The game itself isn't bad on paper and actually has competent content and card design, where it gets asinine is the wasted concept, art, story, endgame balance, and exact content. Kazuma Kaneko is an obviously talented writer directly having a hand with several of the best JRPGs of alltime: Strange Journey, the original Personal trilogy, Shin Megami Tensei IV and Nocturne, even some of the Digital Devil Saga duology--however we don't really see any of that storytelling acumen or actual narrative quality let alone amount or depth from this title. Each floor has a grand total of maybe two paragraphs worth of text with randomly found disconnected worldbuilding that doesn't really matter to you because the characters and setting doesn't really substantiate itself.

The art of course is naturally another pain point, having one of Japanese gaming's most unique artists in gaming and utterly wasting his style on a premise and mechanic that sounds interesting on paper... but again, often lacks a lot of the balance and added story to even make the fact they're clearly using plagiarizing/unauthorized datasets to make extremely middling work while having the playerbase actively train it with a voting system. This is a massive shame, because looking at some of the actual designs, dialogue/mechanic (Stein Doscht of Flanders and the word game mechanic are good examples) from Kaneko here proves he still not only has profound cultural insight and understanding, but that sharp and unique design sense.

Lastly is the gameplay. Listen. You're not doing phase 2 Arahabaki legit, I won't even lie. I love the fact that the game isn't a pushover, but without enough cards and plenty of useless trial cards, there's a definite roadblock at certain points, even if you're busting out crazy armor stacks, and even then, if you were theoretically lucky enough, you could finish the game within a day or two. It does not have a real endgame and I don't think COLOPL has a real direction as to what their game will become.

The people complaining are mad about the AI art. That aside the game play is fun and challenging (as most SMT games are)
I cleared top floors without spending a dime so no pay walls here. If your only reason for liking\playing the game is for art then you should probably try another game.