1st review! (Im also the one who added this game in the first place). I'm not going to bother avoiding spoilers for the game since its mostly just the original game's story which I assume you'd already know. I will spoil some stuff thats new to this fangame though which I highlight so you could potentially avoid. Anyway, even being a fangame, its quality rivals that of the official game's and is pretty faithful to it too. Not to mention, they fixed probably the biggest issue with the game: the difficulty.

Like, the game's actually challenging now. No more spamming gun and pressing auto to win. Now bullets are expendable, weaknesses and resistances matter, buffs are key to winning fights, intelligence affects magic defense so you need to level that up, etc. Theres pretty good quality of life changes as well, like the magician shop that lets you give demons skills, summoning and returning demons doesnt take up a turn so you can quickly reorganize your team, and theres an item that lets you save anywhere (they also only cost 10 bucks each so its on you if you dont stock up on them). All of this comes together to turn smt1 into a fun and challenging dungeon crawler... though its not executed perfectly.

The general reception ive seen to this game is that while it makes smt1 hard now, it makes it too hard, which i can see certainly see. Some of it i think is just theyre not used to the gameplay, but to be fair to them, the difficulty can get pretty bullshit, specifically the bosses. They rely on instakills far far too much, making it luck if you even survive them without a tetraja/pentagram/magic reflect shield, their hp feels far too high, and most of all their attacks are far too powerful.

I would say this only becomes a huge problem endgame, but you have to cheese bosses with -karn spells to win. You wont even feel cheap for it since you literally wouldnt be able to survive without them, what with the bosses being able to act up to 4 times in a turn and using almighty attacks (especially the alignment based ones) that hit like trucks. I don't think its good design when the enemy has a chance to one shot some of your team, even your partner, because theyre just that strong. However, long as you move before the boss and have a good variety of items (its crazy that this game has an itemized version of luster candy that only costs 1500) you can find a way to beat them, albiet with some difficulty.

Another pet peeve of mine is only demons who are summoned can be healed/revived. I personally got softlocked by this on my overlord playthrough since most of my demons were dead after a boss and I didnt have enough money to both summon them and pay for their revival. The original game made it so that demons can be healed regardless of if theyre summoned or in your COMP, and I really see no reason for why this was changed.

Regarding the added story to the new routes, theyre mostly pretty neat. They all explore and flesh out the world even further and make the routes actually feel different to play, which official smt is pretty bad at. Yuriko's route for example is you get to fight demon lords in the demon world, while you get to go to heaven in Yumiko's route, and you can just go insane and fight every boss in the game on the Overlord route. Even after you escape the demon world/heaven on the new heroine routes, they remain a presence in the story and you feel connected to the sides like never before.

I did find myself being disappointed with one aspect of them though... the heroines are pretty lame. Well not Yuriko, shes great, hell i suspect the dev had a bias towards her because of how fleshed out her route was. Yumiko (law heroine) and the original Heroine do suck though. Ironically heroine only gets a personality if you don't choose her route, that being literally just the original game, which no one is choosing unless they're aiming for the friendship ending. Shame because the developer could've taken the opportunity to flesh her out and make her an actual neutral rep like she is in the new routes.

In some ways Yumiko might be even more disappointing since while she does have a bit more personality compared to Heroine, its not that much. Shes only really here to have a distinct law heroine to contrast Heroine and Yuriko since no law heroine existed in the original. Her definining character moment is when (Spoilers) Tokyo is flooded and she becomes disillusioned with the messian cause, and then proclaiming she doesnt believe in them anyway and instead will follow you... you who are following the messians... so nothing has changed. (End of spoilers) I get its hard to write for completely new characters compared to existing ones but c'mon, this sucks. Yumiko's route doesnt even get an extra final boss like yuriko, overlord, and friendship route get. Law getting the short end of the stick even in a fan-game... sad!

Some of my megaten friends have called this the definitive version of smt1, and while im inclined to agree, I'd still say play the original before this. Despite how impressive the quality is, at the end of the day its still a fangame, which is a very different experience than the intended one. Most people also find it really hard, so having the first game beat would get you a little accostomed to the base gameplay. I'd also reccomend making an alternate save at Shinjuku and then picking what route you want, and if you find it too hard, choose Yuriko's route (if you didn't already choose her at the park) since from my experience and research, its the most balanced and fun comparatively.

If you're having a ton of trouble against bosses, someone made a hp balance patch that makes the bosses less bulky, so try that out and see if it works (for me it made my game crash, but im not sure if its because it wasnt compatible with my already existing save files of the defualt game or if it was because i was playing on my phone through the joiplay app, so test it out on a fresh new game or on a computer). Here's the link for that: https://www.reddit.com/r/Megaten/comments/17gptr6/shin_megami_tensei_vx_yumiko_route_and_general/k9aj4zf/

Hope you enjoy it as much as I did! :)

(Pro tip: get the dolphin helm. It nulls ailments which enemies love to use and unlocks after you beat roppongi).