SMT4A: So Very Close To Being A Great Game
This is a game I have a hard time rating, because I'm in 2 minds about it. The plot, while having interesting concepts and has a pretty fresh take on the alignment system so near and dear to Megaten, suffers largely from having Persona-tier writing for most of it as well as a handful of gameplay problems admittedly only relegated to endgame, but they're still there and can still stand a bit of polishing.
Asahi and Toki are pretty much there to only be love interests for the protag (and for the love of God Toki is 14 which is already fucky enough on top of being conditioned to basically be a submissive tool for whoever owns her (which can work in anything that treats the subject matter with any amount of respect AND WHICH THIS GAME SERIES OF ALL THINGS IS THE PERFECT PLACE TO EXPLORE THINGS LIKE THIS)) (and on Asahi she's just generic bubbly anime girl who gets a criminal amount of screentime compared to more interesting characters but otherwise fairly inoffensive), Gaston and Isabeau are just coming along for the ride, Navarre is cool but unfortunately gets few moments to really stand out beyond the "murder your friends" ending (small aside on the voice performance but I legit think Sean Chiplock is perfectly suited for semi-comedic roles like this instead of Wet Paper Towel Protag man) and Hallelujah gets a really cool moment where he stands up to his foster father/mob boss. And that's the really unfortunate thing about this game, it has excellent ideas and the execution is mostly fairly solid, but I didn't care too much about the two main characters you spend the most time with so large parts of the story didn't have much weight to them when they really should have.
And for the protagonist, sticking to a silent protagonist works for a few of the Megaten games, and initially the story was more about exploring opposing ideologies and the horrible atrocities one has to make when following through on them, but in most games and I think in particular this one is where Megaten really needs to drop that formula entirely. At the very start of the game the protagonist gets killed by a sudden demon attack, he goes to Japanese hell, and there he has a schizo edgelord ghost named Dagda who decides to hold the protagonist hostage to his whims in exchange for returning him to life. Dagda wants the protagonist to become his personal Godslayer and to kill Dagda's former comrades with the ultimate goal of killing YHVH. Over the course of the game Dagda is constantly whispering into the protagonists ear about how worthless his bonds between him and his friends are, and this entire subplot would be entirely benefitted by the protagonist being his own person and having legitimate reasons to go in either direction beyond those shown by the plot.
Another major issue I have with this game is the fact that, besides Dagda holding the protagonist hostage, he doesn't give much reason to support his cause beyond a vague notion of "kill god because it's epic and based lol". In addition, it's never elaborated on why Dagda left the Divine Powers to begin with other than he's super edgy edgelord man and they're not. Large parts of the script are solid and very much feels like a proper Megaten game, despite my Persona comparison, but it feels like a first draft in many points and would have definitely benefitted from being in the oven for a rewrite.
For things in the plot I like, I really like Krishna and the Divine Powers. They're basically a dark-neutral alignment with their goal being to create a new universe with a McGuffin dungeon called a Cosmic Egg with the goal of doing so to keep YHVH out of the equation and be free from his influence, and to have non-[REDACTED] gods rule in his place. However he is not above manipulating humans to achieve his own goals so he's still ultimately a snake-tongued usurper who ultimately isn't all that different from Lucifer. I still like him though, because of the spectacular voice performance by his VA, which elevated what would otherwise be a fairly generic SMT villain, and since it's not just one person who's pulling the strings it's a group of demons all with their own motivations to do what they are doing, which is neat.
With the negatives out of the way, there are very legitimate reasons to enjoy the gameplay. This is honestly the tightest gameplay I've ever gotten out of a Megaten game and I've played my fair share of them. The smirk mechanic from SMT4 comes back, but virtually all of its problems have been eliminated and even touched up on to make it work as its own buff and debuff instead of "sometimes its a crit but it can be used up by healing/buffs and doesn't do anything for them for some reason". It works as a powerup for attack spells/skills, offering a damage boost as well as forcing a crit, but it can also serve to power up many skills in the game, including many unique skills on lategame demonns. My favorite smirk buffs are reworking how expel/death spells work and (to a degree) reworking how Salvation works. Instead of just being two types of instakill spells, when they are unsmirked they work as 2 additional damage spells, but when they are smirked they do damage as well as have a chance to instakill. With Salvation, instead of it being Mediarahan + curing all ailments, the ailment cure is the smirk effect now. On paper this idea looks good, but since it's a lategame skill and a number of bosses in lategame, and especially the DLC, love to spam ailments, it can make smirk management even more hectic than it can already get. I think if instead, smirk let you remove debuffs that would be a good enough adjustment to make it worth keeping around, as well as making the smirk effect feel worth it. That being said, just these changes alone makes me wish it will show up in some form in a later game, since it adds a ton of variety to what you can do with certain skills and adds an additional layer of management to combat that unfortunately a lot of Megaten games are missing.
