You should play
Soul Hackers on 3DS

I have never seen the movie Hackers.

I didn't buy Discovery in the year 2001 because my friend Alan told me that after "Harder Better Faster Stronger", the whole album was "techno" , sorry Moe.

In the year 2002, I went to my first rave with my parents in Tennessee for a Destination Imagination competition. My best friend Michael's mom, Mrs. Michael's mom, told me to stay away from the kids with pacifiers because they were sucking ecstasy.

I was scared. Of the music, not the drugs.

I read Neuromancer this year because of Action Button's review of Cyberpunk 2077.

While writing this, I am currently reading Snow Crash because of the Action Button review of Cyberpunk 2077.

I have never played through an entire mainline Shin Megami Tensei.

I have all of played SMT Persona 3 FES, though not The answer.

I have played all of Persona 4 Golden.

I played 21 hours of Persona 5 before realizing that although I didn't know the name yet, Royal was an eventuality, so I stopped.

All this is to say that I am the worst person to review this game.

Soul Hackers was my first dive into the era that I imagine inspired The Animatrix, and I loved it.

Soul Hackers for the Nintendo 3DS violently whisks Y2K zeitgeist with the occult producing the dark creamy cool whip that made the series famous. 

A perfect enigmatic dessert for topping off your meal of 3DS JRPGs. 

Soul hackers for the Nintendo 3DS stored the heart of 1997 in it’s Algon branded microchipped hard drive for 26 years, a heart that beats to the 4 on the floor technostalgia that produced Johnny Mnemonic.

You can run your fingertips over the convergent nodes that link Soul Hackers and the SMT origins. 

The protagonist goes nameless to ensure you are inputting your ghost in the shell by inputting your name into the beta tester list of a new pre-secondlife pre-metaverse virtual reality called Paradigm X,  you travel through the gird based corridors of evil tech giants with names like AlgonsoftNS befriending then summoning demons in first person. 

You

• You - You are you, the you that wears goggles on your head and a green pleather jacket, wields a gun shaped computer, and hangs out with adolescents spending their adolescence on hacking it to the man. I am sure you have a motorcycle and that your best friend only wears an all black jumpsuit unzipped to the waist.

Nemissa and Hitomi

• The Spooky crew - Your best friends each with their own disheveled lives to untangle stirring your pot of emotions and creating a bond that authors call character development. All up to the level that you would expect from the ATLUS that made you care about a horny teddy bear, then a horny cat, and now a more than likely horny owl.
  
  There are poignant story elements that occur to each member of the cast throughout the game. The course of their respective stories brings home why ATLUS still dons the crown.

Phantom Society

Challenge

I wiped in the warehouse by the first spawn of hellhounds. As a person that calls themself JRPGdad on social media, I was hesitant to write this. I make the joke that is based on the truth that I am bad at video games and it hurts to know that even these turn based basics can wreck me. 

This was the first of many deaths. If you are not brain marking which opponents reflect swords, blunt objects, guns, or which opponents cast mudo or hama, you will die too. 

I enjoyed this especially after Bravely Second, it was a refreshing reminder that your floor can get cleaned with your team in games that give you all the time you want to make a decision.

Several bosses were happy to provide said reminders later in the game, challenging in the way that you would expect from the demons commanding the legions of hell. I had to resort to soaking items and chipping health, but you, you are a better player than I am.

You will win, I believe in you.

COMPS

I am a sucker for the SMT guns-are-actually-cool-and-useful-when-they-don’t-shoot-bullets. 

Invoker that you need to point at your temple to free your inner self? YES PLEASE.

Gun that when you pull the trigger a monitor and keyboard flop out of the sides? Call me Oliver Twist because "please sir I want some more."

In Soul Hackers, we get even more than just guns that aren’t guns, we get a guitar that is not a guitar although it can be played like a guitar and sounds like a guitar, but it summons demons. 

There is a saxophone too. 

Animated cutscenes

How did these fall out of fashion? 

My friend Michael, the same Michael from the intro, works at a gaming company now and I asked him why we don’t get animated cutscenes anymore. He said it requires a different team of artists and it is expensive to produce something that is separate from the game, something that only is on screen for a few minutes of playtime. 

This to me underlines a problem with the industry and probably capitalism as a whole. More importantly, it makes me sad. 

The games that can afford it stand out because of the level of connection to the story, and luckily the SMT side story team could afford it for the 3DS. 

There are cutscenes from before the game starts to sending Nemissa home, each rendered in 3 too smooth to be real dimension, slide it up to max, place your eyeballs 6-inches from the screen and let the fear of the changing millennium gush into you.

Nemechi

You get a tamagotchi. 

In the original PSX port for PSX you use the pocket station, I moved to Japan 21 years too late. I am tempted everytime I go to book off, I just want to know. 

I got the octopus, then the dango looking boy, then the angel cat boy. 

Street passes are few and far between, but I carried my 3DS with me everywhere during my time in Paradigm X and it was useful to have a shop of powerhouse demons outside of what you can befriend or fuse.

Can’t stop thinking about the pocketstation Nemechi. 

What I didn't like

Fusion System

I always forget that Shin Megami Tensei is a monster capture game. 

The black mirror Pokémon, the pull of the game is the story and the annoyance is the monsters. 

I love the monster designs in these games, they balance on the razor’s edge of angst and art, but there is no reason to learn the fusion system beyond the basics. I can feel the redditors crumpling under the nails on the chalkboard weight of that last sentence, but they will probably never read this, so eat your heart out. (If you are reading this, I’m not talk about you, I am talking about every other person on r/jrpgs) 

It’s true, I am a basic summoner. 

I use the monsters that have the best stats and I don’t track the waxing and wayne of the moon. I have looked at summoning guides, but only to make sure I could kill death in P3FES. 

There is just no reason to learn. You can beat the game without it. Please someone change my mind. 

I want to convert, I’m ready.

Movement

As charmed as I am by the first person grid based movement of these classics, by the 3rd hour of the game I was using the map to navigate the levels and not looking at my surroundings. 

I fall into this trap often in games and I hate it. It is not on me to adjust my playstyle. Get a better UI you 10 year old 3ds remake of a 20 year old playstation1 port of  a 22 year old sega saturn game. Why can you be more like the Final Fantasy VII Remake? I get motion sickness every time I use the make to navigate in that game, thus forcing my retinas to take in the millions of hours of human lives emptied into recreating the Midgar of Advent Children so I can run around in it. 

Have the map only appear when you stop moving. 

What I didn't mind

Grinding

I’ve said it before and I will say it again, I LIKE GRINDING. 

It provides time for you to listen to The Long Way to the Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers while pushing my intrinsic motivators of progress by leveling up my hell-mon in the pursuit of defeating those soul rotted capitalists at AlgonSoft NS.

Pour the monotony syrup all over my lower brain, give me something to do with my hands while my brain consumes the prose of writers far out of my range.