Beat the game last night. Even with the best equipment for my MC the final boss, unlike the rest of game, requires grinding which is a bit of a shame and something I'm not used to for SMT. Since the boss is about 20 levels higher than the demons in the final dungeon, just playing normally, even with a lot of encounters you're not going to be anywhere near the level of the boss and the main issue is that demons 10 levels or below the boss simply can't survive a single hit and you need them to. Grinded for about 6 hours from level 73->85 and beat it without too much hassle after some party modifying.
In retrospect I think levels are pretty important in the endgame here. If you are underleveled for the final boss rush, the endgame is the hardest in recent megaten history and one of the hardest set of boss in any rpg. If you are overleveled or on the same level as the bosses (which you won't be unless you are grinding) the bosses are pretty fair and approachable by just making the correct team. There's only 1 boss where I'm not sure if being at a higher level would have helped.
Anyhow here's my review now that I'm done (60 hours, 75% book completion, 80-90% of EX missions done):
Review of SMT Strange Journey if you go in expecting SMT4:
Graphics: Great. Very good job on the animated sprites of hundreds of demons. Lots of good art. The boss style is really cool and smart to show the detail and overpowered feeling of the bosses. One nitpick is I wish the bosses animated like the normal enemies. It's like you are fight a giant jpg, lol. Spell effects are good, dungeons look good though the budget most definitely was lacking and there just aren't many dungeon textures.
Music: On the plus side the music is very good. On the minus side there are about 5 songs in the entire game. There are slight variations, but basically every dungeon other than the last has the same dungeon theme. Battle music is always the same. Story music is 2-3 tracks. Boss song. etc... again the game seems surprisingly underbudgeted and doesn't provide the soundtrack you expect for an SMT successor.
Story: :lol The game starts off full of promise. You have a mysterious universe, a handful of interesting characters and later in the game other NPCs get mixed in. But then...nothing happens. The narrative is about as deep and involved as Doom. You go in, you kill bosses, the end. Even the ending was like 2 mins long at most. The main couple of characters are completely one dimensional and just play out their cliche paths,
has no point, other NPCs have no point, the plot is really non-existant for the most part. Which is kind of ironic considering there is a ton of dialogue from your ships AI (though 90% of it is just explaining "you need to go to the dungeon and kill the boss") and that the opening to the game is 60-90 mins long like P3/P4. But that's because all the plot is just in the premise of the game! The actual game has no more plot than an NES era rpg. Horribly disappointing for the next big main SMT game; has nothing on SMT3's interesting NPCs and philosophical discussions. Still better than the terrible Persona 1 plot though!
Gameplay: The core of the game and it's very good. Take the best parts of EO (the dual-screen dungeon crawling) and the best parts of SMT (demon talk/demon fusion/demon party) and you have an addicting game that always is giving you two incentives, getting further in exploring the dungeon (EO) and building up your demon book and party full of all kinds of cool demons (SMT). Being able to fuse anytime, pull stuff out of your book at anytime, use accesories to change encounter rates, drop rates, how easy it is to talk to demons, etc... works great and makes every minute of the game enjoyable. The boss encounters are fairly easy for the first half of the game and then quite hard for the 2nd half of the game and require good strategy and building teams to counter the boss fights. That's what makes SMT great, not being stuck to any specific skill set or character build and being able to modifying your team to counter boss abilities. The EX missions are fun little sidequests, and feature some very good and essential rewards making a certain amount of them almost required to progress. The only negative about the core gameplay is the auto-stating of your character and lack of skills for your character. It makes the game more balanced since you can't create a skewed but awesome character, but it also makes your main character suck pretty badly and for boss battles simply become the item boy who throws out items every round. Not being able to give your MC buffs/debuffs/heal spells gimps him pretty badly. Still, despite the few negative points, the gameplay is ace and lives up to the SMT franchise with enough changes to make it feel like the next SMT.
Overall: With no world map, no interesting locations to explore and only
dungeons along with a very simple and generic plot, the game does not live up to previous main SMT titles even if the gameplay is very good.
B
Review of SMT Strange Journey if you go in expecting a spinoff like SMT...If:
Graphics: See above. Lack of dungeon variety is fine considering it's a low budget spinoff.
Music: See above. Lack of music is still inexcusable. They really dropped the ball here.
Story: The game is a spinoff dungeon crawler. It gives you a good reason to go into the dungeon and that's all you really need since the experience is really about the gameplay. The story isn't full of questions and won't leave you thinking about it, but it's perfectly fine as a background for a "we're in a dungeon the whole game, let's keep going deeper" game. The characters although having very predictable paths are likable.
Gameplay: See above. Very awesome though you'll wish your main character could equip skills beyond a few elemental attacks. You don't need to explore a world when you are exploring the DUNGEON WORLD one square at a time. The dungeon designs are great and big and tricky and full of secret areas and treasures. So much fun to explore. The boss fights in the 2nd half are killer but fun when you beat them. Lots of content to last a good 50-75 hours.
Overall: An excellent spinoff that merges the best SMT with the best of EO. Lots of content, totally addicting gameplay, and very challenging in the later half; the game is the perfect title for for playing on the go.
A
Final Thoughts: the reason I split my review is I feel the team split their game making somewhere along the way. The game is weird and 'almost' feels like they were making SMT4: They had a good premise, they had lots of demons, they had new gameplay ideas for the traditional SMT systems, they had some good new art designs by Kaneko, etc...then it seems that somewhere early on they had the rug pulled out from under them. Maybe they lost their budget? Who knows. But at some point the game became a low budget affair (the spritework is fantastic, but duckroll says the sprite team was all of 3 people) and it's like the team gave up on their inspirations and went nowhere with the plot devise they I had thought up, went nowhere with the soundtrack after the first few tracks were made, didn't do much dungeon work after a handful were made, etc... The first half of the game when you're first hearing the new music tracks, following the movie-length story intro, going through interesting dungeons makes you think
this is SMT4. Then after about 30% in when the story drops out, the music repeats, and the dungeons become less impressive looking, you realize your playing a low budget spinoff which is an awesome game, but it's not the next SMT you felt like you were playing at the start. I have no idea what the behind the scenes was with this game, but there must have been something as the game feels very conflicted as to if it's SMT4 or not. As long as you don't go in expecting the former you'll find what's possibly the best rpg on the DS.
This little guy only costs 14k which is nothing and now on bosses I can instantly add any spell from my collection of sources to my current demons or any stock demon I pull out of the book. 
