About a few months ago, I reviewed a game called Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. The Soulless Army. Yep, that name still doesn’t roll off the tongue too well. I enjoyed the game, despite the many faults it had, with its story pacing, bosses that offer insane difficulty spikes and pretty lacking battle gameplay. Despite that, it had a ton of style and I loved the story for what it was and the characters. So when I heard that the story continued later on in a sequel, I was down for that. Thankfully, the game is far less expensive and costs about the same price as most SMT games. Back then when I played the first Raidou Kuzunoha game, I was but a mere baby to the SMT franchise, having only played the three Persona games and Nocturne. But now having played SMT IV, Strange Journey, Soul Hackers and the Digital Devil Saga games on top of that, I feel like I am a bit more experienced with the franchise and can understand where this is going much better. And I may already be spoiling my critique, but let me just say that Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. King Abaddon is everything a sequel should be.



Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. King Abaddon takes place some time after the first game, with Gouto having come back, even though that makes no sense given the context of the ending of the first game, but whatever. Raidou is told by the protectors of Tokyo that there is a new threat found in a village just outside of the Capital involving locusts that steal people's luck, the town sacrificing their leader’s daughters to the gods of the village, and a group of masked assassins that use the luck stealing locusts to try and obtain godhood and become King Abaddon. So, Raidou, being the spry youth that he always was, goes on another wacky adventure to put a stop to all this madness with the help of the demons along the way. So first off, let me just say that this was pretty much the point where I felt Atlus was finally starting to get the right idea for game design. I love the SMT games, but holy shit, the older games had some serious issues that almost felt like they didn’t want you to finish them. Even Nocturne, for as much as I love it, has these issues. And the first Raidou was no exception. The way it takes forever to grind, the dumb demon ally AI, and much more. But now, this game has added convenience since the first game. All the minor issues you may have had in the first game are gone, even some issues that I neglected to mention. Like how every time you wanna fuse demons to get a stronger one, you have to go to the same one area to do so, so if you’re stuck in a dungeon, too bad. Now you can fuse demons at any save point, which there are many. Every time you want to travel to a new area, you have to pay to do it. Not a lot of money, but to do it a lot when backtracking is a pain. Now there is an item you can unlock that makes it completely free. No more having to pay ludicrous prices to heal your party. You can now heal right at healing stations. No more mana for all your demons. You all share one bar, which would sound like a mistake, but you get so much mana in this game that it’s almost an afterthought. And luck actually becomes a useful stat in this game for once. In battle, you have a few new additions. First off, you can now summon two demons onto the field instead of one, and they are way smarter this time around. No longer do they just screw about and waste energy. If you hit a demon with the right spell that they are weak to, you will get a big mana bonus and practically recharge it all for free. The AI can still be a bit iffy, but compared to the previous game, it’s so much better. But the addition of luck is with the Luck Roulette. In battle, there’s the chance of a roulette wheel popping up that could display either good luck or bad luck. You can get things ranging from more experience and money, demon negotiations going in your favor, or halving enemies health right off the bat, to bad stuff like your attacks missing, certain demons being sealed, no way to escape from battle and more. There are also plenty of Locusts on the field for you to collect to raise your luck a bit. There’s also a feature in the game where if you lose too many locusts, you will lose all your luck and have to pray to the gods to get it back, but I hoard locusts like a mad man so I never did that aside from the one mandatory story reason at the start.
One issue I do have with the battles though is when enemies do an Area of Effect attack, or an AoE if you will. Pretty much most attacks can surround an enemy in a general part of the fighting area, and since this is an action RPG, you can run away from it to avoid it, but if your demons are doing physical damage, they won’t know. You can block, but your demons can’t, so you gotta get them away yourself. Thankfully, another feature that was added since the last game is a button that just hides your demons. The L2 to be exact. Before, if you wanted to save your demons, you had to go to your menu, select Return, and put them back in their tube, and once the attack was over, go to the menu, select Summon and bring them back onto the field, and just hope they can get a few hits in before the enemy does that attack again and you gotta repeat the process. In King Abaddon, you just hold L2 to hide them, and when the attack is done, let go. It’s so much easier. But my problem with the AoE attack is that you have to wait for the attack to go away completely. If you block the attack with your sword, it’s no problem and you’re safe from the attack. But if you let your demons out after that and there is still some semblance of the attack there, even a little bit, your demons will get hit and it could be as minimal as them taking damage as big as them getting a status ailment. Or, you know, dying. You could say that it’s my fault for that, but I blocked the attack and once it deflects from your block, whatever is left there is no good. There are times where the attack ends and my demons still get hit by it. It creates a sense of paranoia and end up holding the L2 button for longer than I’d like to. But that’s pretty much my only gripe with the battle gameplay. Other than that, it’s a big improvement to the original. All bullets do the same damage as others now, so no more buying bullets, you can do way more damage to enemies when they are affected by an attack they are weak to, and hey, King Abaddon actually did it. They added side cases for you to do on the side. Did this game answer my prayers twelve years before I would want them? King Abaddon is genuinely everything I wanted the first game to be and then some. The cases aren’t too amazing, they are not the most cinematic stuff ever. You aren’t exactly getting side quests that rival Fallout New Vegas when it comes to deep stories and stuff, but they’re something. You get tons of interesting side characters from it, some personality from the demons you run into and even big rewards for your time. They are a step in the right direction and would make a third Raidou game a big improvement. But… ha ha, this is Atlus we’re talking about. We’re never getting a new Raidou game.
