Mostly painful to play. I think a lot of players here might be assuming the negatives are not the game's fault but rather their own since they can't read Japanese, but being able to read and consulting an absolutely excellent Japanese guide, I was able to tell that this game was overall pretty poorly made and SMT hipsters are either lying to themselves or just trying to look unique by liking this "obscure game" (it sold incredibly well in Japan)

The most glaring issue is the Loyalty system, which Soul Hackers refined a lot and made usable. In this game, the Loyalty system makes half of all demons just unusable by default (every Level difference demon will disobey constantly until you're at a level so much higher that their stats aren't viable anymore), on top of the fact that magic demons are near useless, further limiting viability. Then you have the command-based demons who you have to train very slowly up to max loyalty by giving them commands that they randomly choose to agree with. They're alright to deal with if they don't have recarmdra. Well the developers were considerate and went ahead and gave a bunch of those types recarmdra so they can constantly kill themselves for no reason. It's funny until this happens every fight. Then you have the item-based demons, which require resources to build up but at least aren't a pain in the ass. The Zouma race would be a great solution to all of this until you realize you will only ever be able to make Jeanne d'Arc at most, all the other demons are obsolete cause they're too high level and you've already beaten the game at that point.

To the western audience who still might not be getting this: the Loyalty system is so bad that most Japanese players just handled most of the game with Kyouji and Reihou. I'm seeing a lot of people playing like this and assuming it's a language barrier thing. Nope. It's the game. I actually made an effort to get some demons to help but for the most part, they were absolutely not worth it. I would really just recommend a few certain demons such as Cu Chulainn, who's incredible and lasts even until end game thanks to Deathbound (if a demon has a great physical skill, they're good, if they don't, they are trash or maybe some gimmick you'll use for one boss fight)

All of this is not mentioning just how utterly slow this game is. The PSP version's music is awful, but you should absolutely go for it instead of the Saturn version. Music doesn't mean shit if you have to listen to the same shit for hours just cause every animation takes years.

So overall, this is a pretty jank experience that's pretty unfun for the most part. It's just Soul Hackers if the gameplay was about 10 times less fun and intuitively built. If you wanna play it for the curiosity, play the PSP version.