Nocturne is such an immersive experience, I always feel a strong sense of isolation and danger at every moment and like I'm really fending for myself in that treacherous ruined world. It has my favorite turn based combat system of all time, which has so many possibilties that it makes every other JRPG I play feel slightly disappointing. With the way buffs work there's rarely ever a need to truly grind, if you bring a good strategy you can win, at least when doing the normal endings. There are countless memorable and epic boss battles with easily the most consistent lineup in the Megatens I've played. Everything about the game from aesthetics to concepts to soundtrack is just so metal and brutal and raw. Even when it's really putting me through my paces or beating me down again and again, I'm never too frustrated for long because another idea occurs to me and something awesome happens again. I first completed it on the remaster on TDE, and it probably goes without saying that this PS2 version has better moodier lighting. This run I skipped the Amala Labyrinth entirely and felt the vanilla content had a much better flow and variety to it, but TDE has some of the best boss fights and extreme difficulty too so it's worth trying it once. I just adore this game :)

confident and self-assured, nocturne takes a risk and diverges from the style established in the classic, genre-defining SNES games and gives up the cyberpunk flair for unsettling, contemporary atmosphere laced in a rich hard rock sound. instead of demon summoning programs and makeshift blade runner-esque technology, demi-fiend finds himself injected and violated by lucifer himself, given nothing but a vague motive to direct the vortex world as an ubermensch-type figure. the protagonist has biological ties to this new world now, and he can't just look away from it -- the marks of a demon are all over his body.

nocturne's difficulty and unforgiving nature redefined the perception of shin megami tensei as a whole: since nocturne, this is a series with high risk-reward combat that paints desolate scenarios the player will find themselves barely scraping by through. the original SMT presented this well through plot, but nocturne was the first to utilize gameplay mechanics to reinforce the series' brutality.

nocturne isn't a joyless, humorless edgelord game either. throughout my entire replay, the main thing that stood out were all of the unique NPCs and optional bits of dialogue that helped flesh out the world. whether it's just hearing random lost souls talk about tangentially related subjects or demons with genuinely clever quips and jokes, nocturne's world is by no means devoid of personality and charm.

i stand by the game being a bit too unforgiving to first-time players that don't know what they're doing. there's no way to know which way is "correct" for a good demi-fiend build, and which magatamas you should be grinding out until it's too late. you can end up making the game as a whole significantly harder for yourself if you put too many stats into ag or lu. demon fusion discourages experimentation because of how damn pricy it is early/mid game, forcing a player to stick with potentially very suboptimal demons or grind their ass off for money.

but with a little nudge in the right direction, nocturne is a perfectly manageable and rewarding experience that respects the player's intelligence and feels great to progress in. every boss, every dungeon, every tough random encounter makes you feel fucking incredible, and that's a feeling that nothing quite nails but this series.

On the final boss my demon trumpeter used the move holy melody, which is a move that fully heals the mp and hp of the lowest health person in the battle, enemies included. I assumed the final boss was still around above half health and I needed to heal someone below a quarter health. The move targeted the final boss and somehow missed, just not doing anything. I think that moment alone took 10 years off of my life for the pure shock of almost healing the final boss to full. I killed him on that run and I think about that moment a lot. I was streaming the fight and I think everyone else was equally as confused. This game rocks.

It's really interesting to think that Atlus apparently wasn't thinking about continuing their mainline Shin Megami Tensei series after the completion of If. That explains a fair bit about why this game, in a lot of ways, feels like a reboot of the series. This is also not to forget that the team wanted to make this game the best it could be and not miss any marks in its potential. Generally speaking, this is a goal most developers have, but it's not uncommon to see pitfalls in the end result because of missing time, skills, and the like. Nocturne was fortunately afforded all of these, and so with its lengthy period of conception and development, its small team made way for a game that's near-perfect to me in a lot of ways. It still has a few slight issues, but none that I can really hold against it.

In fact, it's a little tricky to put into words what I really like about this game outside of the excellent gameplay. The game at a lot of points feels more akin to an introverted experience that one might keep to themselves than one that can be broken down in a myriad fashion and shouted from the rooftops. Much of that comes from the deliberate atmosphere that the game has and I really adore it for that; more games ought to have this sense of comforting isolation. Some of the other SMT games do have it to some degree, but this one is the most overt out of the ones I have played thus far. It also makes jokes related to this game an all the more apt juxtaposition, like this ad for it G4TV once aired.

