MAJOR SPOILERS throughout this entire review!

I’m finally done with Shin Megami Tensei IV (SMT4). My in-game save displays 81 hours while my 3DS Activity Log says 93. If either is true, then SMT4 is probably the longest SMT I’ve played. I was initially hesitant about SMT4 when it was announced because it showed a medieval setting, a very different style from SMT3, and Shoji Meguro wasn’t involved. They also put it on a portable, which still pisses me off and I won’t rest until the next mainline SMT is on a console. My suspicions turned out to not be nearly as bad as I expected, but by SMT standards I don’t find myself particularly impressed in any way even if I enjoyed myself.

Keep in mind this is going to sound much more negative than I expected, that’s because it’s inevitably reactionary because the game got a ton of praise. SMT4 is a good game and deserves much of it, and I’m just expressing both why I think it misses the heights of why this amazing franchise is so notable and why I don’t think it should be representative of it, or rather an ambassador to either the mainline series of SMTs, or to someone who hasn’t played any before. Most of the following judgements are strong because they’re relative to what I consider to be some of the best games ever made, but remember that those games did come out before this one, so I feel a lot of my disappointment is reasonable.

It’s so hard to know where to start when talking about this huge game, so this will be pretty scattered. I guess I’ll start in the game’s first setting of Mikado. Truthfully, I disliked this part of the game more than I expected even considering my natural disdain for medieval/feudal settings in RPGs these days.

Besides the non-contemporary setting, hardly anything else felt like I was playing a mainline SMT. The tone was almost Persona 4 levels of lighthearted, with your samurai partners falling into the most inflexible stereotypes, and the “Casualry and Luxorer” shit was cringeworthy by the names they chose alone.

The writing for the samurai characters and Mikado at large is embarrassing. It strikes a weird ground between the dialect being delivered casually but the word choice being unflinchingly formal. You get loads of sentences throughout the game that make you wonder how many times the voice actors had to try and read their lines without laughing. I wish I wrote some examples down, but I don’t need to. Walter, a Casualry, delivers two of the most memorable expressions when “fracturing his bottom” and shouting “Hell’s bells!”

The voice acting is nowhere near the best SMT has ever had, but if it wasn’t for issues of tone, I wouldn’t complain. Tone is important though and the extremely hammy voice acting ruins several scenes. Besides the Mikado dialogue sounding even stupider when spoken aloud, once you get to Tokyo, the gruff gangster vernacular nearly everyone uses gets old super fast, and I wished for an option to turn off voice acting most of all whenever I heard a voice actor trying to sound “scared.” It’s so hard to talk about how lame and out of tune the voice acting performances are because I feel like you could pick any scene in the game and find an example. It’s all so irritatingly overacted.

Back to Mikado, they stick you in this area for way too long for how little there is to do. it consists only of menu traveling and talking to NPCs in more menus. this was one of SMT4’s many homages to SMT1 by menu conversation having the NPCs represented by featureless sprite characters instead of 3D models or portraits.

Everything Shin Megami Tensei IV took from SMT1, it did so without considering why they worked for SMT1 and why they wouldn’t work in a modern context. In the case of these sprite models, they were done for two reasons. One was that SMT had a first-person view where an NPC would have to be scaled differently from something like Final Fantasy, and the other reason is that the featureless expressions were a result of a lower resolution where attempts at facial features could look very goofy. SMT1 managed to make this limitation into a style as the best games do. The lack of facial features such as eyes decreased comfort and empathy in a game that strived on a feeling of isolation and emptiness. It was uncannily creepy.

Shin Megami Tensei IV is not palpably creepy at all. The game has little in the way of atmosphere because there’s no cohesive means to that end. Isolation doesn’t exist because there are hordes of people to talk to and populated cities, not to mention you are always traveling with a friendly companion or your devoted computer AI Burroughs.

Getting back on track regarding cohesiveness, we have these sprite models that don’t fit in around the rest of the game and feel like cheapness rather than a stylistic choice, which it barely is because it’s just a homage rather than something meaningful. If Shin Megami Tensei IV truly wanted to be like SMT1 it would’ve realized how to properly use its approach rather than lifting it and hope its qualities automatically apply. Shin Megami Tensei IV uses these sprite models, 3D models when on the field, and hand-drawn, anime-style portraits in specific cutscenes.