However, with these positives also come some negatives on the gameplay front. MP management is fine in the beginning since there are many options to do so, either through resting at the Hunter's Association or apps that passively restore MP. However, for consumables they only restore a set amount of MP at a time, which works for a good portion of the game, but especially toward the latter half MP costs balloon and the consumables simply don't keep up. In addition to that, every item has a cap for the amount you can carry, and they are often lower than what should be reasonable. When you can only carry 10 Chakra Pots around, which only restore 150 MP at a time, and endgame spells like Mediarahan can cost upwards of 90 MP or more, and they need to be cast fairly often, it can make battles much more stressful than they need to be. And keep in mind, I played this game on War so I'm not just a wussy n00b. All that being said, this game is doable and I managed to beat the entire game with a good amount of effort put in, but the game could use a little more polish in this area to make it a truly stand out title in terms of gameplay.
Now lastly, the final dungeon. The soundtrack for almost the entire game up to this point has been immaculate, and keeps to what Megaten players expect a mainline game to sound while also keeping its own sound and not just turning into Meguro Soundtrack #2930502935 like DDS2 unfortunately did. However, the final dungeon theme was the most boring, droning dungeon theme I think I've ever heard in any game I've played, and made the already abysmal dungeon more awful to the point I just turned the music off about 25% of the way through, which also stinks since it's a remix of the boss theme from SMT2. And for the dungeon itself, I got lost in it several times even using a map to get through it since every single room has the same exact block textures as the previous one, and no easily distinguishable landmarks or environmental changes to tell them apart. When Sector Grus in Strange Journey is easier to navigate, the dungeon design might be a problem.
All in all, there's a number of pretty significant issues bogging down what is otherwise a solid gameplay experience, and easily has the best combat system of any Megaten game I've played to date, even including Nocturne Hardtype. I think if you drown out most of your party members and only listen to Krishna's epic VA (seriously the only other game I know him from is a fucking minor villain in P5 of all things and even then he still was easily the best voice performance for the villains, this guy should show up in way more stuff) and appreciate the good things it has going for it, I think you can have a good time with it.
This is a game I have a hard time rating, because I'm in 2 minds about it. The plot, while having interesting concepts and has a pretty fresh take on the alignment system so near and dear to Megaten, suffers largely from having Persona-tier writing for most of it as well as a handful of gameplay problems admittedly only relegated to endgame, but they're still there and can still stand a bit of polishing.
Asahi and Toki are pretty much there to only be love interests for the protag (and for the love of God Toki is 14 which is already fucky enough on top of being conditioned to basically be a submissive tool for whoever owns her (which can work in anything that treats the subject matter with any amount of respect AND WHICH THIS GAME SERIES OF ALL THINGS IS THE PERFECT PLACE TO EXPLORE THINGS LIKE THIS)) (and on Asahi she's just generic bubbly anime girl who gets a criminal amount of screentime compared to more interesting characters but otherwise fairly inoffensive), Gaston and Isabeau are just coming along for the ride, Navarre is cool but unfortunately gets few moments to really stand out beyond the "murder your friends" ending (small aside on the voice performance but I legit think Sean Chiplock is perfectly suited for semi-comedic roles like this instead of Wet Paper Towel Protag man) and Hallelujah gets a really cool moment where he stands up to his foster father/mob boss. And that's the really unfortunate thing about this game, it has excellent ideas and the execution is mostly fairly solid, but I didn't care too much about the two main characters you spend the most time with so large parts of the story didn't have much weight to them when they really should have.
And for the protagonist, sticking to a silent protagonist works for a few of the Megaten games, and initially the story was more about exploring opposing ideologies and the horrible atrocities one has to make when following through on them, but in most games and I think in particular this one is where Megaten really needs to drop that formula entirely. At the very start of the game the protagonist gets killed by a sudden demon attack, he goes to Japanese hell, and there he has a schizo edgelord ghost named Dagda who decides to hold the protagonist hostage to his whims in exchange for returning him to life. Dagda wants the protagonist to become his personal Godslayer and to kill Dagda's former comrades with the ultimate goal of killing YHVH. Over the course of the game Dagda is constantly whispering into the protagonists ear about how worthless his bonds between him and his friends are, and this entire subplot would be entirely benefitted by the protagonist being his own person and having legitimate reasons to go in either direction beyond those shown by the plot.
