RAIDOU Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army Review (Switch 2)

Never let it be said that Atlus is afraid of finding new ways to capitalise on its flagship Shin Megami Tensei franchise—for quite a while now, there have been significantly more spinoff ‘SMT-adjacent’ games than mainline entries. Still, that’s certainly not a bad thing, as the company has clearly come up with a lot of fun and interesting approaches to the tried and true JRPG gameplay, whether through the turn-based SRPG style of Devil Survivor or the action-RPG flavour of Raidou.

The first Raidou game, Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army, came out back in 2006 for the PS2 and was itself a spinoff of the Devil Summoner series for the Sega Saturn. Blending action-focused gameplay with an interesting 1930s-inspired alternate universe setting, it stood out to fans of the broader franchise, even if Raidou’s modest sales also ensured that it never caught on in the same way Persona did.

Now, Atlus is giving this lost classic another shot with a comprehensive remaster treatment for modern platforms, billed as RAIDOU Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army. Though there are some aspects of it showing their age, Atlus has overall done an excellent job of making Raidou shine in the best possible light.

To get one thing out of the way, Raidou Remastered really strains the definition of what a ‘remaster’ can be, in a good way. Atlus wasn’t content to just give this one a cheap resolution bump and a couple quality-of-life updates. Even though it’s clear that this was ultimately built on the bones of a PS2 game, many aspects of Raidou have been thoroughly reevaluated and redesigned to make for an overall more enjoyable and modern feeling game. Some fans of the original may baulk at changes to the combat system or demon fusion, but I think all the tweaks and additions here have sanded down most of those rougher and antiquated design elements that made the original such a product of its time.

For its story, Raidou Remastered places you in the role of Raidou Kuzunoha XIV, a fresh teenage graduate of a mysterious organisation of Devil Summoners who live in the shadows to protect the world from supernatural danger by using their otherworldly connections. Raidou (and his talking cat companion, Gouto) is assigned to Tokyo to study and work at a detective agency while he keeps an eye on things there, and soon finds himself unravelling a broader conspiracy after working a kidnapping case in which a legion of red-uniformed soldiers spirits away a teenage girl.

It's a much darker narrative than you’d find in a Persona game, but not quite as dark as something from mainline SMT, and I really appreciated how downright wacky it gets the farther in you go. And while the overall plot feels a bit simplistic in places—character development is particularly shallow here—I felt myself drawn into its curious setting and quirky atmosphere. The newly added voice acting is a great addition here, too, giving these characters a bit more dimension and making for much more interesting cutscenes.

Unlike its more well-known brethren, SMT and Persona, Raidou isn’t a turn-based RPG that sees you assembling demon parties to help you safely navigate dungeons. Instead, this is more of a detective story in which you spend your time tracking down leads, collecting clues, and honing your theories, interspersed with plenty of fights with hostile demons.

Admittedly, the detective side of the gameplay loop can feel simplistic and fetch quest-y as you mostly just run from point A to point B to progress the plot, occasionally having to find a specific NPC or interact with something in the environment to keep things moving.

And though mechanics like the time management and Social Link systems from Persona would’ve felt out of place in a game with a much darker tone such as this, I couldn’t help but feel there was something missing with this detective work—it certainly feels like the most outdated aspect of the loop.

Things get far more interesting when you find yourself in a combat encounter, and it’s here where Atlus clearly did the most work to rehab the gameplay. Raidou’s headlining gimmick is that it’s SMT with action-packed hack-‘n’-slash combat, but the combat in the original release was pretty rough around the edges due to the fixed camera view and Raidou’s clunky movements. To address this, Atlus redesigned the battle system to borrow several elements from Raidou 2's combat, resulting in something far more satisfying and interesting to play.

Combat encounters (which are no longer random) see Raidou dropped into a small arena with up to two partner demons to help him defeat foes locked in with him. These partner demons will each independently fight and use skills, which draw resources from a MAG (MP) shared pool. MAG is topped up primarily by Raidou, who can combo enemies with light attacks that replenish some MAG and heavy attacks that dish out a lot more damage. Raidou himself can also use cooldown magic skills to exploit elemental weaknesses and keep the team in fighting shape.

Though the Press Turn system doesn’t feature here, exploiting enemy weaknesses is still critically important. Not only will doing so place enemies into a brief stun state, but it’ll open them up to taking extra damage and doling out extra MAG the more you pummel them. Combat thus becomes a delicate and thrilling dance of mixing light and heavy attacks to best optimise your damage output and MAG reserves while strategically stunning and disabling different foes in the field.

I really enjoyed how dynamic this system is, as it somehow manages to stay simple while having a lot of depth that encourages player agency and expression. Swapping out demons to adjust to shifting battle conditions, dodge rolling away from attacks, and constantly switching between your various means of attacks leads to fights that are energetic, smooth, and tense in equal measure. In many ways, this feels like how I'd imagine Atlus’ take on a DMC-style character action game, and I hope that this isn’t the last time we see this combat system in a ‘new’ SMT-adjacent game.

When you’re not in combat, character progression is primarily handled via various forms of the SMT series' famed Demon Fusion. After recruiting new demons from combat encounters and growing their stats and abilities a bit, you can initially fuse any two to make a more powerful one that retains characteristics of its predecessors. Not only does this keep your team feeling fresh as you constantly burn and add new demons to your repertoire, but it gives you a great feeling of progression as each new fusion makes Raidou that much more lethal on the battlefield.

Demon Fusion has also been reworked to make it simpler to search for potential fusions and easier to pass on skills and traits to new demons, sidestepping many of the more frustrating aspects of how this system worked originally. Plus, Atlus has retroactively added a few dozen new demons here from SMT releases that came after, giving you a lot more options as you work to fill out your compendium.

Demon Fusion has always been one of the most satisfying means of team-building in an RPG and I’m happy to report that Atlus hasn’t lost a step with its implementation here—it adds a lot to the replayability and makes the combat system even more interesting as you gain access to more demons to play around with.

As a remaster, Raidou Remastered obviously has some much fancier visuals, but it’s also clear that this was a game initially released on PS2. The pre-rendered backgrounds are gone and have been replaced by much more vibrant 3D environments, but many scenes still stick to a fixed camera angle that can awkwardly change perspective with no warning. The character and demon models have been redone, but there’s also a stiffness to their movements and lifelessness in their eyes that betrays their origins on humbler hardware.

I wouldn’t say that Raidou looks bad; in fact, I would say it looks a decent bit better than the SMT 3 remaster Atlus did a few years ago. That buttery smooth 1080p 60fps gameplay looks great in motion, and the combat sequences especially look excellent. Even so, there’s only so much Atlus could do to jazz up a PS2 game without a complete overhaul on the level of Persona 3 Reload.

(Also, even though I put most of my time into the Switch 2 version, you can still pick this up on the base Switch if you wish. That version runs at an uncapped frame rate that typically hovers around 30fps, while the image quality will drop to the Switch 1 screen's resolution of 720p in handheld mode. Aside from the longer load times, it’s otherwise the exact same game and it feels like a solid port that fits well on the Switch hardware, though the Switch 2 version is obviously the superior pick if you want the best possible experience.)

Regarding its music, Raidou Remastered pulls equally from both Persona and SMT with its mixture of bouncy jazz for most environments and heavy rock for the combat. Overall, there’s quite a lot of depth here and I enjoyed how it manages to simultaneously feel like an OST that’s unmistakably descended from SMT while still managing to carve out its own identity.