Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne

[Duke Otterland]

My first review post here, yay (*clears throat*):

A Japanese high school student in Tokyo is going to the hospital to visit his sick teacher one day, when a bizarre event known as the Conception occurs, transforming the city into a strange vortex world, and turning the protagonist into a demon. Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (Lucifer's Call to our friends in Europe) follows his quest to wander around this world and find out exactly what happened. While it does contain a few serious issues, Nocturne proves to be one of the more enjoyable installments of the diverse Megami Tensei series.

During his journey, the hero must fight his way through endless hordes of demons. The compass doubles as an encounter indicator, gradually turning from yellow to red in demon-infested areas (and remaining blue in safe areas) to warn players how close they are to encountering enemies; one minor problem is that the encounter rate is fairly inconsistent at times, even without modifiers.

Battles themselves, however, are actually fairly decent. One chief aspect is the hero's ability to negotiate with monsters for possible alliance, with players at times needing to bribe them with money and items, and correctly answer various philosophical questions, to get them to join. Enemies do, however, tend to be fickle at times, sometimes bailing out on the player in the middle of negotiation, and since getting enemies to join can become expensive, bribing every new demon you encounter to join you isn't exactly a good idea. If more than one enemy is in a battle, other enemies can interrupt your negotiations and instantly attack you. If you encounter a demon of a type you already have in your party, you can talk them away from the battle. When the Kagutsuchi (this game's moon/sun) is full, negotiation, with few exceptions, is out of the question.

The other main mechanism of combat is the press-turn-icon system, where the player and enemy parties receive a number of turn icons depending on their size (up to four for your party). Executing a command that normally damages an enemy consumes one whole icon, although using a skill against which a demon is weak will consume only half an icon. Characters can also "pass" their turns, which consumes half an icon. However, if a skill misses an enemy, or the enemy "voids" it, the player will lose two turn icons; moreover, if enemies reflect a skill or absorb it, the player will lose all turn icons, with the enemies then taking their turns, though the same rules apply to them, as well.

Another feature is Magatama, gained from story events or bought at shops, which the hero can ingest to affect his strengths and weaknesses against certain types of skills, and which allow him, when he levels up, to gain a new skill the player can place into up to eight skill slots. On the Magatama screen in the menus, those that jiggle and glow indicate those from which the hero can learn a new skill when leveling. When his slots are full, though, the player must choose a skill to discard, which the player, consequently, can never get back; however, many items bought from shops, and even the Magatama themselves, can easily substitute for skills. In my experience, I found stat-increasing and decreasing skills to be the difference between victory and defeat against many bosses.

One improvement over previous Shin Megami Tensei games is that the player's demons level up with the hero and gain new skills as well, with the player able to choose which skills to keep or discard in the case of skill slots being full; after leveling up, demons sometimes shower the player with gifts, make extra changes to their skills (mostly for the better), and, in some instances after they've exhausted all the skills they can possibly learn, evolve to more powerful forms. Additionally, at Cathedrals of Shadows, the player can fuse two demons at a time (and, during a full Kagutsuchi, toss in an additional demon) into more powerful (or in some cases, weaker) ones, and eventually register current demons, which the player can then purchase any time.

The battle system, for the most part, is decent, with fights being among the quickest I've ever seen in any turn-based RPG, although there are some shortcomings. For instance, only the hero can use items (though this somewhat adds to the balance of combat), and bringing a dead demon back into battle requires reviving that demon and then having the hero re-summon it (only the hero can change party makeup, which consumes turn icons), in which instance I found it easier to just summon a living demon not in the party at the time. The game also dumps players back to the title screen when they die (the hero's death means Game Over), and since enemies tend to be cheap at times, it might've been nice if the game were nicer to players when they died, even if it meant a penalty of sorts. It's still a pretty solid battle system, though, with the player, for once, really having to think at times.

