I didn't know what to expect going in, and the game surprised me very positively, the gameplay is very unique and satisfying, the puzzles are fun to solve and the combat has a wide variety of enemies that test the capabilities of each one of your personalities, the bosses are great too, most are easy but very creative and fun, and the story... where do I start? It starts off very confusing but it's not that hard to understand if you pay attention, it doesn't tell you everything right away but it gives you all the information you need to understand, the characters are also very charismatic and you get attached to each one of them, even the most insignificant ones, simply for the authenticity of each one, the cutscenes are also very well directed and the ost is amazing, keeping you always in the edge of your seat in each scene and dialogue that appears, and by the way, the dialogues are very well written, the setting is also very unique and well done, the scenery is abstract and deliberately not very detailed, with desaturated yet present all throughout the scenery colors, forming a very bizarre and comforting aesthetic at the same time, my only issue were some very slow animations and some boring enemies, but overall a great experience, 9.8/10, 5/5 stars.

at the precipice of 80+ hours and 8 playthrus. getting every single ending and defeating every single boss optional or otherwise ending with the phenomenally absurd Lucifer superboss that had me begging for luck gods to shine on me just as the final hit from Naoya struck him down. i stand victorious. and content.

i played an unhealthy amount of this game over the past month and i have nothing but positives on the way it tackles Law, chaos and boring neutral (yuzus ending good tho) but what stands out is the flipping GAMEPLAY. THESE BOSSES. R WORTH EVERY PENNY I SPENT ON THIS PHYSICAL COPY OF THE GAME. AND I SPENT 120$ MINIMUM ON IT TRUST ME SHIPPING IS CRAZY BUT I DONT REGRET A SINGLE DOLLAR CUZ MY GOD.

ill be thinking of that Lucifer battle till the end of my days the stress they induced and sheer thinking i had to do to beat it in the end alone justify the 5 star rating but thats just *1* fight out of like, a million that are all incredibly fun to tackle and utterly demolish using ur giant brains.

i am happy. this game exists. it is a part of me that will never, ever disappear. these characters are my family. Naoya is my brother for life. and the rest of the cast all fit into a giant web of sitcom shenanigans that play thru my head everytime i close my eyes. i cant. speak intellectually towards this gamecuz its just THAT special to me. i love it. in all its pain. all its glory. it is. awesome. yayayyayay.

I love this game, it's great in every way. Overclocked is even better, but this version is special to me because it's how i discovered SMT when i was like 12.

I found out about it in a Club Nintendo magazine, the reviewers compared it to Death Note and TWEWY. At that time i didn't play RPGs (now one of my favorite genres), i found them boring except for Pokemon. I imagined cliche plots about medieval fantasy with magic crystals and prohpecies and shit, i was not into it at all (kinda funny considering Dark Souls has a medieval fantasy setting and it's currently my favorite game of all time).

But Desu 1 taking place in modern times and fighting using demons caught my attention and decided to play it.

I still remeber the first time i booted it up. It was night, i was playing it with headphones and hidden under my sheets. The fucking intro theme and text SCARED me enough to turn it off, i had to start playing it the next day in the morning.

A bit of context:

1) I used to be a MASSIVE pussy, like, i was not able to beat 1-1 in Re4 because i was too scared to progress. I couldn't handle scary shit AT ALL. I would eventually get over it years later by exposing myself to that stuff until it didn't scare me anymore. Now i love horror games and can play them without any issue but the side effect is that nothing scares me wich also kinda sucks :/

2) I grew up in a VERY religious family, one that ate up all the satanic panic garbage up. For example i couldn't play Doom because they tought it would LITERALLY SUMMON DEMONS to our house. And of course i believed it.

So yeah, not only the intro scared me to death, i also felt like i was doing something wrong.

Anyways, i loved it and i sucked really really REALLY bad at it, this was my first non-pokemon RPG, and it's not an easy one regarldless of your experience. Horrible teams, terrible stat spread for the MC, fucked up every event, getting stuck for months in a few bosses, getting the bad ending, getting the not-good ending, etc.

But i couldn't stop playing it because i was having too much fun and i eventually mastered it and beat it like a billion times.

It also shaped my taste in media, it improved my english a little bit (just a bit, what i know is self taught and this game and the AVGN were one of my main learning tools), and Naoya's edgyness was my first step to questioning religion.

It's probably the most important game i played in my life for all the effects it had later, it literally made my life better. It also helped me discover the Persona series, and Kanji's Social Link was ANOTHER thing that had massive influence in my early teens and made me a happier person.

Thank you for everything edgy japanase game with gravity defying boobs.