RAIDOU Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army - Digital Deluxe Edition

I went into RAIDOU Remastered half-expecting a light coat of paint on a twenty-year-old action RPG that most people never got to play because physical copies were trading at collector prices. What I found was something considerably more ambitious. ATLUS essentially rebuilt the combat from the ground up, grafting in the superior system from the second Raidou game, and the result sits closer in feel to Persona 5 Strikers than to the clunky original. Random encounters are gone. Good riddance. The setting does the heavy lifting on atmosphere. You are Raidou Kuzunoha XIV, an apprentice Devil Summoner working the Narumi Detective Agency in an alternate-history 1930s Tokyo, guided by a talking cat named Gouto, and secretly protecting the capital from supernatural threats under the banner of the shadowy Yatagarasu. Each chapter structures itself as a discrete case, which keeps the pacing tighter than most open-world RPGs and means the story never outstays its welcome chapter by chapter. The film noir aesthetic and Kazuma Kaneko's character illustrations give the whole thing a visual identity that holds up better than the polygon counts might suggest. Combat is the star, though. Battles are real-time and instanced: Raidou fights directly with swords, spears, or axes, weaving light and heavy attacks to drain MAG from enemies and fuel his demons. You run up to two demons alongside you at any moment, with each one attacking automatically while you manually command their skills through a pause-friendly menu. Hitting an elemental weakness stuns enemies and boosts your own damage output, so knowing your demon roster matters. The weapon crafting system, unlocked through side content, acts as a shallow but satisfying skill tree, letting you slot in Combat Skills and passive Sword Skills that can be swapped even mid-fight. Stealth Strikes before battles open with a stun window that rewards attentive play. Boss fights, which require breaking a Weakness Shield before the real damage phase, give the action genuine structure rather than just button-mashing. The demon fusion system is here too, expanded with over fifty demons added to the roster compared to the original release, though negotiation itself stays deliberately light so it does not interrupt combat momentum. Demonic utility extends well past the battlefield, which is where the adventure-game DNA makes the experience feel distinct from anything else in the SMT family. Certain demons can read NPC minds to surface hidden story details, reveal concealed items with an Inspect skill, fly to unreachable areas, or run solo investigations that briefly let you control the demon directly. It is a clever way to make roster-building feel purposeful outside of pure combat optimisation. The detective loop of roaming Taisho Tokyo, talking to citizens, and deploying the right demon to crack a case has a low-key charm that scratches a very specific itch, somewhere between point-and-click adventure and ARPG. What does not scratch that itch are the side quests, which are mostly fine but rarely memorable, and some filler enemy encounters that serve mainly as MAG farms rather than genuine challenges. Visually, managing expectations is honest advice. Running at 60 frames per second with improved resolution and aspect ratio is real progress, and the updated character models and full voice acting make the main cast feel properly alive. But this started as a PS2 game, the human character models in particular carry their age, and the world itself is modest in scope. None of that undermines the experience in practice because the writing and the combat loop do enough work to keep momentum up. If you can stomach some dated geometry in exchange for one of the stranger, more specific supernatural detective stories the genre has produced, the trade is well worth it.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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