The years preceding Localization Crimes III: Nocturne saw a large number of spinoff releases for the series. One of them was Persona, which Act reviewed way before this, but a lesser-known one was Devil Summoner, which is basically identical to the main series so I’m not entirely sure why it’s a spinoff.

The first Devil Summoner sounds interesting from the Wikipedia article, but it was never even fan-translated, so I instead started at Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers. Ah, you know something’s a franchise when it contracts colon cancer!

This takes place in the alternate Persona timeline where the nukes were stopped, so the demon stuff is a masquerade instead of the new norm. The setting is a near-future cyberpunk city where demons are using the internet to steal peoples’ souls, and it’s up to you as a leet hacker to stop it. Except you don’t do any actual hacking and demons are running around the physical world as well as the internet, so that’s more of an aesthetic than anything significant.

What I really appreciated, coming off of SMT3, was that this game has actual characters with likable personalities who work with you instead of running around like headless chickens. The protagonist’s hacker group has a nice balance of personalities who make useful contributions to the plot without getting in your way, so I felt actually motivated when they were inevitably kidnapped and in need of rescue. What is it with only the spinoffs having any understanding of character writing?

And minor quibble, but I didn’t like the art shift. As a demonstration, here is the same demon’s SMT2 and Soul Hackers sprites side-by-side:

  

The hand-drawn Soul Hackers sprite is much more detailed and artistic, yes, but, well, that same beauty and detail makes it look like a painting rather than a living creature. It’s looking to the side rather than at the player, and what is it waving to? The simplistic SNES sprites were actually animated, with blinking eyes and flickering spirits, which all contributed to the sense of them being actually alive; that’s lost here. (Well, the sprites do animate, sort of, but they do so by stretching the sprite in a way that’s very painfully artificial and honestly just makes it worse. Devil Survivor uses the same art style but doesn’t do this, which is a marked improvement.) Moreover: would you have known these are the same demon if I hadn’t told you? The artist takes some very extreme artistic liberties, to the point demons are rarely recognizable as the creatures they are intended to be, let alone the same demons they’ve been in past installments.

(Also, apparently this game originated the sexy BDSM angel design seen in SMT3. Why.)

The handling of female characters could be better, but as Devil Survivor 2 was so eager to demonstrate, it could also be a whole lot worse. The protagonist’s girlfriend is your single human party member, and the reason she’s able to fight is because she is possessed by a demon at the start of the game… but she actually cohabits with the demon instead of needing to fight for control of her body, and is able to talk normally in cutscenes instead of getting erased from the narrative. The demon does change her into a sexy outfit, which annoyed me, but it also demonstrates that this artist understands how boobs work instead of whatever was going on in DeSu2:

Yeah, not great, but the bar was set so very, very low. And at least her dressing sexy is an explicit character choice instead of stripper gear being the default outfit for women.

The gameplay is built upon the model of If…, with your party split into two rows of 3 and the back row unable to use melee attacks. However, it expands on the concept a lot: enemies also use this system, certain weapons allow human characters to attack from the back, and there are more AoE patterns such as rows vs. columns vs. squares, as well as gradient AoE attacks where enemies on one side will receive more damage. All of it feels like a very natural evolution from If…, and fixes the problems it had with back row characters mostly having no choice but to twiddle their thumbs and the lack of clarity in what the rows meant and what attacks could be used from the back.

Unfortunately, it also doubles down on one of the series’ worst mechanics: There are two skills that make your team reflect all attacks of a type (either physical or magical) for one turn, but unlike in Pokemon, they only work if the user acts before the enemy in the turn order. This makes them either gamebreaking or completely useless depending on the user’s initiative (which contains a random factor because of course it does), and most of the endgame bosses are practically impossible without using these skills to cheese them. A lot of enemies also have utterly ridiculous evasion rates, so Sukukaja is practically mandatory. The endgame was mostly just very frustrating to me, and it felt like my specific team choices — you know, the game’s central mechanic — were irrelevant aside from one or two demons with those key skills.

It’s also pretty bad at explaining the impact of important choices. At the start of the game you are given three options to describe your girlfriend’s personality: “She’s a calm one,” “She’s more upbeat,” or “Sexy defines her.” (-_-) What you aren’t told is that these choices determine whether she learns fire, ice, or electric spells, which is an incredibly important choice that affects you the entire game. Have fun with that! You get a similarly poorly-communicated choice at the end of the game too, where you have to make a choice that will determine whether the final boss uses a physical or magical build. Does the game tell you which is which? Haha no, screw you. (The game does at least tell you the impact right before you fight the final boss… except for some reason they mixed up the two messages, so it tells you the opposite of what’s actually true.)

The game does add one major new mechanic of its own, which is that demons will sometimes refuse your orders. Each demon has a personality that determines which skills they prefer to use; giving orders contrary to their personality will sometimes make them angry with you and do their own thing, while giving orders in line with their personality will make them more loyal, which makes them more willing to follow other orders. It’s a neat idea for treating the mons more like actual people, but in practice it’s just incredibly frustrating. Battles are, as usual for the series, very difficult and can go south extremely quickly, so even a single demon disobeying your orders to Leeroy Jenkins the enemy can be disastrous. It also makes Kind demons extremely suboptimal, since they’d rather waste MP on healing spells when everyone’s fully healed than lift a finger to actually contribute to the battle. In practice, it seems like the intended approach is to work around your demons’ personalities instead of with them, either by grinding their loyalty so that they’ll never disobey you or by getting them drunk, which temporarily changes their personality.

I suppose this demonstrates that what is ethical and what’s fun are in conflict here. Realistically, yes, if you are commanding a group of people, you shouldn’t be able to perfectly control their every action like they’re robots… but in a strategy game, that’s extremely frustrating, especially if disobedience is a random event. And when the demons are explicitly sapient, it sort of wraps back around to being stupid again: I’m supposed to believe that these guys are people with rich inner lives, yet they’re also whiny, childish idiots who will kill themselves with HP-eating physical moves because “I need my exercise!”, cast spells that the enemy absorbs because “I don’t want to get my hands dirty,” or refuse to attack even when the enemy is slaughtering their companions left and right. Clearly they don’t deserve to have their opinions respected, and everything would be better if I could just mind control them!

Furthermore, it completely ignores the one interesting thing it could have done: Demons under your control have no opinion on killing their own species. That’s been an elephant in the room since the series’ inception, yet when they finally have the chance to address it they don’t. Enemy demons still truce with you if you have their friend, but that same friend will slaughter them without remorse. What on Earth was the reasoning here?

The plot is… better than the mainline games’, but still very jumbled and feels like it got cut short. In ancient times the Algonquian creator deity got captured by a demon summoner and used as a weapon to commit atrocities (???), then in the present day it gets captured by evil demon summoners and imported to Japan, where the summoners partner with an IT mogul to steal peoples’ souls through the internet and feed them to the Great Spirit in exchange for power. At the very end you’re told the Great Spirit wants to die because it is anathema to human life and realizes the two can’t coexist, even though it is literally the personification of all life in Algonquian mythology, what even? The whole thing is just a mishmash of ridiculous campy tropes rather than anything philosophically meaningful, and it’s blatantly just overwriting the Native American aspects with Japanese philosophy rather than anything respectful or interesting.

…But maybe that’s for the best, because when it does try to be profound it’s just more of the disgusting Buddhist death cultism we saw in Sekiro. If you want to tell people death is something to be celebrated, kindly shut up forever.