When Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne first came out I made the mistake of not buying it within a few months of its release, so unless I wanted to throw away a good bit of cash, I wasn’t going to play it. But, luckily Atlus reprinted the game earlier this year and I jumped on this chance to play this supposedly amazing JRPG. And after playing the game for about ten or so hours I must say I’m both impressed with the game, and disappointed that it took me this long to find a copy.


The main character.

In case anyone reading this doesn’t know the specifics about this game, you take the role of a nameless high school student who soon finds himself in possession of demonic powers. Very early in the game the world experiences what is called the “Conception,” which is essentially a doomsday like occurrence which leaves most humans in Tokyo dead, and a myriad of demons take their place. The protagonist, or “Demi-Fiend” must then make his way through the ruined Tokyo to find out exactly what has happened and if there are any survivors. This story is then told through extremely cryptic pieces of dialogue, and like many great JRPG’s, the player is left with very little understanding of what is actually happening. But to be honest, there’s so much more to this game then just the story.


Apparently Dante makes a cameo, which is both odd and awesome.

Being a character in a world full of demons, the roles of your party members are naturally filled by said demons. The gameplay is almost Pokemon-esque in that you have to recruit other demons for them to join your side. Once they agree, they can be summoned and dismissed at will to allow the player to create a party for any specific encounter. Although what really gets me about this concept is how you attain these other demons. You don’t capture them, or get them as rewards from battles; you actually have to convince them to join you mid battle. Basically, Atlus included negotiation as a key part of the games battle system. The player must usually eliminate all other enemies from the battle, and then choose to talk to the enemy and ask them to join. Sometimes the demon will ask for money, items, or even ask questions which will lead them to either join or continue fighting. In addition, certain demons get special abilities such as “seduce” which give them the opportunity to do the same. The whole system is something we’ve seen in games countless times before, but it adds so much more depth to the actual capturing of the demons.


Atlus mascot Jack Frost runs the main shop the player will frequent in the game. This has led me to the conclusion that every store needs to be run by an albino midget with a blue jester hat.

Another aspect to Nocturne worth mentioning is the amount of input the player has on the main character himself. Anyone who has played the more recent entry in the Shin Megami Tensei series Persona 3 will understand the kind of depth the series has. You can hand pick which stats increase with each level, thus defining exactly what sort of character he will be in combat. But more importantly than this are the dialogue options. I’m currently only about ten hours into this game and it seems that with every bit of important dialogue, I get to contribute somehow. While the options may be somewhat binary at times, with the main character either being a cool guy or a dick, it’s much more choice then many other RPG’s.

With all that being said, I’m not exactly sure what the point of this post is. I kind of just stumbled upon this game when I saw on Play Asia that there had been a reprint, and have been completely blindsided by the coolness of this game. And just as a side note, please warn me if you mention any spoilers from late in the game, I still have a good bit left to play. If you like JRPG’s and haven’t played Nocturne, you should definitely consider picking this up before they sell out again.