Role-playing games of all kinds tend to be games where you play as a noble, stoic hero on a grand quest to save the world.
Which makes it all the more refreshing when we see a game like Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne arrives on the scene to tip the genre on its head.
Even though its name is ‘Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne’, this is actually the fourth game in the main series of Shin Megami Tensei games by Atlus.
However, the last game in the series to release was ‘Shin Megami Tensei: If...’, not counting the games in the Persona miniseries, or even the Devil Summoner miniseries, having released on the Super Famicom 10 years prior to the release of Nocturne.
And in the here and now, Shin Megami Tensei - whilst still relatively obscure in the eyes of mainstream gamers who go for a quick match on Call of Duty - has become a powerhouse of a franchise, spawning many media works.
Nocturne was the first game in the main SMT series to release in both America and Europe, with a port of the original SMT released on iOS devices, and a sequel - Shin Megami Tensei IV - released on 3DS.
As of recent, the reach of the Shin Megami Tensei franchise has been hailed as one of the saviours of the JRPG genre, for its style, gameplay, and mature theming.
You play as a student who, on his day off, decided to tag along with a couple of friends to visit their teacher at Shinjuku Medical Centre. Upon arrival, you and your friends feel concern and confusion at the lack of any activity in the hospital.
Eventually, you find the teacher you’re looking for, but unfortunately, you also find a man who, for whatever reason, wants to kill you for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Your own teacher then explains vaguely what is going on atop the roof of the hospital, but ultimately to no avail as the world, all of a sudden, ends due to an event known as the Conception.
Eeyup. The world ends before the game starts proper. Ain’t that a kick in the head.
But because you were in the hospital, you are still alive......except, you’re no longer human. A young man and old woman force you to ingest Magatama, turning you into a demon.
Your fate is sealed - your quest is not to save the world, as the world has invariably ended. It’s gone. Finished.
Or is it? The remnants of Tokyo are still very much explorable, even though a considerable portion of Tokyo has folded in on itself to become a Vortex World.
You must explore the wastes and find out how anyone and anything are even surviving, all the while defeating and recruiting demons to join your ranks, as well as thinking about how you would like to revive the world.
Rule it with an iron fist? Destroy it permanently? Revert the world to its original form? The choice is up to you.
The story for this game, of course, is basically an end-of-the-world scenario (go figure), but the way in which it is told is not only different for the SMT series as a whole, but is perhaps one of the more original takes on an apocalypse scenario.
The game’s story is more powerful than a simple “oh, the world’s ended; live with it, bitch” story, since it has that feeling of dread, though you have that feeling of power at the same time...perhaps enough power to make a change in the world.
The game has multiple endings, as I eluded to earlier, bringing in that feeling of essentially infinite possibility. Do you want the world to be reborn as it once was? Do you want to stop the cycle of death and rebirth? You’re given the choice of how you want to treat the world by way of the actions you take throughout the game.
Now, onto the gameplay. Shin Megami Tensei games generally share similar gameplay styles to one another.
Before I begin with describing the gameplay in full, the game I would like to use as a comparison in terms of gameplay is Pokemon. Weird, eh? Because Pokemon’s totally demonic and stuff.
This is a dungeon crawling JRPG of sorts, where many of the dungeons are connected to an extent to one another.This allows for access to different areas whenever you’ve at least visited them, through the use of Terminals. More on that later.
There are two kinds of map you can explore. The first kind is that of landmarks and cities. These usually tend to be labyrinthine, but their designs are pretty easy to remember, and if you do get lost, you can always refer to your map if you forget where it is you’re supposed to be headed.
The other kind of map is the world map. This is your segmented overworld of sorts. It is divided into six large areas, in correlation to their location in the vortex world.
Within each area are different landmarks and cities, and each area is only accessible between one another through the use of the Amala Link.
The Amala Link is accessible via terminals, linking to other terminals that have been used already. This allows for a faster medium of travel than having to walk all the way back to the area you want to go to.
Terminals also allow you to save progress. You can find normal Terminals all in several areas of the game, but within dungeons you’ll also find Small Terminals, which are also save points.
Instead of being connected to the Amala Network, they are instead connected to the larger Terminal which sits at the entrance of the area, allowing you to return to the entrance if you so want, but you will have to go all the way back in yourself.
The heads-up display whilst exploring dungeons and exploring the wastes are similar to one another.
Going in a clockwise direction and starting from the top-right corner, we have the current location, the compass/encounter warning, your region of the Vortex World (on the world map only), and the phase of Kagutsuchi. A little more on this later.
The compass is perhaps the most useful tool on the HUD, as it details not only where you’re facing/looking, it also informs you roughly when you’ll encounter another enemy.
When the inside of the compass glows a light bluish-white colour, you’re in the clear, and there are no enemies to encounter.
