RAIDOU Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army

My first hour with RAIDOU Remastered felt less like booting a remaster and more like watching a quietly beloved cult classic finally get the version it always deserved. Set in a fictionalized alternate-history 1930s Tokyo, you step into the shoes of Raidou Kuzunoha XIV, a freshly minted Devil Summoner who moonlights as a detective at the Narumi Detective Agency while secretly protecting the capital from supernatural threats. The inciting case - a young heiress abducted by red-cloaked soldiers who vanish into thin air - pulls you across both the human world and the Dark Realm in a chapter-by-chapter mystery format that keeps the pacing tight. At around 20-25 hours for a focused main-story run, this is one of the rare Atlus titles that doesn't demand a month of your life. The combat overhaul is the headline change and it mostly lands. Battles shift to a fully real-time 3D arena where Raidou dodges, slashes with sword types (Sword, Axe, Spear each changing your heavy-attack feel), fires his pistol, and commands up to two demon companions simultaneously. Light attacks restore the shared MAG pool that fuels your demons' elemental spells, while heavy attacks hit hard but drain resources. Timing a perfect dodge triggers a Devil's Bane counter that refills MAG in a satisfying burst, and building the Spirit Slash gauge for a screen-clearing finisher gives combat a rhythmic push-pull that feels genuinely responsive. The demon roster has grown to over 120 recruitable creatures across multiple Orders - Fury demons for raw physical pressure, Pagan demons for Death and Mind magic, Skill Order demons for buffs and debuffs - and fusing them at the Goumaden while passing down inherited Passive Skills through Sword Alchemy is where the RPG depth lives. Boss encounters that demand you crack a Weakness Shield before unloading your full kit are the system's high points. That said, the combat has a ceiling. Regular encounters flatten out past the midpoint once you've settled on a demon pair and a weapon type. Raidou's own Summoner Skill tree stops delivering surprises after a few upgrades, and the stat caps arrive before the credits do. The detective investigation side of things also got simplified enough that some reviewers noted the puzzle-solving rarely demands real thought - you'll swap in the right demon type to read a mind or scout a restricted area, but the game often signals exactly which one you need. A mahjong mini-game is included and almost entirely unexplained, which will frustrate anyone who didn't already know the rules going in. Human character models, a legacy of the PS2 origins, look noticeably rough against the otherwise strong environmental and demon art. For players coming from Persona who want to go deeper into the Atlus back catalog, this is an ideal next stop. The tone is darker and stranger than Persona - closer in spirit to SMT proper, but with an episodic detective structure that makes it far more approachable than Nocturne. Full voice acting in both English and Japanese is new to this version, five difficulty tiers including a no-game-over Sleuth mode for story-first players and a locked-on-completion Detective Legend mode for the masochists rounds out the accessibility range. You do not need prior knowledge of the Devil Summoner series to follow the story; Raidou XIV's origin is the tutorial.

Alex · Scout Team

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