This is probably the easiest SMT game one could recommend to anyone who wants to branch out from just the Persona series. That's not to say it's perfect, it just has all the necessary beats that show what an SMT game is supposed to be, but only executes some of them flawlessly.

The main thing it gets extraordinarily right is the combat and presentation: everything is clear and easy to understand and satisfying to pull off in the trademark style of "everything in this world is against you so you have to pull out all the stops." The unique models and animations per demon makes collecting and using them satisfying even if they aren't necessarily useful, and the music does a good job of hyping you up even if it gets repetitive pretty quickly.

Where it really drops the ball is the story, and it drops it pretty hard. None of the path representatives have much character or actually do much of anything in the story and could be boiled down to literally just calling them whatever they're supposed to represent. The only reason I remember any names is because I bothered to fuse them, but it's not like the core concept of the game was interesting to begin with.

All in all, I think this is the first game most newcomers to the series should play just to get a feel for if they like it or not. Personally, I enjoyed my time with it, breaking the difficulty into a thousand pieces, and look forward to the changes and doing the same in the Vengeance version.