When it glows green, you’re a distance away from an encounter, so you should be fine for now.
When it glows amber, be cautious, as you’re getting closer to the encounter. And when it glows red, get ready.
The battle screen introduces a slightly old-school feel to this game, in that it is a turn-based RPG, in similar vein to Final Fantasy. Where the comparison ends, however, is in the overall battle system itself.
A few SMT games utilise a gameplay system known as the ‘Press Turn System’, which, simply put, rewards efficiency and quick battles and punishes mistakes and bad moves.
On the top right of the screen, there are icons. To simplify things, we’ll refer to these as points. These points are correlative to how many members there are in your party. If there are three party members present in battle, you get three points.
If you attack an enemy with something they are weak against, or if you land a critical hit, you use half of a point. Keep exploiting weaknesses and landing critical hits, and you can lengthen your turn in battle almost twofold.
If, however, you miss an enemy or they void the attack, you lose the two points that are ready to be used next.
And if you attack an enemy with something they absorb or reflect, it will automatically end your turn.
In battle, you - the main character - are pretty much the centrepiece of it all. If you are killed in whichever way, it’s a game over. And you will see the game over screen a fair amount during this game, so be prepared for a ball-wrenching experience.
As the main character, you can not only attack demons, you can also talk to them, use items and summon demons in your stock. Attacking demons and killing them attains you both experience and money, and occasionally items. The harder the enemy, the more you gain, so if you need to grind a few levels, try finding an area that’s possibly a bit out of your comfort zone.
Let’s face it; you’re going to be out of your comfort zone a considerable amount duting the game anyway, so make yourself at home.
There is a plethora of different moves you can perform in battle, and these all serve a significant purpose. Physical attacks, elemental attacks, instant kill attacks, healing abilities, magic point swaps, status ailments, buffs, debuffs......
And every one of these kinds of attacks can make or break a battle, especially boss battles.
Just be careful, because whilst an enemy may be weak to a specific attack, it could well miss, and you could well pay dearly for that.
Also, make sure you utilise buffs and debuffs to the fullest. Whilst in many other RPGs they prove to be rather useless, buff and debuffs can and will turn the tides of battle.
If an enemy uses an attack buff on themselves, immediately try to take the enemy down, or use an attack or accuracy debuff or defense buff so as to save your bacon.
As I mentioned earlier, you can communicate with demons you fight. This is the main way you will attain more demons, and this is vital, as it makes the game much less of a drag.
However, make sure you’re careful with what you do in regards to communicating with demons, because if you’re not careful, they could attack you.
Sometimes, you might get unlucky and they don’t come with you, resulting in them leaving. On occasion, however, they will drop an item or some money before leaving you.
There are instances where you will not be able to communicate with demons, however.
Kagutsuchi ties in to this. Kagutsuchi is notably similar to that of the moon phase system in older SMT games and even the original Persona.
If Kagutsuchi is in its Full phase, any demons encountered will be mesmerised by Kagutsuchi and will ignore any attempt at communication, and will simply focus on slaughtering you.
The other instance is if the enemy is a boss, though this is at least makes sense.
As I eluded to earlier, this game IS HARD. Really hard. And that’s on the Normal difficulty setting, which is the easiest difficulty you can play on. There is a Hard difficulty, which I daren’t imagine...
And it only gets harder thanks to specific additions to the version of the game us Westerners also got.
The original SMT: Nocturne released in Japan in 2003, with an updated version released in 2004 titled in Japan as the ‘Maniax Edition’, and it became the version of the game that would be released in the west.
It included more demons, an entire new dungeon, an entirely new ending, and a cross-company cameo between Atlus and Capcom.
Character and demon designer and creative director Kazuma Kaneko assisted Capcom with their work on Devil May Cry 3 by designing the Devil Trigger forms of Dante and Vergil.
This, incidentally, brought Dante into the world of Nocturne as not only a demon you can control, but also as a boss...uh-oh...I’ll talk about a certain kind of enemy that Dante falls into in just a moment......
The special dungeon you can access is known as the Labyrinth of Amala, and is separated into five levels known as Kalpa.
Near the start of the game, you are greeted to an old man in a wheelchair and a woman dressed in black. They permit you access to the Labyrinth of Amala if you agree, and you are given a Candelabrum. Once you are given a Candelabrum, you are a sitting target for Fiends.
Fiends are special bosses. And they usually appear when you are least prepared for them.
Before you encounter them, you are given a warning, with the Candelabrum flickering wildly. This is your fight or flight signal.
In certain circumstances, you can avoid Fiend battles, but it’s more of a coin flip than actually escaping from the battle before it begins.
And if you aren’t even remotely ready, you are in for an absolute world of pain and misery.
