"Do you still feel Human?"

Well blow me with a pitchfork, Arthur, you tell me! Because I don't think I've seen the endgame section of a game such as this eat shit as hard as Strange Journey. Even with the context that I decided to go after every single ending, using the Goblin trick to save me... what, at least 180ish hours? I still feel like I've gone through the gameplay equivalent of that one Star Trek 'This is revolting, more please' meme. Thank you, Mem Aleph and Shekinah! I hope you both rot in hell!

OK, positives for a bit:

- The character writing was fairly strong for the most part. Zelenin might have just become my favourite female character in all of mainline (?) SMT, with her plight of feeling directionless within the Schwarzwelt having just the right amount of emphasis to be relatable without coming across as overbearing. New Law is even my favourite ending from this game for the simple reason that, after Alex shoves the two fatal flaws of her future back in her face, she becomes a receptive example predicated on the being grateful to the angels like Mastema (who I will concede that temper tantrum he had was out of character when Zelenin attempted to explain the situation to him in the last dungeon), but also realising what a slippery slope the song was. The fact that she's Russian has also aged in about 10 different directions (whichever revision of Christ Putin sees as a means to an end makes certain details of both her endings somewhat humorous to think back on), but that's what makes her endearing (as well as being an acknowledgement of solutions to problems that I'm grateful to see). Jimenez is equally as compelling for the opposite, alignment-coded reason, with New Chaos ending staying true to his beliefs by cutting Mem Aleph (the strongest being in the Schwarzwelt) down, after acknowledging that Bugaboo is the reason he's even lasted this long (even if he and Alex are kinda talking past each other, because 'strength' wouldn't even be a factor if Bugaboo hadn't given him that amp). And as far as 'redux exclusive' characters, Alex... I'll concede she's not the most dynamic, but she was at least compelling - especially knowing a friend of mine that constantly likes talking about temporal concepts, it'd probably give him about 5 different things to chew on.

- The gameplay, for the most part (with the exception of what happens with the Mem Aleph fight and onwards - more on that later) has it's own rhythm to it, what with the emphasis on Alignments and that bolstering your damage. Simple enough to not need a 10-page explanation, but effective all the same.

Stuff that aren't really flaws but also aren't positives either:

- The OST and it's 'marching band' vibes are... a bit of an acquired taste, if I'm going to be honest. I think there were a couple of tracks I'm a fan of, but I don't picture that sticking for the foreseeable future.

- The way fusion was handled in this game was a bit odd, even if D-Sources make things at least workable. I mostly point fingers at the fact that initial fusion has devolved back to certain skills being automatically passed down UNTIL you apply a D-Source (if you choose to do so at all, which up to the route split, you have to be a bit stingy about applying lest you deprive yourself of alignment appropriate resources for 2 of the 3 routes), in which case all of the skills, inherent, auto-picked, and source skills are all added to a pool that you can hand pick from... which IMO is a bit silly. I think the comparison I'll make here is Essences from SMT V (which despite my ire aimed at that game, the Essence system from that game was handled fine, it was just hooked up to a combat engine that didn't really let you feel it's effects all that well) - because D-sources kinda feel like a Supermarket-brand version of that, but it's hooked up to an objectively better combat system. Not bad, but I'm kinda wondering what the devs thought process was, especially 1-2 years after IV Apocalypse and other games, where a fully manual inheritance system was in full swing.

Actual flaws now:

- The alignments themselves are... not that compelling. And if you're expecting me to preach to the Choir about how 'redux ruined the OG' or whatever... you'd be mistaken, because looking at every card on the table, I don't really think the nuance was ever there to begin with (Old Law has you lobotomise all of humanity, and Old Chaos is what IV's Infernal Tokyo was taking the piss out of). The Neutral endings seem like a dead wringer for this problem in the sense that they technically shouldn't even exist on a count of there being an earlier plot point, where the UN Joint Project tried to literally nuke the Schwarzwelt from the outside - with nuclear warheads LITERALLY being specified as used, and has the joint problem of A) even if you'd succeeded, you would have just doomed mankind in the fallout (another allegory that is going to age backwards any time now...), hence B), both Neutral endings have you amp a spare nuke stored on one of the ships with the power of the Cosmic Eggs in order to say 'take 2' and evac the Schwarzwelt 'for good'. Then again, it is the UN - props for admitting that Globalists have no real world experience, I guess (even if you were just going to turn around and call them heroes for no reason). What happens with Ubergestalt (...however you spell that word) Gore is also a Deus-ex-Machina of EPIC proportions, and beyond his initial rhetoric sounding worryingly similar to the "mothers" of the Schwarzwelt, it should be obvious why I say this.

That brings me onto my second point about the Neutral endings, and that is the fact that in New Neutral (and to a lesser extent both neutral(s)), the pessimism of 'humanity sucks, and that's why the Schwarzwelt returned and fucked all of humanity within a week' has something of an Oppenheimer problem (or AoT S4H3/C139, if that's your frame of reference) in that it's not only a 'warning' that doesn't understand that a cautionary tale should never condescend an audience (a mistake that a lot of these 'contempt porn' stories tend to make), but like such, it doesn't offer a solution in the same vain as New Law or... anything, really. It's just MC being stuck on the moon until humanity decides to shag itself again. My friend feels your pain, really he does, but you don't have to rub it in!

- Endgame-based gameplay woes: Why is the Mem Aleph battle (and to a lesser extent the 'old ending' Alex fights) not just a massive difficulty spike, but also fundamentally antithetical to SJ's entire design philosophy? These are the fights that made me equip the 'March to Death' passive, and after beating MA on Normal only once with it on, I just thought 'sod this, I'll drop every other run from Normal to Easy - I have better things I could be doing'. I find myself reminded of Kevin Winnicott from Saga III quite a lot (for those who have seen the script for my scrapped Xenosaga retrospective will be made quite aware of my strong opinion on his same narrative altercation and fight), where just from the teambuilder alone, you're basically checkmated without an exorbitant amount of grinding.

As an aside, all of the above honestly makes the game a sort of Bizzaro SMT IV in a way (see my review on that for more info), in that, while that game got off to a slow start, had moments of narrative enjoyment, and then really hit it's stride in the back 45-50% of the game, SJ/SJR sets up for it's endgame quite strongly, and then you get to the 'destroyed' Elevator that would have took you straight to Mem Aleph, and that's when the game is unfortunately caught with it's pants down... speaking of which:

- As a corollary to the above, a lot of the puzzle design, while already overly cryptic for what it's set out to do (see the amount of times you basically have to sidestep to face walls to get anywhere), REALLY starts to eat it after the alignment lock. Horologium gives me 'ascent to Nirvana' vibes, and if you know anything about my stance on DDS1, that is the absolute last thing from a complement. Meanwhile, trying to figure out the last 'new ending' dungeon on my first go around nearly gave me a blinding bloody headache (whilst being speedrun-worthy on my next two attempts). To adapt yet another quote from Blizzic into something more applicable to this here medium of gaming 'your audience likes to be challenged, but it does not like to be fucked with'. And sad to say, SJ falls a bit too hard into the latter category for my liking.

Anyway, I've said enough for now. Tl;dr:

+ Fun gameplay in the moment.
+ Very good character writing.
? Serviceable enough story, with concerning implications.
? OK-ish OST
? Questionable fusion mechanics.
- Unclear and cryptic dungeon design.
- Unfair endgame decisions.