(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.