soul hackers thread (spoilers ahead!)

I’ll start with 3 points (story, characters and gameplay) and I’ll pretty much branch off from there

the plot in soul hackers is really cool to me, the cyberpunk aesthetic, the gradual buildup throughout the story and the overall 90’s feel to it. I loved how it built up from you just fighting the Phantom Society to fighting a threat to your town and possibly the whole world

The buildup throughout the plot delivered a pretty solid and bittersweet ending, which I think fits this game pretty well and is a well deserved ending for our main cast, the Spookies

The characters i felt were really good, with one exception but I’ll touch on that later. Nemissa/Hitomi, Spooky, Lunch and Six all got through really good arcs during the game and it makes them feel complete as characters as nemissa learns to sympathize and become calmer,

Lunch warms up to his dad and makes amends with him, Six matures, leaving behind his immature ways and Spooky carries his selflessness to a higher degree and dies to put a halt in the Phantom Society’s plans

Yu-Ichi to me felt like a plot device and was brainwashed to show the true extent of what the Phantom Society can do, although he does come around in the end to tell you Manitou’s affinities based on which boss you killed earlier

Onto gameplay, i loved the gameplay. It’s fast paced, smooth and overall felt really fun every time you went into a new dungeon. I love this era of dungeon crawlers (Devil Summoner, Persona 1 and Soul Hackers) mostly because the newly 3D rendered dungeons look amazing

i really liked the final boss too, it’s a good mix of being a challenge and being fun and it pays off with that satisfying ending (and that post game dungeon too :-))

on the topic of final boss, the main antagonists were really cool to me, my favorites being Carol J, Finnegan and Kadokura. I do wish they expanded on some of the phantom society members but they were really cool as is. I also loved the mystery of manitou’s true power as well

another gameplay aspect I liked: the vision quests. They were a really neat way of giving exposition to the player and neatly tied into the plot too and even gave us returns characters from the previous devil summoner game as well (my favorite vision quest was Naomi’s btw)

all in all, i really liked this game and even though it still has some flaws that i wish they touched up on, it’s still a really good game