I don’t think SMT 3 is a very fun game. I have been playing a lot of relatively difficult dungeon crawlers this year and loving them, but I don’t think SMT 3 is a particularly good one of these. Breaking news: person deep in a subgenre thinks popular one isn’t the best one.

SMT 3 feels like someone forced me to play a board game, refused to explain the rules beforehand, and then is gloating that they have a better strategy than me. I expect these kinds of games to be punishing when you make mistakes, but for that to be a learning experience so you know how to avoid that mistake next time (e.g. high-numbered encounters in Dungeon Encounters instantly killing you teaches you to be wary of high-numbered encounters). SMT doesn’t really do that, instead since your party and their skills are constantly rotating, the lessons are things like “this particular boss has a fire attack and you have one party member that happens to be weak to fire, so replace them for this fight”. That doesn’t deepen my understanding of the game, doesn’t make me rethink how I build my team long-term, and doesn’t make me feel clever for overcoming the boss.

Also, I try really hard not to use this term, but this game is too grindy. Part of the general structure of dungeon crawlers is fighting a ridiculous number of random encounters to gain enough xp to fight the boss, but that usually doesn’t feel tedious to me because part of the challenge is managing your resources so you can explore as much as possible before returning to base. SMT 3 doesn’t have very big maps, barely rewards exploration, and requires a lot of grinding beyond filling out the dungeon map because you get so little XP from each fight. It feels bad when you complete a random battle in a level appropriate dungeon by just auto-attacking and get 150xp when you need 200xp to level up, and you need 2 levels before you can do the demon fusion you want before you fight the boss. I have switched the difficulty to Merciful to help with this, but it changes too much for my taste.

Reviewed on Dec 21, 2021


1 Comment


2 years ago

going to say this in the nicest way possible but no smt game is grindy except for maybe 5 because of how harsh the level scaling is. If you feel like you need to grind you might be getting filte...