“This game is one of the most difficult RPGs ever!” “This game wants you dead!” “Play a real Shin Megami Tensei game!” and so on were all things I had heard about Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. The SMT franchise has a huge gatekeeping fanbase that gets louder the smaller a given game's fanbase is. As some of you may know, I played through all the Persona games during quarantine so I was interested to play the series that Persona spun off from and without some of the anime nonsense that hindered those games for me as well as having some of that challenge people had mentioned. But it’s not just peer pressure that informed my decision to play. Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne came out for the Playstation 2 in 2003 by Atlus. The PS2 era of games is probably my favorite. It’s when big-budget games were at their weirdest and most experimental. That era brought us Killer 7, Metal Gear Solid 3, Silent Hill 2, Shadow of the Colossus, etc. So I bought the remaster for Switch and I have some thoughts about it. Before I start, however, I will point out that it’s very easy to compare SMT games to Persona games, but I will not mention the spin-off at any point for the rest of the review. Other RPGs will be compared and contrasted to it, but not other Atlus games.
Speaking of comparing Nocturne to other RPGs, the core gameplay loop is not dissimilar to Pokemon. The game consists of exploring areas and recruiting demons to join your party and then using them in turn-based battles where elemental weaknesses matter. The primary difference being that in Pokemon you weaken an enemy and then catch them but in Nocturne you have to open up a dialogue with them. This dialogue will often have you giving the demons money, items, moral opinions, and health to get them to join your team, and they still may not join even after all that. It sounds annoying but you get into laughing about it pretty quickly. The dialogue is also written so most demons are comically rude, giving it more room to be entertaining rather than grating. The demons you recruit can learn new moves, evolve, and you can combine two or more demons to end up with a powerful new one with just the right moves and typing. The fusion mechanic is pretty unique to the franchise and gives the recruiting some strategy.
Most people will say keeping a keen eye on demon fusion is integral to doing well against boss fights and I guess it kind of is. My biggest problem with the combat mechanics is that the game is supposed to be infamously hard. I played on normal mode and I only died once early on in the first 20 hours of play. Maybe that’s a problem of me knowing the mechanics already, but the fact I never changed my team comp for over five hours and through several bosses isn’t great. Most of the bosses don’t have elemental weaknesses so the strategy is just hit them as hard as you can with physical attacks and throw in debuffs and buffs in there. I read that “this is the kind of game where normal encounters can fuck you up!” But after a certain point, I just put the battles on autoplay because it wasn’t worth using MP to beat them and you can buy health items pretty easily, so any damage taken didn't matter. Some may say that the true game is played on hard mode with the true ending but that’s just another level of gatekeeping of where the "real game" is supposed to be. The game has good mechanics, it's just not hard to get good enough where you can mop the floor with most enemies.
The dungeons in Nocturne, where you’ll spend most of the time, can be annoying to traverse. A lot of them are designed in a labyrinthine fashion with many corridors leading to dead ends or empty rooms. Sometimes the rooms will have an NPC to berate you with though, which can sometimes be worse than an empty room. I get that the point of the sprawling dungeons is to make it so you can get into more random encounters, though that can get grating really quickly. I like the boss fights a lot, they’re the highlights of the game. Seeing the music swell and the world turn to shit around you as you face off against a cool enemy is exhilarating. The slog in between those fights of random encounters and dungeons where you’re checking the map to see which identical hallway has a door you haven’t opened yet is an extreme slog. That slog may get especially worse if you’re not enthusiastic about the plot.
Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne starts off with an extremely stock anime protagonist high schooler who goes to a hospital with two of his friends to visit a teacher. Shortly after, the world gets destroyed in an event called The Conception. Earth is now a weird limbo world filled with demons and all but a few humans have survived. Quickly Satan himself puts a bug inside the protagonist's mouth that turns him into a half-demon/half-human being called the Demi-Fiend. After wandering around for a while you find that the other humans that survived are collecting Magatsuhi, the essence of a human’s emotions, to recreate the Earth however they see fit. Towards the end of the game, you can side with one of the human's plans for a new Earth and fulfill it for them.
