How far did you get: One completion
As the game has eluded us in the states for so long, it garnered a reputation of being one of the best Shin Megami Tesnei games, causing fans of the series to be rather frustrated until this game was finally announced for released here. The truth is, there isn't anything particularly special about Soul Hackers.
With the exception of the sprite art, this game is full of visual ugliness. The dungeons are all bland and boring. I spend most of my time in dungeons looking at my map on the bottom screen, as I knew I wouldn't miss anything on the top screen. The cinematic movies were all ported as is from the Sega Saturn version, and they look terrible. It almost looks like stop motion, which might have been cool if that's what they were going for, but I don't think it was.
The amount of fun your going to have with this game depends a lot on how long it takes you to figure out how to actually play it. As a jrpg, you expect a certain amount of stat handling, but this game doesn't make it obvious as to what you should do with certain stats. For instance, there is are 2 currencies in the game, macca and magnetite. Macca is just your money, but magnetite is where things get confusing. Magnetite is required for your summoned demons to live. If you run out, they take damage for every step you take. You also get magnetite for winning battles, but you don't get macca. If you want macca to buy things, you're going to need to stockpile magnetite and sell it for macca. If you try playing the game with 4 demons summoned at all times, you're never going to be able to stockpile any magnetite, which is a fact I didn't come to realize until I was about halfway through the game. I thought I needed my demons to win fights, but the truth is, you only need them for bosses. If you build your two human characters right, you should be able to defeat all the regular enemies using only them. In fact, you'll find that fighting regular enemies is actually much easier when you don't summon demons, because you won't have to worry about trying to keep them alive and you won't spend magnetite trying to heal them. Once you figure that out and buy some anti-death magic armor for you two humans, the game quickly becomes the easiest Shin Megami Tensei game. The hard part is trying to figure it all out.
Soul Hackers also doesn't help you out much when building your human characters. When you level up, you are allowed to distribute points into whatever affinities you want to. While this sounds great, the game doesn't tell you that your main character never learns any magic, despite what you do. So you may spend the first part of the game throwing points into magic and intelligence on your main character for absolutely no reason. Fortunately, I decided from the start that I was going to use my main character as a tank, but not everyone will do this.
On the more positive side, the battle system is just as great as it is in any Shin Megami Tensei title. It doesn't have the press turn system that some of the newer games do, but it does focus on buffs and taking advantage of enemy weaknesses. The demon recruiting system is as in depth and fun as it is in any SMT game, as well, though I found the personalities began to repeat themselves far too early in the game.
The story is fairly good for it's time, but it didn't impress me as much as other titles in the series, and reminded me more of Persona than a main series game. It's dark, but not as dark as I had hoped. The main cast of characters, called the Spookies, are a hacker group trying to explain all the strange things happening around the city. They all have pretty distinct personalities, but I didn't get all that attached to any of them. The ending was pretty lame, too.
Shin Megami Tensei Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers would probably be a pretty good starting point for anyone looking to get into the series, as long as they can figure out how to play it fairly early on. I'm less inclined to recommend it to Shin Megami Tesnei purists, though. It's a bit too easy, the story isn't really up to par, and the visuals and sound weren't very good.
Rating: 68/100
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