These are three very different representations of the same character designs and they don’t work well together, and you often go from seeing all three of these formats together within seconds. It’s extremely jarring, but the worst thing at all is even if they stuck with only one or two of these none of them would be worth doing. They’re not distinctive. SMT1 had a limited dark color palette that aided the eeriness. Nocturne‘s all 3D models had that distinct glow to them. The new character designs for Shin Megami Tensei IV are by no means poor, but they’ve got nothing on the likes of someone like Kazuma Kaneko or most character designers that’ve already worked on the franchise. Even if SMT4 had achieved more cohesiveness, it wouldn’t be very impressionable due to its conflicting art styles.

Another thing Shin Megami Tensei IV copied from SMT1 without thinking about is the implementation of Fiends. Fiends are one of the most popular minor aspects of the SMT franchise. When you think about why the simple reason is that they’re memorably strong bosses with a concurrent character design theme, but that’s not truly it. The Fiends have developed a personal relationship with SMT fans because of the way they were used in games such as Nocturne and Raidou 2.

Just hearing that you’re going to fight a fiend is embedded into every SMT player’s mind as something to be very concerned about, and the two mentioned games use this to their advantage by implementing some of the scariest enemies in the game into their own unique gameplay mechanics. In Nocturne and Raidou 2, the Fiends were a constant but unseen presence that could prey on the player at any defenseless moment and potentially end their game.

They’re practically godlike figures in their passive, condescending nature towards the player and they added fantastic tension to both these games and put a very real sense of fear in them that pushes certain SMTs into being horror RPGs. It’s a genius idea that still hasn’t been taken advantage of perfectly, but Shin Megami Tensei IV renders the idea completely useless by taking SMT1’s obviously archaically obtuse method of finding them only in certain unmarked areas and only with about something like a 1/251 chance to run into them out of the encounters in that area.

There are only two quests to manually encounter fiends, and one is New Game+ only. It’s possible and likely for the player to go the entire game without encountering a single Fiend, and obviously it’s impossible to fear something you don’t even know exists. There’s practically no way for them to put Fiends in an SMT and completely waste them worse than they did here. They did once with SMT1, but that was decades ago.

Once you get to Tokyo things pick up a lot. You have to put up with a lot less cringey dialogue, you get fully explorable 3D environments and a world map, and everything is just more interesting and robust in general. The feeling of reaching Tokyo is great as it really is the game suddenly opening up, but it still takes too long to get past what’s basically a streamlined introduction/tutorial.

The environments look nice, but many are lacking flavor. For a post-apocalyptic environment, a lot of Shin Megami Tensei IV‘s areas look pretty normal outside of the perpetual darkness. When that punk aesthetic actually does show up, though, it’s pretty cool, like the atmosphere of the quest bar and the graffiti on the door. Unfortunately, this is very rare and most of SMT4’s environs don’t look like the product of a chaotic society but rather one that just got lazy. Lights are dim, trash is lying around everywhere, but it’s not like you see some serious violent damage done to anything. Take out the murderous monsters and SMT4’s Tokyo seems like a fairly nice place to live.

One of the biggest problems I have with the game is that there’s a serious lack of actual dungeons. The game seems to think that these huge empty spaces outside of the town shelters count, but it’s just dull ground to cover and areas to stick sidequests in. These outside areas all blend together regardless of city, and the actual dungeons with unique, surrealistic designs are extremely few and mostly very short. I miss when they used to be huge labyrinths to get involved in and test your survival skills, but there’s none of that threat or daunting scale in Shin Megami Tensei IV.

A really stupid thing they added is the ability to look up or down using the D-pad, a simple camera control would’ve been fine but instead they went backwards for whatever reason and made it lock you in place whenever you’re looking. When I was first getting used to my 3DS, I would often accidentally hit up on the D-pad up and become fixed in place where an enemy would attack me. This “look” feature is necessary to find hidden areas to climb into, but is such a feature really worth it?

I can’t say I ever felt like much of an explorer for how little these secret spots are. I’d much rather it be like any other game and let you press A to automatically climb a ladder when near it instead of having to stop and press another button after you’ve positioned yourself properly. It’s so pointless and I don’t comprehend why they even thought of it. This is even more minor but the orange scanning graphics as you travel the field are also unnecessary and obtrusive on any atmosphere or immersion. You should’ve been able to turn this off, seeing orange lines fly around the screen all the time on their own is annoying and ugly.

Even when I got to Tokyo, it still felt like I was being introduced to it by the time I was halfway done with the game. The plot is dolled out in very small snippets, and I bet if you looked at just the important events of the story, there wouldn’t be many. It all develops unsatisfyingly quickly and takes predictable directions both in the plot and development of the main characters.

