By far the best customization for demons and their moves. Most of the difficulty in previous games came from how limited the move sets can be without tons of grinding certain demons. The essence system removes that entirely.
"Story" is a generous term, but the lore they came up with for the nature of the apocalypse, Gods, and devils was very clever. I enjoyed it more than most.
Absolutely hated the dungeons though. Terrible design, terrible atmosphere, all which can be blamed on the Switch hardware.