Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne Review

 No matter how much I cry or shout, this nightmare won't end.

So I have been a Persona fan for a while now, and since that means everytime I bring it up around nerds I have to be fed the never ending gusset of facts about how the franchise is actually a spin off, don't ya know? Yes, Atlus created the very niche Shin Megami Tensei franchise, which span off several which ways- one such way was to a game called 'Revelation Persona'. That little game would become a franchise. By the time of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3- those games started to develop a identify distinct from the core brand. And then when Persona 5 came out- that little franchise weren't so little anymore. Now Persona is frankly the biggest brand Atlus has ever made and old hats are stuck sitting on the edge of street curbs crying about how great SMT used to be before Atlus became 'The Persona company'.

Okay things aren't that dire. SMT fans got to eat with SMT V and SMT V: Vengeance- both of which have been very well received- but you know how fans of storied franchises can get. Heck, fans of storied JRPG franchises! Did you know that you haven't actually played a Final Fantasy game until you've played Final Fantasy VI? Which is nice to hear, because otherwise I might threat about the around 400-500 hours I've devoted to that franchise on the main games alone. (Thank goodness that time is... refunded, I guess?) Fans won't accept a supposed 'fan of ATLUS' games until they've touched the holy grail of the franchise according to them. Which means playing Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. Which means you can slap a rapier in my hand and a stylish blue waistcoat on my back because I'm about to become a real boy. Which is to say- I'm going to play Nocturne. Not sure how that turned into a Lies of P reference. (I really loved that game.)

First off I might as well be straight and fair- this is the recently released HD version of Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, and before going in I wasn't aware of how significant of a deal that is. Let me be clear- if you want to play this game for yourself, skip the base game and get the HD version. It is more than just a 'HD upgrade'- it comes imbued with very specific Quality of Life features that make some of the game's more unintentional tedium vanish- whilst still retaining the very 'quintessential' tedium which you can bet I'm going to touch on in this review. Still- if you are an SMT head and suddenly think that disqualifies me from having an opinion on this game because I didn't suffer the indignity of rerolling fusion inheritance skills- I don't really know what to say except- don't worry: I found a much more direct method of consuming the pure torture that Nocturne is renowned for.

Here's the part where I do my 'Do as I say, not as I do' message. Because you see- even though this was my very first time playing Nocturne ever, and my first SMT game to boot- I'd played all of the modern Persona games- two to utter completion- I figured that I knew what was up. I even beat Persona 4 and P3P on hard- I mean that ain't no mean feat! (3 was really the headache, obviously.) But here's the thing, I was only mildly aware of the reputation Nocturne has for being painfully unforgiving. I also didn't realise that people meant it was that hard... on normal. So yeah. I picked Hard. And let me tell you that decision alone was a mistake. I directly scuppered my chances to like this game in the early few hours by this direct blunder, and much of my later heartache can be traced by to this complete butterfly-moment screw up. The game is said to be utterly fair and fine on Normal. That being said- this review is for the Hard version of the game- and you can bet I'm going to talk about some of the hoops this game made me jump through on the daily for that decision! 

I reckon that if you kidnapped your average Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne fan off the street, strapped them to a chair and refused to let them leave until they coherently conveyed exactly what it was about the game which made they go all go-go eyed around it- one of the first words out of their mouths, after they've finished crying for their closest family member, would be 'atmosphere'. And there's a reason for that. Shin Megami Tensei takes place in the desolate wastes of a world that had ended, not one scorched in radioactive fire or drained of it's water or any of those other more traditional 'apocalyptic settings'- Nocturne's Japan has ended. As though the thread of fate was just cut and everything ceased to be. What remains doesn't stand as a testament to what was before so much as it does to be an unsettling transitory limbo utterly inhospitable to the very idea of conventional life.

There's an oppressively wide-open emptiness about this world, reinforced in the droning accompaniments to many of the quietest background tracks to even the oddly electric, and typically funky, overworld theme that plays on themes of 'weirdness', and feeling 'out of step' and 'uncomfortable'- but in those typically creepy ways a horror soundtrack might. Of course, the sense of being a round pin for a square hole is reinforced in a gameplay sense by the sheer fact that for the vast majority of the game you are always in danger. SMT 3 employs the 'ambush' system of RPG games and there isn't a single safe tile for the first 15 hours of gameplay at least. You can be attacked at anytime, anywhere and if you play in Hard difficulty- you also cannot run away. Thus you can be killed at anytime.

Alongside static save spots which are of course a staple of games from this age, you pretty much always feel a sense of lurking danger as something precious is in peril of being lost, whether that is a demon you finally managed to bag or just the last hour or so of your freetime given that save points aren't exactly around the corner from one another in this lost world. Personally I suffered having to beat the first major boss of the game three times because I found myself ambushed and killed literally at the door to the save room both other times. Which is about where the sense of 'wow, this really aids the mood' starts to melt away into 'okay, this is deeply frustrating and I hate it'. (But that's Nocturne for ya!)

