What’s the longest you’ve ever waited for a video game sequel? Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers was released all the way back in 1997 on the Sega Saturn, a first-person dungeon crawler JRPG created by developer Atlus. Four console generations later, we finally have a sequel – Soul Hackers 2 – although it’s really a standalone game with mostly thematic connections to the original. 25 years is a long time in computer graphics, and Soul Hackers 2 has a wide variety of technology it could potentially use – but early footage didn’t really impress. There’s little here to suggest that the current wave of consoles is being taxed by this Persona-lite release – and the knock-on effect of that seems to be that the last-gen machines are getting some shocking ports, especially the vanilla Xbox One.
Soul Hackers 2 borrows its gameplay elements from other recent Atlus titles, so at a basic level it’s a turn-based RPG focused on exploiting weaknesses, which is a pleasant enough system, but nothing special for RPG veterans. There are some twists, such as an overkill-esque mechanic that rewards strategic play, and a lot of customization. But this is not particularly new. Elsewhere, however, this game really shines. Soul Hackers 2 is a party-focused title that weaves multiple characters through a twisting, serialized story. Interpersonal conflicts and interactions take center stage here, and a social system gamifies out-of-combat interactions, turning simple conversations into actual consequences. It’s more of a TV show than a movie, with a “villain of the week” style story with multiple short storylines that build up over time.
This formula is fairly new by industry standards, but if you’ve played other recent Atlus RPGs – most notably Persona 5 or Tokyo Mirage Sessions – you know what to expect. Fortunately, so does the rest of the pack, with a keen sense of visual style. But you can’t make a video game from just artistic flourishes – so how does the 3D rendering hold up?
Let’s start with the good stuff. On the plus side, the 3D character models are fairly high in graphics fidelity. They have a high enough polygon count, have good texture work, and are smooth in cel shaded. The character rendering itself isn’t state-of-the-art, but it doesn’t have to be and works perfectly here given the visual style.
However, the environments really expose the weaknesses in the rendering. Eighth-generation staples like physically based materials, global lighting and reflections in screen space seem to be completely absent – but that’s just the beginning. All the ambient lighting appears to be baked and doesn’t affect the shadowing at all. The geometry budget is quite limited, which makes for thick-looking curved surfaces. Texture resolution is questionable and there is minimal texture variation. Cubemaps are remarkably simple and misaligned. Post-processing is also limited, as the game lacks per-pixel motion blur and bokeh depth of field.
Soul Hackers 2 runs on the Unity engine without the High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP) feature set, so I wasn’t expecting technical-level parity with advanced software. But the results here are very basic and not that far ahead of PS3 and Xbox 360 titles. It’s particularly odd given the platform goals for this project – PS4, Xbox One, PS5, Xbox Series, and PC – all of which are perfectly capable of handling at least more ambitious assets.
If you compare Soul Hackers 2 to Atlus’ latest game, these issues really become apparent. Shin Megami Tensei 5 was released on Nintendo Switch last year and shares many elements with Soul Hackers 2 – including most of the enemy models. But despite the limited hardware power in the Switch, the rendering techniques there are much more mature and assets are generally of higher quality. Engine differences are certainly part of the picture here, but not the whole story.
It’s safe to say I’m not thrilled with Soul Hackers 2’s display makeup, but there’s an even more glaring problem with the visuals in my opinion. Soul Hackers 2 has very simple environmental artwork for the most part. Dungeons are made up of similar-looking corridors in bare, industrial settings, such as shipyards and subway terminals. There’s little to distinguish one room from another with copy-and-paste hallways and flat lighting. Each dungeon can have a small handful of room designs and corridor functions, which are repeated ad nauseum over the course of hours and hours of gameplay.
Luckily there is a mini map you can access while exploring – otherwise it would be very easy to get lost. However, the game’s boroughs do look decent. These zones are admittedly quite small, and the weak points in the display still irritate. But if the dungeons had anything closer to this level of care and attention to detail, there would be a lot less to complain about.