You’re playing a fish-out-of-water-samurai who’s supposed to be completely confused and curious about what’s going on, but as an SMT fan in real life, I know exactly what the Ashura-kai is going to be like, what the Ring of Gaea is going to be like, how Mikado and Tokyo are going to relate, etc. It’s a pretty typical SMT story that’s lacking in meat. SMT1 and Nocturne also gave very small plot details rarely, but this suited the ambient atmosphere of both those games well and there wasn’t enough info given to immediately assume where it was all headed so the player could relate to their avatar.

SMT4 has a small plot too, but it has a lot more dialogue to meander in with all the NPCs to talk to and quest dialogue. It just has little interesting to say. I never cared about any of the human characters and rarely was I surprised at anything that happened. maybe instead of programming so many quests into the game, many of which are just fetch quests and/or have near useless rewards. They should’ve spent that time on adding more story scenarios with additional plot and character details.

The best part of the game was easily Infernal Tokyo. This is what the Tokyo of SMT4 should’ve been to begin with. it looked much more dangerous and intimidating, and it had a few fresh setting ideas for SMT with so many humans willingly fusing with Demons to become Demonoids, not to mention the whole “Nourisher” thing. It’s a much newer area for SMT than the tired, regular Tokyo.

The difficulty in SMT4, as everyone says, is completely backwards. It starts out challenging if sometimes unreasonably so because Smirk is so broken by default, and as the game goes on it never stops getting easier. Many SMTs get a lot easier towards the very end of the game which is a shame, but it’s rarely decreased this much this quickly.

The best SMTs rely on their difficulty to make dungeons and battles both challenging but fair and endlessly tense. One of the main reasons people attribute to the decrease in difficulty is being able to freely choose inherited Skills. There’s a lot of explanations for the lower difficulty, and inheritance is one of the smallest ones. A difficult game like SMT practically required you to carry over everything you wanted regardless; you just wasted more time doing so before SMT4.

SMT4 is much easier because there’s extremely limited tasking of resource management with an abundance of free, powerful items, there’s an ability to save anywhere you want so there’s no risk while out in the field, and even should you die, the punishment is too minor to really worry about. You also have a huge stock of Demons to possibly carry, encouraging more Fusion and an even more diverse library of Skills.

Enemies hand out boatloads of experience to the point I was level 90 out of 99 by the end of the game and getting fully healed frequently, and there are literal hundreds of easy quests to get more items and experience out of. Healing is cheap, and dungeons are so short that you can frequently find yourself back at a safe spot to heal.

Encounters are also not forced so you can avoid a problem altogether if you simply dodge an enemy on the map. SMT4 simply gives far too many concessions to the player. Risk is drastically decreased while the rewards are more frequent than ever. There’s nothing to fear in SMT4 besides the occasional Smirk, and the powerful, oppressive atmosphere these games are known for can’t survive without its challenging tests proposed to the player.

Speaking of Smirk: fuck Smirk. Smirk is bar none the dumbest, most-concentrated detriment to SMT4. I could go on about how Smirk is contrary to the fundamental balanced design of the great press turn battle system, but I’ll keep it simple. Extra turns are already extremely useful and reward a player for planning out their fusions and taking and avoiding certain risks in battle regarding criticals and resistances.

It’s simple but effective, as it can greatly change the flow of battle when many RPGs have battles become nothing more than mechanical, repetitive processes where you use the same actions in identical orders until the enemy is dead. With Press Turns, luck can healthily intervene and force you to improvise and determine which risks you should take in order to both recover from the enemy and regain control over the battle. Smirk is not like this in that it Smirk is very nearly an instant win button.

There’s no way to protect yourself from it because it’s completely luck-based and you pretty much can’t kill anything that’s Smirked, and though I appreciate them trying to make status causing moves more useful by having them be the only thing to turn off Smirk, they’re not worth it enough in general to keep so you might as well not consider them an option. Save for late game rare moves like Tetra/Makarakarn you’re pretty much fucked when an enemy smirks and you’re completely at the mercy of how smart their AI is.

Smirk also benefits the enemy much more than the player because a multiplier on an enemy that’s already stronger such as a boss will be huge, and although Smirk barely matters for you in random battles because they’re so short anyway it turns an enemy that’d normally be disposable into a killing machine that could wipe out you in an instant even though you’re much stronger. It’s fucking bullshit.

