I'm a fan of RPGs, but I would say that my enthusiasm for Shin Megami Tensei is recent even though I've known about the series for quite some time. Persona 3 was fantastic and I have been trudging through Persona 4 Golden on and off for the past 3 years, but even though it has personality, I'm just not into it as much as I'd like to be. Shin Megami Tensei IV is the game that did it for me, and I'm excited to play SMT4 Apocalypse soon as well.
There's a lot that feels dated and low-budget, like the lack of monster animations during battle, and the art is sometimes reused from other SMT games, but there is a lot to like in this weird and fun game.
You travel with 3 other samurai companions for most of the game, along with all of the demons you recruit in classic SMT fashion, by talking to them rather than fighting them. This mechanic can be tricky and often seemingly random, but it is satisfying when a demon joins your group and benefits from experience points and ultimately becomes fused with another demon to make higher level demons for your army. As part of your own character building, every time you level up, you receive attribute points and app points. Attribute points increase things like strength, dexterity, etc., and app points adds new capability and gameplay options for your character, like increasing the amount of demons you can own, being able to ask demons for money, or recovering HP while walking around the environment. Demons will also level up, gaining new combat abilities, and they may ask you if you want to accept a transformed ability from one skill to another skill.
Most demons have strengths and weaknesses, and its up to you to remember them when fighting them or using them to fight for you. One of my favorite tactics against bosses in the game is to reflect damage with Tetrakarn/Makarakarn while I buff up my party and de-buff the enemy, finding out its weaknesses during the fight and then exploiting the weaknesses to win the battle. You occasionally run into enemies that don't have weaknesses, and those battles end up being a matter of survival and attrition many times.
The game didn't get its hooks into me until I reached Tokyo, which can take the player a while to get to initially, but the scope of the game is large enough that it is still near the beginning of the game. The game became a different animal for me at that point because it opens up the world and the tone of it dramatically changes from a medieval fantasy-style game to a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting, and you and your samurai compatriots are now strangers in a strange land. As time goes on, the samurai uncover the horrors that are happening there while battling hundreds of demons and their bosses, and they slowly discover the truth of the situation that Tokyo and the Eastern Kingdom of Mikado (your homeland) are in. Throughout the game, the player is forced to make choices that align the protagonist in 3 separate directions: Law, Neutral, and Chaos. The player may not recognize that this alignment mechanic exists until he/she is locked into a certain storyline, and it is a matter of playing out the rest of horrifying conclusion.
If you're still on the fence about this game now in 2016, I would say go for it if you're a mature adult. It's cheap these days, and worth the money. I don't normally marathon long games like this. Usually, I do about 40 hours of a game over the course of a couple weeks and take a break from it by trying another game of some kind, but this one still hasn't let go after 90+ hours now, and I found myself starting a New Game+ with my level 84 character.
Shin Megami Tensei IV Apocalypse is out on Tuesday, and I'll probably start playing it right away even though Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past is staring at me right now. Either that or I'll keep playing SMT4 to try for one of the other endings...