It would take me an unreasonable amount of time to explain all of the reasons I love this game, so I won't even try to do so for the time being. The long and short of it is that I see it as this sort of theoretical maximum amount of purpose you can wring out of modernist game design. The basic concept of the story is clearly informed by the need to Make A Shin Megami Tensei Game, ie it must 1) be conducive to brutally difficult boss fights, 2) be highly allegorical and religious, 3) be exceedingly dark, and 4) contain at least 3 philosophically distinct story routes.
This boxes the game in to some extent, but beyond the basics it sets out the game becomes this genuinely insane story pulling together Mahayana sutras and the book of Job into this profoundly depressing psychological challenge addressing a unique range of topics (themes that jump out to me personally include fascism, sexuality, the need for metanarratives, and powerlessness). Since these ideas were already set up to work within traditional game design, you get some of the most playable JRPG battles I've ever seen and some of the tightest balance between those and the dungeon crawling out there to totally reinforce it the whole way through. The boss fights in particular are a highlight, with each one having some immediately interesting strategy they run on you which you can only get past by keeping your wits about you.
It's a slick game with writing better than most novels I've read, cutscenes more stylish and expressive than many movies I've seen, and design more meticulously balanced than essentially anything else in the medium. On a meta level, it also speaks to the limits of the SMT franchise, the requirements I listed out earlier in this review of being "the next Shin Megami Tensei game". It fundamentally tries to show the player that these can only go so far, even seeming to tacitly encourage them to want to essentially destroy them. However, even in that ending, the game ultimately puts its faith back into it. It's like when I'm playing this game I'm hearing rumblings of something which would finally make me less than embarrassed to admit my love of games, that I might live to see a game which is self-aware enough to deconstruct its own mechanics and build them up into something greater than the sum of its parts. Nocturne stops just barely shy of this; it's an anticipation of a masterpiece that I hope to play someday.
This boxes the game in to some extent, but beyond the basics it sets out the game becomes this genuinely insane story pulling together Mahayana sutras and the book of Job into this profoundly depressing psychological challenge addressing a unique range of topics (themes that jump out to me personally include fascism, sexuality, the need for metanarratives, and powerlessness). Since these ideas were already set up to work within traditional game design, you get some of the most playable JRPG battles I've ever seen and some of the tightest balance between those and the dungeon crawling out there to totally reinforce it the whole way through. The boss fights in particular are a highlight, with each one having some immediately interesting strategy they run on you which you can only get past by keeping your wits about you.
It's a slick game with writing better than most novels I've read, cutscenes more stylish and expressive than many movies I've seen, and design more meticulously balanced than essentially anything else in the medium. On a meta level, it also speaks to the limits of the SMT franchise, the requirements I listed out earlier in this review of being "the next Shin Megami Tensei game". It fundamentally tries to show the player that these can only go so far, even seeming to tacitly encourage them to want to essentially destroy them. However, even in that ending, the game ultimately puts its faith back into it. It's like when I'm playing this game I'm hearing rumblings of something which would finally make me less than embarrassed to admit my love of games, that I might live to see a game which is self-aware enough to deconstruct its own mechanics and build them up into something greater than the sum of its parts. Nocturne stops just barely shy of this; it's an anticipation of a masterpiece that I hope to play someday.
2 Comments
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Well, for starters, the game is about the stage between a "conception" and a "birth". The magatsuhi that needs to be gathered in order to summon a god to make one's Reason a reality accordingly looks a lot like sperm cells and pr-transformation Kagutsuchi appears like an egg cell pre-transformation (after which point it looks like YHVH, the basis for all human appearances if we're going by Genesis rules). It's doing a sort of Doctor Strangelove-y thing in my opinion, where it's evoking this imagery of fertilization to get across a sort of base human desire thing.
More directly about sexuality as opposed to the sex itself, I found that the way characters will presume the Demi-fiend is a demon just like them to resonate a lot with my experience being closeted. There's an overt subplot about the Demi-fiend needing to choose between defining himself as a human or defining himself as a demon, yet the way he just sort of silently decides it's better to not cause a fuss by pointing out he's not like the rest was something I felt pretty deeply. The sort of borrowed imagery from slasher movies also leads to a little bit of perhaps-unintentional queer-coding in some of the cutscenes. It would also make it not too unlikely that some of the team was familiar with David Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch, a story in which insects are used as a prominent symbol for not-heterosexuality and the persecution that invites, which the magatama remind me of to some extent. As far as that reading would be concerned, I think it makes sense that YHVH would deny one the rights of humans for getting bitten by that particular bug.
I also think there's some stuff in there which loosely implies a sort of courtship angle to demon negotiation. I'd have to, like, dive into the text of all of the negotiations or some shit to really prove this but I feel like the demons in this game are way hornier than they are in other entries in the series. Since they tend to see the Demi-fiend as one of them in a way that they don't see other SMT protagonists (barring the Naohobino, I guess) there's a bunch of stuff about them sort of seeing him as a potential partner. Also, there's moves for negotiation like "seduce" and whatnot. One time one of the demons gave me a tutorial tip that talked about how that one is most likely to work when the demon using it is the opposite gender to the demon it's being used on, which strikes me as a little strange. I'm honestly not totally clear on the ins and outs of that mechanic, since there are a couple of demons whose designs are meant to look like gay or lesbian stereotypes (the pixies and high pixies come to mind) for whom it would make more sense if that weren't unilaterally the case, but generally I think it's supposed to be on the player's mind.
More directly about sexuality as opposed to the sex itself, I found that the way characters will presume the Demi-fiend is a demon just like them to resonate a lot with my experience being closeted. There's an overt subplot about the Demi-fiend needing to choose between defining himself as a human or defining himself as a demon, yet the way he just sort of silently decides it's better to not cause a fuss by pointing out he's not like the rest was something I felt pretty deeply. The sort of borrowed imagery from slasher movies also leads to a little bit of perhaps-unintentional queer-coding in some of the cutscenes. It would also make it not too unlikely that some of the team was familiar with David Cronenberg's adaptation of Naked Lunch, a story in which insects are used as a prominent symbol for not-heterosexuality and the persecution that invites, which the magatama remind me of to some extent. As far as that reading would be concerned, I think it makes sense that YHVH would deny one the rights of humans for getting bitten by that particular bug.
I also think there's some stuff in there which loosely implies a sort of courtship angle to demon negotiation. I'd have to, like, dive into the text of all of the negotiations or some shit to really prove this but I feel like the demons in this game are way hornier than they are in other entries in the series. Since they tend to see the Demi-fiend as one of them in a way that they don't see other SMT protagonists (barring the Naohobino, I guess) there's a bunch of stuff about them sort of seeing him as a potential partner. Also, there's moves for negotiation like "seduce" and whatnot. One time one of the demons gave me a tutorial tip that talked about how that one is most likely to work when the demon using it is the opposite gender to the demon it's being used on, which strikes me as a little strange. I'm honestly not totally clear on the ins and outs of that mechanic, since there are a couple of demons whose designs are meant to look like gay or lesbian stereotypes (the pixies and high pixies come to mind) for whom it would make more sense if that weren't unilaterally the case, but generally I think it's supposed to be on the player's mind.
ThatMagicalMage
2 years ago
Great review btw!