But of course, this is just stuff from the gameplay. And while the gameplay is fun and all, this is an RPG. You will be playing this game for a good 40 hours. And if my ass is going to be sitting in my Office Depot chair and start losing sensation, that story better be good. And is it? Well, I’d say it is. Unlike the first game, King Abaddon introduces a feature common in the SMT series, the Law, Chaos and Neutral system, a system that puts you down a certain path depending on your decisions of the game. Do you wish to unite everything as equal, then you support Law. Do you want a world where the strong can choose their own destiny, then you support Chaos. Or do you have no side and just believe in humanity as a whole? Then that’s probably Neutral. Now of course, in Soulless Army’s defense, it’s not like it was the only SMT game to lack that feature. Soul Hackers’ questions barely mattered, and Digital Devil Saga lacked it completely, along with the demon negotiations, and that’s considered the peak of the franchise by fans. And I will say, the feature in Raidou Kuzunoha isn’t too spectacular. What it will mostly do for you is open a few side quests for you, make some bosses appear and some null and void, and change the ending. But aside from that, you don’t really get much. Honestly, the most interesting thing it does is bring back Rasputin from the first game as a hostage rather than best girl Tae. Seriously, Rasputin is still allowed to walk the streets. Didn’t he super kill a man in the previous game? Now he’s going around trying to hit on women in a super perverted manner? Forget the assassins, Rasputin’s the fucking threat to the Capital! But seriously, though the Law, Chaos and Neutral pathing isn’t the best, it does offer variety in the gameplay. I did find myself really enjoying the story, however. I was already familiar with the cast of Raidou, Gouto, Narumi and Tae, but I did enjoy the brand new characters we got along the way. I enjoyed the dynamic between Akane and Dahn, I thought Nagi was an interesting character, and I thought Geirin was an absolute badass. But like all SMT games, I thought the big god enemy was kind of obnoxious after a while, talking about, “This is what humanity desires. For me to save humanity, I must end it”. The fuck is this fucking Seymour Guado, “If all life were to end, all life would be saved” bullshit. I know it’s absolute heresy to say anything positive about the Persona games when talking about SMT, but at least the human villains in Persona were interesting and not going on and on about humanities desires and all that. I’ll take a flawed human over some perfect deity any day. But that’s just a personal issue I have, really. Nothing to take to heart. But what can be taken to heart is this, my biggest issue with Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. King Abaddon. It’s way too easy. I’m not complaining too much since my backlog of games is piling up and for an RPG, I’ll take that any time. I choose to play games on easy not because I suck at games and need a challenge, but because I have too many games and want to get to them all. I know, first world problems. Poor me, poor me. But damn, Raidou Kuzunoha is super easy. I think I only died like twice in the whole game, and only one of them was to a boss, and it wasn’t even mandatory. Any SMT fan can tell you that the most intimidating enemy ever is Lucifer… and then Minotaur… then Reaper… then Beelzebub… But somewhere in there are the Fiends. The Fiends are some of the most intimidating enemies in the series. They come out of nowhere with no warning and when they put up a fight, you better bring your best or you will die. But in Raidou Kuzunoha, even when I felt like I met my match with one that could do a full heal, I just had my demon Rai-Ho do Glacial Blast and before I knew it, I won. Even the final boss wasn’t hard. Long as hell, mostly because your magic will be practically drained at this point in the fight since it has three phases, but even still, it was not that difficult. Just hide your demons, run around the attacks and be ready to use Luck Locusts when it brings out the roulette wheel. But hey, I’ll take long and easy over long and I wanna fucking kill myself like the first games final boss.
But still, despite the easy difficulty, I love Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. King Abaddon. While I consider the first game to be a guilty pleasure that only die hard fans or someone who likes that style will enjoy, Raidou Kuzunoha Vs. King Abaddon is genuinely a good SMT game. The style just adds to it all. The gameplay is even more fun than before, the story is more interesting, and the side cases just puts a big grin on my face. If you have any desire to play the Raidou Kuzunoha games, I would suggest starting with this one. Don’t worry, you don’t need to play the first one to understand this one. Some minor characters will go over your head, but that’s about it. But sadly, this was it for the Devil Summoner subseries. After King Abaddon, the series was put to rest aside from a 3DS remake of Soul Hackers later on. But after that, no more Devil Summoner, no more of the Kuzunoha Clan. Would I personally want another Raidou Kuzunoha game? Well… I don’t know. I can see tons to do with this world. You can have all sorts of adventures with Raidou. This is a series where potential is brimming from it to just create a brand new story and cases. But I feel as though I am satisfied with this game. If we get more Raidou in the future, I’ll be down to play that. If not, that sucks, but I’m satisfied with what we have. But, again, Atlus. If it ain’t Persona 3, 4, or 5, it didn’t happen.