"The comfort of death will come for men and demons alike..." RPG masochists rejoice!
User Rating: 9.1 | Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne PS2
This is without a doubt the best PS2 RPG I've played. My only major complaint is the excessive random encounters. I've never liked random battles, in fact, many times I've sworn I'll never play another game which falls back on this cheap, time-extending tactic. I'm glad I was weak and bought this game despite knowing full well it was loaded with these. Yes, they are a nuisance, and yes the game would be a hell of a lot better without them, but the battle and demon fusing systems are just so great, the gameplay challenging, and the setting intriguing, I enjoyed myself despite them. "The comfort of death will come for men and demons alike..." Be prepared to see these words many, many times, especially if you play on the hard setting as I did. This game will punish you. It's fortunate the game has such a cool looking 'game over' screen. It helps ease the pain at times. Seriously though, I think a big part in what makes this game enjoyable to me is this extreme difficulty. Yes, I'm one of those nutjobs who enjoy running around in circles leveling up, and leveling up, until you have just enough strength to squeak by that insanely difficult boss. The thing about an extreme challenge in an RPG, is it makes you actually care when you level up. It makes you care when you learn a new spell or find a new weapon. Now SMT: Nocturne has no weapons or armor to find, but it more than makes up for it with the simple appearing, but incredibly deep demon fusing system, and thanks to the difficulty level, you'll be forced to discover all it's intricacies if you're to survive. Every monster you encounter in the game can be persuaded to join your party. Some will require large bribes, others will beg to join you without you even asking. Some will require that you have a certain spell equipped among your party before you can even talk to them. Each type of demon will learn a few different spells or skills as they level up. You can then fuse these demons together to make new demons which will retain some of these skills. I big part of the fun in Nocturne is just seeing all the crazy monsters you can create. The creature design is just great. My only complaint with the fusing system is that you when you fuse a demon, the spells retained from the two component demons will be completely randomized. Essentially what you have to do is select the two (or sometimes 3) demons you wish to fuse and it will give you a list of spells that will be retained if you choose to go through with the fusing. You'll have to keep selecting and un-selecting until you get a list of spells that's to your liking. Simply allowing a manual selection of a certain amount of spells to retain from each demon would have saved me many, many hours. It's fortunate that the battle system is so slick, because as I mentioned, you'll be seeing a lot of it. Everything moves quickly. No drawn out Final Fantasy-style animations here. The key to victory in Nocturne is to exploit your enemies weaknesses to certain spells, and defend against your own. Now that may sound kind of trite. You have to do that in every game right? The difference in Nocturne is that you'll actually be able to attack more times each turn if you find your enemies weakness. You see, each turn, if all four of your characters are alive, you'll have four action points which you can use to ether attack, cast spells, or use items. Each time you exploit a weakness you'll be given an extra action point. Of course it works the other way too. If an enemy is resistant to your attack, you'll lose a point, and if they completely absorb it, you'll lose your entire turn. The same rules apply when enemies attack you, so it's important to have a good variety of resistances among your party (a good trick I found was to fill all eight of my main character's skill slots with resistances). If you play your RPG's primarily for story, then SMT: Nocturne is not the game for you. Although the story is somewhat interesting in it's premise, (the world is destroyed at the beginning of the game, and you'll have fight to choose what the new world that will be created will be like) the fact is, there's just not very much of it. This is an RPG that focuses primarily on gameplay, and personally, I prefer it that way. It's not for everyone, but if you like this kind of game, and you like a good challenge, Nocturne will keep you busy for many, many hours (I clocked in over 90 hours not including my hundreds upon hundreds of deaths).
