As a child who grew up in the heyday of Pokémon and Digimon, Megami Tensei always seemed to me like the next step, and I couldn't even imagine how correct I would be.

It's incredible how here Atlus and their team wanted to do something new for the third game in the series, and they hit the mark so well, so majestically on the first try. If there's a leap in quality like the one from the second Shin Megami Tensei to the third, I personally am unaware of it. Nocturne isn't the template used in the majority of post-Nocturne Megaten for nothing; this formula is particularly amazing, and the Press-Turn System is the most enjoyable thing that has ever come out of JRPGs. All the other systems seem like they play in an inferior and separate league when compared to it.

Of course, it's a game that leans more towards the hardcore side of things, with quite a bit of friction and some completely unfair deaths (Hama and Mudo in this game are kind of OP, aren't they?). But it's cool because it's a series that generally wants you always on the edge, always prepared for the worst, and these games, when made with such quality, become unforgettable experiences. And sometimes it seems like they don't make things like this anymore, on a large scale.

Indeed, there's almost nothing I would change about this experience, in this brutalist visual style that has aged so well, in this absurd pacing that makes the game almost feel like a boss rush, in its minimalist story that makes you think more about each of the reasons. In its soundtrack, in its different guitar solos for each phase of the moon, in its metallic and completely unique vocals with that broken English (although I would have changed the audio quality in the remaster, but that's another story...).

Some things have improved in later games, like choosing fusion skills (thankfully implemented in the remaster), better balance without demons that will carry you through the whole game like the Fiends here, and the audio quality itself. But nothing has really captured the experience as a whole like in Nocturne. And of course, its leap in quality compared to the games before it is out of this world too. Nocturne was my first Megami Tensei, and even though I eventually became a big fan of the series, playing everything Atlus could offer, including spin-offs, nothing has impressed me like it until today. A cult classic for a reason.

Low key katsura hashino should never be allowed to write another game ever again. Every character is either edgelord cringe "philosophical" slop or just an anime stereotype in everything he ever writes. This game is still sick because the fighting is really fun and the dungeons get pretty creative but sometimes feel a bit too labyrinthian and copy-pasted around. This game's shortcomings lie mostly in the boring but all around pretty unobtrusive story that you can mash through easily enough to get back to the fun part. I also think that the game funnels you into using certain demons and has other demons be rpetty much useless or fusion fodder which kind of sucks, so you'll be seeing the same demons over and over in your party between playthroughs unlike something like pokemon where you usually have a lot of freedom in how you structure your team. It's also pretty much mandatory that demi fiend is a physical character which i find annoying. They still do this shit in SMT5 where you're at a huge disadvantage if you chose to do a magic build over physical which is annoying and vice versa in SMT4. End of the day this game is not relevant anymore and they won't fix this stuff cause it won't get remade. Maybe if there was more going on dates with high schoolers and cool awesome nippon defender warrior ramen side quests it would get more attention but it's probably better if they leave it.

Nocturne definitely is not the BEST game ever made, but it very well might be the coolest.

The style with which it oozes can cause one to forgive so, so many things. Many of Nocturne's bosses suck. It's not that they're "too hard", it's that they suck. Some are just too restrictive (Matador, Mot) while others are too reliant on the RNG (Noah), and I KNOW that the instant I say this, some freak is going to start cackling and screeching about how I'm a baby and I should "go back to Persona," so lets get this out of the way right now.