Smirk is uncontrollable and unfair, yet is the biggest contributor to determining who’s going to win the battle. I restarted countless boss fights in the game the moment they got smirk because it’s such a guaranteed loss. All because an attack missed or, God forbid, one of my idiot AI partners attacked the enemy’s resistances. Why should I have to lose because of them?

In other SMTs, I really liked being able to choose your stat increases because I upgraded them based on what I needed at the time and I felt proud when I saw it making a difference. SMT4 is so simple that all I did was a balanced approach that favored agility so I’d never be double attacked and it worked out totally fine. I never felt advantaged or disadvantaged because of my stat distribution, so I felt like I had less agency.

Demon Whisper is all right. No real complaints there, though the simple decrease in MP with additional levels is pretty lame. I had a lot of fun getting Burroughs apps, and it gave me the sense of control back I lost from choosing my level up stats. Choosing between which Apps I wanted could be genuinely difficult, and that was really fun. I never got tired of it.

I also really like what they did with Fusion. The Fusion system in SMT4 is so drastically improved that it makes it look like they were jerking around in every previous game. The ways you can sort specific Demons in search is awesome and would’ve been even more appreciated if SMT4 were more demanding in difficulty, and I love how the game notifies you of Special Fusions and keeps track of them. It’s just about perfect, though I would’ve liked an option to do the old style of Fusing by choosing any two Demons. If you want to do that now, it’s slightly more convoluted.

Despite the game having the highest number of Demons yet with a shitload of them hidden, there’s no fucking Compendium completion %. What the fuck is that? It’s been in so many games for so long and they kept it out of the game that could use it the most. I hated this and it really killed my desire to keep Fusing new Demons. Seriously, what the fuck is this?

The interface of SMT4 in general is very fast and smooth. It feels like a very modern game in that respect, and while some of the improvements weren’t necessarily what’s best for the gameplay like saving anywhere and having a huge stock of Demons, they all at least come from some position of benefit.

Still, there are times where I feel that things aren’t as fast as they should be. leveling up after battle is the most annoying one after you get a huge demon stock because you’ll have demons leveling up after nearly every battle. even holding down X to skip past it all it takes too long, and you’re interrupted at least once per post-battle to tell an idiot Demon not to change Megidolaon to Posumudi.

Sometimes, they have additional shit to wade through when giving you a crappy item. Burroughs also talks WAY too much. I don’t need to be notified if a quest has been updated, if I want that info I’ll look for it, and I certainly don’t need to be notified of how to use the terminal every time and where I landed. Maybe those 10 extra hours not logged by the game were me skipping through redundant Burroughs dialogue boxes. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised.

The new soundtrack is great. It’s not one of my favorites by any means, but it does the franchise justice. Some songs aren’t ones I’ll want to listen to again like Meguro’s can, but they always suit the themes and aesthetics of the game. I especially liked the variety of battle themes for specific locations in the game. The sheer number of songs in the game is tremendous. It’s too bad that the 3DS has such shitty speakers that I can’t remember a bunch.

I’m getting tired of writing this and I feel like I got most of what I wanted to say off my chest. To reiterate, SMT4 is a disappointing game for where it positions itself in the series. Both the story and narrative are lacking in plot and original style. The e battle system isn’t good enough to compensate this time around due to the easy difficulty and forgettable dungeons and challenges. SMT4 is a competent game, but it feels like SMT as a product, possessing the franchise’s token elements and lacking its own artistic vision.

SMT4 is practically SMT junk food, or rather, Chex Mix: it feels like a game composed of parts various games in the franchise have done much better with nothing to specifically recommend it for other than it being modern and simple to get into. But though the less forgiving SMTs are unfriendlier, they’re substantially more rewarding in both aesthetic and gameplay depth and are still what I’d use to convince someone of the franchise’s quality.

Shin Megami Tensei II was a much bigger pain in the ass to play than SMT4 for example, but I know I’ll look back on that game much more often than I will for SMT4. There are excellent individual moments that stand out amongst the slog that I can pick out and remember fondly. SMT4 doesn’t really have any of those for me.

SMT4 was a fun game while it lasted. I don’t regret a moment of it, and most JRPGs wish they could reach at least this standard to be worth playing. I’m even going to do all the other routes and DLC sometime because it’s still such a fun game, but it’s not a game that really added to my life or inspired me in any way like so many other SMTs have done. It’s a fun, well-made game by general standards, but it’s not a game that ever grabbed my heart. I don’t believe it really tried to.