Game of "did you buy Fire Emblem Awakening, have a cheap extra game to get pumped for the bizarro crossover," aka Shin Megami Tensei 4: Finished. This is... an odd, odd game. (As are most SMT series games, in fairness.) In terms of quality, Tactics Ogre might be a weird comparison - both make huge, unforced errors and have various nasty system traps lying around for you, but they both end up decent games anyway. Although TO is notably better.
Anyway, the fundamentals of SMT gameplay make "balance" a tricky, tricky thing. It's a damn good thing they at least gave you basically infinite continues before the battle you lost, but even then, things can get annoying. Here's the SMT4 difficulty cliff:
Beginning: OH GOD NO DEAD AGAIN NO WHY DID YOU RUN OFF WITH MY STUFF #$%^&
Earlygame: Punishingly "hard." Except hard in a totally random "lol you went 2nd and the enemy randomly hit your weakness or got a crit and killed everything" kind of way, or in an annoying - if you aren't save / reloading everything - style, oh boy back to the inn due to another BS demon death and I don't want to use an expensive revival item.
5-10 hours in: Massively hard, but at least you start to have the tools to deal with it. The first big boss takes like 4 rounds of spamming his weakness to kill, and has uber damage that gets multi-hits and slaughters you, and has moves that get lots of crits to slaughter you even more. But he is beatable... if you spam evasion-up buffs and get lucky enough on dodges to not die instantly.
10-30 hours in: Randoms start not being a huge threat, and your MC build starts to pay off, and you have tools, but can still definitely wipe to random bullshit, and there's a few good bosses here to keep you on your toes. (NOTE TO SMT DEVELS, THIS IS THE SWEET SPOT)
Back half of the game: lololololol, now the system is rigged in your favor. Smash randoms with unstoppable non-elemental MT damage even if you can't hit their weaknesses (which you can), watch as enemies ram into your elemental nulling like morons, etc. As you can tell from the stat topic, bosses inexplicably stop really doing more damage later, too! So terrifying bosses who could dispel all your buffs & debuffs and do massive MT damage get succeeded by bosses who don't have a crucial all-dispel and don't do appreciably more damage vs. more HP and haxier options.
It's tricky. Action games can be punishingly hard and it's "your fault" so fine. Games like Fire Emblem can have huge weakness mechanics but since there's a map, they functionally only punish mistakes and reward good decisions. Even Pokemon, in 1v1s, makes huge weakness / huge resistance work because, well, that's the whole game. Having a large party with a hefty random component to who goes first, and add in enemies who are balanced around sometimes randomly smashing your weakness and sometimes randomly losing their entire turn, and you end up with what is an "unsatisfying" random experience. In the early middle it's okay because you have just enough tools & demon stock to control things, and then toward the end your broken just plain trumps enemy broken, the random becomes "will the enemy be sort of okay or totally ineffective."
Since disliking things is easier than liking things, some random errors & things that just bugged me about SMT4:
* Silent Main. Specifically, silent main in a game where he's the focal point of a fair amount of plot. Think Serge from Chrono Cross. Thankfully the game eventually figures out that a Silent Main going everywhere is lame, and Our Hero takes around an RPG party for color commentary, but this only fixes so much.
* The overarching goal of the game is barely integrated with it. More spoilars, but also think Chrono Cross - you do a bunch of random stuff and stop some bad people, and then at the end oh by the way you can also achieve this too, semi-randomly. Silent Main doesn't help here.
* The obligatory trip to the status screen for healing after every battle - well, before you start wiping every battle in 1 round, at least. Forget it and eat a death! Okay, I can accept that old-skool style, but what about poison curing?! Setting a demon ability on poison curing is a terrible waste, and it takes multiple button presses to make your way down to the poison curing items, again, and fix things up. This is in a game with poison rivers and poison zones everywhere. Look, one poison river for flavor reasons is fine, but so many?! Is this place livable at all?! More importantly, is this place too annoying for heroes to visit, having to constantly go reset the damn poison in the status screen?
* There's some weird plot threads left hanging, which I can only assume are things that I'd know if I'd played the other SMT games. (Example: Dude saying "You don't even know what the Yamato Perpetual Reactor really is, do you?" Well... no. And apparently you aren't going to tell me, Mr. Game.) From checking Wikipedia afterward, the game seems to heavily reference SMT1, at least. Not that SMT plot necessarily makes any sense even when things are "explained."
* Dungeon design is occasionally terrible, although usually mercifully short. Seriously, small dungeons are a merit, I'm fine with just 3 screens. Flip side, SMT4 likes (tiny) maze dungeons as some kind of old-skool throwback, which meh, even if they're small. It also has a few teleport dungeons, which bah. Again, they are also small, but still, screw that.
* Demon lord Lucifer is ugly. What's up with that? He's the "Morning Star!" Tarnished beauty if you must, but he shouldn't be vanilla ugly.
That said, to be clear, I liked SMT4, and it was a fairly gripping experience, eating up a decent amount of my time. The plot, while filled with holes, ends up reasonably compelling enough anyway, and sometimes smashing everything is pretty fun.