SMT games did struggle to keep gameplay fresh for a little bit. New entries during the fifth generation still boiled down to the simple demon summoning and fusion mechanics with standard turn-based gameplay that maybe had some odd alterations mixed in (see Devil Summoner with the loyalty system). Compared to what Final Fantasy was doing with each entry then, it made the series look a little barebones in comparison. However, Nocturne introduced the press turn system which has become a mainstay for the mainline games; seeing some additional use in that mobile game DX2 and the Digital Devil Saga games as well. Maybe it's a little weird to get the hang of initially, but that confusion shouldn't last long. Fundamentally, your entire party has a shared set of turns they can use, and certain outcomes can extend or reduce how long the player phase goes on for. Normally this would just be one turn per party member, but you can get fancier than that. Things like passing a turn, getting a critical hit, or getting at an enemy's weakness will count as half of a turn letting you move an additional time. On the other hand, having moves miss, be reflected, drained, or nullified will use up more than one turn; sometimes all of them. There's a little more nuance to it besides that, but in the end it's a rather simple idea that can lead to really fun (or devastating) outcomes. It all depends on how you've built your team and strategize. Well, mostly, there's still the standard randomness typically seen in an RPG, of course.

The player character, Demi-fiend, is treated like a blank slate to build stats and moves on. You can choose a stat of his to raise on leveling up, but in addition can also find magatamas throughout that give you certain resistances to swap out and moves to add to your skill list. Some of these are much harder to get than others, but most of the practical ones not so much. Many of them can be bought from stores or by doing a neat side quest, and it's not required to get them all. Though, the final one you get for collecting the first 24 is absolutely busted, despite you getting it really late in the game and having to suffer through the Puzzle Boy minigame to get it. Said minigame is an homage to Atlus' old puzzle series of the same name (in Japan at least). I like those games from the little bit I've played, but you have to do 20 stages in one go and they get very challenging. The option to get back to the normal game and resume later on would have been cool, but that's beside the point. Magatamas are handy, and make for great team customization.

It's also rather common for RPGs to include elements that intend to add complexity to their games that either don't do anything or push the complexity into convolution. A balancing issue between breadth and depth, perhaps. But this game is rather impressive for having this yet never feeling too overwhelming by allowing a variety of strategies to be viable within a rather simple framework. It also makes good use of pretty much every aspect of the game's systems. One that jumps out at me the most (that I hadn't mentioned already) is that auto battle is actually useful. Especially the case since it's speedy and physical attacks are a solid neutral option oftentimes. I'm not the biggest RPG buff, but as far as I know, systems like that are usually not very helpful unless you wanna die. A couple pitfalls come from the Luck stat on the Demi-fiend not being very handy since it just lowers the chance of being cursed by your magatama, which itself is already pretty rare. Demon negotiations are also a bit weaker in this game. They're much more simplified to the point where scoring a new demon to summon hilariously becomes almost complete chance, save for a few instant recruit scenarios (i.e. some skills fare better depending on who is talking to whom). It's pretty funny to joke about, but when you actually have to deal with it and demons start robbing you of your items and macca, not so much. I do think it was nice that they wanted to make it more accessible to newer players, but the overreliance on randomness makes things a bit annoying. Similarly, demon fusion is great as usual, and lets you choose which moves you can transfer, but not really. In order to get some combination of skills you want in a demon, you have to go in and out of the menu until the fusion preview randomly selects the ones you want. I don't think manipulating this was intentional at all though, as they probably would have implemented choosing skills directly if so. So having to game that system slightly is an annoyance, particularly since lower-level skills like Kidnap and Pester are more likely to be selected, and personally I don't want more demons with negotiation skills.

In fact, practically all of the minor quality of life peeves I have are addressed in the Hardtype mod. Cool! It's a much more technical version as well, but it's also still got the random skill transfers which I'd imagine would make me want to vomit a bit when preparing for some of the late-game encounters. The recent remaster does outright fix that though, but it also looks like it has more things that would aggravate me personally, like the battle music still being compressed when it doesn't need to be. Thus, I'll likely still prefer this version over it.

