Of all the subseries in the greater Megami Tensei franchise, Raidou Kuzunoha is one that I’ve had a particular curiosity about. Growing up, my sister was a huge fan of both Devil Summoner games and would regularly pester everyone she knew to give them a try. Naturally I did what any older sibling would do: I ignored her requests completely. Now with the original Devil Summoner returning to modern platforms with a shiny new remaster, I can finally tell my sister the words she’s been waiting to hear for more than half our lives: It’s fine.

Raidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army stars Raidou Kuzunoha XIV, the latest in a long line of Devil Summoners in the Kuzunoha clan. By day Raidou serves as a member of the Narumi Detective Agency, odd jobs and mysteries for the people of Tokyo. By night, he wields the power of demons to silently protect the capital from supernatural threats as a member of the shadowy Yatagarasu. Eventually the worlds he operates in intersect as the heiress of the prestigious Daidouji family is kidnapped by mysterious red soldiers who vanish into thin air. Believing the soldiers to be demons from the supernatural Dark World, Raidou takes on the case to find the Daidouji girl and discover the nature of the army who took her.

Gameplay sees the player roaming Tokyo to search for clues and unravel mysteries in the hopes of solving the Daidouji case. Raidou’s biggest tool as a detective comes in the form of demons that he’s captured and can summon to take advantage of their skills. Demons have a variety of abilities such as spying on oblivious humans, reading the minds of uncooperative witnesses, and inciting the emotions of a target that you want to be a bit more talkative. This is an area of the game where Raidou Remastered introduces a substantial quality-of-life improvement over the original PS2 release. Where the player previously had to manually summon different demons in order to trial-and-error which abilities would be helpful in a given situation, a context-sensitive menu will now pop up to automatically swap out your demon and use the ability you’ll need for any given situation.

While I certainly think the tedious demon swapping of the original game needed a rework, the solution offered by the remaster feels like it goes a little far. It rarely feels like you’re actually doing any detective work in Raidou Remastered, so it can feel sometimes that you’re just doing busy work between cutscenes until it’s time to start fighting demons. My sister would tell me about how in the original game she had to familiarize herself with her demon’s abilities and think through which ones would be useful at any given time. By contrast I never committed any of my demon’s abilities to memory, and progression through the story tended to be pretty mindless unless I was outright missing the ability I needed.

You’ll often find that the next step to solve the case is hidden in the Dark World, which is where you’ll need to get your hands dirty by fighting demons yourself. Unlike the majority of games in the Megami Tensei franchise, Raidou Remastered’s combat occurs in real time with action elements. Your demon companions will bring spells to exploit the elemental weaknesses that Megami Tensei games are known for, but Raidou himself serves an important role of dishing out damage and generating magic power to fuel your demon’s spells. Light attacks do very little damage but restore your magic power in exchange, while heavy attacks forgo magic generation entirely to hit enemy demons hard. While you can probably get by relying on your demons and mashing light attacks through the whole game, you’ll find success more easily by carefully juggling between light and heavy attacks to optimize your DPS while keeping your magic power high.

For existing Raidou fans, the remaster has overhauled combat to be a more refined version of the sequel game, Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon. Since I never played the original PS2 game I don’t know all the nuances of what’s changed, but while my sister was watching me play she said it felt like she was watching me play a hypothetical Raidou 3 rather than a port of the original game. Two major additions I know are brand new are the ability to have a second demon ally on the field, and Raidou gaining his own elemental attacks to strike enemy weaknesses without needing to rely on his demons as much. These changes are certainly convenient, but it doesn’t always feel like the game is balanced around their presence. Since I could have two demons on my side I would always have one healer that never left the field, and that gave me the freedom to let my other demon hit enemy weaknesses without having to worry about my own health.

We only received the Switch 1 version of Raidou Remastered, and overall it is a pretty solid version of the game. The Switch 1 version targets 60fps, and while it doesn’t always manage to hit that target during combat it tends to get pretty close. I only noticed slowdown during the flashiest attacks that put a lot of visual effects on screen, and the framerate would always pick back up pretty quickly. As with most Switch 1 games, Raidou Remastered receives a substantial performance boost on Switch 2, so if you own a Switch 2 and for some reason you’re still purchasing the Switch 1 version (which offers no discount for upgrading to the next-generation version), then you’ll be getting a perfect 60fps the entire time.

Raidou Kuzunoha carves out a fun niche in the Megami Tensei franchise by choosing to focus on real time action instead of turn-based combat, but I think the remastered version might have been too overzealous in the very necessary changes it made. Overworld exploration and combat have both had their edges sanded down to the point that they’re a little too frictionless, and I think some of the magic has been lost as a result. It’s a detective game where I never felt like a detective, and an action game where the action felt simple on all but the hardest difficulties. It’s certainly a fun game, the period piece vibes are immaculate, and I hope it’s successful enough to lead to a remaster of the sequel that my sister tells me was even better (or maybe even a third entry in the series), but unfortunately I wasn’t quite as wowed by the remaster as I was hoping after twenty years of putting the game off.