The story is one of the most celebrated things about the game and it is not great. Initially, the game is very enticing because Nocturne starts off with gameplay pretty quickly. It doesn’t beat you over the head with a long intro, but that’s a blessing and a curse. It’s nice I can get into the game quickly but the time slowly moving through the world in other RPGs establishes character, context, and motivations. When the conception happens, you don’t feel the weight of it because you didn’t see how the world was before the apocalyptic event. None of that character fleshing out like you see in disaster and horror flicks is here. Likewise, Nocturne’s characters don’t have a lot to say. It’s nice when you don’t have the pacing stop to a halt because of an hour of dialogue, but because they need to convince you of their grand ideas for a new Earth, their limited screen time means they don’t have any believable arc or argument. The two friends of the Demi-Fiend I mentioned earlier have very odd arcs. After the intro, you don’t see your female friend in the denim dress for a few hours. When you do she mentions how panicked she is all alone in the apocalypse, doesn’t join your party, and by the next time you see her, she’s explaining her idea for a new Earth where only the physically strong will survive and the weak will be wiped out. The scaredy-cat to eugenics touting shift is a huge jump. How it got there is beyond me because the game doesn’t show you the progression. So there isn’t a lot of depth to the plot or a lot of plot in general despite the run time and reputation. Most of your time playing will be the turn-based grind.
Part of the disconnect between the plot and the player may be the protagonist. I don’t mind silent protagonists when they get some characterization or are near a charismatic supporting cast. Wind Waker Link is my favorite Link because in the first hour or so the game lets you know he’s brave to a fault, would do anything for his family, and pretty dumb. All without ever having Link talk. In Portal 2, Wheatley and Glados make the plot engaging because they are such fun characters to watch. The Demi-Fiend has no traits nor any goals. I don’t put myself in his shoes because it quickly becomes such a supernatural scenario I can't relate to, and the protagonist never seems to have a clear goal. Most of the plot is just going to places people tell you to go. All without emoting to his friends being hurt, antagonist taunting, or anything in particular. He’s a blank canvas but I never found myself relating to him, and that’s because there was never a character that felt human in this world. I had no avenue into the plot. Nobody to relate to or root for.
Now not to say the game doesn’t have good moments. There’s a bit with a serial killer member of a group of creatures being used as slaves. Said killer wears members of his tribe’s faces as a costume, and yeah that’s interesting and there’s a clear goal. Find the fucked up maniac and beat him up so he stops killing innocent people. Most of the game does not have a clear goal besides recreating the world, but there’s an intense amount of meandering up to that point. Still, it’s not even clear for most of the plot if the world can be saved, and couple that with a bunch of ideas for a new world that all border on insane like eugenics, humans are no longer social creatures, or let's destroy the world entirely. Each position not really getting explained fully besides an elevator pitch. The only one that makes sense is that there’s a stronger sense of community in the world but the guy pitching this is the main antagonist with an insanely high kill count and the people he hasn’t killed all think he’s a manipulative asshole. But I suppose that’s what people like about it: the soul-crushing vibe.
Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne’s vibe is doing a lot. There’s an atmosphere of unease and despair in this world filled with demons and seemingly no way out. Eerie music, spooky visuals, and dialogue from demons that want you dead all convincingly create a sense of entrapment in this apocalyptic world. It’s one of the game’s strengths in depicting a realized apocalypse. Now that said, the surface elements of the game; graphics, music, art direction, all have their shortcomings on the technical side. Shoji Meguro is a phenomenal games composer, and his metal tracks for bosses get me pumped every time. When a boss shows up and the singer is screaming “ONE MORE GOD REJECTED,” I’m having a great time. The problem is the audio is compressed no matter what version you’re playing. Plus the game can suffer from frame rate dips in some boss arenas but nothing too bad. Graphics, atmosphere, music, etc. are all aspects that Nocturne pulls off. They make the world of Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne feel distinct and may keep you going through the story and gameplay to see what location and enemy the game will throw at you next.
Final Thoughts: Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne is not a bad game. It comes with a recommendation from me if a crushing vibe that is different from most RPGs can carry you through a 40+ hour runtime. The music, world, art, and design, in general, makes the game feel very oppressive in a world that may not want to be saved. But it’s not really challenging and you can push through the game rather easily if you’re quick on the uptake. Plus the plot isn’t easy to engage with, nor does it seem like its characters want to be engaged with. You may find that if other RPGs used entertaining characters, deep plot, and fairly inoffensive gameplay to keep you playing you may not gel well with Nocturne. Though, if you want Pokemon in the apocalypse, it can probably get you by. So, take this recommendation with a huge asterisk.
3/5
eh
