Overall if you're looking for a quality JRPG released in 2024, this is a really good choice, though not perfect.

The bad: The story can be hit or miss, and a lot of the conversations can be a little hamfisted, particularly in the earlier part of the game. Certain design choices can be frustrating and almost baffling. If you don't learn how to prepare for dungeons you will be crushed. The game has unbelievably long text segments, to the point that they included a skip option which you would think alleviates this, but in practice is kind of worthless. It only fast-forwards you to the next -of what is usually several- multiple choice questions, which often feel like padding more than anything. Even once you finish one it'll often just skip to another. There are segments -such as the bit near the middle with Louis at the opera even skipping dialog you can be chained to a series of events with little in the way of choice for hours. "Maybe you're just not used to rpgs." I've played through hundreds. "Well maybe you're not used to Atlus rpgs." Many of those hundreds were Atlus rpgs, including several Shin Megami Tensei games and several Persona games, among others. Believe me, you will be amazed by how tedious the dialog can get.

The good: This game features one of the best RPG soundtracks I've heard in years. Your ears should be delighted start to finish. The visual art style and character design is generally top notch and very creative. The setting and world building are both something quite special as well, including enemies based on the mind-bending art of Hieronymous Bosch. I was in particular impressed with this game's combat system, the turn-based segment is fairly standard if you're used to SMT and Persona, but the live-action combat adds an entirely different dimension and makes combat feel much faster and make grinding a breeze. A real treat for fans of the genre if you also enjoy action rpgs. Generally I found the playable cast pretty likable.

Before I go, let's address the elephant in the room, "Is it woke?" The usual suspects have been trolling the discussions and on twitter taking screenshots out of context or taking one instance of the word "diversity" -in the entire game- and pretending it's assigning a modern, western political sensibility to it, let me disabuse you of that by pointing a few things out. First, yes generally the female cast is not terribly sexualized, and it wouldn't surprise me if this was suggested to them by a consultant and they caved, but a few designs -some of the summons and a couple more minor characters- are still a bit curvy. And while this is a different direction from the SMT/Persona series recent highly sexualized designs (ex: Cleopatra in SMT:V), the slight figures of the women are reasonably in line with other games they've made in the series and outside of it with the same artist. As far as the "diversity" Of your main playable characters including Gallica 7 out of 8 are overtly white presenting with blonde or red hair and blue eyes, so their perspective on this was clearly different. The 8th character has black skin, but not in an African sense, he also has red eyes, a tail and fur and his older brother is as white as the others. It's a moot point anyway on top of this as the game is revealed to be taking place directly on top of the ruins of Japan, we enter Shinjuku's ruins at one point, so logically everyone in the game's probably simply Japanese, it being a Japanese game and all. Beyond that, one more minor character Catherina has her entire subplot end in a full-throated rebuke of wealth redistribution. This character gives her people a speech about how theft means you're living off something you didn't earn, and will justify whatever you stole eventually being stolen from you. She goes on to declare that her people should not be expecting handouts, that they need to take their future into their own hands, and she literally tells them they "need to get jobs and learn to earn for yourselves". Conclusion: Not woke.