My Strange Journey through Shin Megami Tensei - Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster

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If any Shin Megami Tensei game is a sacred cow, it's gotta be Nocturne, right? It's the Final Fantasy VII of SMT: the one that set the trends the series follows to this day. The one that broke containment and exposed a whole generation to new ideas and aesthetics. Certain types of people have been calling this the best JRPG ever made for decades.

The way people talk about it, it might as well be Dark Souls. What does one say about such a game? I can never like it enough for those whom it was a formative experience. The absurd strawman arguments start sprouting up unbidden in my brain. I am burdened with expectations from Persona. Modern conveniences have made me too soft and doughy for its demonic edges. I should have more respect for the SHIN Shin Megami Tensei.

I get the hype. If I mind-palace my teenage self playing this, it would be unlike anything I'd ever seen before, particularly transgressive and alluring for someone raised in a fundamentalist Christian household. Alas, many years have passed. When I look at Nocturne now... I see the beginnings of the world I've lived in over the past months, a world that once seemed so full of potential but has proven to be stuck in the past.

Nocturne is an affirmative to the question, "Can a game run entirely on vibes?" You get a piece of evocative imagery and trudge through 90-120 minutes of hallways to get to the next piece of evocative imagery. The blasted remains of Tokyo in the Vortex World are so striking that both SMT4 and SMTV simply re-used them, albeit to different degrees. The end-game dungeons sure have some neat geometric shapes. There are two guys with their bodies covered in faces! Luxury!

The setup feels old hat due to my backwards trajectory through the series. The world ends, the infinite cycle of death and rebirth hastened by some cult or another. The player character - a normal human - is infected with a demonic bug called a "Magatama", becoming Devilman the Demi-fiend. Multiple factions among the ruins vie to be those who remake the new world according to their ideals. What exactly are those ideals? Why do they subscribe to them? Ehhhh, don't worry about the details, just roll with the cool pictures and broad strokes.

After playing half a dozen of these games, Nocturne feels bereft of context. Why am I even doing any of this, other than that it's a video game and you go forward in video games? I'm not on a mission like in IV, V, or Strange Journey; nor am I desperately fighting for survival like in Apocalypse or Devil Survivor. I'm just a guy who apparently has a thing for his teacher (which, I'm realizing, is a concept that crops up in multiple Hashino-helmed games for some reason).

I recognize of course that this is because Nocturne established itself as the baseline. Those later SMT games - including modern Persona - are arguably just different clothes on the same Manikin. It certainly lends Nocturne a weight in hindsight that cannot be denied... but I'm getting some real diminishing returns after six games in a row. It's tough to shake the "that's it?" feeling when it comes to Nocturne.

I played the HD Remaster of Nocturne on PC, which I'm told is a port somewhere in between "bad" and "bare-bones". In an act of chaotic transgression, I perverted the game's original intent and installed some mods to eliminate some of the more egregious drudgery. To be specific:

I also briefly used a Cheat Engine table to shuffle the order Demi-fiend's skills were displayed because I like having them a certain way. I didn't change any stats or anything. Not that it matters; I would still have most of the same problems with the gameplay. I'm sympathetic to the "well, it was 2004" argument, which is why I played in good faith and did not blatantly cheat. However, this is also the exact kind of game that would make a certain variety of asshole say that JRPGs "don't respect your time".

Nocturne debuted the Press Turn battle system, which I've written about multiple times already. It's good, even in its most nascent form. Buffs feel even more crucial here than in later games and the infamous Matador fight will make sure you never forget it. But the real killer is that random battles are constant; I've had some happen literally two seconds after the previous battle. By the time you're strong enough to kill almost anything in a single round of auto-attacks (about 60% in), the tedium becomes exhausting. And as always, diligent preparation can only take you so far. Sometimes you just get unlucky and die through no fault of your own. I knew that going in, so while I rolled my eyes a few times, it did not bother me.

