Soul Hackers 2 is an endurance marathon of a video game that left me with an shockingly profound case of Stockholm Syndrome.

I gave 76 hours of my life that I will never get back to trudge through the most abysmal dungeons in any video game that I've ever played, a remarkably bland story, mostly unlikable characters, and I don't even know if I'm upset.

This game has so few redeemable qualities in regards to the time it requires out of the player, it is downright impressive.

Soul Hackers 2 is an affront to the adult human. Time is not respected. Sanity is not respected. Intellect is not respected. The hypothetical of watching the entirety of One Piece is a resoundingly better use of time.

Little about this experience in retrospect could be described by the four letter use of diction in the English language that is the word: good.

Usually I would write a long form review, as I do with most of my plays, for games that I have a generally strong positive/negative reaction to, but Soul Hackers 2 drained enough out of me, Dracula would be proud.

I liked Tokyo Mirage Sessions, but no game should have the player ever, in a modicum of occurrences, say "I would rather play Tokyo Mirage Sessions."

Seriously, I have never complained about a game I've played this much, for this long, and had that come up in my review. I am mellow, I am very mild-mannered, but Soul Hackers 2 had me considering donning a purple jacket, some clown makeup, and changing my legal name, that my lovely mother and father gave to me, to Arthur Fleck, also known in the DCComic Universe as The Joker.

Speaking of Joker, man do I miss Persona. This is an SMT game through and through, that should've been a sign to me. I knew it was SMT, and I kinda like SMT, but I don't Liiiiiiiiiike SMT.

I pledge to play video games that respect my time a little more.

The genuine pros of this game, is that the hub vistas that you revisit are quite beautiful and the game design of the environments (minus the dungeons) is great. The character design, minus Arrow, is awesome and some of the better that I've seen in the JRPG space recently. Ringo, Figue, Milady, Nana, and Saizo all had great and unique designs that were candy to the eye and played to their respective characters. Speaking of the (main) characters, they were pretty good actually. Though they were sort of juvenile in their approach
to the tentative apocalypse that would lead to the death of all humanity, they were fun to listen to talk and hang out in the downtimes.

The shop menus and art style was very well done too. The presentation of Soul Hackers 2 was the lone spotlight in a sea of begrudgingly depressing and miserable decisions.

I can't recommend you play this game, unless you have a lot of free time, and not the will to enjoy a good game.

This has legitimately numbed my approach to video games, I'm hoping in a sort of shell-shocked fashion that I will get over. I hope the next game I play, has some redeeming quality that makes me smile or interested in what I'm interacting with, Soul Hackers 2 may be a paradigm shift in the way I approach games. I hope one day, that the spark that Elden Ring brought will return, because playing Soul Hackers 2 is the complete antithesis of everything I enjoy.

The more I think about the plot, the more I want to go out into the country of the state I live in and lie in a field of grass so that I can forget how poor it is.

Saizo really was a great character though, I just wanted to let that be known.