There are so many elements that are executed to near perfection in this game. The plot, atmosphere, music, dungeon design, and combat here are all top tier. The sense of progression through unlocking apps on the Demonica is super satisfying. SJ contains some of the most interesting characters in the entire franchise. The journey through the Schwarzwelt is fantastic, engaging, and unnerving nearly every step of the way.
Strange Journey isn't just a dungeon crawler or a JRPG. It is also existential and horrific. Unlike other games in the SMT franchise, SJ is pre-apocalyptic rather than post-apocalyptic, and it is up to the player to decide on a course of action to either halt or accelerate the incoming doom to humanity. In my opinion, no other SMT game expresses the weight of such a decision as well as SJ.
Most of the gameplay involves navigating a number of dungeons. They can include surprising amount of complexity, my favorite being swapping out entire chunks of the region from a different dimension. Graphically, the areas don't necessarily look that interesting, and without the map, different parts of the same sector would be indistinguishable, but luckily you'll be looking at the map on the bottom screen more often than the first-person perspective on the top screen.
The combat isn't quite as strategic as the Press Turn system found in many other SMT games, but the Demon Co-Op system present here is still very fun and gives you a reason to be more selective of your party members, as demons that align with your protagonist make for a significantly stronger party.
Character development in SJ is among the best of JRPGs here. In a relatively short script, some NPCs slowly evolve from simple fellow crew members to ideologues of various alignments, and all of them are either fascinating or easy to sympathize with.
The main drawback here compared to other SMT games is how limiting the fusion can feel. In standard fusion, you can customize abilities with demon sources, but those are difficult to come by more than once for each demon, so fully customizing a demon with the abilities you would like is very cumbersome without using a password calculator.
Speaking of passwords, I wouldn't recommend using the password system for the most part. You can input a password to automatically summon a demon into your roster, but there are two problems with this. Most obviously, being able to summon nearly any demon can break the balance of the game and allow the player to entirely circumvent the problem-solving element of boss fights. Secondly, it costs a lot of in game currency to summon demons this way, which is already fairly tight if you aren't farming for it, so using this system regularly would require more grinding than the game needs. Passwords may be a good system for players that would prefer to farm their way out of a challenge instead of dealing with the puzzle of fusion, though.
New to Redux is the Womb of Grief, a monstrous mostly-optional dungeon with a new plotline. It's fun and the plot with new character Alex is interesting, but not as solid as the base game. Also new in this version is a simplified character portrait art style. I don't personally mind the updated portraits as much as it seems others do. It's a little more "anime" looking than the original SJ, but it doesn't compromise the unsettling tone of the game for me. To me, the most important new features in Redux are the additional apps available to the player. They provide a ton of quality of life upgrades that make dungeon crawling more forgiving, while not necessarily easier.
All of that said, this game won't be for everybody. It is very trial-and-error heavy in its dungeon design. I enjoyed learning the layout of every floor of each sector, and solving each teleporting puzzle was very satisfying to me, but if a player is more into story and combat than exploration and puzzles, they might find the maps tedious. Outside of the demons and combat, this doesn't have as much in common with SMT 3, 4, or 5 as one might expect. Mostly, I would recommend this to fans of other JRPG dungeon crawlers, like SMT 1-2 and the Etrian Odyssey series. If you like the more modern SMT games and are open to old-school exploration, or are a fan of classic blobbers and wouldn't mind a modern/sci-fi twist, then you should definitely give it a shot.
Strange Journey isn't just a dungeon crawler or a JRPG. It is also existential and horrific. Unlike other games in the SMT franchise, SJ is pre-apocalyptic rather than post-apocalyptic, and it is up to the player to decide on a course of action to either halt or accelerate the incoming doom to humanity. In my opinion, no other SMT game expresses the weight of such a decision as well as SJ.
Most of the gameplay involves navigating a number of dungeons. They can include surprising amount of complexity, my favorite being swapping out entire chunks of the region from a different dimension. Graphically, the areas don't necessarily look that interesting, and without the map, different parts of the same sector would be indistinguishable, but luckily you'll be looking at the map on the bottom screen more often than the first-person perspective on the top screen.
The combat isn't quite as strategic as the Press Turn system found in many other SMT games, but the Demon Co-Op system present here is still very fun and gives you a reason to be more selective of your party members, as demons that align with your protagonist make for a significantly stronger party.
Character development in SJ is among the best of JRPGs here. In a relatively short script, some NPCs slowly evolve from simple fellow crew members to ideologues of various alignments, and all of them are either fascinating or easy to sympathize with.
The main drawback here compared to other SMT games is how limiting the fusion can feel. In standard fusion, you can customize abilities with demon sources, but those are difficult to come by more than once for each demon, so fully customizing a demon with the abilities you would like is very cumbersome without using a password calculator.
Speaking of passwords, I wouldn't recommend using the password system for the most part. You can input a password to automatically summon a demon into your roster, but there are two problems with this. Most obviously, being able to summon nearly any demon can break the balance of the game and allow the player to entirely circumvent the problem-solving element of boss fights. Secondly, it costs a lot of in game currency to summon demons this way, which is already fairly tight if you aren't farming for it, so using this system regularly would require more grinding than the game needs. Passwords may be a good system for players that would prefer to farm their way out of a challenge instead of dealing with the puzzle of fusion, though.
New to Redux is the Womb of Grief, a monstrous mostly-optional dungeon with a new plotline. It's fun and the plot with new character Alex is interesting, but not as solid as the base game. Also new in this version is a simplified character portrait art style. I don't personally mind the updated portraits as much as it seems others do. It's a little more "anime" looking than the original SJ, but it doesn't compromise the unsettling tone of the game for me. To me, the most important new features in Redux are the additional apps available to the player. They provide a ton of quality of life upgrades that make dungeon crawling more forgiving, while not necessarily easier.
All of that said, this game won't be for everybody. It is very trial-and-error heavy in its dungeon design. I enjoyed learning the layout of every floor of each sector, and solving each teleporting puzzle was very satisfying to me, but if a player is more into story and combat than exploration and puzzles, they might find the maps tedious. Outside of the demons and combat, this doesn't have as much in common with SMT 3, 4, or 5 as one might expect. Mostly, I would recommend this to fans of other JRPG dungeon crawlers, like SMT 1-2 and the Etrian Odyssey series. If you like the more modern SMT games and are open to old-school exploration, or are a fan of classic blobbers and wouldn't mind a modern/sci-fi twist, then you should definitely give it a shot.