Each Fiend carries their own Candelabrum, and in order to progress to further levels of the Labyrinth of Amala, you are required to collect every one of the Candelabra.
Fiends are hard enemies as a whole. It’s almost a given you will die against them on your first try without a clue about what it is you have to do.
In terms of strategies, however, they tend not to be any different from other bosses in the game; they tend to have some vulnerabilities and some stuff they are resilient to, and as such you have to exploit these vulnerabilities and you just have to adjust your party.
As for adjusting your party, there are quite a few variables that you can adjust.
In the game’s pause menu, you can go to several different submenues: ‘Item’, ‘Skill’, ‘Party’, ‘Magatama’, ‘Status’, ‘Config’, and ‘Load’.
Selecting ‘Item’ allows you to explore your inventory, displaying what recovery and usable items you have on you, as well as any key items, and even the gems you collect. More on that later.
‘Skill’ allows you to use any abilities that are possessed by your demons. Some of the skills you can use are based around recovery, however some of the abilities available have their uses outside of battle.
‘Party’ allows you to change how your party of demons is arranged. You can pick who is in your party, as well as release your demons if you so want...but why would you do that?
‘Magatama’ brings you to a screen containing a table of sorts, containing 24 spaces, some of which may be occupied by creatures known as Magatama. Each Magatama has their own properties, and they each have different strengths and weaknesses to certain kinds of attacks, and ingesting them gives you those strengths and weaknesses for the time you ingest it.
‘Status’ shows you the condition of you and your demons, as well as all the skills you have.
‘Config’ gives you options such as vibration settings and menu selection memory (remembering which option you picked for whatever and using that as the default).
Lastly, ‘Load’ loads up a prior save. Simple, really.
As for the landmarks you can access in the game, you can find the Amala Link Terminals, the Cathedral of Shadows, Rag’s Jewelry, the Junk Shop, and the Fountain of Life.
I already covered what the Amala Link Terminals are and what they do earlier on.
The Cathedral of Shadows allows you to perform Demon Fusion. Go to a Cathedral, and you can select two demons you want to fuse, and provided you are at the right level to fuse them, you can fuse.
There is also a second form of fusion, known as Sacrificial Fusion. The Sacrificial Fusion can only be performed when Kagutsuchi is in its Full state. It allows you to perform a normal fusion, but by sacrificing a third demon, any power that demon had is transferred to the fused demon, however it doesn’t determine what demon comes out as a result.
As for other shops, Rag’s Jewelry is a shop in which you can exchange gems you pick up for a wealth of different items such as rare healing items, and even demons, such as Elemental demons and Mitama demons.
As for the Junk Shop, this is where you’ll buy a good number of things to assist you, such as Revival Beads, Medicine, and the like. You can also buy Magatama from certain Junk Shops, but they’re usually there for when you get enough money.
Lastly, the Fountain of Life. There are a considerable number of these located around the world. Using these, you can revive, heal, and remove curses from you and your demons, at a cost depending on the severity of your condition.
I think it’s safe to say that the gameplay as a whole is amazingly complex, yet simple enough for any JRPG aficionado to pick up and play as and when.
It also provides the depth the Shin Megami Tensei franchise is known for; summoning and recruiting demons, traversing all manner of different dungeons, and difficult gameplay.
In the case of Nocturne, however, as I mentioned before, this game is really hard. In fact, it’s harder than a number of more recent Shin Megami Tensei games, almost to the point of ridiculousness.
It’s not an easy game, and in fact can turn away many people who want a reasonably easy game to play. It’s not a bad thing for a game to have challenge, but it can feel like it’s alienating to some.
One quirky thing about exploring dungeons and cities is the controls.
The camera is situated right behind the Demi-Fiend. How do you control it? The right analogue stick? Yes, actually......well, sort of.
The right analogue stick controls the camera, but only turns the camera to a right angle of the Demi-Fiend’s facing direction. And whilst you’re doing that, the Demi-Fiend is locked in place, meaning you’ll only really be using that to check different paths before you go down them.
Instead, to properly control the camera, you will use the L1 and R1 buttons, or you can move the Demi-Fiend in the direction you want with the left analogue stick, with controls not too dissimilar to that of the Zone of the Enders games.
This game’s visual style is one of the biggest selling points, however.
The graphics in game are cel-shaded, giving them a slightly anime-esque appearance. However, in the case of this game, the cel-shading helps add a little bit of colour to this game.
Usually, post-apocalyptic games tend to have rather bland colour palletes, ergo Fallout. However, this game utilises a lot of reds, blues, and faint bits of yellow to create a strikingly visual experience.
Yeah, it looks more anime-esque, but the Shin Megami Tensei series has always, at its core, been slightly anime-esque, albeit a more realistic style, as opposed to the whole wide-eyed fayre.
Graphically, the game doesn’t do much to showcase the potential of the PlayStation 2, much unlike Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.
