Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers

About Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers

Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers (1997) is Atlus's cyberpunk Megami Tensei role-playing game for the Saturn, in which a young hacker in a networked city negotiates with demons, recruits and fuses them, and fights alongside them.

Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers in Depth

Players explore dungeons in first person, solving puzzles and fighting demons in turn-based battles. The party always has one or two humans and can summon up to four demons. New demons are recruited by talking to enemies and negotiating, answering their questions, intimidating them or giving them items they want, and several allied demons can be fused into a single new one that inherits their abilities. Allied demons behave according to personality and alignment: friendly ones prefer healing and defence, while sly ones attack on their own, and a demon ordered to do something it dislikes may refuse or do nothing. Demons of clashing alignments may not co-operate. Raising their loyalty with gifts, or by letting them act freely, helps. Summoned demons consume magnetite, earned in battle or traded for, and take damage if it runs out.

The game is set in Amami City, a harbour town where the company Algon Soft has wired every home and business into a network as a demonstration of a "city of tomorrow", along with a virtual world called Paradigm X. The hero, a member of the hacker group the Spookies, gets into Paradigm X's closed beta and runs into supernatural forces, investigating demon attacks across the city with help from Nemissa, a demon possessing his friend Hitomi.

Making Devil Summoner: Soul Hackers

After the success of the first Devil Summoner, development began in 1996 with Okada producing and Kaneko returning as character and demon designer. Kaneko created the world, writer Shogo Isogai the detailed story scenes, and the team experimented with showing different characters' points of view, drawing much of its antagonist Manitou and other elements from Native American folklore. Amami City was invented as a futuristic city on the opposite side of Japan from the first game's setting. Meguro wrote around fifty pieces, with less memory and freedom than he wanted, and found the project exhausting.

Atlus released it for the Saturn on 13 November 1997. It sold 160,850 copies in its first week and 258,679 by 2007, the 27th best-selling Saturn game in Japan. Its popularity led to a 1999 PlayStation port with new events and a Paradigm X casino, which sold 137,458 by the end of that year. The 2012 3DS version added full voice acting; critics liked its challenging battles and demon negotiation but found its dungeons bland. Soul Hackers 2 followed in 2022.