Nocturne is not particularly hard. At all. It isn't even on the higher end of difficulty for SMT unless you're playing on hard and on an older version that limits your control over skill inheritance. I actually found it easier than SMT IV, though part of that is because I played the remaster and A LOT of it is because SMT IV's Smirk mechanic made me hate even booting it up. Auto-game-overing when the protagonist dies is a trivial concern. Even if you've made yourself weak to darkness or light, you can just pop another magatama whenever you want pretty much any null skill you could ever dream of. You can stack points into the demi-fiend's vitality stat all day long and render him practically immortal. Buffs and debuffs are the name of the game, and while this is often held up as some great triumph of Nocturne, this is massively overblown. I have heard over and over again from SMT evangelists that in "most RPGs" stat-changing skills are useless. These people are talking about Final Fantasy, a franchise in which combat is often an afterthought. Dragon Quest has been flying the buff/debuff standard for at least as long as Megaten has, and once Pokemon had some time to sort out their spaghetti code and actually think, Swords Dance and Dragon Dance became the scariest moves in the whole metagame. The idea that SMT, and even more-so Nocturne in specific, single-handedly upended anything about support moves in the world of RPGs is total fallacy... it's just that most people have never actually tried to be good at Pokemon because the games never ask it of them, and few westerners like to acknowledge the existence of Dragon Quest at all.

With that said, it's plain to see that Nocturne hasn't quite yet figured out HOW it wants to design its combat around its buff economy. As things actually stand, almost every random encounter becomes an auto-battle and every boss becomes the same buff and debuff routine. Even if the boss you're up against DOES have BOTH Dekaja AND Dekunda to defend itself from this, (and a staggering number of them do not) there's still a shockingly high probability that they won't bother to use them at all, or won't use them until it is far too late. It generally isn't good for a singular strategy to completely RUN OVER your whole RPG approximately 100% of the time, and especially not one so easily attainable. Nocturne, in fact, feels outright hostile to any other form of play. That in itself is somewhat of a pet peeve of mine, but I don't particularly mind being forced to meet a game on its very specific terms, as long as those terms are actually fun.

In Nocturne these terms are... mostly inoffensive, but not exactly exciting. At least not to me. While this is the first appearance of the fantastic Press Turn system, I've found that most bosses either rolled over and died with no fuss whatsoever, or proved exceptionally annoying for reasons that I would never actually describe as "challenging". Nocturne's combat just does not feel like it has achieved its final form.

Anyway, there's more to Nocturne than its battles, though to be honest I dearly wish that those battles would stop invading the rest of it. The encounter rate in Nocturne is QUITE high, and that's a recipe for disaster in the sadistic labyrinths with which Nocturne presents you. The dungeons are, in a word, mean. This too, is a a frequent staple of more main-line adjacent SMT games, though I respect it. There is an ancient Dungeons and Dragons player within me who can in fact chill with a death maze full of stupid bullshit... as long as it's funny, and as long as I'm not being constantly harassed and disoriented by monotonous battles. Sometimes Nocturne achieves "funny". Much of the time it does not.

It's just... man, when you look at some of the STUFF that's in this game, and how it's all presented, and you listen to that MUSIC, it's like no criticism matters. I can sit here all day and poke holes to explain why I'm not so irresistibly compelled by Nocturne, but it's just SUCH a luxurious Experience For Freaks. It's got true artistic clout, even if much of its philosophy amounts only to insufferable right-wing extremism. It's a piece of real culture, and it deserves its due respect. Am I glad that I finally got around to playing Nocturne? Absolutely. Do I want to play through half of the game about five more times to get all of the endings? No... I can't say that I do.

No está muy mal

La historia es creativa pero minimalista y sin mucho desarrollo, el arte y la atmósfera son magníficas y dan una excelente inmersión.

El diseño de niveles es malísimo y perezoso, y bajo la justificación de que es para vender la sensación de hostilidad, yo digo que hay otras maneras de hacerlo que no impliquen pasillos eternos, vacíos y dar vueltas en círculos para moverse a la zona de al lado.Un buen ejemplo son Dark Souls y Rain World

Las filosofías de las distintas rutas son básicas y extremas hasta el ridículo, y a diferencia de lo que (imagino?) que intenta el juego no te hacen pensar, sino que son más alternativas extremas al status quo, presentadas en cinemáticas de menos de 2 minutos. No se desarrollan fuera de eso

Los personajes son minimalistas y no tienen mucho más allá de la ideología que representan.

