i have opinions
- overall it was pretty middling
- the game's music is good, but suffers a lot from short loops. individual tracks are nice on their own, but the soundtrack as a whole suffers from underusing the non-square pulse waves imo and can feel pretty samey
- infini palace in particular has a really disappointing and annoying theme. it's almost very good, with a solid buildup that could have a cool payoff... and then it just doesn't have one and starts a really short loop once the percussion has kicked in
- the combat is serviceable but incredibly basic
- lots of stuff you might expect from an rpg is conspicuously absent. there's no non-key items like potions or anything (except for jewels); there's no equipment menu, you just automatically equip what you find or buy; there's extremely little to actually find while mapping the game's dungeons, which makes them feel kind of pointless and empty. etrian odyssey spoiled me i guess
- there's not really a lot of room for. expressive play, i guess? nakajima whacks things and summons demons, yumiko whacks things less hard and has an array of varyingly-useful spells, and your mp can't go higher than double digits, which means that for the most part the best demons are straightforwardly the ones with the biggest sticks, and if you're lucky they'll have one of the handful of useful support spells too. even negotiation is really shallow and basic
- several aspects of the game's design, like level-drain attacks or enemies with the top-level ice spell or the izanami gem puzzle, are just weirdly rude
- this isn't entirely fair to hold against the game, but several mechanical aspects (what your stats mean, how fusion works, how numbers are calculated in combat) are explained poorly or not at all, and on the english-speaking internet at least, i've been able to find very little useful information
- i don't think it's a super grindy game but i did still have to spend a few hours walking back and forth through a door and autobattling at multiple points, which is more than i usually need to do as someone who fights every encounter they can while not optimizing my routes through areas
- the game has very little qol. your one party member with clink gets paralyzed? time to head all the way back to micom! need to fuse some demons? hope you've memorized the route home or have the start spell! game ran invalid assembly and exploded somehow? have fun with the worst password screen you've seen in a hot minute!
- Video Game Sex Essentialism! 💥
overall i had a decent enough time with it for what it is but it's definitely not like, a gem of the famicom library or anything. 5/10 too many succubus encounters