[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.

This game is fantastic. It fixes basically every issue I had with its predecessor.
Now not every single location in the overworld is filled with encounters, they actually let you rest with encounter free areas. You can walk through the town of Tsukudo-cho without being harassed by demons every 5 steps. Speaking of, Raidou's movement speed is practically doubled both in battle and out. He can travel at a reasonable pace and actually do some respectable moves in battle. The gun is way faster and so actually a worthwhile option, and he even now has a dodge roll move so he no longer feels like a sack of bricks on a trolley. The magnetite system has been completely revamped and is actually a factor in battles now.
Like its predecessor it still has an incredibly strong style and amazing 10/10 meguro ost.
The only thing I'd say is that I prefer the plot of the first game, but 2's is by no means bad and in the end thats just personal preference.
Its a shame that this is a niche game within an already niche series. I think more people need to experience this one, its seriously fantastic.

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.

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.

One million times better than the first game, being able to summon more demons, faster and more fluid combat, more movement options, less dumb AI (Still kinda dumb tho), a vast demon collection, better cast of characters and plot, however, it can get a little tiresome to get lost and don't know what to do to progress the game, also getting ambushed in this game feels TERRIBLE and i seethed with rage everytime i dropped locusts because of it. I would never call this game amazing or anything, mostly for the lack of memorable boss fights and i still would take press turn over this game's combat anyday of the week, but it's the only solid entry of the Raidou duology.