Speaking about older SMT... I wish they brought back the idea of recruiting generic human party members. I don't get why they didn't go for it in SMTIV/A, it seems odd Ashura-Kai and Cult of Gaea members would be completely unwillingly to join the main cast.
To be fair, the early games don't exactly have masterful writing either, but they just went for something very different atmosphere and story-wise from the more recent ones, so it'll likely clash with people who enjoyed those older entries. For example, in the original SMT game, the law and chaos heroes are big archetypes that don't even have official names. The Heroine has character initially, but at a certain point she becomes just a generic love interest. However, even if you choose the neutral route and attempted to turn against both law and chaos, all disasters that happened in the other routes still would be there. You still would be left with only the same party member that would remain with you in the other routes. It wasn't presented as a better ending than law and chaos, just kept your character clean from participating in their actions, giving a very different experience from the current games where bonds save the day and even in something like IV Neutral route is something that you consciously need to go for, with the game deliberately making it hard to reach it.
Then you've got Nocturne which seems to be a big entry point for part of the fanbase, and is even further storywise from the modern games, where there weren't human party members or even generic npcs to talk to, and the few surviving humans were pretty much enemies of the player unless you choose to join their crazy plans.