However, whilst this game doesn’t have much going on in the graphics department, the artistic style of this game, coupled with how cool the game looks, as well as how forboding the Labyrinth of Amala looks, join together to create an unforgetably great looking game on the PlayStation 2, despite the not massively impressive technical specs of the graphics.
That being said, most of the models appear to have an unusually high polygon count for the PlayStation 2. To be honest, I didn’t think the PlayStation 2 could handle this level of polygon numbers on the same screen at a time.
The polycount helps character models and props and everything looks their best.
One other thing of note are the character, demon and environment designs.
Kazuma Kaneko, the character and demon designer of the Megami Tensei games from the get-go, brought to us some really cool looking characters and demons throughout the years.
For Nocturne, however, it felt somewhat like the demon designes were toned down a little bit, in comparison to games gone by.
However, whilst the demons didn’t look quite as impressive, one thing that hasn’t fallen are the character designs.
The character designs, especially for the other human characters, all look visually different from one another, not only in their general appearance, but also their clothing. You kind of get the feeling that if you saw those people on the street, you wouldn’t feel weird in seeing them there, since their clothing, whilst distinctive, is still recognisable without being too outlandish.
As for the Demi-Fiend, his design comprises of some crazy tattoos, as well as a horn extending from the nape of his neck. Granted, he also wears short skin-tight trousers and a pair of trainers, but his tattoos glow in the dark It’s rather crazy.
If the texture for the Demi-Fiend’s character model was a higher resolution, it would probably look even better.
And the environmental designs are where the game shines the brightest.
The best examples of great looking environments include the Labyrinth of Amala, the Mantra Headquarters, the Amala Network, and Kabukicho Prison. Each area exudes an aura about it, and gives off a cool style to it. The design of the environments scream brilliance, to the point of adding to the already brilliant visual style by being striking, memorable, and recognisable upon entry.
I could rave on about the game’s visual style, but I’ll leave it at that. I guess I’ll carry on to the game’s audio, which is...largely good.
The game’s soundtrack was composed primarily by Shoji Meguro, Toshiko Tasaki and Kenichi Tsuchiya, with some of the tracks being reprised from the original Shin Megami Tensei, whose soundtrack was composed by Tsukasa Masuko.
Admittedly, the soundtrack isn’t massively memorable. There are, however, a good number of tracks that are overall largely memorable and, perhaps, catchy.
The best songs in the game tend, largely, to be battle themes, and as is usually the case for RPGs, the final battle is the best in terms of music. This is no exception.
The music uses a lot of different styles, such as emotional or mysterious piano pieces, highly-active electric guitars (which tend to be a signature with Shoji Meguro’s work), and music synonymous with demonic horror.
The game has no voice acting, which is unfortunate. I would have loved to have seen this game get some sort of voice acting to it.
The game, however, did get a Drama CD adaptation, which basically retells the game’s story, but with voice acting.
It would have been great to see the two mediums combine into one, so we can see this game fully realised in a mostly perfect state.
The general sound design is pretty solid, featuring a number of somewhat creepy moments, despite the game not being a horror game, as such.
The overall ambience of the game is dark and murky, and the sound design and backing music showcase this pretty well, and coupled with the visual style, it makes an atmospheric experience that is rare in JRPGs.
For similar games to this, I would like to point you in the direction of games in, technically, the same series.
One such game is Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga, the first of two games a miniseries which plays more like a tradition JRPG compared to SMT: Nocturne.
Digital Devil Saga utilises the Press Turn System which Nocturne also uses, and has a mature story and style just like Nocturne.
Unlike Nocturne, however, it has just one ending which carries on over to Digital Devil Saga 2, has no demon recruitment system, and has fully voice-acted cutscenes.
Another game which this game is similar to is...and I can imagine people being confused as to what I am about to say......Pokemon.
Yes. Pokemon. As previously mentioned. And admittedly, it’s with one particular mechanic: the demon recruitment mechanic.
Shin Megami Tensei was the game that brought about recruiting enemies you would fight normally and/or capturing them to fight in your ranks, and it was Pokemon that popularised it.
However, you had better be ready for a severe spike in difficulty in contrast between Pokemon to SMT, because it’s ridiculous.
Play this game if you want a different kind of JRPG, or if you’re burned out on traditional JRPG fayre, and want a darker tone to your RPG overall against the norm.
Don’t play it, however, if you can’t handle difficult games. Yeah, you can level up a lot, but Atlus games as a whole aren’t particularly friendly towards newcomers to JRPGs. It also has a demon which looks like a penis, so...if that bothers you...
Ultimately, this is a brutally difficult, dark and serious game which changes the playing field for JRPGs and their styles. If you want a dark JRPG, SMT: Nocturne is what you will want to pick up.