[Emulated on PCSX2]

Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon is the sequel to the first Raidou game and fourth entry in Devil Summoner series. Despite loving Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army I found this game to be quite disappointing, both as a standalone game and a sequel.

Despite being a sequel, King Abaddon does not respect the original game. Kaya’s gone (apparently moved?), a certain character I won’t name is revived just to be a note-taker which totally defeats their death in the original, the cast from the original game get no more development and it feels like they are there because it being a sequel demands it (some are even reduced to mere comedy relief such as tae’s entire character being fainting since she faints every scene she appears in). King abaddon also tries really hard not to reference the previous game’s plot to the point the shopkeeper doesn’t even remember you which makes me question why they even made a sequel in the first place.

Story-wise I did not like this game at all. Story fell out all over the place without a clear idea of what it wanted to say and would dwell on certain plot points way too long that I was waiting for it to be over. I really do wish they would have brought back the original writer because it really shows that they didn’t work on this one (they probably didn’t even plan for a sequel considering how soulless army wrapped up its story perfectly). One big addition I was not a fan of is “alignments”, a staple of the SMT series that made its first and only appearance in the devil summoner series with this game. While they can be well implemented, king abaddon does a terrible job with it by awkwardly inserting philosophical questions into casual conversations which really took me out of the game. What's even stranger is that none of these choices matter - no matter which alignment you choose the ending will be the same with the only major difference switching the deaths of two characters. Content-wise they’re also almost identical with at most swapping out a mini-boss or two (final dungeon and final boss remain the same). With how poorly they’re implemented along with how they don’t even change anything makes me question why they were even added in the first place, to appeal to SMT fans I guess?

As for the gameplay, I was not a fan of it in this game. While raidou can dodge (which is a great addition), Atlus had no idea how to balance this out and their solution was to make every single enemy constantly teleport across the screen (which makes fights really tedious like a game of whac-a-mole). Guns have also become completely useless with the removal of elemental bullets and just letting the player have access to unlimited bullets. Unlike the first game, fights take an extremely long time to escape from making it more viable to just kill the enemies. Another change I was not a fan of was the MAG rework, giving all your demons a shared MP pool. The biggest issue with this is that, unlike the first game where you were encouraged to swap out demons when they ran out of mp, you can pretty much just use the same two demons the entire fight and when you run out of MAG fights become very frustrating (looking at the final boss). While I suppose it's not too big of a deal some mechanics such as combo attacks and sword fusion are missing from this game which was a bit of a letdown. With that all said, one of my biggest issues with king abaddon is boss reuse, the prime offender being the soldier bugs which are reused and reskinned throughout the entire game even up to the final chapter (appearing a total of 13 times) making the game feel extremely repetitive.

While I’ve said a lot of negatives, King Abaddon does make some changes I like. Gone is the tedious fusion where you had to grind to make loyalty to fuse, gone are the random encounters in towns, gone is having to go all the way back to konnou-ya just to fuse and heal. King abaddon also allows the player to use two demons at once and offers more control options such as hiding them (making them invincible while holding a button but they can not take action during this) and being able to teleport them to you. Fusion is also more robust with nice additions such as demons leaving notes when fused and the ability to pass on passive skills. Negotiations are also great, possibly one of the bests in megaten with demons having their own conversations if they recognize each other and being able to use your demons to help you out when negotiations are not going well. Demons leaving sad notes when fused was also such a wonderful way to make them feel alive and broke my heart every time.

Presentation-wise the game oddly feels a lot lower budget with lower quality prerendered cutscenes and a lot less. One of the funniest scenes is when a cow gets kidnapped by a bug and just flies into the flat background (it looks so bad). The redone models for characters such as raidou and tae also look noticeably worse.


While I personally did not enjoy it and have a lot of complaints about it I still believe it's a good game in its own right and worth giving a shot especially if you’re a fan of the series. I just wish this game wasn’t so disappointing for me because I really wanted to love it.

Making an artstyle so infamously stylish and cool like Kaneko's translate so fucking poorly to 3D - when it very much didn't look as bad in this game's fucking predecessor - should be criminal.