Another major issue I have with this game is the fact that, besides Dagda holding the protagonist hostage, he doesn't give much reason to support his cause beyond a vague notion of "kill god because it's epic and based lol". In addition, it's never elaborated on why Dagda left the Divine Powers to begin with other than he's super edgy edgelord man and they're not. Large parts of the script are solid and very much feels like a proper Megaten game, despite my Persona comparison, but it feels like a first draft in many points and would have definitely benefitted from being in the oven for a rewrite.
For things in the plot I like, I really like Krishna and the Divine Powers. They're basically a dark-neutral alignment with their goal being to create a new universe with a McGuffin dungeon called a Cosmic Egg with the goal of doing so to keep YHVH out of the equation and be free from his influence, and to have non-[REDACTED] gods rule in his place. However he is not above manipulating humans to achieve his own goals so he's still ultimately a snake-tongued usurper who ultimately isn't all that different from Lucifer. I still like him though, because of the spectacular voice performance by his VA, which elevated what would otherwise be a fairly generic SMT villain, and since it's not just one person who's pulling the strings it's a group of demons all with their own motivations to do what they are doing, which is neat.
With the negatives out of the way, there are very legitimate reasons to enjoy the gameplay. This is honestly the tightest gameplay I've ever gotten out of a Megaten game and I've played my fair share of them. The smirk mechanic from SMT4 comes back, but virtually all of its problems have been eliminated and even touched up on to make it work as its own buff and debuff instead of "sometimes its a crit but it can be used up by healing/buffs and doesn't do anything for them for some reason". It works as a powerup for attack spells/skills, offering a damage boost as well as forcing a crit, but it can also serve to power up many skills in the game, including many unique skills on lategame demonns. My favorite smirk buffs are reworking how expel/death spells work and (to a degree) reworking how Salvation works. Instead of just being two types of instakill spells, when they are unsmirked they work as 2 additional damage spells, but when they are smirked they do damage as well as have a chance to instakill. With Salvation, instead of it being Mediarahan + curing all ailments, the ailment cure is the smirk effect now. On paper this idea looks good, but since it's a lategame skill and a number of bosses in lategame, and especially the DLC, love to spam ailments, it can make smirk management even more hectic than it can already get. I think if instead, smirk let you remove debuffs that would be a good enough adjustment to make it worth keeping around, as well as making the smirk effect feel worth it. That being said, just these changes alone makes me wish it will show up in some form in a later game, since it adds a ton of variety to what you can do with certain skills and adds an additional layer of management to combat that unfortunately a lot of Megaten games are missing.
However, with these positives also come some negatives on the gameplay front. MP management is fine in the beginning since there are many options to do so, either through resting at the Hunter's Association or apps that passively restore MP. However, for consumables they only restore a set amount of MP at a time, which works for a good portion of the game, but especially toward the latter half MP costs balloon and the consumables simply don't keep up. In addition to that, every item has a cap for the amount you can carry, and they are often lower than what should be reasonable. When you can only carry 10 Chakra Pots around, which only restore 150 MP at a time, and endgame spells like Mediarahan can cost upwards of 90 MP or more, and they need to be cast fairly often, it can make battles much more stressful than they need to be. And keep in mind, I played this game on War so I'm not just a wussy n00b. All that being said, this game is doable and I managed to beat the entire game with a good amount of effort put in, but the game could use a little more polish in this area to make it a truly stand out title in terms of gameplay.
Now lastly, the final dungeon. The soundtrack for almost the entire game up to this point has been immaculate, and keeps to what Megaten players expect a mainline game to sound while also keeping its own sound and not just turning into Meguro Soundtrack #2930502935 like DDS2 unfortunately did. However, the final dungeon theme was the most boring, droning dungeon theme I think I've ever heard in any game I've played, and made the already abysmal dungeon more awful to the point I just turned the music off about 25% of the way through, which also stinks since it's a remix of the boss theme from SMT2. And for the dungeon itself, I got lost in it several times even using a map to get through it since every single room has the same exact block textures as the previous one, and no easily distinguishable landmarks or environmental changes to tell them apart. When Sector Grus in Strange Journey is easier to navigate, the dungeon design might be a problem.
All in all, there's a number of pretty significant issues bogging down what is otherwise a solid gameplay experience, and easily has the best combat system of any Megaten game I've played to date, even including Nocturne Hardtype. I think if you drown out most of your party members and only listen to Krishna's epic VA (seriously the only other game I know him from is a fucking minor villain in P5 of all things and even then he still was easily the best voice performance for the villains, this guy should show up in way more stuff) and appreciate the good things it has going for it, I think you can have a good time with it.