Many people say this game is Peak shin megami tensei, and they are not completely wrong about it. But, I have to disagree in some aspects.

Gameplay: Is the regular SMT system with new tweaks like mantra trees and "hunt" skills to help you unlock mantra skills faster, I really appreciate hunt+ap share for farming. The only problem I have with it is how slow the game is, fighting is borderline frustrating in regards to animations and waiting times. Even the cinematics are needlessly slow. In regards to grind and farming: I had to do some mantra farming for some hours but is nothing that difficult a braindead sesion with a podcast in the background can't help with. I never had to farm for levels.

Story: Is okay at best. It's not really unexpected coming from regular shin megami tensei to have a plot about a post-apocalyptic world where everyone tries to kill you. Side characters and motivations are never disclosed as deep as we want, everything feels rushed and restless. We don't even see the main characters interact as a "group" outside some cinematics and dialogues, they just exist. It's like it wasn't trying hard enough, or even trying.

The characters were "interesting" at best, I wanted to know more about Gale and Argilla who were in my main party for almost the hole game, but in the end I couln't really care about them even when I wanted to, they are as hollow and one dimensional as they can be with almost fully voiced dialogues, voices are the only point I consider great besides character design.

Music: Accurate to the story settings, dark and unsettling. there even were sometimes tunes resembling Final Fantasy menu themes.

Last dungeon of the game and ending: I know it's a ps2 game and people should get time and quality for the well spent money, but, the last stretch of the game is innecesarily long. why the fuck should a dungeon be 2+ hours long when all the others were easily 30 minutes. It's not that it had huge amounts of content, absolutely not, is 2+ hours of empty hallways, teleport mazes and frustrating respawn points in game over, hell, some save points are hidden behind teleport mazes and random stairways.

The boss fights towards the end were fine, some were gimmicky (fuck ananta) and enemy encounters were annoying and almost meaningless, I mean, to that point you are probably good enough in level to beat almost anything in 1 or 2 turns.

Final boss was pretty good actually, I enjoyed facing it. But the ending. Omg, I don't know if they had planned a sequel already when the game came out or they cut the game in half because they couldn't finish an actual ending towards the deadline. It made everything feel like a half-baked story, like: ¿WHY? it's unrewarding, hollow and meaningless. Hell you need to play the sequel to feel like you finished 1 single game. It made me feel like I spent 30+ hours aimlessly grinding towards a goal that didn't even exist to begin with, huge dissapointment

The gameplay experiencie you hope to obtain playing a shin megami tensei title is here, many different enemies, many different ways to play and build your characters, many dungeons with bosses and optional encounters inside, etc. But, I feel it lacks SO much in other aspects I can't recommend it to someone else unless is a veteran player willing to try this for themselves.

I don't want to play the sequel, im tired...

4.5/10