Adds the law-neutral-chaos system (with a massive bias to chaos) which sucks an insane amount of ass and shows how even the most interesting entries that this series can muster almost inevitably runs back to older aspects of the series instead of being bold in any way.

Combat is very much better than the first, but instead of getting bored two hours in I get bored about four hours in. A design as immediately striking as Raidou being relegated to an extremely mid ARPG is the most unfair part of SMT.

The moments that make me remember the 2 games fondly is their pulpy charm and style, the wandering around and talking to people, and the esoteric plots with demons and detective work; not a single thought is spared for their main gameplay that I hacked away at for several playthroughs.

Gouto is a severely underrated bro.

This game was a huge insult to the first game.
They took everything from the first game and made it worse in every way possible.

The most frustrating part is what they did to the characters and the plot. The plot was terrible.
It doesn't even have a clear antagonist until the last
couple chapters. The characters were absolutely butchered, for example Tae, who has a new appearance/model, new personality, and even calls herself a different name for... some reason?

Tae was a pretty decent character in the first game, whereas here she's just another "hehe who is your favourite girl hehe" trope. They even added a hotspring scene where she's naked. (nothing visible at least) That scene takes place during a random part at the end where she randomly starts complaining about how women are treated (which she never complained about outside of this one scene by the way) before and after that scene starts, which made me feel like they were making women's rights into a joke.
Gouto was butchered as well, just showing up to say "Oh hi I'll add this to your notebook" at the end of every cutscene.

Overall the gameplay is just a downgrade, story was boring to the point where I just skipped dialogue since everything was very predictable, or just recapping events that have already happened.

This review is a massive rant with no structure, so I'll complain about another scene in the game.
At one point, there's a massive plot dump, but the game doesn't respect your intelligence and asks you if you need to rehear what was said every 5 messages. It was actually insane, and very annoying.

Anyways, I'll end this here, I've played bad megaten games and hated them before, but none have disappointed me until now.

Devil Summoner 2 - Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon sped up the pace and added handy QoL conveniences, with a set of rearranged combat controls and mechanical tweaks that - oddly enough, embraced a more chaotic but more tactical, meter-dependent form of action-RPG. Alas, whatever potential it had was largely wasted by an even greater demand for elements, revolving its overhauled MAG system (now a universal MP bar) solely around exploiting weaknesses. Battles are faster and flashier at the cost of flexibility. Whereas the previous game captured a balance between motor and strategic skills, combat here boils down to simply picking the right spell type instead. Progression was similarly monotonous at times, and the large batch of extra systems (mostly descending from SMT, including: alignments, negotiation, pre-battle RNG, roaming bosses, etc.) didn't amount to much. Atlus addressed the more confusing and tedious aspects of the past, but they also dropped much of the humor in favor of lengthy, banal drama - while a few unwelcome add-ons magnified the same issues that only slightly detracted from Soulless Army.

A sequel better at pretty much everything. Gone was the random encounters on cities, now you get access to one more demon in battle and the flow of battle is all around better. An example how a sequel should be, really. Most of the dialog it's pretty fun as the first one and OST is Atlus goodness. The plot is not as interesting as the first one but it's not bad either. Great flow and pacing too, the only misstep is the battle against the four riders being the way it was. I can see someone getting softlocked with it easily.

Devil Summoner 2 has much better gameplay and more interesting story than the first game.

First of all, we have a roll mechanic -first game doesn't have it- and smooth animations in the game so the fights are more fun, demon compendium is diverse so the fusion system is impressive as always, i really love fusion system in the atlus games the bosses are forgettable and repetitive, i hate fighting same bosses, they don't offer a challange, they are just waste of time, Rate of random encounter is better, there is no random encounters in places like capital so investigations are more comfortable in these places,

to fusion special demons, you need to complete some sidequests

Soundtrack is great especially Battle Theme, it's my favorite.