But before I get any further I should probably touch on the rather unique quirks to combat that SMT rocks over any other ATLUS RPG. This is still very much a turn-based affair with all that entails, except turns are not as cut-as-dry as one might expect. Instead there is a 'stock' system in place wherein each turn is awarded a 'stock' of actions determined by how many are on that side which they are allowed to conduct before the turn switches to the enemy. Now this is basically the same as your average Persona experience with the exception of the way stock is spent. You see, attack or spending an item (Items can only be used by the protagonist, by the way. Which is horrendous design.) will use up a single stock, but failing an attack uses up two. Failing by missing, or having the attack be resisted can chew up the amount of turns your team would have had. Perform a group attack that hits two enemies but two others dodge? Well sorry but that turn expended four stock instead of just one and now it's the enemies turn. Conversely scoring a crit, or hitting a weakness, adds stock to your turn- allowing players to prolong the punishment. A pretty cool tactical change-up to traditional turn taking, I actually really like it!

Another interesting aspect of SMT combat that literally no one felt necessary to tell me was the fact that debuffs and buffs stack. Only in SMT- they stack up to four times and last until dispelled. This is pretty much essential information because one stack of buffs fails to be enough to achieve anything pretty much right away necessitating familiarity with how to work this tools. Especially on hard difficulty, if you haven't got a fog breath build by the end of the game you might as well kiss your chances of finishing goodbye as every enemy rocks up with an extra 6 stocks per turn- you need to be able to force those misses! I would have appreciated a tutorial on that matter at some point, though- or some sort of visual indicator to tell me how buffed I was or how debuffed an enemy is. But I guess we all start somewhere, huh.

Demons are of course SMTs original iterations of what would come to be known as 'Personas' in their more popular franchise- and these creatures come to populate the world you explore and beat the foes you fight. (Similar to Persona 5.) They even have personalities that become relevant when you need to fill out your party by recruiting them in the middle of a fight (on the last survivor, obviously) during which Nocturne throws everything in your way from Quizzes to monetary demands that either accept or rejecting can be the right choice. Honestly, there's a hint of creativity I commend in this idea- even if the entire system is much more trouble than it's worth. Being stuck with an underpowered party because the game keeps RNG-ing every demon you talk to running away is a slap around the face to an already frustrating gameplay experience- without having to then wrestle with the fact that you're supposed to try and recruit only on the new stage of the moon cycles that rotate every 10 steps throughout the game. (Which, of course, is never explained anywhere because this game was made by and for insane people.)

At least in the later game you have so much funds, and have enough demons already registered, to be able to just fuse a decent party. And that's where the natural charm of ATLUS games starts to shine through. Building teams of Demons with complimentary skills and affinities is always fun no matter what the Megaten game, and learning all the quirks of the system just amplifies the amount of small details you can dedicate yourself to. Such as how the Mitami Demons don't change demons but rather reinforce their stats on fusion- or how certain special demons can only be fused at a certain stage of moon being up- those are cool little things the game doesn't explain to you and which don't scupper the experience by not knowing. Push and pull.

Ah, but all this talk of being in 'parties', and using 'Demon' companions belies the core most sensation that Nocturne exemplifies so much you might even call it a core philosophy of the entire story: loneliness. Given that the vast majority of mankind has died it shouldn't come as any great surprise that you aren't exactly rubbing shoulders with fellow mortals all that often but SMT 3 takes that to the extreme. Those handful of survivors aren't like the supporting cast you find in your average Persona game, they are all singularly disaffected and disengaged. Islands to themselves that persist to shape the vortex world in their own images and bring those ideologies to fruition.

You see, the heart of SMT 3's narrative is based around this idea of 'extremist solutions to the world's ills'. In fact, you might say that is something of a prevailing echo in these plots if what I've read about SMT 1 is worth anything. Seeing the faults in our world is one thing, but how about serious discussion into rebalancing the world in a grand restart? Reforming our way of life to focus around exemplification of solitude or total dedication towards the worship of unchanging serenity or complete fulfilment and individual happiness? In isolation these sound like worthy pursuits but faced as actual world policies even the populist measure one can seemingly imagine seeps into dictatorial decrees or regressive indulgence.

Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne does not necessary wave these ideologies in your face to pick holes in them, but rather presents these ways of thinking and the types of people who can end up formulating such dreamlike, if flimsy, extreme ideals. It's really the vast tracks of land you have to walk between objectives, the funky soundtracks, the isolation- that gives you room to really digest it all. That and the way that no matter what the cause, whichever group of demons or angels is formed to bring it all to life, it all seems to waver and crumble to ruin. There's no such thing as the perfect world, the perfect society or the perfect idea- and we get to see that play out time and time again in a relatively lean narrative- cutting away all the excess.

