RPG fans, especially fans of Atlus games, stop right now and take a good look at Raidou Remastered: The Mystery Of The Soulless Army. The game is out this week, and you better not sleep on it.
The remaster of Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha VS The Soulless Army is not only a sold Shin Megami Tensei game, complete with the expected demon fusing fun and unexpected difficulty spike, but it’s also a really fun take on an action-based combat system, layered in a fascinating setting. This is not “another one of those,” it has a completely valid reason to exist in Atlus’ long line of RPGs, and I dare say it deserves a new entry once the next game is inevitably remastered after this.
We are not ready to have a full review of Raidou Remastered just yet, we’re still working through the game, but the first 10 hours is enough to convince me that this is a game that deserved not only a remaster, but also a second appraisal. The world was not kind or keen of Japanese RPGs back in the mid-2000s, but close to 20 years later, I believe more of us will come to appreciate what this game tried to do, now in a more polished and refined state.
SMT With Real-Time Combat Exists 19 Years Ago
If you ever had a hankering of what how Atlus would make an action-RPG like most modern games do nowadays and move away entirely from turn-based combat, well, here it is. It was here all these years.
Raidou Remastered has you directly control the titular Raidou, who fights with a melee weapon and a gun, as well as the help of two demons. He’s a Devil Summoner after all. Though for the remaster, instead of using the first Raidou game’s combat system, the team at Atlus instead has grafted the combat system from the next Devil Summoner Raidou game (Devil Summoner 2: Raidou Kuzunoha VS King Abaddon), which was more well-received, into Raidou Remastered. And it’s a good call, I feel.
Think how Tales Of Arise does its combat encounters, where you freely move in an arena where its background mimics the surrounding of the locale you were in, with a moveset that includes a light attack, heavy attack, jump, ranged attack and some skills tied to a cool down. You can dodge and block attacks too.
This is still an SMT game in that you build a party of demons by catching and fusing them, and then have them inherit active and passive skills to make them stronger. But due to the pace of the combat, combat skills attached to the demons are activated automatically. Your party members will do their best to use the skills available to them. Don’t worry about having to manually cast a buff spell, the AI is usually good at prioritising them and more importantly, those spells last the entirety of the encounter. No need to micromanage buffs.
What you need to actively manage is the MAG bar. The two demons use that resource to automatically cast spells and buffs. You gain more MAG by doing repeated light attacks, but they deal little damage. So you want to also mash heavy attacks in to properly chip an enemy health bar down. As such, it’s a game of balancing resources, know when to mash light and when to mash heavy, and when to dodge as well as when to get out of dodge from unblockable attacks that can one-shot you into a game over.
It doesn’t look pretty in screenshots, but it flows so beautifully in motion. The combat flow is fast, fluid, and can get a bit of that Musou feel as you mow down seemingly endless waves of enemy respawns. That is all topped with an amazing soundtrack.
And yeah, the soundtrack. Do you really like the music of Shoji Meguro? Especially the music from Persona 3 and 4? His latest work on Metaphor: ReFantazio has seen a sonic change, but if you wish there was more music that has that acid jazz blended with J-Rock beat to it, go and listen to Raidou Remastered’s music. Listen to the saxophones. Those french horns. The guitar licks. Welcome back to the 2000s, baby. The original game was first released in 2006, just months before the original Persona 3, and just like that game that launch Atlus into global fame, Raidou’s soundtrack sounds just as catchy and evergreen today. Well, it’s supposed to match the upbeat depiction of Taisho era Japan, circa 1931. And in that regard, it fits the setting, but I can’t help but associate this type of beat to 2000s era of JRPGs. In a good way.
A Digestible RPG Exists 19 Years Ago
And yes, the setting is just as fascinating. We rarely this era of Japan depicted in video games, for now at least. It’s such an eye-opener seeing how life was as East meets West, where the traditional Japanese lifestyle is going through globalisation. And it is framed as a detective story. Raidou’s a detective apprentice solving one case after another in each Episode (story chapter). And the way the story is told is very episodic.
Each episode is structured similarly (at least the four episodes I’ve seen through) and follows a story arc of a TV-show, complete with a villain of the week of sorts. All the while, an overarching story, a conspiracy that begins with a schoolgirl getting kidnapped which slowly escalates into a national crisis where the supernatural is involved. This makes Raidou Remastered relatively “snackable,” an episode lasts around 3 hours of playtime and you get a full gameplay loop that includes story exposition, combat challenges, linear investigative exploration and a boss fight that may or may not include an unexpected difficulty spike at the end.
Plus, Raidou Remastered has added so many quality of life changes to suit the sensibilities of the modern gamer. You have quicksaves and autosaves on top of manual saves. Using the demon abilities in field exploration doesn’t require you to actively equip said demon anymore, so long as you have a demon with said ability, the contextual menu just let you press a button to activate said ability.
And for Demon Fusions, you also have the ability to do a Reverse Fusion, where you pick the demon that is possible to be fused from your available stock, rather than having to go through all the combinations to find which is a new one. Neat! And most dialogue is voice acted, and I find the English cast did a fine job bringing the characters to life.
Give Raidou A Try
Really, if you love Shin Megami Tensei games, and the Persona series, you’ll find elements that you come to love from them within Raidou Remastered. It also plays nothing like the rest of the MegaTen games, so don’t do yourself a disservice and sleep on this sleeper hit. It has its rough edges, and it looks like a modern AA game today even with the up-resed graphics. But look past its scope and budget constraints and you’ll find a solid action-RPG in here, at least that’s what I feel after playing 10 hours deep.
Hopefully the entire game can keep up the quality it shown to me here, because the first few hours here leaves a good impression on me that I’m ready to recommend it right now.
Raidou Remastered: The Mystery Of The Soulless Army is available on PS4, PS5, PC (Steam), Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2.