Nocturne has two modes of difficulty, Normal and Expert, with the former having its tough spots, although players who master the battle system will have a much, much easier time, with only the cheapness of enemies making the game "hard" at times.

Interaction in Nocturne, while mostly adequate (the menu system is clean and the automaps are really helpful), does contain some very irritating features. Ironically, one of the biggest problems comes in a relatively small part of the game--demon fusion. When players select demons to fuse, the game randomly selects skills the fused demon will inherit. The player can, however, cancel out selections and reselect the demons for a different random skill set, repeating as desired. Since victory in the game is so highly dependent upon your party's skills, why not save some time and annoyance by just letting players manually select skills during fusion? Randomization is usually never a very good idea in RPGs, but this was...well, a really bad idea.

The other issue involves the spacing of save points. There are two types: main Terminals and S-Terminals, which provide one-way trips back to main Terminals, which in turn allow for rapid conveyance among visited areas of the game's world. While this wasn't so much of an issue, that the player sometimes has to spend well more than half an hour getting from one save point to the next in the game's many large dungeons is nothing short of frustrating. This works in RPGs that don't dump players back to the title screen when they die, but an unfortunate encounter with certain enemies can easily yield quick death and a lot of wasted progress, a feature that, in this reviewer's opinion, simply shouldn't exist in any game today. Overall, interaction is, at best, irksome.

Nocturne retains enough features from its predecessors to make it feel like a logical continuation of the Megami Tensei franchise, such as demon negotiation, demon fusion, siding with various philosophies, many skills, many monsters, and the setting of post-apocalyptic Tokyo (the random encounter indicator comes from Legend of Dragoon, as well), although it introduces new features, chiefly the innovative press-turn-icon system and Magatama, to make it feel fresh.

Nocturne's story is good, but could've been *so* much better -_- There are a few good twists, and even many philosophical choices that affect the ending, but the execution of the plot leaves something to desire. I'd have preferred it, for instance, if the game spent more time in fewer, maybe even smaller, areas. That the game takes place entirely through the hero's point of view also weakens the plot somewhat, given the number of events that allegedly occur behind the scenes. Main story events could've used more dialogue, as well, and the endings could've certainly been much longer. The appearance by Dante from the Devil May Cry series is utterly pointless, as well, and overall, the plot is, at best, middling.

The execution of Nocturne's soundtrack could've used some improvement, as well. To be honest, I enjoyed the music on the soundtrack CD more than the soundtrack in the game; there are many great tunes, although many areas of the game opt for ambivalence, and while this doesn't detract from the game's atmosphere, better placement of the music would've certainly been welcome. The sound effects and vocals in battle are well-done, though, and overall, the game certainly won't drive you to hit the mute button or listen to other music while playing.

Nocturne buries itself in Gothic cel-shaded visuals, which border on perfection, what with colors that fit the atmosphere of the game, many well-designed characters and enemies, gorgeous architecture that rarely shows spotty texturing, an overworld that looks pleasant for once (although your character is just a swirling blue doohickey), and so forth. Much of the scenery appears slightly jagged, though (Why can't anyone fix that?), and the dodge animation of your characters and enemies looks stupid, but otherwise, the graphics are easily one of the game's paramount qualities.

Blazing straight through Nocturne, finally, can take as little as forty hours, although sidequests, chiefly the Labyrinth of Amala (whose completion, I should warn, can lead to several nasty boss encounters, including a forced battle with an extra final boss), can easily boost playing time to the vicinity of a hundred and twenty hours, with a replay mode allowing players to go through again and try for different endings.

At first, I really didn't like this game; it has many issues, to be certain, such as the potential to lose hours of progress due to enemy cheapness, the demon fusion interface, and the relative brevity of the storyline. Nocturne does, however, have many things going for it, with the battle system easily rewarding players who master it, and the graphics being among the best I've ever seen on the Playstation 2. While not perfect, it's still a lot better than previous games in the Megami Tensei series, although newcomers to the franchise might want to take it with a grain of salt.