It's a little easy, but main series titles are supposed to be.
Persona Q is supposed to be difficult.
Strange, I thought there is article about it on kotaku. Its supposed to be so hard to take away gamers pride.
Key word there might be
Kotaku. Shin Megami Tensei IV is probably hard to the general audiences that read Kotaku.
I suppose some aspects of it are challenging, but they're not 100% in the right places. First, there's the usual Megami Tensei bs where if you get caught with your pants down the enemy drowns you with crit after crit of multi-target damaging spells and your whole party dies before you even get a chance to respond. Opposition in boss fights can be stiff, but since you can save anywhere and have a free/low cost respawn immediately before the fight anyway, there's not a whole lot of encouragement to change your strategy.
Resource management is sort of tricky, but annoying rather than fun. Stuff is expensive and you need access points to make it out of the dungeon to reach the free recovery (you'll be restored to life with your pre-fight health and mana). Enemy respawn and prevalence can make it hard to get to the boss while maintaining your health and mana. So, you have to fight down --> fight back for the experience points and then run back to the boss while avoiding enemies so you can fight him at full strength.
A game that starts challenging your patience does so to make up for shortfalls in challenging your tactics and imagination, although I can't say this is unique to JRPGs or even Atlus.
Probably the worst thing is that combat seems weighted too much around critical hits, even more so than usual in Shin Megami Tensei. Even once you discover the ideal strategy for beating a boss, you'll probably rolling the dice over and over again to make it work if they get too many critical hits and you get too few. That endows the combat with aspects of a lottery. This is not at all desirable.
These things aside, Shin Megami Tensei IV is still a good JRPG for the same reasons Megami Tensei games are fun: fusion, cyberpunk + horror fantasy themes and aesthetics (post-apocalyptic cyberpunk in this case), and measured amounts of tactical challenge.