Image quality, perhaps unsurprisingly, also lags behind the curve. There is no anti-aliasing at all. Ironically, the relative lack of geometry helps a bit here, minimizing visible aliasing in some scenes. However, expect a glossy presentation. Even high resolutions do not solve the problem. PS5 and Series X both offer graphics and performance modes, which are essentially the same, with one running at full 4K resolution with a 30fps limit and the other running at 1800p60. Xbox Series S? There’s only one option, which delivers a bizarre 2048×1152 resolution, with an unlocked frame rate. The lack of AA doesn’t help any of these versions, but Series S gets the worst deal here.
Performance-wise, the 4K30’s graphics modes work as intended, with no noticeable performance drops — as you’d expect from a relatively unloaded game. On PS5, the performance mode almost always hits 60 fps. The only exception really comes down to certain full-screen attacks during combat – namely the ‘breath’ attacks that emit a high density of alpha particles. You will often notice a short series of dropped frames as these attacks take place on the screen. Beyond that, though, the game locks down to 60fps, and it’s the better way to play.
Series X doesn’t do nearly as well with this option. The short dips during combat return, but the game really struggles in certain city areas and sinks into the 40s and 50s for extended periods. Certain cutscenes also see prolonged performance dips. The combat issues are understandable, but the other issues don’t make much sense. Series S plays pretty much the same, even with its drastically reduced pixel count.
If there’s a sense that Soul Hackers 2 isn’t technologically ambitious and slightly under-performing, it’s still a big, big improvement over the last generation versions. As of Xbox One S, performance is miserable. Soul Hackers 2 tends to run between 15-35 fps here, with city environments proving to be extremely taxing. Most of the cutscenes hang in the 1920s, as the fights fluctuate wildly. For some reason Atlus has opted for an unlimited frame rate that seems totally unsuitable for these frame rates.
Perhaps the 1080p rendering resolution is partly to blame, though with these images it’s hard to see where the bottleneck is coming from. Performance continues when fast-forwarding through cutscenes, although all last-gen machines have issues in these segments. One X does a little better. The unlocked frame rate is back, but performance has improved by about 5-10 fps in comparable gameplay and the resolution has quadrupled to a full 4K. This would work with a 30fps limit (which the game doesn’t have), although excursions into the low to mid-20s are still way too common for my taste.
PS4 is the first machine of the last generation that manages to deliver some kind of consistent performance. We can still push the machine to a low of around 20fps in certain scenes, but it’s critical that a framerate cap of 30fps is actually in place. We get 1080p resolution just like Xbox One but with performance lows closer to the One X and with a decent frame rate 30fps ceiling to boot. PS4 Pro hangs at 1080p without any visual boost over the PS4 code, but performance is very, very close to a locked-down 30fps, with only Karachuko’s challenging city environment causing problems. Of all the latest generation machines, this is definitely the one to go for. However, Atlus’ decisions with Soul Hackers 2 seem very strange. Why leave the Xbox One versions unlimited? Why run One X at 4K and PS4 Pro at 1080p? I am truly lost. While the game seems inexplicably tough, the configuration issues on last-generation machines only make a bad situation worse.
I love the Atlus games in general, but I have my doubts about Soul Hackers 2. The game itself is very good, combining strong characters, a satisfying combat system and excellent music. It matches up very well with other Atlus titles and while it probably isn’t quite as polished or expansive as a game like Persona 5, this is a solid game for people who like these kinds of titles. In addition, there are visual elements that hold up very well – namely the 2D illustrations, animations, character models and menus.
However, the graphics are just way below par. The rendering technology is primitive in just about every way, although it’s something that’s usually overlooked once you get used to it. Still, the dungeons are offensively simple, with ugly, copied corridors in the game’s combat sections. The game has some troubling performance issues on many of its supported console platforms, with the Xbox One S in particular showing some of the worst frame rates I’ve seen in recent times. As a contemporary full-price release, Soul Hackers 2 falls under just about any technical standard. But if you’re otherwise interested in this title, it’s worth playing – as long as you keep technological expectations in check.
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