It's another helping of the Shin Megami Tensei fast food we've all come to know and love. Assuming no catastrophic assembly line failure, you always know exactly what you're getting with this franchise; the product is satisfying and reliable. Unfortunately, it's been twenty years since I first emulated SMT1, and given this tendency toward the static, neither the mechanics nor the pet themes hold much interest for me any longer. Hard mode is more artificially difficult than ever, with nothing new to offer veterans except the easily-gamed Magatsuhi critical threat, and until you break the game with Luster Candy/Debilitate you're basically at the mercy of the rigged RNG. I do appreciate the return to relatively austere storytelling, and the concept of an overcrowded pantheon causing Law/Chaos strife is interesting, but at the thematic level this is mostly the same story Atlus has been telling for the six previous games. I'll chalk all this up to "it's not you, it's me" for now, but it's hard to ignore that Megaten is running on fumes at this point, and if Persona 6 is set in a high school again then I'm tapping out for good.

Doesn't help that the game is ugly as sin. You spend 75% of the game wandering through bombed-out, bloom-lit shitholes that are entirely interchangeable save for their color schemes. Dancing Crazy Murder is so good that I almost forgive it though.