Ok would be a good description. The more I play the less I'm impressed.
Finished the first dungeon and it was really, really boring. By the end of it, I was counting the minutes for it to be over.
The story and characters are on point, but the gameplay - the main driver of SMT games - is really, really weak. The encounter design is poor and lacking variety. I was still killing Pixie's even at the end of the dungeon. Ambushes are too unbalanced on your end. Shadows are far easier to get an ambush on this game, making battles repetitive tedium. Battle difficulty is low, low, low. It almost reminds me of a Final Fantasy in that area. Dungeon design so far is extremely poor. The gimmicks (sneak thief stuff) are cool but little else. There's the occasional puzzle, but it's mostly just a gauntlet of battle after battle. Resource management, risk/reward, all elements that made SMT games great are absent here.
As it is, I love the non-dungeon stuff as it is. The stories and characters are great. But the battles, dungeon design, gameplay loop, are not SMT quality.
I'm actually disappointed. When I hope it'll get better the game puts you on rails and tells you can and can't do on endless days. We're going to go out and celebrate beating the first dungeon, but this means I can't study why exactly? That's tomorrow. Why can't I study today? Oh, because the cat won't let me go down stairs. What were they thinking? Again, the games limitation rears its ugly head.
So far, this is not on par with P3 or even P4 and its gameplay goes against everything that made me a Megaten fan in the first place.
I'm really hoping it gets better but right now I'm dealing with a cat tell me what I can and can't do.