few exceptions, the story is perfectly paced and the dialogues are fantastic. You will occasionally get to play through memories of people who have passed away which helps fleshing out the story while breaking up the pace of the game. Really top-notch quality on this department! It was a nice touch that they also included characters from the first Devil Summoner game.

+ Great atmosphere. It sure is a Shin Megami Tensei game, despite being an off-shoot of the main series, and it is definitely noticeable in things like the overall tone in the game.

+ Good variety in the dungeons. Each dungeon felt unique with its own set of puzzles. Some of the dungeons were better than others though but I'll get to that in the "con" section.

+ Fantastic Music! One of my favorite soundtracks in the series! The game features a wide variety of memorable tunes with the distinct 90's electronica type of sound that's become a staple of the series.

+ Collecting demons is just as fun as ever. The game also adds a few more twists to spice it up, like being able to fuse monsters into swords or items

+ Added depth to the demons. Each demon now has an associated personality like Sly, Wild, Dumb or Calm. Depending on the demon's personality, he/she prefers to do certain actions. If you command the demon to do the action that they want to do, during combat, the loyalty meter goes up. If a demon has a high loyalty towards you, he/she is then more likely to do the action that you commanded him/her to do during combat. A low loyalty means that the demon might reject your command or even leave you. You can use items to temporarily alter a demon's personality or increase their loyalty. I found this quite useful later on in the game. The alignments also make a return (Law / Natural / Chaos each with a combination of Light / Neutral / Dark) and you can only have demons in your party with somewhat matching alignments.

+ Great port on the 3DS! Basically, everything is in 3D except for the FMV scenes (which just screams mid 90's! So much yes!) from the Saturn port. The combat animations have also been improved from the Saturn version. My only gripe with the 3DS changes is...


Cons:


- Nemechi. Please note that this is a minor complaint as this refers to additional content that you get for free with the 3DS port. Nemechi is a monster/thing/celebi? that allows you to trade your 3DS play coins for "souls" that you can use to purchase demons that are unique to the 3DS port. You can also use souls to evolve Nemechi in order to be able to purchase even more demons. While this sounds great in theory, the execution could have used some tweakings. Nemechi will devour Play Coins like there's no tomorrow. To purchase a single demon costs ~10 Play Coins and to evolve Nemechi costs 20 Play Coins. You can also only trade 40 Play Coins per day. This limitation combined with the fact that you need to stock up on a massive amount of play coins in order to be able to purchase anything through Nemechi just made me loose interest in the whole thing altogether.

- The menus are rather clunky. While they made some improvements in this department compared to the first Devil Summoner game, this is really where the game shows its age. It is especially noticeable during Demon Fusion. The game allows you to perform a Demon Fusion Search where you can see which demons can be produced based on the ones that you currently have. However, when you pick a fusion, you can only see the names of the demons that are going to be fused. With the large roster of demons that are in this game combined with the fact that you will be swapping demons from your party on a regular basis, the implications of this is that you now have to remember the names of the demons, exit from the Demon Fusion Search and then try to find which demons you would have fused just to see whether or not these were demons that you wanted to fuse. This started to annoy me quite a bit as I got later into the game and started to loose track of the names of the demons. So I started taking pictures of my picks for the Demon Fusion so that I could buy them back from the Compendium after they had been fused (provided that I had any demons in my party that I wanted to keep). The clunkiness of the menues was actually the first thing that struck me as I started playing through the game. Thankfully I got used to most of them as time progressed except for the ones during the Demon Fusion process.

- Some of the dungeons are massive and requires lots of backtracking. One dungeon in particular, really got on my nerves. It was comprised of many floors, each filled with doors around every corner, and you had to find the "correct" door on each floor. All other doors sent you back to the basement level. That combined with a frequent enemy encounter rate was extremely annoying. Most of the other dungeons were fairly good but some of the puzzles required plenty of backtracking which could be irritating when the dungeons were large and the encounter rate was high.

- Back attacks resets the party formation. I suppose that this is a minor annoyance but sometimes you'll encounter enemies that do "back attacks". The back row in your party will then be shifted with your front row. This would be okay if the change was just during battle but it's permanent. So after every "back attack" encounter you have to go into your comp, pick "move" and then re-organize all of the party members. Some people might shrug it off as a minor complaint but it got a bit annoying after a while.

- This game could use macros... Once again, just a minor annoyance but considering that you have six party members, picking their action every single time is quite tedious and you will most likely fall back to using the same series of actions.

- Insta KOs... Yes, they're here. Sometimes the enemies do those on your party leader which results in insta game over as well :(


Overall

9.5 / 10


Closing Comments:

I had a fantastic time with this game. This is one of the strongest entries in the series, that I have played! It does have a few minor annoyances here and there but one can easily look past that considering the overall outstanding qality of the game. Highly recommended!
Edited by pestro, Sep 2 2014, 12:11 AM.
Ginga Force translation
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
TNT
Member Avatar
Totally Not Thanous
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
Love this game!! Never beat it (but that can be said for almost every other game I've played too XD) but playing it quite a lot and it's definitely one of my favorites in the series.

great review btw, love this format
Posted Image
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
pestro
Member Avatar
Level 7
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
Thanks a lot, thanous! I'm glad to hear that, I think that I'll use the same format for future reviews although I guess they're more like impressions rather than actual reviews but whatevs :P I wrote a couple of "proper" user reviews on the gamespot forums before I signed up here but I had a hard time putting my thoughts into words while making the text flow nicely yet still trying to cover the important aspects of the games. I much prefer doing these short bullet-note reviews that people can easily scan to get the highlights while I'm leaving my impressions on the games. I also feel a lot less pressure in writing them because of that since it's not really a "proper" review.

Thanks once again man, I'll post more in the future :)
Ginga Force translation
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
TNT
Member Avatar
Totally Not Thanous
[ *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  * ]
pestro
Sep 2 2014, 07:30 AM
Thanks a lot, thanous! I'm glad to hear that, I think that I'll use the same format for future reviews although I guess they're more like impressions rather than actual reviews but whatevs :P I wrote a couple of "proper" user reviews on the gamespot forums before I signed up here but I had a hard time putting my thoughts into words while making the text flow nicely yet still trying to cover the important aspects of the games. I much prefer doing these short bullet-note reviews that people can easily scan to get the highlights while I'm leaving my impressions on the games. I also feel a lot less pressure in writing them because of that since it's not really a "proper" review.

Thanks once again man, I'll post more in the future :)
I prefer reviews like this, it's succinct and sweet, long detailed reviews can get boring and convoluted, but like this it's easy to see everything you need to see.
Posted Image
Offline Profile Quote Post Goto Top
 
1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous)
« Previous Topic · Modern Gaming · Next Topic »
Add Reply