SMT fans will tell you that this one has the best writing of the mainline games, but when I started Apocalypse I had the thought: “oh, there was some writing describing what a character did while they talked, that almost never happened in IV” – immediately followed by the realization that IV failed to clear a bar that all but the most incompetently written books would easily pass. This probably had something to do with why I found IV's story kind of boring; it turns out that writing a visual novel and having it be 99% dialogue makes for rather dry reading.

The gameplay is fairly fun though, if a bit dated in some annoying ways here and there.