Atlus announce Soul Hackers 2, coming to PC in August
A devilish RPG sequel 25 years in the making
Almost as if Atlus had heard we were celebrating Souls Week on RPS, the Persona peeps today announced Soul Hackers 2. May I briefly say: hack the planet. Anyway, so, demons are kicking around again, and it'll be up to save the world from the apocalypse with the help of our own demons. Check out the RPG's announcement trailer below.
The term "apocalypse" is overused in video games but I'm well onboard when devils are involved.
In the sprawling family tree of Atlus games, this falls under the Devil Summoner series on the Megami Tensei branch. Those are games about summoning demons to battle for you, like Pokémon but more explicitly drawing from mythology. I know the first game give your devils plenty of personality, with alignments and interests and preferred attacks that can make building a party an interesting challenge, and presumably that continues here? Atlus haven't said much about the game, only announced it.
Its existence is a surprise in itself. The first Soul Hackers debuted on Sega Saturn in 1997 and only came westward with a Nintendo 3DS version in 2013, and now the sequel is following another nine years after that. But hey, I'm always up for weird Atlus devils and angels and demons.
Atlus say Soul Hackers 2 is produced and directed by Eiji Ishida (director of Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, and designer of Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner - Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army) and Mitsuru Hirata (co-director of Radiant Historia, and a battle system designer on the aforementioned Soulless Devil Summoner sequel) with character designs by Shirow Miwa (writer and artist of the manga series Dogs) and music from MONACA.
Soul Hackers 2 is due to hit Steam on the 26th of August. It'll also be on PlayStations and Xboxes, last-gen and current. See the Soul Hackers 2 website for a few screenshots but not much info.
Atlus tweeted that it'll include options for English or Japanese voiceover, with subtitles in English, French, Italian, German, and Spanish.
I'm heartened to see this coming to PC from the start, a platform Atlus largely ignored for years. Parent company Sega recently said they'd like to do simultaneous worldwide launches on multiple platforms. Alas, we've still not had Persona 5 on PC, only the Dynasty Warriors-esque spin-off Persona 5 Strikers (which I hear some good things about but, as our review said, just isn't the same). Persona 4 Golden eventually came over, so I live in hope.