The setting in this game is also fascinating. This game uses a contemporary world, but, whoops spoilers, the world (i.e. Tokyo) "ends" in the first couple minutes of the game, and its remains become this surreal spherical landscape called the Vortex World. Old places like Shibuya and the Diet Building are warped, not beyond recognition, but far beyond how they would have originally felt. Nearly everyone from the previous world died, so the NPCs are primarily demons, human-like creatures called Manikins, and the spirits of the dead. That description on paper probably sounds hellish, but like I said earlier there's a rather comforting feeling to it. Series artist, Kazuma Kaneko, envisioned the player running around the desert naked, and exploring the world map isn't too far off from that. Many of the locations also have aspects of Buddhism, Gnosticism, and then some in their appearance, and it makes every dungeon ooze with memorability. Kabukicho and the Obelisk are usually first to come to mind for me, and I really think the Amala Network's look would make for a trippy interior in a hotel. There are a lot of strange things like this and such that are never fully explained. They just exist as idiosyncratic phenomena. And of course, I'd be remiss to forget mentioning the outstanding soundtrack by Shoji Meguro, Toshiko Tasaki, and Kenichi Tsuchiya. There is not a single song in it that isn't solid; even the ambience tracks used are perfect. An excellent OST for playing on the go, for sure.

Earlier games played more with the idea of a law vs. chaos setting, but this game leans much more into the chaos side, leaving it to the player to choose which of three doctrines will govern the world (called Reasons). You also have several options for rejecting them as well, making for six possible endings. Gameplay-wise, they don't affect too much save for changing which of the bosses you fight near the end. The exception being the True Demon Ending which requires you beat an extra dungeon that's available to you closer to the start of the game. For the most part, the game gives you positives and negatives for every outcome which makes the decisions feel nonjudgmental and respected. There's no definitive best ending, and only what you decide to make of them. The closest one to a bad ending being the one I accidentally got this time around, which is pretty funny, so I give it a pass. The cast of characters is also very small and major cutscenes are kept to a minimum, which gives things a little less intimacy, but they're always cool and visually remarkable. I find it interesting that the aforementioned remaster gives the cutscenes voice acting; not a downside most likely, but I do think this a rare example of a modern game that benefits from not having any there.

I do also find it interesting that this game gave this series its reputation for being tough as nails. The developers designed much of this game for accessibility and it shows since it's rarely tedious, however it does require you to play by its rules. Matador is the first boss that really makes that apparent. If you're focusing on having a higher level, you're probably still going to have a hard time because the more efficient way to play is by crafting a team that can take the most advantage of the press turn system in a given fight. Once you understand that, the game is rather doable. Of course, I often still died a lot. Partly because the sort of creative gimmick each boss has requires a different strategic approach, and partly because sometimes the game just feels like picking on you.

The original Japanese version of Nocturne didn't include any of the parts related to the True Demon Ending. Those were all added into the definitive version subtitled Maniax, which was the version that ended up being localized for the West. Out of all of the definitive versions of Atlus games I've played, this is the only one that doesn't make changes and additions that feel overly jarring and out of place. The exception to this being Dante/Raidou's inclusion. Though that "Featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry" series badge on the European cover is legendary, so I'll take it.

Unsurprisingly, with how long the development of this game was, there's a ton of unused stuff. A handful of unused songs, dungeons that look trippier than the ones in the final release, and a UI that looks closer to the ones seen in the fifth-gen SMT games just to list a few. It looked like a completely different game, and I'm glad the developers have showcased early development on it, even if there's no prototype builds publicly accessible. I find this to be an excellent game as it fosters a unique style and never slacks on substantial gameplay. I think with the next playthrough I might finally go for the hard difficulty (not the Hardtype mod). It's just for a good challenge, but hopefully changes like not being able to run from battle and items costing thrice as much don't drive me nuts. After all, this game would never take advantage of my innate gullibility.

Quite possibly the most important JRPG title to be released by ATLUS, it played a huge part in their identity standing out in the western market which lead to the major successes of SMT:Persona 3 and the following ATLUS games.
It's extremely difficult combat and luck based outcomes make this game unplayable by many, but learning how to make the perfect Demi-Fiend and team is extremely fun to me and I'm not a huge fan of overly difficult games.
The atmosphere, art style, and music is largely unmatched by anything other than it's sequels, it is an artist's paradise to pick through it all. It's small but great story is also fantastic, every ending was a blast to go through even 20 years later.

