In theory this game should be way better than the first game, way more important and well realized story and characters, a meaningful progression through the game, more demons, faster gameplay and more strategy than just banging your head against enemies, but jesus christ this game is difficult, like, REALLY difficult, you have 4-5 main characters compared to the only 2 of the first game, which in theory also would be cooler, it's like you're controlling a whole squad of demon summoners/hunters, in practice most of them aren't very useful and if ANY of them die is game over, so you have to micro manage and play pretty much perfectly with ALL of them or else you'll be seeing the game over screen over and over again, its INCREDABLY frustrating, also the EXP gain is complete horse shit, it's almost impossible to keep the LV of all characters about the same. Tie this with the fact that you can't safely grind in any part of the game, it becomes a impossible race of trying to catchup LV's with all your characters.
The game is really long and tiresome, i had very little fun or enjoyment playing this, it's a kinda bad smt game that feels like a chore. Some of the demon designs are cool tho, also the OST is nice most of the time.