... just ... holy fuck. Jesus Christ.

How many good things can you flush down the toilet?

This game has amazing characters, a unique style and premise and an extremely powerful story and plot.
Aaaand it ruins all of that with some of the worst design blunders I have ever seen in my life. It simply beggars belief.

Let's start with the fact that this game has the pacing of a glacier. The beginning up to the first dungeon is particularily bad.
How was this acceptible?

Another one of the worst offenders is actually that some of the best characters in the game (Shinji, Akihiko, Aegis, Junpei) DO NOT HAVE A FUCKING SOCIAL LINK! WHY?!? It makes absolutely no sense and egregiously prevents these great characters from having the same impact and screentime as the characters that do have social links.
Some that do are actually not only just... bad social links, but also bland characters, like Kenji, who is just a complete bufoon and his social link is so cringe I actually had to force myself to finish it.

Oh, and the backtracker-dungeon, the so called Tartarus is a gigantic grindfest that constantly interrupts the storys momentum and your immersion and it TAKES ON FOREVER! WHO MADE THIS?!?!? AND WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA AND SHOULD BE KEPT IN THE GAME?!?

... what else? Oh yeah, you... can't... control your party members directly... like... ever. They are always NPCs and you just have to hope that they make the correct decision.
... just... wow. Like... seriously??? Who programmed this shit?

This is basically what's wrong with this... thing. There is some other stuff you can critizise but it just pales in comparision to the monumental blunders I have just listed. They make this game impossible to enjoy and impossible to appreciate everything it does well.

Don't play it. At least not this version.
Try out the PSP Version or some certain... questionable version (not FES, that's also pretty bad).