After mostly playing older SMT games as my only first person dungeon crawlers, this game awakened my third eye to the possibilities of first person dungeon crawlers and how good they can be. The FOE mechanic is fantastic, and adds an element of Pacman to first person dungeon crawling that makes exploration so much more fun and rewarding and gives you multiple options on how to deal with them. The dungeon design even outside of FOEs is very good at time. Not all the floors are interesting, but when they are good, they are incredibly interesting and fun, and mapping it out all on your own gives you a feeling of adventure and accomplishment few RPGs achieve.

The grimoire system is pretty annoying though, not the process of getting them (on normal I was never in enough of a pinch to grind for them), but the UI for the synthesis is so cumbersome and annoying, I dreaded having to create new, stronger grimoires. With some better UI this mechanic could have been a lot better.

I played Storymode and the story is serviceable. But what I heard from Classic mode / the original sounds a lot better, so ignore story mode for until you finished the original.