Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne HD Remaster
Letting the demon out of the bottle
INFO
As if finding out your teacher is a prominent figure in a cult isn’t bad enough, the world literally ends, and you’re transformed into a neontattooed demi-fiend. Talk about bad days. This isn’t a JRPG about saving the world, but about surviving in it as one of the few humans who weren’t instantly obliterated when Tokyo wrapped in on itself, Inception-style.
In a Persona game, you team up with your remaining friends for a heartwarming adventure about growing up. But main series Shin Megami Tensei (from which Persona is a spin-off) is much more cynical. You catch up with other people at various story points, but you’re the main one with power, and only by adding other demons to your party will you survive.
That means negotiating with them in random battles, fusing them together, and levelling them up to learn extra skills (sometimes evolving them into new ones). With a slow XP grind, you’ll partner with many demons, and slam them together to make higher-levelled ones. You can even retreat and summon them in and out of a larger stock. It’s a little like Pokémon, if the ’90s moral panic over media were actually true. Want to team up with a goat-headed Baphomet, wellendowed incubus, and a (shudder) cute little pixie?
Well, you can. The power is in your hands.
PLAY THE CLASSICS
Old-school is the name of the game. Some nice visual design aside (many of the lighting choices still look superb), the settings are corridor-heavy dungeons that are as crawly as they come. And for some reason the audio is still poorly compressed in places, most notably during battles, despite being properly mastered in older soundtrack releases.
Let’s face it, this is titled simply “HD Remaster” for a reason. All-new voice acting, higher-res models, a much easier Merciful difficulty, and extra Maniax content from a later rerelease might add shine, but Nocturne is a PS2 game through and through. What’s m0re, it’s a hard one if you don’t opt for the easier mode (difficulty modes can be switched at any time). The early boss fights with Matador and Thor are infamous for a reason.
This is a game that expects you to think constantly about buffs and debuffs, and to use its Press Turn system to exploit elemental weaknesses and your own defences to heap on extra turns (it’s sort of a precursor to Persona 3’s One More system, now a series hallmark). One of Atlus’ first PS2 releases, the game set the pace for the studio’s JRPGs in the post-PS1 era. Later Persona games owe as much to Nocturne as they do their own precursors.
It’s almost refreshing to revisit a nononsense PS2 JRPG, and its cynical edge feels fresh. Persona diehards will find this an interesting artefact. Oscar Taylor-Kent