After playing this game again for the first time in two or three years I was surprised at how different my vision of this game ended up becoming by the end of it. When people talk about the "glory days" or "golden age" of Atlus games they tend to refer to the PS2 era consisting of Nocturne, DDS1 and DDS2, and also the Raidou duology. Sometimes people consider persona 3 and 4 to be a part of this era but they've been remastered and reworked a few times each now so I feel like they've transcended the PS2 era since they're both still relevant and both just got a brand new physical release announced. I always felt like the more Atlus progressed into their arguably as prominent 3DS era, they lost a bit of their original magic they had previously around the DDS era. It could have been a change of visual style with Masayuki Doi making the vast majority of new character art for the mainline series, along with shigenori soejima's art style changing to something that's (I feel) less unique. Both Doi and Soejima, in my opinion, have a more consistent track record of great art compared to kaneko but that's besides the point. This game came out in 2008 for the PS2, which to me is crazy because the jump from PS2 to PS3 was pretty huge. Hard to believe this game came out in the same year as like metal gear solid 4. This game really feels like it's way older than it actually is, and re-uses so many assets from the first game it left me feeling sometimes like i wasn't even playing a sequel, more so like an FES or a Royal version of Raidou 1 which caused me to unfortunately lose interest in the story much earlier than i would've liked. This is sort of where Persona started to have a bigger influence on Shin Megami Tensei as a whole. Even looking at the box arts for these two games you can tell that the second game's art was made much more ''palatable'' for a more mainstream audience. Even throughout the story there's brief but weirdly important scenes that involve picking a hypothetical love interest which really felt like it was ripped right from something like persona 4 because of how out of place it felt (in comparison to the first raidou, and the other ps2 smt games aside from P3 and P4). The music also felt like it took a bit of a hit. Re-using most of the music from raidou 1, raidou 2 boasts a much less extensive list of original songs, made even shorter if you don't count remixes. The songs in this game sound a lot like the ones from Persona 3, and even more so, Persona 4. The same guitar tone, the same trumpets that get really annoying after a while, etc. People say that Shoji Meguro got really burned out because of the constant pressure to make new music for a new megaten/persona game like literally every year or so at this point so a lot of songs blend together after DDS (which even he claims to be his most creative work). Besides the Art and music, the game plays pretty solid for the most part since it's building off of the bones of the last game, which itself was a little too simple for my liking. Now Raidou can roll and use special movies. Ammo is now infinite which is nice, but i rarely find myself using it, even with the elemental bullet spells, which brings me to my next point. This game has a lot of mechanics that go pretty much unused because you just don't need to use them. I bet most players didn't even know that blocking, and tapping X right in front of an enemy would roll you behind them like in wind waker, but i'm pretty sure they never explain it to you in game, and if they do, you won't ever really need to use it other than to feel cool. For the ladder half of the game you'll be so good on MAG, the primary mana resource of this game, that you'll be able to spam super high-level piercing spells that hit more than once to obliterate anything. Keep in mind that in my playthrough i only ever did 2 of the optional side quests and grinded only once for a super long fusion chain late-game towards the 25 hour mark. The game is way too easy for me and I'm glad they added a hard mode in the form of King difficulty, since it's something that me and my friends really wish they would've added to DDS since it's absent exclusively in those games. The only part of the main story that I found difficult were the fiends. Some may say that they're side content but they can literally interrupt the main story of the game whenever the moon phase hits 'New' and force you into a fight with them sort of like the riders from nocturne camping outside the terminals. Fighting them requires a moderate level of strategy and good MAG management to make sure you don't waste any by missing, since the riders like to teleport a lot. In my playthrough, I was able to kill every fiend including the Raidou clone a few times, since he can respawn unlike the others that stay dead for the remainder of the chapter. This game follows the SMT trope of having your decisions make an impact on your moral alignment and by extension, the ending of the game. While the 3 main endings in the game are for the most part, pretty similar minus the death of one character changing to another dependant on the route. I ended up getting the neutral ending which is pretty cool since I usually get either law or chaos in the other games, or TDE in nocturne since it's the most fun. Overall, the gameplay loop of Raidou 2 isn't as fun as something like Nocturne with the more prominent emphasis on demon fusion and the Kalpas, or