This game is amazing, what more do you want? It's good, it's free, it's one of the best 2D marios and it's not even made by Nintendo, go play it.

All my gripes with it are products of its time, you can't rebind the strange control scheme (jump on the up arrow is heresy) without pulling out autohotkey, it'd be nice if there was a way to set the default zoom to something that lets you see more of the level instead of having to hold the zoom out key, but when the game is this good despite the limitations of its engine and manpower behind it, who cares.

SMT IV is like a gentle slope leading down into a cliff, it is impressive how this game managed to slowly bleed out my enjoyment over the course of many hours before finally bringing down the hammer and crushing my soul.

The beginning section in Mikado is the best part of the game and I feel like this is a massively unpopular opinion. Despite knowing we'd eventually end up in a post apocalyptic Tokyo I had high hopes that Mikado would get about half as much screen time... that it didn't, and it disappointed me a little, but by far it is not my biggest problem with this game's story. What makes Mikado great is how it sets up the law/neutral/chaos conflict SMT is known for, gets you to know the friends that will more than likely betray you as is series tradition, and introduces the gameplay with some proper bite meant to say this isn't your grandma's monster collection game. By the end of the game most of these aspects will be botched, the only exception being the character dynamics, those survive the end game slump and that's commendable.

The first proper boss-like encounter of the game is the hardest it ever gets, I'd go as far as to say the minotaur boss is overhyped, but still, everything within Naraku is at a nice level of challenge. The game plays more or less like any other mainline SMT post 3, you got your press turns, you got your fusions now with manual skill selection, and you get to distribute stats, though with the notable disappearance of the vit stat. SMT 4's troubles aren't in the Megaten formula, but how it handles it, magic is simply too dominant, the game ends when you whisper megido to Flynn as you'll never struggle with a random battle ever again, and even bosses will fold in often only two turns. This isn't simply an elitist "Megaten is supposed to be hard" take, the game is just boring after a while and it never recovers unless you try your hand at the DLCs. What makes it worse is that one of the three endings, neutral specifically, requires you to do a mountain of mind numbing side quests in order to access the final set of dungeons, this is likely an attempt at making neutral feel like the definitive ending where you do the most stuff, a notion I already dislike because what's the point of choosing an alignment if the "neither" option is definitive, but it comes out as pure needless padding.

As mentioned above, neutral is framed as the definitive choice in a complete antithesis to the series' identity. The story arcs that precede the alignment lock are the closest the game ever gets to surpassing the intro, presenting arguments as to why chaos cannot exist without order and order cannot exist without chaos, it then promptly fumbles it by making chaos the bad choice and order the worse one. The only reasonable choice is the neutral route, and it ends up being too reasonable as the only thing you sacrifice to achieve the best outcome is losing your sanity doing a mountain of side quests.

I wanted to like this game, and I did for a few brief moments, but I cannot truly enjoy it, its flaws are too many. I do not put it in the same high pedestal as most other fans, but I'd much rather replay it than SMT 1 so that's something at least.