El gameplay es excelente y desafiante, con su propia manera de ser que lo eleva encima de muchísimos otros jrpgs, pero con el estilo artístico es el único punto notable del juego. Pero esto es un videojuego no una película, y el gameplay se lleva 3 estrellas para él solo (2 por el diseño de niveles).

No se acerca a ser uno de los mejores rpgs de la historia, pero la originalidad que tiene y las cosas que hace bien merecen la pena

7/10

First, we wanted to draw attention to the fact that this game is a true successor to the Shin Megami Tensei series. III, however, is not only a continuation, but also a new Shin Megami Tensei, completely different from its predecessors, so we added the subtitle to imply that this is the beginning of a new Shin Megami Tensei.
- Okadu Kouji, on the title of Nocturne

It's interesting how much of the perception of the Shin Megami Tensei stems from Nocturne. When you ask the average JRPG fan what they think SMT is like, they'll usually bring up a lot of tropes from nocturne. Ideas like “the games don’t really have a story”, or “the characters aren’t important”, and potentially most infamously, “megaten so hard matador red capote dante lol”. The last one isn’t really important right now, but the first two are curious (and I think, detrimental) statements because they just aren’t true.
For all intents and purposes, Nocturne is a black sheep within the mainline smt pantheon. That’s not to say it’s a bad game, far from it, but what I mean is that it’s pretty far removed from its peers in a lot of ways. It really was a new Shin Megami Tensei, tearing down what was before in order to be reborn. It was the franchise’s own conception.


So, Kouji and Kaneko were not lying, Nocturne really is a whole different beast from its predecessors. Everything you knew about the series with demon recruitment, alignment, non fantasy setting, throw it all out. Nocturne instead takes the franchise in a bold new direction as a puzzle game. An odd choice, but not a bad one.
Instead of a human main character, you play as a demon. You’re trapped in a maze in which you need to push blocks around and into holes in order to escape. The graphics couldn’t be simpler, but they’re a great adaptation of the super nintendo game’s aesthetic in 3D. While the premise couldn’t be more simple, the puzzles become quite taxing very quickly, with many citing the game’s difficulty as one of the core parts of its identity. I think the difficulty is an artistic decision, with the playable Jack O’ Lantern’s unfailing determination serves almost to the player. He cannot ever die, and he can always rewind his mistakes. Though wordless, it is a powerful story about the unshakable will of life, and how it will always prevail in one way or another. No matter how difficult, Jack O’ Lantern’s, and by extension, the player’s victory is only a matter of time.
There’s also a weird minigame that’s some turn based crap but I don’t think anyone really cares about that. I barely played it lol.

Across every platform I've played this game on i think my favourite is probably PS2, or the Maniax Chronicles version with raidou since i like him more than dante. I've beaten this game a ton of times and each time I find myself noticing more and more that bugs me with it. it use to be my favourite of all time but i think that's gotta be DDS1 and DDS2 tied now. Nocturne is still my favourite mainline SMT game without a doubt but it's definitely flawed in the sense that the game is difficult to navigate without some sort of guide or previous SMT knowledge. I also find that the game's limited number of viable demons has each play through feeling similar to the last. later games mostly fix this issue with i think SMTV being the best in that aspect overall (might be the only thing that game is the best at) but honestly nocturne is still one of my favourite games of all time because of the way it plays and sounds and looks. It really resonates with me.

What a surprise, the MegaTen game that launched the series into being a cult classic thing in the US and has been universally praised in JRPG circles for the last 20 years lived up to the hype and kicks total ass.

This is a direct upgrade from SMT4 in basically every way, so much so that this could have been sold to me as the game that came after and I would have believed it. Better demon recruiting systems, better overworld, better presentation, better dungeon design. This is still to this day basically the ideal and quintessential SMT game, not my favorite but the one that the series should probably strive to be more like.

Some really fun boss encounters, those last two at the end were absolutely wonderful. Has a pretty reasonable difficulty curve aside from a couple moments, to the point where I actually think this is still a good entry point into the series.

Only downside is that the story is kinda basic I guess. It does what it sets out to do, it just doesn't set out to do a whole lot.