that time kazuma kaneko + shoji meguro summoned a whorling liminal space that tricked jrpg fans into enjoying meat + potatoes (teleporters + pitfalls) dungeon crawling. same shit your grampa plinked away at on his apple II a century ago, same shit your grandkids will plink away at on their apple II a century from now in their neofeudal bunkers

and much like your relatives, I love that shit; I love a big ass maze with a million dead ends, and if it ain't broke don't fix it, lest we end up with whatever the fuck those P3 + P4 dungeons were

at its best and most confident it understands the simple things — things like teleporters originally being designed to thwart manual graphing; that automap needs to be accounted for with appropriately disorienting, discordant layouts and structures; and that imbuing a sense of doomed futility is non-negotiable. there's a desire here to smother, obstruct and impede; a love of mazes that reveals its hand in slow motion, peaking with twinned monstrosities — the labyrinth of amala, and the tower of kagutsuchi — that crank the pressure inch by excruciating inch

complimenting it is the arrival of press turn serving as an antidote to blobber slugfests and the sedentary JRPG-isms that descended from them — the dynamic action economy shifting combat from sludgy attrition to a revolving door of lightning round encounters closer to puzzles than math problems. it's no surprise that many of the bosses took up hallowed positions in the genre pantheon, nor that the sinewy party building was so lauded — few games in the genre that succeeded it would be so mechanically accomplished, to say nothing about those that came prior

all of this is further defined by an aesthetic sensibility befitting a "vortex world"; a collage of textures, words, images, sounds, and ideas — from solipsism to darwinism to occult esoterica — delivered in broad, painterly strokes, flickering past rapidly in service of potency and immediacy above all else

the sensation is one of extraordinary emptiness, intentional and otherwise; nihilism born from its themes as much as the capricious relationship it has with them. a fugue state drive through half-conjured nouns and adjectives that recede at the slightest touch; worlds, people, and ideologies just fuel for ephemeral spectacle

nocturne feels like it's trapped in amber: a static image of a bygone era for megaten, atlus, and the medium as a whole, still shadowed by fables and folklore about its difficulty, opaqueness, and bizarre allure. newcomers still looking over their shoulder for matador and finding themselves lost under waves and waves of dead ends and instant kills, further prolonging its mythic qualities

far from perfect in any sense of the word, it persists nonetheless as an object with no clear analogue. atlus will assuredly try and fail to replicate its appeal until heat death of the universe, but it's telling that even they can't quite pin down what happened here, why, or how — and who could really blame them?

brief thoughts on the remaster:

can't say I'm happy about the JRPG Paypig Tax or the crusty ultra compressed 128kbps OST, but it seems few people are mentioning the one inclusion that makes the remaster worthwhile: the option to play the original pre-maniax version of nocturne — previously unreleased outside of japan

while most won't be interested in seeing the game in what's widely understood to be an unfinished state — no fiends, no labyrinth, no dante raidou, or True Demon Ending — it's exciting to have the option to return to the game at its most rudimentary and see how the differences affect an experience long since overwritten by a slew of rereleases and additional material that recontextualize many of its design decisions

unfortunately, it's only present on the PC version, but credit where credit's due: atlus didn't fuck something up for once, and that's a miracle. I'd still rather eat gravel than pay full price for this thing, but it's a big, quiet win nonetheless from the least likely of places

"worst guy you know" etc.