DDS and the mantras and expanding your skill tree. I maybe went through 3 or 4 party cycles in Raidou 2, and never once felt like i needed to fuse to power myself up, it was just to explore the compendium and see more of the more niche Devil Summoner demons you don't see too often in mainline. I saw some demons in this playthrough that I'd never seen before which was super cool. My one problem with the demons is that the ones that are probably the most optimal to use can be found as wild demons in the current or next major area, which makes them feel less unique, and also makes the compendium feel a bit smaller. Speaking of gameplay loop, the dungeons are probably some of the most forgettable in the series. I've played this game twice now and still couldn't recall a single name of any dungeon despite reading a guide while playing, which I must say, isn't always necessary. It also doesn't really help that the dungeons are interspersed between probably some of the driest dialogue from the driest characters introduced in a megaten game. Worse than the reasons in Nocturne. Nagi and Geirin are both that trope where characters say a certain thing over and over like how Teddie P4 always makes a bear pun, Nagi and Geirin both say "bounds of my conjecture" or "theoretically" in almost every second sentence without fail. It's not okay this time cause Tedddie P4 tbh was more of a comic relief character but i can't really feel bad for these young sheldon sounding ass characters when either one is going through it. The one character I can say that i really enjoyed watching was Narumi. He was my favourite character in 1 and probably still in 2. He's just a good guy that isn't just comic relief like a lot of people think of him as. Another big problem with the dialogue is that none of it is voice acted, which is okay i guess considering this game was probably a lower-budget title but this game is practically begging for a Nocturne HD treatment. DDS was somehow lucky enough to get okay voice acting 4 years before and considering how that game performed I'm assuming they didn't wanna risk it again, which is understandable. It's just that this game has lots of scenes where stuff is being explained to you over these ugly looking 3D models that bob up and down and express like one of 4 emotions. I know it probably sounds like i am hard core shitting on this game, but I just think that this game and the Raidou world and characters are so slept on. The whole way through this game I couldn't help but think how great this game would've been had it released on Xbox360 or PS3. Catherine and Persona 5 both had a release that generation and they did really well in sales i'm pretty sure. Granted, Catherine is like the biggest clickbait of the video game world but it's still worth mentioning. Seeing the ever-mediocre persona 5 strikers get the megaten action game of the decade release really upsets me now that I can imagine a world where Raidou or even just the SMT franchise got int instead. Raidou being able to run around a fully 3d environment instead of those 240p pre-rendered backgrounds at full 60fps with a proper skill tree and great boss fights would have easily cemented Devil Summoner as a pillar title for Atlus, but instead they had completely and utterly ruined their chance with the embarrassingly lame soul hackers 2. This game set out to create an action game out of PS2 megaten and i think when you put it that way, it definitely succeeds, since both the bad and good carried over mostly from Nocturne and DDS and even Persona 3 and 4. Raidou is probably one of the more interesting Megaten protagonists and the lore behind the Kuzunoha family is really interesting especially after having played Soul hackers and persona 2 a few years back, you can see how it all ties together. This game is definitely more polished than Raidou 1, and overall a better game that improves on most of what raidou 1 needed to fix, like having only one demon at a time, but for me, it doesn't quite hit the mark that DDS did, and I'm not remotely satisfied with the dormant status of this series/character and I'm so extremely confused at how Atlus was moving in the right direction for the most part but completely dropped the ball on this guy. If it were on 10 i'd probably give it a really solid 7, and maybe I'm biased cause I love Raidou and megaten but I generally enjoyed this game start to finish. It just doen't help that it was bogged down so hard by the previous gen's specs since if had just been given more time to break free from the mediocrity of it's predecessor and define itself as a true successor, i could easily see Raidou 2 as a 10/10 action RPG in another life.

Creo que la mejor manera de definir este videojuego en comparación a su primera parte es: "mejor". Tiene mejor historia, mejor jugabilidad, mejor desplazamiento, mejor combate, mejor temática, mejor música, mejor duración y, en especial, es extremadamente mejor que la primera parte. Es fácil jugarlo y es fácil divertirse con el. La dificultad, es sustancialmente superior a la primera entrega, pero sigue sin ser especialmente difícil en casi ningun aspecto y, similar a la primera parte, no persivo eso necesariamente como un problema. La conclusión es bastante agradable y más que digna de tal sobresaliente videojuego. Este definitivamente es un videojuego que merece ser jugado y al menos hasta ahora, mi Shin Megami Tensei favorito (sin contar Persona).