Finished neutral, lvl.87, 52 hours.
Cool game bro, but yeah story starts strong and has neat stuff midgame but kind of forgets it's a story-based rpg for the last 1/3rd. Gameplay is good though once you hit the 80s with all the best attacks there's nothing much left to do gameplay-wise. Like there's hardly any new demons to fuse and no one has any new interesting skills. Both final bosses were beat with the same strategy of only my MC attacking (with his 300 magic and 200 agility) so 800-1400 damage per attack while the other 3 do luster candy/debilitate/heal.
Still a lot of fun stuff.
Pros:
+Great battle system
+Excellent soundtrack, lots of tracks, lots of good stuff.
+Pretty good art design
+Nice world map, lots to explore, good amount of cities
+Story was pretty interesting for a long while but gets weak in the end
+Tons of demons
+Good graphics for 3DS and budget
+Fast pacing, but still great length
Middle:
+/- lots of sidequests which some are fun to do an add content, but they also drag the pacing of the overall story and game down, especially for neutral route
+art is all over the fucking place. But a lot of its solid. Only hated a few designs like Medusa and Lucifer is gross.
Cons:
-Too easy for a mainline SMT. On normal outside of the first 8 hours, probably easier than Strange Journey and thus easier than Nocturne or most of the megaten spinoffs. Not much sense of dread.
-Don't like how a lot of areas didn't have distinct music and there were just a bunch of dungeon/city themes that cycled, took away from the memorable character of the places
-Story is a lot like Strange Journey where it starts of intriguing but then becomes GOOD/BAD standard by the end. Also kind of not-epic by the end, maybe least "epic" scale SMT yet
-Why doesn't the demon book have a % complete wtf
-No really big dungeons. The smaller dungeons are like 20 mins long and the bigger ones are like 40 mins long. It feels like MGS Peace Walker where everything was made "bite-sized" for 3DS. I miss big long dungeons that you have to worry about endurance to make it through.
Still great game. One of the best rpgs in a while. A bit better than Strange Journey, though I still think Nocturne is a much better adventure. This plays better for sure though with all the updated systems and fast pacing (I'm sure Nocturne feels dated these days).
Will be interesting to see how Soul Hackers compares when I get around to playing it in a few months. Need an SMT break. Took me like 4 months of playing a couple hours a week to get through IV.
The best part of the game (at least the most SMT part) imo was the:
spoiler (click to show/hide)
tower to rescue the 3 trapped angels. Was very creepy and very mythos. You were rescuing 3 weird as fuck looking dudes but you had no idea who they were, only they couldn't die and so they were being held in cages by demons. The whole tower bit and then their restoration as angels was great. Wish the game was more mythos like that.
