In 2006 ATLUS released Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army, the game was an action based spin off of their already existing Devil Summoners sub-series of video games in the greater Megami Tensei franchise. In 2025 ATLUS released RAIDOU Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army, remastering the original graphics and adding many many features such as improved combat from later entries in the series, fast travel, voice acting and more! Raidou is primarily broken down into two gameplay styles, Navigation and Combat. Navigation its self can be broken down further into two more sections, Overworld and Darkworld. The overworld sections of the game largely take place in populated areas where you walk around, speak to NPCs, preform simple quests, visit shops and occasionally use Demons to solve puzzles. Darkworld sections take already existing areas and twists them into demon infested dungeons, these dungeons are rather simple as all things go, navigating areas that are already familiar with the occasional straightforward puzzle, with only one or two outliers that will take more than a second to solve, it leaves a bit to be desired in my opinion. As for the combat, I feel that unfortunately that the game falters here pretty heavily, the combat is an attempt to bring over the celebrated press turn system from mainline Shin Megami Tensei into an action game context. This isn't quite successful, the combat feels, spiritually muso-esqe, as in your inputs are very simple, a strong and weak attack which can chained together, where this fails and muso games succeeds is that in those games combat is fast and enemies die quickly, where as in Raidou your combos feel rather slow, with heavy attacks feeling down right sluggish (but do do almost 4x damage) and the enemies take an eternity to die, which can either feel incredibly boring when the enemies pose no threat or downright unfair when enemies or bosses have the have the ability to kill you in two hits from full health. Continuing from that point, many of the bosses in Raidou are straight up not fun in the slightest, I'd say more often than not I would be very very frustrated with every boss fight with few exceptions. The problem was largely the same in each fight as well, the first problem was the sheer amount of damage each boss was able to put out, most bosses were able to kill me in 1-2 hits, sometimes being guaranteed due to some of their attacks having additional stuns that could last up to 20 seconds, following that, attack tells or telegraphing is very minimal or doesn't give you enough time to react especially if you're locked in a combo. Occasionally bosses will have mechanics, you'll see lines where devastating lasers will or puddles on the ground where fire will rain from this sky, this is good, I like this as an idea, unfortunately there are only about 4 or so mechanics in the whole game that get reused very often with no variation so it doesn't really feel special anymore after the 3rd time. When it comes to your own combat options, you have a few to choose from, in addition to Raidous basic and heavy attacks you have summoner skills, more powerful or utilities that have a cooldown of various times, usually around 20-30 seconds. Passive sword skills which can increase the defense of guard, make recruiting demons easier and much more, both of these are great features, and do allow for more building opportunities to create a unique Raidou, which I think has always been a strength of the megaten games. But largely I feel like these don't amount to much more than "I need this element to hit a weakness". Raidou does have a few other elements in his kit, a new gun attack that allows you to do ranged damage, Devil's Bane, a counter-attack that triggers on a perfect dodge and Spirit Slash, a big attack that hits all enemies, most of these new additions are negligible at best, at most being a nice little bonus and worst being forgotten, with the odd one out being Spirit Slash which is incredibly useful, especially during sloggy boss fights. The other half of combat comes from your demons, in classic megaten fashion you can recruit most enemies to fight on your side, in combat you can have two demons deployed out at once, they act of their own accord attacking and casting spell at their digression, you can give them specific commands but thats in menus so I never used it, I doubt the game was designed with pausing every few seconds to issues commands in mind. I'm honestly don't really care for this system, it feels mostly like a set and forget system, as long as my demons have the right abilities I'll just leave them to their own devices, and they'll hit weaknesses eventually. Which feels very un-megaten to me, megaten has always felt strategic to me in my brain, planning out all your moves so you can maximize your turn economy, obviously this can't be a 1:1 thing because of the genre change, but I wish it felt better. Lastly the combat system MAG Drain, I think this system could be fine, but as it is now, I think it needs more time, how this system works is that you have a resource called MAG, which is spent when your demons or you use magic or certain abilities, you can recover MAG by preforming weak attacks, but at the rate that your MAG goes down there's almost no reason to do anything but weak attacks because if you run out and your demons can't heal you anymore you'll die rather fast. Overall I do think the system might have something there, but either cost or regen could do with a rebalance so I have some wiggle room to work with. The story is where I think that Raidou really shines and is what kept me invested, it starts as a low stakes supernatural detective story, which almost immediately starts building up with insane twists and turns, where the game starts and ends are so far from each other that you'd swear you were playing a different game. Thats the beauty of the writing of Raidou, If you went from the beginning to the end with no journey in the center you'd accuse the game of jumping the shark, but the journey between points A and B slowly raise your acceptance levels of odd happenings until you're at the end of the game and incredible things are happening. I really love the characters and world around Raidou, theres so many NPCs to talk to with so much dialogue which can be expanded by using demon abilities, and even more as the story goes on. One of my personal favorite things is how the demons feel much more characterized than in other entries, some are friendly and will chat and hangout with you, I really hope to see things of this nature in future games. But if there's on spot Raidou falters, its in the writing and choices around the newly added side quests, instead of following a traditional quest giver system, the game forgoes it entirely and just puts every quest you have access to into your log, this can lead to confusing instances where you're exploring around the cities and accidentally completing a quest and getting surprised by a quest complete screen. I think this could be addressed by instead of auto accepting the quest you would have to talk to an NPC first, you could still have them listed in the journal but involving the player more would bring a bit more engagement I think, as for the quests themselves most of them aren't anything to write home about, very very uninteresting fodder, though some do give you some neat insight into demon and human life and a few that are very neat and fully voice acted, but those are few are far between. The visuals in Raidou Remastered are very solid for the most part, Raidou already had a very striking art style, as did many megaten games, so they already had a very solid base to work with, if there was anything to complain about its that many of the filler NPCs that you can't interact with still hold their PS2 polygoness, while that does have its own charm it is worth mentioning. A final thing (and the thing that bugs me the most) When you enter a battle or complete a side quest, you get a little PNG of Raidou on the screen and it just looks so bad, maybe from the animation of it or just the still image, there's something about it that feels very cheap. But if I need to nit-pick something like that, it must be doing pretty well. ATLUS games and especially megaten games have been known for decades at this point for their incredibly good soundtracks, and this is no different, Raidous soundtrack is brassy and full of good times, and worth the listen. Raidou Remastered is a rocky game, but I do believe that its worth the time if you enjoy stories that a go a little nutty, but maybe consider dropping the difficultly because its not fun to engage with and not worth the headache.