To start off, yes i do think this is a good game, a lot of aspects of it are incredible and unique, however a few glaring problems stop this from being as good in my opinion as most other megami tensei games.
To list all the things i personally like about this game i think the route selection adds a lot of replayability, the removal of any world map sections makes the encounters flow a lot faster and some elements (that were later incorporated into devil summoner/soul hackers) like ammo that can run out and party members in the back row not being able to use basic attacks.
But for all the things this game improves, there's an equal amount of ridiculous choices that were somehow made during this game's development.
For one, The guardian system isn't thought out that well, the concept of not having to reload your save after dying was refreshing for an snes smt game, however everytime you do die you lose your current guardian and all your points are taken away.
This would be alright if it wasn't for two huge flaws, those being the fact that it takes hours to get your guardian meter up to an exceptable level, and there are literally only 4 save rooms in the entire main route (including the one at the very beginning), so you barely get a chance to get your guardian meter up and the game expects you to just except your death and lose all of your goddamn points.
Thanks to all these annoyances my opinion on this game's pretty mixed, i know that i like it but i can't decide how much because of every glaring flaw that has no reason to exist.
However, despite everything that i don't enjoy in this game i have to applaud Atlus for writing a character as well as Hazama, by far one of the best characters in all of megaten.
Oh yeah i forgot to mention the world of sloth.
That place sucks