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 is one of those beautiful games where every aspect of them feeds its own greater themes. The unforgiving gameplay, the alien and hostile setting, the constant drifting apart of the few friends you think you can rely on and the overall cynical hopelessness of the world all come together to form a beautiful narrative in which you're ultimately forced to blindly feel around for its meaning, rather than be given one. I always get a bit upset at the take that Nocturne's story is barebones just because unlike newer SMTs it doesn't take care to explain every event in excruciating detail like some of the newer games. It's a sleek, minimalist game that uses a lot more than words to tell itself, and I have a lot of respect for that.

Probably my FAVORITE MegaTen game, very close to being one of my favorite jRPGs ever.

The atmosphere and vibe of this game is second to none, the combat is challenging and it is not ashamed of being itself.

If Nietzche was a game, this would be it.

SMT Nocturne is the JRPG from Hell. At times it feels like the game is sentient and hates you. Once you accept this, however, it's surprisingly fun.

So yes, this game is difficult. But now that I've actually PLAYED it rather than just watched boss fights and consumed memes, I realize it's also surprisingly well-designed. Yes, you will die a lot. But save points are fairly frequent and reasonably-placed, as are heal points. I rarely lost enough progress from dying to be frustrated. Dungeons are also fairly short, so tend not to overstay their welcome. And it's not ALL dungeons, there some towns with NPCs to speak to, and said NPC dialogue is pretty good at giving gameplay tips to newcomers along with guidance on where to go next.

Speaking of newcomers, this was the first Shin Megami Tensei game to introduce the now-standard (and beloved) Press Turn system. Hitting an enemy weakness turns one of your turns into a half-turn, effectively granting you another action. (You can also "pass" your turn for the same effect) While hitting an immunity or missing an attack consumes 2 tuns. And in classic SMT fashion, mechanics work the exact same way for both sides. Minus Beast Eye and Dragon Eye, anything the enemy can do, you can do too.

If you haven't played a Shin Megami Tensei game before, you'll quickly find that buffs and debuffs are your friend. Status ailments are deadly, but they're also part of the element system, letting you punish the enemy for using them with the right Demon allies.

Aside from the customizable "Demi-Fiend" protagonist, you'll be making your party out of the Demons you battle, like a twisted version of Pokemon. Demons always have the same weaknesses and resistances on your side as they do as enemies, and this is... a little hit-or-miss in Nocturne. A surprising number of Demons, even early ones, have no weaknesses at all, forcing you to rely on physical critical hits to gain turn advantage. And then these same Demons, once recruited, essentially let you forget about enemies gaining turns off YOUR weaknesses, which kinda saps some of the fun. The Fiends are especially notable here. Optional bosses added in the "Maniax" version, they all lack weaknesses and nullify ailments (therefor robbing the enemy of turns for attempting them), AND tend to have overpowered skills, so can trivialize gameplay once you unlock them.

Most Demons are obtained via Fusion (which should be familiar to those who played Persona) or the dreaded negotiation. Some Demons can also evolve, Pokemon-style, though this is left as a fun "easter egg" to discover. I was surprised at how little I minded negotiation though. As long as you're not too stingy with money and items, you'll get the demons you want eventually through sheer persistence. There are skills that make it easier, but I was fine embracing the randomness most of the time. Once you unlock the Compendium you can re-summon any Demon you've had before, which helps.

Having played through the whole game, even the difficult optional dungeon, my main criticism is Evasion buffs and debuffs are actually pretty broken. As missing means you take no damage AND the enemy loses turns, Fog Breath on the foe and some Sukukajas on the party can make you practically invincible. Only late-game bosses carry buff/debuff cancel skills, and some don't even have both.

Being an older SMT game, Nocturne has its fair share of jank you'll have to live with. The protagonist learns skills from Magatamas (think equipped armour), but if you refuse a skill you never get a chance to re-learn it, and only the next skill a Magatama learns is visible, meaning it's easy to give up skills you later realize you need if you don't have a guide, or give up on a Magatama too soon.
Hard Mode is what the bosses are designed around (Normal is secretly an Easy mode, halving damage taken), but it also triples shop prices and prevents running from random encounters. If that sounds annoying to you, I'd recommend playing on Normal for exploration, and switching to Hard for bosses. (Difficulty can be changed from the menu at any time, at least in the remaster) The HD Remaster at least lets you select inherited skills in fusion (after a patch), while keeping the option of randomized inheritance if you prefer that.

