this is a game that a certain sub-sect of the internet hypes up to no end. to them, life is incomplete until/unless one has the irreplaceable experience of playing shin megami tensei: nocturne on the playstation 2.

your birth, your high school graduation, your first big boy job, your marriage, the birth of your first child, etc. are all trivial milestones compared to the mark of a TRUE shin megami tensei gamer: having played nocturne.

every other game you've played, book you've read, movie you've watched, album you've listened to... they're all just preambles to the REAL masterpiece that is shin megami tensei: nocturne.

all other media that you experience afterwards will surely never compare to the pinnacle of human accomplishment that is nocturne.

in my personal opinion, it's good but it's not THAT good lol. i don't even think this is the peak of atlus, let alone the peak of JRPGs/gaming as a whole. but i mean, if it really is that good to you then i guess i can't tell you that you're wrong. still though, the endless hype machine left me a little disappointed that i just found nocturne to be a... pretty good game and not the life-changing masterpiece that it's purported to be.

of course, that's all petty fandom squabble and nothing i said here has any bearing on the quality of the game. let's talk about the actual game at hand, then:

i feel like nocturne has a lot of potential but it falls short of reaching its full potential, due to a few key flaws.

nocturne attempts to separate itself from the other shin megami tensei games with its internal logic, mythology and world design. if you've played any other shin megami tensei game, you start to get the hang of the formula: post-apocalyptic tokyo, law and chaos factions warring for control, demons that align with law and chaos assisting/leading said factions. nocturne shakes things up a little bit with central themes of primordial chaos and creation.

the game vaguely takes place in a post-apocalyptic tokyo, as do the other games bar strange journey, but the vortex world of tokyo in nocturne is different because the apocalypse is seen as a beginning-state rather than an end-state. in most of the other games, the apocalypse has already happened, and your goal is to avert it in some way by aiding the faction that fits your beliefs in regards to the best way to handle it.

in nocturne, the vortex world is a world of primordial chaos that has yet to be shaped. it serves as the beginning of a new world, a liminal state between an old world that had grown stagnant and a new world led by a different ideology. your goal, ostensibly, is to pick the ideology that should lead the new world (the reasons) and aid in creation, again with the assistance of certain factions and demons.

this outline here makes for a really cool concept/subtext and is one of my favorite things about the game. it's a welcome shakeup to the tried and true shin megami tensei formula. where i feel the game falters is the way it handles these themes, especially with the inclusion of the maniax/chronicles content: the true demon ending and the labyrinth of amala.

i should note, i don't have a problem with the gameplay additions of the maniax/chronicles content, just the ways in which the new content clashes with the themes of the game. firstly, the labyrinth of amala totally derails any semblance of pacing that the game has. there's really no way to approach it that makes it seem any less out of place.

secondly, the true demon ending abandons the theme of creation and ideology, which is the central thing that makes nocturne so unique. i find the shijima and freedom endings far more compelling from a narrative standpoint, because they mesh better with the themes of the game. yet, because the true demon ending has unique boss fights and requires the completion of the labyrinth of amala, it's seen as the default/definitive ending to the game. with the existence of TDE, most don't bother with any of the reasons or the other endings, and why would they? so much content is exclusive to the true demon ending, and everyone wants more content.

sure, you could argue that it's all optional. but again, given that it is an option, who would choose NOT to do it? the FOMO factor means that almost everyone is going to go through the labyrinth of amala and get the true demon ending.

i think i'd like this game a lot more if it weren't for how the maniax/chronicles content supersedes the rest of the game and forsakes its central themes. yet, i rarely see anyone else express this opinion. you'll see quite a few people say that they prefer the original releases of other atlus games like strange journey, catherine and persona 4 for similar reasons, but you'll almost never see anyone say that about nocturne.

i have to imagine it's because the west never saw the original version of nocturne, every version of the game we have includes the maniax/chronicles content. so almost all nocturne players in the west have no frame of reference as to what the original game looked like before the rerelease.

interestingly enough, the remastered release on PC includes a way to play the vanilla game without any of the maniax/chronicles content. however, i opted to play the PS2 version over the remaster, since i found the pricing of the remaster to be a bad deal. later on down the line though, i'd love to try the remaster with the vanilla content. i bet i'll probably like it a lot more.

even with the disappointments i mentioned, it’s still a really good game, mind you. just a little frustrating that it barely misses the mark of being god tier