But the dungeon design is what really started to piss me off. I never want to see a trial-and-error one-way-teleporter maze ever again; they suck in Strange Journey and they suck here. They actually feel like artificial padding, where your only way forward is to check every single fucking hallway not just to progress but in case there's any hidden treasure. Then combine that design ethos with bland subway tunnels where you have to use Float Balls to avoid floor damage and Light Balls to see what the hell you're doing. Absolutely miserable.

Which makes it even more frustrating is that the game does have one really good teleporter maze: the Diet Building. Here, the hallways are littered with false doors and textured walls that use perspective tricks to disorient you. Once you fall for them once or twice, you start to look for the tells. It becomes fairly easy to navigate the maze as long as you're observant and careful. Which is like, Nocturne's whole thing! Did they make this one good by accident or something? Did it take too long to implement and force them to make another Amala Network dungeon where you have to choose between three indistinguishable paths over and over? Considering later games, even all the way up to Metaphor, it almost feels like we haven't progressed at all on this front.

Narratively, the game makes economic use of its scrawny plot. Why does the Demi-fiend have to find his teacher and push forward through this demon-riddled hellscape? To find a capital-r Reason, naturally. Just as how creating a new world in V requires a Nahobino containing both Power and Knowledge, the Vortex World demands a Reason to drive the next cycle. Only humans sponsored by an extradimensional deity can form a Reason; being half demon already disqualifies the Demi-fiend.

The three available Reasons are broad stand-ins for the franchise's usual Law-Neutral-Chaos trichotomy. We've got:

So, every, let's say, two dungeons or so, you meet someone from the old world and they explain to you they've thought about it a lot offscreen and now believe in [SUPERGALACTIC DARWINISM] or [OMEGA SOLIPSISM]. Sometimes it's Hikawa making a villainous speech about the futility of your actions, or possibly your teacher telling you that you're her only hope. It gets downright comical how often the characters say hi, power up, posture about their newfound resolve, then immediately leave the stage.

There are also two additional endings for rejecting all three. One is the "bad" ending where the new world fails to form without a Reason, leading to the Vortex World persisting indefinitely. The final ending is closest to what usually passes for Good / True Neutral in these games, where you side with your teacher to achieve the restoration of the previous world and a return to mundane life. It's about twice as long as the others and has a bespoke epilogue cutscene (the Reasons all share a single one with different dialogue) with a standard "change your mindset, change the world" moral.

Said teacher - customizable name, with a default of "Yuko Takao" - is the most fleshed out cast member, which is admittedly a low fucking bar in Nocturne. She's the "Maiden", Nocturne's version of the eponymous "goddess reincarnation", whose will is required to bring about the Conception and the Vortex World. The game opens with you and your classmates making a surprise visit to the hospital she's staying at, and your broad goal for the first half of the game is to track her down so she can exposit for you.

I take pause for a moment while writing this. I was about to state that Yuko was in the hospital because of what's implied to be a suicide attempt. Why did I think that? The hospital in question is completely empty. It's arguable if it's even a real hospital or just a front for Hikawa's cult. Her ending monologue talks about how she had no hope for the future and you saved her, but there's no reason that isn't just referring to the literal events of the game. Did I subconsciously place additional weight on a vague statement because it led to an interpretation that better resonated with me? Or is this just what counting Press Turns for six months does to a MF?

It seems to be a running theme in series entries I've played that the "best" ending (or more cynically, the ending which lets you fight more bosses and do more dungeons) usually involves a reset button or a return to normalcy in a sort of Campbellian sense. Depending on how hard any given game leans on the idea of endless cycles, this sometimes comes across with a "kick the can down the road" feeling. Even Devil Survivor 2, one of the tonally happier ones, has an entire sequel game in its Record Breaker remake about how regressing the world simply hastened and intensified the conflict. Strange Journey flatly states the Schwarzwelt will return unless the vector of civilization changes course or SMT Doomguy halts his eternal vigil.

So really, I can make jokes about fence-sitting and not committing to Law or Chaos all I want. The games' text (or at least their texture) supports it to an extent. There's probably something to unpack here considering the series otherwise puts so much emphasis on taking extreme stances and whatnot; I don't feel qualified to dig into that. Maybe returning to a regular world feels more appealing because of how extreme the other ideologies get.