But what I'm commending there is the meat of the narrative- not the presentation. Nocturne is an old game and the age shows in the structure of the game and the way most of it's story beats are quite literally shuffling your way across the world driven by vague pointers from passing non-hostile demons in order to hear a cutscene before being pushed somewhere else. It is not all that engaging and that lets down the breadth of what the audience is being asked to treat with somewhat involved introspection. It kind of feels like stumbling around lecture halls around the world's biggest, and most deserted, and most dangerous, university campus. Really the only place where Nocturne actually tries to go above and beyond with it's presentation is within their dungeon mazes- and let me tell you something about their dungeon mazes...

The Nocturne community seems fairly self aware about the pain-points of the franchise they love, but when it comes to the dungeons they will fall on their sword to defend them. Which surprises me given that nearly all of Nocturne's mid to late game dungeons are eye-gougingly bloated mazes stuffed silly with false turns, dead-ends, traps and time stealers. You'll be dropped down a floor for taking the wrong corner, teleported to the other side of the map thanks to an utterly random and invisible trap-teleporter, be treated to an obtuse upside down dungeon which requires moon logic in order to solve. (Give a spoon to a NPC that looks identical to all others around him so that he can dig a hole through a stone floor. I'm not making that up.) These are all asinine.

And I like the idea of creative dungeons, don't get me wrong. Giving us more to do than just 'kill the unique enemy types' is engaging on paper and I wonder if Persona dungeons might be more interesting with a little bit more to them- but the amount this game invests into making these sprawling diatribes into madness defies belief. You can spend actual hours trying to figure out what is even the correct way to go in some of these later mazes, particularly the final one which slaps you with so many random, unprompted, teleportation's you'd be forgiven for thinking there isn't a way through at all. But there is! It's just painfully long to reach through. My favourite of these was a little moon-cycles addition puzzle that was related to a three-prong boss fight in that last dungeon- but of course that ended up being stretched out past the point of novelty because this comes from the age were JRPG meant 'I'm taking all your time and punishing you for ever having it to begin with.'

When it comes to the optional dungeons in the Labyrinth of Amala I was much more forgiving about the crazed puzzle navigation because they both felt more fitting over there and, crucially, never dragged themselves out to painful degrees. In fact, the later Kalpas become curiously more straightforward as they went along- as though someone recognised that the challenge of the bosses themselves was the actual draw of the gameplay and the journey to face them should be a bit more direct. God knows what possessed the original team to decree the path to the final bosses should be an invisible mousetrap hellhole- but I hope they learnt to temper themselves in future titles. Gimmick dungeons are cool, frustrating puzzles for the sake of time wasting is not. 

But speaking of Amala- these is an entire network of optional bosses and dungeon unique to the rerelease editions of the game that all really amp up the challenge at the various points of the narrative in which they're introduced. The menorah holders all, alongside the boy and his maid, provide perhaps the clearest questions and answers in the game and thus drew me more to their story than to the overarching main plot. This alone makes it somewhat contentious with fans of the original game, who see the inclusion of an alternative route through this plot as an imposition upon its themes and values- but personally I like the agency of taking this world of choice and giving the player their own place within it, instead of just expecting their capitulation to another's dream as the core game does- even if this alternative route is, in some ways, a manipulation from the mind of the master deceiver themselves.

In these alternative optional routes throughout the game comes a unique companion, which makes the only non-demon character in the game that you can actually recruit and thus oddly the only friend it feels like you can make in the desolate world. Within the Japanese version of the game that friend is a cameo from the Devil Summoners games, and in the European version they are... Dante from Devil May Cry? I'm not kidding- for some insane reason Dante is a character within this game and his inclusion is as random as that sounds. The new voice acting introduced with the Nocturne re-release also brings the modern Dante rather than the DMC 2 boring version of him that would have been accurate to the time of the release too- so the man has some charisma! Another controversial addition for a community that seems to recoil in the face of change- but I enjoyed seeing a oddly fitting addition from across franchises in this world of demons. (I also very much appreciated his Stinger sword which cuts through the type system!) 

Speaking of- yes Nocturne's recent Steam Release is slightly different from even the original re-release editions all those years ago in a couple of interesting ways. In one, the game comes with new voice acting from a cast that are more modern than the original game was- providing a performance that was actually solidly good and broke my brain for a time as I couldn't reconcile an early 2000's JRPG with quality localisation acting that talented. As it turns out the original was voice acting free which- again- means that series veterans harrumph and grumble that the new voice acting 'ruins the mood' of the original. Because at this point they'd complain if the game ran better. (You can mute the voices if it kills your mood that much.) More pressingly, however, some of the dialogue was also retranslated- which leads to some straight anachronistic moments were terms such as "Simp" are dropped- actually undercutting the mood. Otherwise the port is pretty solid. 