I haven't even talked about the story yet. If you're playing Nocturne, you're likely doing it for the gameplay. It has less "story" and more "lore" and "atmosphere", but both are very good. You'll be exploring some of the most unique and creative-looking locations in any JPRG, with an excellent soundtrack by the legendary Shoji Meguro setting the mood. The difficult gameplay enhances the atmosphere, making you feel like you're struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic world where everything wants you dead. The characters are all varying degrees of unlikable, but that's kind of the point.

My only real criticism isn't to do with the plot itself, but how one of the Maniax additions impacts it. The original story had multiple endings, all shades of grey, but Maniax added a new ending with far more content that essentially invalidates all the others. As a result, you don't see the original 5 (yes, FIVE) endings discussed or considered much, which is a shame as they're all conceptually interesting.

Overall, do not go into Nocturne unless you have some experience with Shin Megami Tensei and/or Persona already and are looking for a challenge. But if you do, you'll find some of the best gameplay, boss fights and atmosphere in the JRPG genre.

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.

(This review is my old take on Nocturne. It’s a very negative view of the game but I actually like Nocturne now. I completed the HD port and this is my more recent review for it.)

I want to like this game but I can't. This is one of the worst designed JRPGs I have ever played.

First let's start with this game's so-called "Difficulty". The only difficult thing I had to do in this game was use an insta kill shield before going back to auto battling. 90 percent of the boss fights in this game are an absolute joke. This is mostly due to evasion buffs being one of the most broken things in the game.

One of this games stand out mechanics is its "Press Turn System" which essentially allows you to transfer a turn to the next party member. Here's the catch though. If you get a crit you get another turn, but, if you miss your attack you lose 2 turns out of the 4 it gives you per player phase. This also applies to enemies which includes boss fights. This system is extremely abusable due to evasion buffs and debuffs. I was literally just using evasion up over and over again for every boss fight and then the bosses would miss their attack and not get a chance to do anything so I could continue auto battling with no repercussions. The good thing is sometimes they will have moves to remove debuffs on themselves or remove your buffs. I've barely seen these moves used though and most of the time the bosses were at the end of the game. Even still, the bosses are super unbalanced and extremely easy to beat. Oh, but there's also the bosses which have gimmicks like being immune to physical damage. So you can sit there for 10 minutes trying to use magic moves (which are very weak in this game) in a stall match waiting for enough turns to use the weak spells as the boss does 2 damage to you and wastes their turns because of the evasion buffs you have.

Now, my biggest problem with this game is the dungeon design. They decided to resort to picking a random path in dungeons for progression. It's super cool when the final dungeon in the game's gimmick is picking a path. If you pick the wrong one you get sent back to the beginning, which is really fun because of the random encounter rate! I swear any time this game has puzzles it's just hoping you went in the right door or area and hope you don't have to start over (which you will).

If you want to fight the fiends then I hope you remembered you probably should go back to the starting area halfway through the game for no apparent reason with no NPC in areas but the place mentioned having any hints or info on the subject. Every time I had to fight a fiend I was literally just going down the checklist of every area in the game including all of the little rooms scattered about in the towns.

The Demon Fusion system is really cool in concept but I wish it made some semblance of sense. It's not touched on beyond the fusion room guy telling you very basic info. It is basically just throwing shit at a wall and hoping it sticks. Hope you can fuse whatever you need from luck alone. I can't help but think that there are ways to make this system more understandable for a blind player, like possibly a graph displaying possible fusions and filling in with the fusions you've already created.

The story is not very good too, which sucks because the concept is actually very interesting. The world is wiped and there is a battle of reasons to determine how the new world will be run. The problem is that the characters have very unrealistic motivations (save for Futomimi) and are barely given any time for me to care about them, or maybe understand where they are coming from.

This is just the surface of this game's issues, there are plenty more but, I would be here all day. But, besides that I will say that I do like the art and world design in this game. It gives off a very unique feel I've never experienced before in a video game. That alone, was the only thing I can take away from this experience that I appreciated, along with some of the songs in the soundtrack.

