I really wanted to like this game when i first played it, i'd heard so many great things about SMT 4 but when the credits finally rolled across the screen and i reflected on the game i had played, i just felt disappointed.
To get some positive stuff out first, yes the music is amazing, some of the best stuff i've ever heard in or out of a video game, the atmosphere around the entire journey is definitely unique and some humorous moments throughout the story worked really well despite the aforementioned atmosphere.
Unfortunately that's where my praises end, so i'll just go out and say that i don't like the gameplay, the encounters aren't random but are somehow more random than random encounters,(if that makes any sense at all) enemy groups will spawn into you, spawn half a second after a battle ends and before you can regain your senses, spawn in huge circles around you without a second's warning and sometimes even when you hit them directly and start the battle yourself, it can still count as an ambush.
The in-battle gameplay is far superior though, it maintains the style of battle Nocturne had with press turns and 4 party members in total, however many unnecessary things were changed such as a new feature called "smirking", which triggers after you hit an enemies weakness/get a critical and lasts for one turn.
While a party member or enemy is smirking their next attack is a guaranteed critical and their evasion is increased by a large amount, this system is okay at best and rather annoying at worst, i don't think it's particularly bad or good but i don't think it was really all that necessary.
My major problems with the combat stem from the negotiation, in most megaten games there's only one option to negotiate and if you do it successfully you'll get an option to ask for the demon to join you, for some macca, for some magnetite (in games that use it) or for them to leave you alone.
SMT 4 however has several options for negotitation, some of which you have to unlock, with the main "scout" option being standard negotiation and others being used for other things, (IE: getting macca and telling the demons to piss off) though the amount of macca you do get tends to be very little, even when using the negotiation app designed specifically for getting macca.
You could just win battles to get macca but even then you get less than a barely passable amount from many encounters, and the prices for items and equipment are the standard amount even though you're always carrying around spare change and not much else.

I've said my piece about the gameplay so now i'll describe my misgivings with the story.
looking at the story as a whole it's pretty good, even for megami tensei standards this is a decently paced an definitely passable story, that is until you reach the final parts of the game where everything becomes bland and predictable.
Everything leading up to that point is stellar but that gets thrown out the window when the last portion zaps away all the uniqueness most alignment routes have by making them all boring and predictable.
I'll try not to spoil anything but the barebones structure of law/chaos/neutral endings is used to it's full here without adding any creative additions, and don't get me started on the alignment choices, barely any of them actually try and test your values with most of them being "do you want to be nice man or rude man?" and the sheer lack of neutral choices makes it so the neutral ending is impossible to achieve while actually trying to be neutral.
And don't get me started on the content in the neutral route, they gave up on making it longer than the other routes so they just forced you to do about 16 or so menial side quests to add artificial length, plus there's no uniqe final boss for it as a reward for dealing with all that nonsense(and yes i know smt 1 did that and i love that game but the difference is that smt 1 was released in 1992).
Then on the topic of the law/chaos endings, these suck too but for different reasons, unlike most other games in the series your character doesn't make a conscious decision take on their alignment but you're forced into it via weird circumstances like having the characters for your alignment just sitting there after the alignment lock with no explanation why it's exactly them that's there.
Now for the alignment characters, they all feel like their main personality trait is just being their alignment and not many other elements are given to them, you can predict the way they'll react to literally any situation and you can predict how they're gonna end up at the end of the game, which isn't even shown to you unless you do their alignment route(Isabeau is the exception here).
If you don't do their route however, you're given a few hours worth of gameplay after last seeing them(many more for the neutral side quests) and bam, they're genocidal maniacs.
Of course if you do their route this is given full explanation but anything else and it feels like they've just disappeared from the story without explanation.

I hope that outlines a few problems i have with this game and why i do think it is a little overrated, though i do understand why people like it.
also hoy

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