I've read that base game SMTV (Canon of Creation) has a similar ending spread to Nocturne, but I played the Canon of Vengeance, which insists on a pure Law-Chaos dichotomy via splitting the usual True Neutral tropes in half. Restoring the old world is considered Law regardless of your intentions because you're perpetuating the cycle. Chaos is rejection of the entire system, though still with the intention to create a new world unbound by the past. From that point of view, most of Nocturne's endings would probably still fall under Law.

So we come to, of course, the DLC (which, if you're playing the remaster, must be downloaded separately). The "Maniax" reversion of the PS2 game is what was originally brought westward as simply Nocturne, including a new game-spanning mega-dungeon (the Labyrinth of Amala), accompanying boss fights, and Dante from the Devil May Cry series. There's a brand new ending if you reach the bottom, and it's taken on de facto "true ending" status because of how much more work it is. Nocturne's cultural footprint in the west seems to revolve completely around it.

English-speaking fans call it the "True Demon Ending", though official sources call it "Destruction" and I've read the Japanese community calls it the "Deep Amala" ending. Delving through the Labyrinth whilst enduring an absolutely terrible Sonic 2 bonus stage esque minigame and ever more circuitous dungeon tedium allows you to meet directly with the mysterious benefactor whom transformed you from a human into the Demi-fiend. He completes your metamorphosis into a Fiend and recruits you to his cause.

A huge amount of exposition is gated entirely behind this bonus content. Each floor of the Labyrinth comes with a slideshow and narration explaining various concepts in the narrative. It's comical in how blatant of a patch job it is, but the game really does need it. Like, I didn't really care about Hijiri as a character at all while playing the main plot. After I saw the slideshow about him, I still didn't care, but it made his role feel a bit more notable. Honestly they're probably worth it just for the absurdity of having Dante in the montage of Fiends that represent Death Itself.

Forsaking your humanity locks you out of choosing any Reason, because you have abandoned the concept entirely. Instead, you fight an extra final boss fight against Lucifer to prove your demonic strength then join him in leading the armies of hell to slay God and unmake the infinite cycle of death and rebirth.

Which, I mean... fuck yeah. Metal. What a cool final image.

Almost cool enough to make a guy forget how annoying actually playing the game was.

It's been 20 years and dozens of sequels and spinoffs and people still say, "Well, sure, but it ain't Nocturne. Nocturne was so good. What happened Atlus???" Armed with newfound context, I look at the state of the franchise and I'm disappointed. Not disappointed that games since aren't enough like Nocturne, but that they have to live in Nocturne's shadow. Each of them has had something cool and compelling that Nocturne doesn't, something that could be iterated upon and turned into a great game if it got the chance.

But I guess I get it. The possibility of a new world always feels grander than the actual result. Nocturne brims with that unrealized potential in a way its descendants, further cut and polished, cannot. That's an appeal in itself.

Is that the trick? I know that the farther I get away from Nocturne, the grander it'll feel. I'll eventually forget climbing up a hundred identical ladders and running in circles around Mystical Chests and the stupid block-pushing puzzle. But I'll probably remember the vibes, the imagery. Eventually, my memories will be of the colors and sounds and feelings of the Conception; not its actual texture. And my mind will inevitably fill that empty space with what it wants to see.

I play this game and my brain fucking invents new details which the text at best lightly brushes with its fingertips, because I keep grasping for some kind of deeper meaning behind the curtain. Surely, if so many people care, it must be there? People have exalted Nocturne for so long. Surely this game is "more" than a 3-star JRPG with 5-star aesthetics. Surely I am just a fool for not seeing it.

Yet I also keep thinking about that old Cohost post from Heather Flowers. "If you want to make a work people are obsessed with, make it almost good." It's normal to search for meaning in what we do, what we experience, and maybe we search all the harder when it feels just out of grasp, whether we want to or not. We need a Reason.

I may never find one, but I'm still here. I'm not dead yet.

I return to my normal life. The world turns. The cycle continues.

#games #rpg #SMT

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