As you've likely deduced if you've any knowledge of this game, I ended up pursuing the path of the True Demon throughout my hard playthrough and, honestly, that was kind of a masochist choice on my end. Like I had to prove something for my own mistake of choosing 'hard'. What I willingly subjected myself to was something of the alternative path that takes something of a detached look at the conflict between the various reasons that seek to shape reality- whilst assaulting you with some of the difficult bosses that the game has to offer. Menorah holding horsemen of a vaguely apocalyptic nature, these damage wall roadblocks demanded full mastery of every tactic available to you at that level in order to progress- pushing you up to the wall in a way that not many other RPGs make too much of a habit of.

This is also the way into my favourite dungeon of Amrita, even if they did suffer from the most confusing 'checkpoint' system possible alongside an honestly comically annoying 'minigame' travelling between each Kalpa. As brutal as it can be I think the Megaten combat works at it's absolute best when you are pushed up against a wall using every tactic to get ahead- that's when the veneer of 'just affinity hunting' falls away and actual strategic planning takes hold- managing buffs, baiting reactions, sometimes even drawing aggro when possible. At it's best you'll get a tough duel you'll feel like you earned- at worst you'll bang your head against a wall of perpetual bad luck.

The final boss of this mode had me sweating even up against the level cap- which is startling when compared to my other experiences playing ATLUS games. I was up against a enemy so unpredictable that I literally no idea whether any of his attacks would magically oneshot me every turn- and don't get me started with his health pool- good god! But in the manner of all the best challenging games out there- I relished that fight because of how unfathomable of a hill it seemed to climb, I relish the achievement of having overcome it and I respect the ending it gave me. Even if some might say that the True Demon Ending is the least conclusive out of all the endings. Such as me- kind of felt like a beginning.

Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne is a master of atmosphere draped across the widely successful demon-collecting and affinity hunting framework that has ensured ATLUS' continued success across all of these years. It does suffer a lot of pain points of a game of it's age however- lacking the neatness of well presented narrative events the game coasts by on admittedly powerful vibes and a fascinating scenario- which do a lot of heavy lifting but don't relieve all sins. Also, a lot of Nocturne's difficulty is tied to the ever annoying 'explain nothing to the player' style of presentation which keeps an artificial mystery around what is otherwise a decently fun JRPG monster collector-style game. They don't even explain what moon cycles are let alone how oddly important they'll decide to be or not be on random systems throughout the game.

Otherwise challenge is deferred to genuinely tough bosses or frustrating gauntlets of dungeons that stretch on for what feels like hours at a time. As is the case with many old RPGs, however, often that difficulty devolves into cheese. Be it a roadblock enemy who dumps moves of a higher tier than you can currently do- basically forcing you to go off and grind up 10 or so levels, or a stalker boss who literally follows you around the map and forces you into a boss fight you can't win. There's that one guy who spams 'Beast Eye' giving himself unlimited turns, (that was because of a bug, but it still sucked) and then the moments when you're literally at the whims of an AI's random choice whether it decides to kill you. Nocturne all too often slips into the worst side of challenge and not always in a way that feels worthwhile on the otherside.

At the very least the rerelease came with exclusive grind dungeons to make up for this. Two unique areas, one offering money grinding and the other EXP grinding, and both in a way that isn't just cheating- it's time saving. You still have to go through a ton of successive fights, you still have to deal with an unforgiving drop rate calculation and you'll still be spending considerable grinding time- you just don't have to spend tens of hours in order to grind up for the big finale bosses. Well... not multiple tens of hours at least... Behind the frustration the general quality of Megaten game systems holds the game up just enough, which is why I bet a Normal playthrough wouldn't be too bad at all for the average, non psychotic, player.

SMT had a reputation in my head ever since I heard the first game was literally about tyrannical order and uncaged chaos symbolised in heaven versus hell- and I'm glad to see that even by their third iteration the franchise was finding nuanced and interesting ways to subvert those universal black and white conflicts. In terms of gameplay there have definitely been better Megaten games since and I don't believe there's any special spark of SMT 3's take on the formula that draws my heart it's direction. But for World and scenario, atmosphere and mood, narrative and pathos- I'd say that Nocturne is worth at least one run through. Maybe even a watch through if you can't stand the prospect of it's painfully tuned difficulty settings. Where does that sit on a grade scale? It's a difficult one. In the moment I would have probably graded lower but there is a certain fondness the game has left me with in the weeks since- so lets call it an even B+ Grade. Above the average, but lacking the overall mark of quality that higher grades denote. Still, I enjoyed my time and have moved on to other SMT and general Megaten games since to see if any one gets the balance just right- I have high hopes in 'SMT V: Vengeance'!