I'll copy and paste something I wrote up a little while ago:
I've played about 2 hours of it so far and I want to write a few impressions down. The first is that this game might even be harder than Nocturne. I can't be that rusty - I only finshed Nocturne a few weeks ago - but I died several times in the tutorial dungeon. THE TUTORIAL DUNGEON. The press turn battles are back and are probably more devastating than before when you take as much advantage of them as you can, and the enemies can (and will) do the same. Doesn't help that attacks from the first few demons take off more than half of your health. I'm not sure I quite understand the Smirks yet - they don't seem to do anything except make your next attack a little more powerful, which doesn't seem like something that Atlus would make a big deal out of. Maybe that really is all there is to it, or maybe I haven't fully grasped the idea yet.
Fortunately, this game does "casualize" some parts of Nocturne. For one, you can save anywhere. For two, dying brings you to Charon - you know, that river Styx guy? No, not the band, Greek mythology. Anyway, he will bring you back to life for a price. You don't actually go back to your save points until you're out of Macca or you choose to not come back to life, so if it's been a while since you saved then you get a second chance. Also, one thing that greatly alleviates that tutorial dungeon is the Barracks. If you can make it back to the beginning of the dungeon, a relatively simple task if you run past the encounters, then you can (for free) take a nap and you and your demons will be fully healed, including MP. I imagine that this becomes less useful in later dungeons, where traveling back to the beginning would not be such a trivial task, but don't forget about this in that first dungeon. Speaking of encounters, they pop up on the map in pre-determined locations. If you beat one and then hang around that immediate area, it seems like another one won't pop up for quite a while. It's very comparable to Persona, actually - you can never fully clear a dungeon but you can make the room you're in much safer. The encounters are still "random", they just aren't invisible and are dodge-able. The downside to this is that fleeing, now given a percentage chance that you can see, isn't as likely. Instead of "almost always", it's "half the time".
The third thing I want to say is that fusion, potentially the most boring part of SMT games, has been given a huge restructuring. Now, whenever you go to fuse (and you can fuse anywhere), you get a recommended list of demons to fuse. Might be handy, but I don't know how effective that will be yet. You can also set up a bunch of search parameters, and you can include your entire compendium in that search. Close to 500 demons means that there are thousands, probably tens of thousands, of potential combinations; this isn't a default thing because it would probably take some time to do and the game warns that this might take time. My compendium consists of three demons at the moment and I haven't done any actual fusing, just looked at the interface for it, and it appears to be much better than previous SMT's fusion, which often wound up being a guessing game where you would pick one demon, go through the list, pick another, go through the list, pick another, etc.
The game looks really good when playing in the third person dungeons (better than Nocturne, even), but the cutscenes actually seem to have a resolution that's too low. I don't know if it's just me, but they do not seem as crystal-clear as they should be. The first person battles look fine, but I wish the sprites were a bit clearer. As it stands they look better than Strange Journey's but not by tons. This isn't going to bother me much - I made a thread about how mechanics in the battles are more important than the way they look, and those mechanics are more solid and fun than they've ever been - but it's still a bit of a shame that the demons themselves couldn't have had a bigger presence.
On the topic of story, these characters are definitely more defined than Nocturne's walking plot devices. Nocturne had a good plot and story, but it was presented in a very minimalistic way. This game seems less minimalistic in its dialogue and events, at least in part because there is a city of actual people instead of a world with, like, five. Also, unlike the first person battles, I feel like honest-to-God cutscenes during important moments would be better than static images. Those static images are fine when someone says "Hey! Look at this quest item! Better go turn it in so we can move on!", but something like getting the Gauntlet should have been a cutscene. The impact of some of the later happenings in Nocturne wouldn't have been the same if it had been an image instead of in-engine animations and movement.
EDIT: I've played some more since I first wrote this and done some fusion and stuff, but this is still pretty reflective of what I think of it so far. It's pretty damn good, you should play it. That said, at this point I think that Charon was a good idea but could have been done better. You have to skip through a really long cutscene and way too much dialog that you've already heard in order to get to the part where he'll revive you - why couldn't they have cut that out once it had been established? As soon as you die, there should be a message saying "I'll revive you for this much Macca". I also don't know if it's entirely necessary when you can save anywhere. You can just say "nah, don't revive me" and then keep all of that money, provided you're saving often enough. I guess if you don't save much at all it's a pretty good reminder for you to save, but Charon costs a lot of money.
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