Raidou Remastered PC Port Preview – Steam Deck Impressions and More

As someone who got into Atlus through Persona 4 Golden on the PS Vita, I was curious to try more of its games back then. I ended up going on a journey discovering Etrian Odyssey, which became my favorite Atlus series, loving Shin Megami Tensei IV, and slowly making my way through whatever was available on 3DS and PS Vita. I missed out on Atlus' PS2 releases until trying out Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga through the PS2 classics releases on PS3. I didn't play Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army at all so the upcoming remaster (more of a remake) meant I could finally rectify that. Having now spent a few hours with a preview build of Raidou Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army's Steam version on Steam Deck and ROG Ally, it is a fascinating release in many ways. 

Before going further into this PC port preview, capturing my own screenshots was not permitted for this build and I've used assets provided by Atlus for this feature. I put time into Raidou Remastered across my Steam Deck OLED, Steam Deck LCD, and ROG Ally to see how the PC port is shaping up over a month prior to launch.

Having never played the original, Raidou Remastered feels unlike anything I've played from Atlus before in a good way. After the opening hour, I watched a playthrough of the PS2 version, and the visual upgrade is staggering, but it still is very much Raidou Kuzunoha vs. the Soulless Army. For more on the game itself, I recommend reading Cullen's preview here. I'm going to focus on my thoughts with the PC port so far. Since this is an early build, keep in mind that things likely will change for the final release.

Raidou Remastered PC controls 

Before discussing the graphics and display options, I wanted to see how friendly Raidou Remastered is with its input options. Not only can you choose button prompts for controllers with many remapping options, but you can also play it with keyboard and mouse controls. The latter lets you click and drag to move as well. It also correctly changes button prompts on the fly if you swap from using a controller to keyboard and mouse controls. 

Raidou Remastered PC graphics options

While this isn't as feature-packed a port as some recent Sega Like a Dragon releases, it is good to see Atlus not deliver another Nocturne HD here. Raidou Remastered is a step above that not only in port quality on PC, but also as a complete release. It is thankfully not capped to 30fps like Nocturne HD was. In fact it even can run above 60fps on PC pretty easily. The game doesn't have an in-game frame limiter, but will run at your monitor's refresh rate when you enable v-sync. When disabling it, the game targets 60fps. 

The graphics settings are a bit bare-bones. You can use a prioritize graphics or performance preset, but these seem to only change the rendering scale, shadows, and anti-aliasing. You can adjust the rendering scale (60, 80, and 100) and toggle both shadows and anti-aliasing on and off. There were no other options in the build I had. It also seems to support downsampling from the get go. 

Raidou Remastered Steam Deck impressions

Since this is a preview build and the game is still a month away, I don't want to definitively talk about performance or Raidou Remastered Steam Deck recommended settings, but even now, it is very promising on Steam Deck. For my testing, I used my Steam Deck OLED and my Steam Deck LCD. I'd go so far as to say Raidou Remastered will be Steam Deck Verified by launch if it hasn't been done already. Everything works as it should on Valve's handheld right now including keyboard input. 

Visually, everything holds up well and it scales down and up better than Nocturne did, but it currently has some performance issues in specific situations on Steam Deck that don't seem to be hardware related given the performance doesn't vary in those situations even when running at a much higher or lower resolution. Whatever I did, the frame rate hovered around 40-45fps in these situations. I imagine this will be ironed out by launch, but it is the only issue I ran into in an otherwise great experience. This also mainly happened in the first area with the game running generally better later on.

Raidou Remastered ROG Ally impressions

On the ROG Ally, I had no issues with the game. When played at 1080p at 100% render scale and both anti-aliasing and shadows own, it was always above 100fps. There was some hitching in specific areas, but nothing major.

Even as an early preview build and in the opening hours, Raidou Remastered impressed me with its story, music, and aesthetic. You could say my expectations were at rock bottom because of Nocturne HD's bare-bones port, but I'm more than pleased with Raidou Remastered on PC so far in almost every way. I can't wait to play the final Steam build and hopefully also check out the game on Switch 2 as well.