Eu nunca joguei um jogo tão ruim na minha vida. A nota tá alta, claro, ele tá dentre os meus favoritos jogos jogados, eu aqui me refiro a "ruim" num sentindo vulgarizado da palavra, aquele "ruim" a quem populares, habitantes do Brasil de base (ou "Brasil profundo"....) se referem, o "ruim" antônimo de "bom". O dialeto popular comunica sem complicações e arrodeios — gosto bastante dele — e vem super a calhar porque a forma como esse jogo é "mau" não é gráfica, ela é espiritual, acionando assim essa memória religiosa que origina o termo; a atmosfera de Nocturne é de um pleno apocalipse, a narrativa é conduzida através de plot points setados por decisões baseadas em egoísmo, ganância e orgulho, não há virtuosidade em Shin Megami Tensei III, o jogo começa te introduzindo a uma guerra aonde o bem perdeu e não parece que possa se fazer muita coisa a respeito, ou então que talvez nunca tenha existido esse tal lado; mesmo em canecido branco, pálido, nocturne não parece existir a luz e brilho que conhecemos, isso é um elogio, e não se fala em outra coisa quando se toca nesse jogo, subcomunidades internet a dentro, porque existe um forte culto em torno de todos os aspectos desse jogo a nerdaida não poupar elogios ao falar da direção de arte e como ela é incrível; sobre história também e ela é bem maneira sim, como dei a entender agora etc.; trilha sonora? sou todo ouvidos!.. mas, irmão, a gameplay disso aqui que é a melhor coisa, eu nunca conceberia um jogo de turno tão foda nesse aspecto — satânica máquina de eficiente entretenimento.
Ele é difícil, mas te educa, de uma forma tão rígida que beira ao criminoso nos remetendo àquelas histórias "Você acha que seu pai é ruim? a pois o meu me batia de cipó de goiabeira..." que os nossos avós nos contavam— em referência ao tal Brasil profundo aqui supracitado.
O beabá é mais ou menos esse aqui: um boss é extraoirdinariamente filho da puta contigo, abusa de mecânicas que o jogo não te ensinou, você morre, você bola uma estratégia para vencer ele, você morre mas vê que pode dar certo, você passa: real senso de mérito. Há uma liberdade gigantesca para o jogador moldar seu personagem e os demônios da sua party a partir de skills e o sistema de fusão, pena que ele é pouco acessível e eu realmente recomendo o uso de sites com a calculadora de fusão e os demônios para jogar; dominar bem essas mecânicas e conseguir derrotar os bosses te dá um senso domínio tão forte e esse aspecto da gameplay é refletido na narrativa: true demon ending.

It's my favorite game of all time. Period. The mood, atmosphere, music, press turn system in combat, mazes, bosses. Everything is great.

Altrough it's not perfect. There might be some bullshit moments here and there, a bit unfair at times. But you can also use for your advantage against the enemies, even bosses.

The Kalpa levels are nerve breaking mazes. That's what I want, a challenge. This game delivers big, I love it. And the TDE (for the ones that know what I'm talking about) that's perfect for our character. It's total Dark-Chaos.

In short, it's perfect for me.

Took me around 35h to complete so it's not a big RPG.

Featuring "Imagine if your friends played the game you like: part 3" from Marl's Review Series.

"Who can we pray to? There are only demons and fiends here."

The probably most famous SMT entry, and well deserved that praise.
First of all, i must say i am a little dissapointed because i thought this game was gonna kick my ass, and it did not. It's not easy, but it's not hard either. For me is the same degree of difficulty of every other Atlus game that are not persona (even persona is harder at some points). That's a bad thing? No, but i was hoping for more after hearing so much. You will become stronger very early and if the boss it's not immune to physical, you will destroy it very easily.

Other than that i really found the story to be lacking, much of the game it's just you and that's it, characters are completely whatever and i tend to like a little more than that in storylines. The demons interactions are still amazing though.

Okay, no more cons. THE ATMOSPHERE IS SO COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL. The edgy boy inside of me was having a blast. Walking around, fighting fiends, feeling the air, everything was so immersive. I did the True Demon Ending so i explored the entire map (i hope i did) and was a fullfiling experience.

SMT still alive and kicking, let's go kill demons Demi.