Shin Megami Tensei IV was a great entry into the series for me. Although I played some of SMT V, I gave up on it early on, but I decided to give the series another chance with SMT IV, and I am thankful that I did. This game is great in all aspects. I've fallen in love with the battle system, the story, the characters, the demons, everything, and it has made me go on a binge through every SMT game.

I like how the story revolves around a Chaos and a Law route (there also being a Neutral route) with one character that is a symbol of each route. I will say that if Neutral wasn't such a pain to get (without a guide), I would've went with that, but I decided to go with Walter and Chaos, and I actually liked that route. Although a bit cliche, I enjoyed the story a lot, I liked the contrast of the above-ground Kingdom of Mikado, and then the underground city of Tokyo, separated by the bane of my existence, Naraku. The conflict between the Ashura-kai and the Ring of Gaea was interesting. I will say that I was somewhat confused during both the Blasted and Infernal Tokyo segments, but they were enjoyable enough. The final boss being against either Merkabah or Lucifer was also enjoyable, even if it made me stay up until 2:30am because of how many game overs I was getting.

I enjoyed the main cast of characters for this game, with Walter and Isabeau being the highlights. Jonathan I have no opinions on because I just didn't agree with his path alignment, and Navarre can suck it. Characters like Skins and Fujiwara are confusing because they just appear out of nowhere and I just don't care about them. It was fairly obvious how the game was going to handle Issachard after he failed to become a Samurai, so no surprises there. Hikaru was interesting because I did not think she was going to turn out to be Lucifer out of all things, and thought she was just another random character. Also, Burroughs is so annoying after a really intense conversation she's like 'You've completed this mission.'

As for the gameplay, I like how this series uses the Press Turn system to encourage striking weakness, while also encouraging the use of buffs like Sukukaja to make enemies lose their press turns. I need to talk about why this game doesn't have a 5 star rating, and that is because of Naraku. I think I almost wanted to ragequit in Naraku and that made me turn the difficulty down to the lowest difficulty (I turned it back up later). The amount of gameovers I had in Naraku was unbelievable and I wanted to cry because of it. Other then that, I enjoyed how the game made me utilise buffs more than I have ever had to in Persona. I also found it enjoyable fusing a bunch of different demons in the Cathedral of Shadows. A very rewarding system which was one of the reasons why I fell in love with the series.

While I enjoyed getting to walk around Tokyo on a map, it was so annoying not knowing where to go sometimes. Coupled by the fact that I decided to stop doing sidequests because of how pissed off the random encounters on the world map was making me, and I never got the levitating function so the world map remained an annoyance for me. I did do most of the quests and they were quite enjoyable, involving different demons, and some were unique, such as running away from Seth in Naraku.

I have so much love for this game, and coming off from Persona 3 Reload was no easy feet, but it did deliver a great game that I thoroughly enjoyed.

EDIT: What on earth did the devs do Lucifers sprite? Also, now I know what getting SMT’ed is now, pain.