Not as good as the first game. Improves in some ways, but they were trying too hard to make this game more challenging when the original was already challenging enough. The dungeons are way too big with nothing in them, and they throw harder layouts at you way earlier. They also PUNISH you for knowing how the game works by forcing you to increase your main character's magic stat, something which many may not realize they have to do until it's way too late and you have to grind. This goes for the first game too, but play this with a guide, for your own good.

I haven't touched Akira's route yet at the time of writing, so my feelings may change with time, but man this game is good. It's by no means perfect (we'll get to that), and I do wish it hadn't completely done away with the post-apocalyptic setting of the previous two games, but if what you're after is just straight dungeon crawling without any filler*, then this is the game for you. There are tons of quality of life changes made from SMT2 that make the game a lot better to play, the soundtrack just takes all the compositions that worked and adds to them, and in general this feels like the devs taking what they learnt and building upon it.

All that being said, this game has one absolutely MASSIVE flaw, which is the Domain of Sloth. This dungeon is one of the absolute worst pieces of game design I've ever seen, and almost singlehandedly killed my motivation for the game. When I give this game 4 stars, I am choosing to mostly overlook this dungeon, because it's so bad that I don't even feel like it's fair to count it, especially when the rest of the game is as good as it is. If you haven't played the game before you might be thinking "oh it can't possibly be that bad", but trust me it is. The Domain of Sloth forces you to grind, but not just in the sense of needing to level up more to overcome a tough difficulty spike, no this dungeon literally locks progression behind walking back and forth for several hours. In any game this would be bad enough on its own, but one of the core mechanics of this game is that there are multiple distinct routes with unique content, and 3/4 of them visit the Domain of Sloth. So this dungeon isn't just badly designed, it goes against the design of the rest of the game.

Overall though, this game really is quite good. The Domain of Sloth may kill it for some, but I do feel like beyond that there's still a great game to be had.

I wish I could rate this game more highly. I played this via the Zero/ZX Legacy Collection, and I used the save-assist option, call me a pleb if you like but I thought the game offered plenty of challenge even with the save-assists turned on. For the most part this game is really tightly designed, but the first of the two biggest complaints I have with it is the fact that boss cutscenes play every single time you attempt them, and if you're someone like me who needs to practice a boss several times to get past it, then trust me when I say this gets annoying fast, especially in the final boss. The second complaint is the cyber elves. I get what they were going for here, by giving players an option to make the game easier while requiring you not to use that crutch if you want to get a higher score, but so much of the game's mechanics revolves around them that everything besides health pickups loses all meaning if you aren't using them. What I think would've been a much better option would be to leave the elves that restore health or provide temporary buffs as-is, and make the ones that increase your health and provide other permanent upgrades not reduce your score or need you to murder in-universe sentient creatures, y'know just have the upgrades hidden in the levels like in the X games. If you still wanted to encourage players to try not using them, then you could just lock hard mode or Jackson behind it. Overall this game is good, but I feel like it could be better.