My first ever SMT was SJ:Redux and having a similar fusion system felt nice in the early game, but it's kinda frustrating when you need to get specific moves. Also, the heritage system is kinda wack and basically prioritizes conversation abilities and low levels skills over everything else, so yeah, you'll spend a lot of time rerolling.
This is not that important considering demons learn like 4-5 abilities leveling up so it's mostly preferred to fuse demons that already have good skills (like for example Amaterasu as a support demon, which learns tetrakarn, prayer and debilitate). The easy accesibility to Mitamas kinda fix this too, but yeah, the fusion system could be better in my opinion.
The level of difficulty is fine, I love that most bosses in the game don't have weaknesses so you can't exploit the turn system, but felt kinda dissapointed with the final boss (went for the true demon ending) considering how challenging and unique are the bosses from the last area.
The rest of the stuff is pretty good. The music is pretty cool (if you listen to it decompressed), the dungeons are fun, but are frustrating sometimes (specially the ones with random teleports) and the story and characters are good overall (still blows my mind they managed to put Dante in it). It's kinda cool that there isn't a clear law/neutral/chaos ending and the fact that the true ending is like a ultra chaos one, so points to that.
There's some other stuff that could be rebalanced in some way (Matador having a x4 sukukaja move when you barely have access to debuffs, the fact that magic damage decreases with level making magic builds a joke with very few exceptions, a certain boss with phys repel and 90% allmighty resistance which isn't the final boss for some reason, the first wind magatama giving you tornado, you can only use Freikugel/Masakados against 2 or 3 bosses because you literally get the last magatama near the end of the final dungeon, etc), but overall nothing is too crazy or broken except the damage the MC does.
In short, a real SMT experience which could be better but holds pretty well for being a 2003 game.
This is not that important considering demons learn like 4-5 abilities leveling up so it's mostly preferred to fuse demons that already have good skills (like for example Amaterasu as a support demon, which learns tetrakarn, prayer and debilitate). The easy accesibility to Mitamas kinda fix this too, but yeah, the fusion system could be better in my opinion.
The level of difficulty is fine, I love that most bosses in the game don't have weaknesses so you can't exploit the turn system, but felt kinda dissapointed with the final boss (went for the true demon ending) considering how challenging and unique are the bosses from the last area.
The rest of the stuff is pretty good. The music is pretty cool (if you listen to it decompressed), the dungeons are fun, but are frustrating sometimes (specially the ones with random teleports) and the story and characters are good overall (still blows my mind they managed to put Dante in it). It's kinda cool that there isn't a clear law/neutral/chaos ending and the fact that the true ending is like a ultra chaos one, so points to that.
There's some other stuff that could be rebalanced in some way (Matador having a x4 sukukaja move when you barely have access to debuffs, the fact that magic damage decreases with level making magic builds a joke with very few exceptions, a certain boss with phys repel and 90% allmighty resistance which isn't the final boss for some reason, the first wind magatama giving you tornado, you can only use Freikugel/Masakados against 2 or 3 bosses because you literally get the last magatama near the end of the final dungeon, etc), but overall nothing is too crazy or broken except the damage the MC does.
In short, a real SMT experience which could be better but holds pretty well for being a 2003 game.