A 30 to 40 hour JRPG is almost unheard of at this point. And it’s breathtaking. Sure, there’s little room for walls of explanation and expository dialogue. There’s no hidden lore fragments to collect. The character side quests are straightforward to resolve and clearly telegraphed. Soul Hackers 2 tells a good anime story about rivals to friends, AI learning about humanity, and dealing with trauma, and wraps it up in some of the best dungeon crawling Atlus has put together in over a decade. It’s condensed and digestible, perfect for a modern gamer who has way too many things in her backlog. Look, I’m not unsympathetic to the brutal coarseness that got us here. I dearly love mean-spirited, immensely flawed dungeon crawlers. They are satisfying in ways current AAA games can’t touch. But we’re never going to get that from Atlus again. These were games that were marked by their insufficiency, and really only now, looking back, heralded for it. Phantasy Star 2 is only Phantasy Star 2 because its creators were still figuring out what the genre even was. Gaming, like Amami City, moves ever forward, growing over top of its history, for worse and for better.