Better than SMT1 in every conceivable way. The atmosphere and the explorable world are also very interesting and cool, from the post-apocalyptic cities of Tokyo Millenium, to the underground world and the demon world.

It goes way beyond the scope and ambition of SMT1, especially with the inclusion of real characters and an actual fleshed-out story.

Game has a lot of really cool moments and set-pieces that make it pretty memorable. My only issue with this game is that it's pretty held back by the gameplay.

Not only are magic attacks (and therefore a good chunk of the demon roster) completely worthless, but at a certain point the game gets pretty much trivialized by AoE guns and nerve bullets, so even to the end of the game the combat is not engaging in the slightest; I beat the final boss by buffing first and then just letting auto-battle do its thing, only stopping to heal every other turn.

All in all, it's definitely a great game that any SMT fan should try out but it requires you to look past a bunch of flaws.

Might actually be the greatest racing game of all time. A joyful fusion of JRPG and racing game. The customization aspect is incredible and it makes it so much fun to try and go through the game with all sorts of car types.

Soundtrack is just actually an absolute banger and listening to the music while driving around the towns never gets old.

The story is absolutely batshit insane and I love every second of it. It's absolutely ridiculous and played completely straight which makes it all very enjoyable.

I'm writing this review 27h46m into the game, at the third to last battle event in the game.

If you've played Fire Emblem Three Houses, the general flow of this game is pretty similar: You go through a calendar scheduling classes for your students, improving their stats and making them learn skills; then about every month or so there's an event where you have to go into combat.

Problem with this game is that the combat is absolutely miserable. Battles consist of the player having to choose from one of four suggestions from your students as to what action to take in battle, and you can only take that one action per turn. Later on there's passive skills as well as some other mechanics that allow you to do some extra stuff per turn but you're mostly limited to one action each turn.

But even then sometimes your students will refuse to suggest using their multi-target skills on groups of enemies or your healer simply will not bring up their healing spell despite stubbornly suggesting using it turns before back when you didn't need it.

No matter how far you get into the game and no matter how many skills your students learn, you will always feel just as weak as you did in your very first fight, and your students' attacks will always feel like wet noodles. However, since the game has pretty little combat all things considered, the game feels the need to make it so that every single enemy in the game takes an obscene amount of time to kill.

The game lets each of your seven students have four different skill loadouts, I suppose the intention being that you must build 28 different loadouts for any possible scenario. The issue being that that is such a hassle to do, and the massive skill list inspires such choice paralysis that I found it very difficult to tackle this the way the game apparently wanted me to.

The game has a system where you can start over from the beginning with several bonuses after each restart so that every future run is easier than the last. I figured this meant it was gonna be a somewhat short game that required several runs to achieve the best ending. However the game ended up being decently long and the bad endings really easy to avoid.

The story was also just deeply uninteresting. None of your students are outright awful characters and I didn't really dislike any of them but they're all pretty dull and generic and this made it pretty hard to care about the story, since the majority of it is so focused on them and their problems.

I was so close to beating the game that I figured I could just power through, but the game hits such a huge difficulty spike in the last few months of the game that I just lost all patience for the game. Enemies were now able to decimate my party with very little effort and battles could easily take over thirty minutes each.

As I said, the story wasn't interesting in the slightest so at that point I felt it just wasn't worth wasting any more of my time with this game.

I was pretty intrigued by the admittedly amazing cover and the raising-sim-like mechanics of the classroom, but I would suggest anyone who's curious about this game to just avoid it.

This game is so much better than every other mainline SMT before it. It's a game that perfects SMT 1 & 2's post-apocalyptic setting and also manages to populate it with really cool characters and story.

The previous three SMT games had this huge issue where even if they had cool ideas and settings, or even really engaging and exciting gameplay, they always fell flat on having little to no plot or really shallow characters, but SMT4 excels in every aspect.

On the first hour of the game alone, your three companions already show off so much character and personality that I personally got attached to them almost immediately, and it was such a treat to have them accompany you for the majority of your journey.

Another thing worthy of mention is how for the first time in the series I actually had a hard time picking which alignment I wanted to follow. Not only were both Jonathan and Walter two characters I really liked and cared about, but the things that both routes would have you do were equally troubling and awful in their own ways. I ended up (accidentally) on the Law route after (also accidentally) triggering the "White" ending, and although I thought I was heading towards Chaos, I actually felt pretty satisfied with the conclusion of the Law route. It was a bittersweet ending but I understood there wasn't going to be an ending where nobody got screwed over so I accepted it.

I think if I had to make a complaint about this game is that I wish it did more with the Kingdom of Mikado. I thought the juxtaposition of Mikado's medieval aesthetic and all the modern, technological stuff from Tokyo, the terminals and the gauntlets was really interesting and I wish Mikado got more development.