I'm not going to lie, I'm not sure if I actually would recommend playing this game. For now, I'm going to say if you are a hardcore RPG fan it's still worth playing through once. Not only to have a better understanding of the roots of a classic series, but it legitimately has some good ideas in here (mostly brought over from SMT games that came before to be honest).
The OST slaps, though some prefer the original. I liked this one a lot though and if I was someone who listened to VGM there are one or two songs I'd be immediately putting into my playlist. Visuals and character designs are fine, though they don't stand out comparatively.
The story is ok. The plot is interesting, but it features a lot of RPG / Anime jank where characters just do things because that's what the game needs you to do to progress. The fact that there are demons invading (and seemingly killing people) doesn't really faze the high school kids you play as, and you'll do a lot of stuff because "it's the right thing to do" or "to help a friend". Character writing and development for most of the cast is pretty mediocre, but there are some interesting moments surrounding the character Maki.
What drags down the experience for me was the really bad progression curve. It seemed like the game wanted you to recruit demons from new areas as you encountered them in order to fuse new personas to help with the new challenge, but my party was usually underleveled which prevents you from recruiting them. On the off chance I was actually able to recruit new demons, the persona's they made were often 5-10 levels higher than what I could use. Combine this with the fact that by abusing elemental weakness you can take on enemies of a higher level (which you should be doing anyways), and what I found was that I rarely used the fusion system for the first half of the game. It wasn't until I was ready to face the (true) final boss that I even thought about what persona's I needed. Even then, because guns are so powerful, I only cared about what my persona's resistances were rather than building a team with varied abilities.
So even though the game has dozens of persona's you could theoretically make, you rarely need to until the late game. Also, a bunch of the really powerful ones you are probably supposed to use to defeat the final boss (the ultimate persona's given to you in the dungeon before the final dungeon for example) would have required me to grind 10+ levels for some characters, which would have taken hours.
The demon fusion system is really deep, but unfortunately you don't really get to engage with it much unless you grind for hours to get your characters levels up to where the game wants them to be.
The OST slaps, though some prefer the original. I liked this one a lot though and if I was someone who listened to VGM there are one or two songs I'd be immediately putting into my playlist. Visuals and character designs are fine, though they don't stand out comparatively.
The story is ok. The plot is interesting, but it features a lot of RPG / Anime jank where characters just do things because that's what the game needs you to do to progress. The fact that there are demons invading (and seemingly killing people) doesn't really faze the high school kids you play as, and you'll do a lot of stuff because "it's the right thing to do" or "to help a friend". Character writing and development for most of the cast is pretty mediocre, but there are some interesting moments surrounding the character Maki.
What drags down the experience for me was the really bad progression curve. It seemed like the game wanted you to recruit demons from new areas as you encountered them in order to fuse new personas to help with the new challenge, but my party was usually underleveled which prevents you from recruiting them. On the off chance I was actually able to recruit new demons, the persona's they made were often 5-10 levels higher than what I could use. Combine this with the fact that by abusing elemental weakness you can take on enemies of a higher level (which you should be doing anyways), and what I found was that I rarely used the fusion system for the first half of the game. It wasn't until I was ready to face the (true) final boss that I even thought about what persona's I needed. Even then, because guns are so powerful, I only cared about what my persona's resistances were rather than building a team with varied abilities.
So even though the game has dozens of persona's you could theoretically make, you rarely need to until the late game. Also, a bunch of the really powerful ones you are probably supposed to use to defeat the final boss (the ultimate persona's given to you in the dungeon before the final dungeon for example) would have required me to grind 10+ levels for some characters, which would have taken hours.
The demon fusion system is really deep, but unfortunately you don't really get to engage with it much unless you grind for hours to get your characters levels up to where the game wants them to be.