this game is always so close to being kinda great it's unfortunate, i was always excited for this one. the main thing is that the soul matrix genuinely sucks the fuckin life out of every other part of this game cuz just by existing as it is the whole game is built around this one dungeon you're gonna be spending half of your playtime on (i mean that literally, it was over half my playtime). most of your insight into characters is in the soul matrix, but the game also has to account for you possibly not doing much in the soul matrix. so the main story is basically always out of step with how these characters should be/what you know about them and ends up being underwritten in every scene. there are barely a dozen actual dungeons in this game (two of which share themes with other dungeons anyways) so the level curve gets absurd if you're not grinding the soul matrix the moment new parts of it open, putting story progression on complete hold for the next uhhhhhhhhhhh 5 hours. your goddamn BASIC EQUIPMENT all requires MATERIALS that you're mostly getting from grinding in the soul matrix along with the insane prices some of it gets to that you ALSO usually only cover with grinding in the soul matrix and man at that point it feels like the actual fuckin.....main game here is just a background element to this really uninteresting and overly long dungeon man it's so unfortunate. i think the disappointment hits this hard for me cuz soul hackers 1 is like my favorite mainline SMT and this game's setting/presentation fucking rule but it be like that sometimes

at least ringo rules tho she's just like me fr

during interviews a lot they said that they consider this the next step for the series like how sonic adventure was back then and i think that's actually insanely accurate
any fuckin notable issue i have with this game technically, control wise, structurally, etc is so incredibly mute when this is the closest i think a sonic game has ever gotten to fully realizing every idea it wanted to get across

in my eyes, by the end this game's themes in writing/gameplay/music/etc all revolve around showing the heart of sonic and this whole series and why it'll never really die no matter how badly the past can cause you problems
i dunno know if anything for sonic is more perfect than than the final boss telling at you through the entire fight that trying is worthless cuz so many before you have failed only for sonic to never even think twice on pushing ahead anyways

this series means so much to me, and i'm glad to see it back

as someone who is still very not experienced with much of mainline SMT this game s basically everything i want out of these

the setting and style are like peak shit here. all the usual SMT apocalypse environments are mixed with the 90s cyberpunk city feel so well it's like very easily my favorite setting in any of these games that i've played no contest. in other mainline games i've played i felt like most of the cast are very non active participants in the world around them making them feel so separated and not essential compared to how good the worldbuilding usually is. but here like almost every event is driven by you or what the people in The Gang™ want at that moment, so the game is able to specifically have both support each other so any themes that come up from either are able to be explored as much as possible and GOD you have no idea how much i wanted that when i played nocturne and SMT5. this game's ideas on its own could edge so close to "technology bad" and that'd be really funny but how it relates to the characters and SMT's general themes of how humans & demon live with each other is so insanely strong that it's like the first time i'm fully satisfied with the story in a mainline game i love this shit dude. it's also got insanely good gameplay/story integration with SMT's usual mechanics for customization and the demon loyalty system AND the ost is some of the best shit ever but "the gameplay and music in SMT is very good" is like the coldest take of all time so yknow yknow.
but yea it's good it's GREAT i need soul hackers 2 so fucking bad man

also god all my long reviews are about SMT games they give me so much to say even if it's one i don't like lmao

this is everything i could've possibly wanted

i have like so many thoughts on this one and almost all of them are positive this is some of the most fun i've had with a new jrpg release. favorite thing easily is the world and all the gameplay that revolves around it. the maps here are massive with so many things to look at, npcs with frequently changing dialogue, and side quests that i just get lost in it all so much. stuff like a random side quest about a demon who feels weak so he asks you to outside and tell other demons "he's useful, i swear" or another where there are two demons with opposing views on how to run things in that area and it's completely up to you who to help and how the world will be shaped. a lot of this doesn't have very long last consequences outside of the direct rewards you get but it's so frequent and the game has so many ways of doing this i just can't help but want to see it all and get genuinely super attached to this world because of it, and in a game that wants to really dig in to the relationships between humans and demons in smt it's genuinely perfect and smt's general gameplay is more than enough to keep up with it. press turn and demon fusion is fun as always it's genuinely really hard to make it feel bad. THOUGH i think making buff and debuff skills single target is really weird choice and doesn't really benefit the game much but it's not that big a deal.

the story is also pretty underwritten and focuses a lot more on how things work out thematically more than anything so a lot of the characters don't feel nearly as fleshed out as they could be on their own but even then it's hard to be TOO upset about that when the game's closing hours (at least in the true neutral ending that i played) bring it all together in such an insanely good way that's perfect both for this game and following up on the theme's of noctune. was just kinda sitting in pure silence when the credits started, i never imagined this game giving such an emotionally great pay off to story that was mostly just serviceable for a large amount of the game.

this game is good it's good yea i love this

i've tried to play this game like 3 separate times and each time i just feel like i get a lil more sour on what FEELS like should easily be a great game.

i think it's super good when it wants to be but almost every strength kinda starts to fall apart when i really try to think about a lot of it more. press turn system is pretty great but honestly not near interesting enough for how high the encounter rate is, how the general enemies are designed, and how much dungeons are designed to have you get to dead ends or doors that lead nothing just to have you walk around more so you get more encounters. when i started noticing this trend then so many of the dungeons felt so blatantly designed by a 15 year old that just got their hands on rpg maker to the point i think this is the only jrpg where random encounters genuinely felt like a flaw to me. bosses are always super great though, only complaint there is that i think demons grow at a rate that's a BIT too slow so the SMT Fusion Grind™ is a tiny bit of a chore here but it's not a big deal, it's still good and fusion is always great.
i think nocturne's world building is GREAT. i genuinely do love seeing how the general random demon tries to make due in a place like this, the factions they make, watching those factions break down in an instant, the dire aimless state the whole world feels in due to the conception, it's all honestly super good. but unless you're going for true demon ending the actual story and writing for the main cast is lacking behind that great world so much i honestly kinda wish they just didn't bother with alignments in this game. nocturne tries to write the characters in a detached way that i think does work a lot for this game on concept, but does it in a way that makes them just feel like the most boring binary "this is how you select the different law/neutral/chaos routes." you see so little of how the characters interact with the world they're in that most of the conclusions they come to feel like they don't matter at all and for a game that clearly wants to get across how much a world like this breaks people this is honestly such a bizarre decision to me. i think the one exception is isamu cuz you're there first hand to see the things he wants and how the world treats him so he's the only one who feels like he has even the slightest bit of weight behind him. that said i think true demon ending is a PERFECT conclusion to everything nocturne is about and plays off of nocturne's strengths the best it possibly can. it just kinda makes it more disappointing that the only time i feel like nocturne's story keeps up with the rest of the worldbuilding is when you have to actively disregard the entire rest of the cast. disregard them in a thematically KINO way but yknow still.

i've played jrpgs with one or more of these problems in some way but nocturne in particular feels like its sum is so SO much less than its individual parts and by now i just wanna leave it as a kinda fun kinda frustrating experience so i can go play other SMT games i'd probably like more.