I just finished a replay of Shin Megami Tensei 3 for the first time in a decade, so I felt compelled to write a big long unstructured essay about it where Im going to sound like an overwrought crazy person. Thats okay though. Theres just something about this game that really speaks to those of us who find our way in. When you sound like a hyperbolic cultist writing soaring prose to try to meet the game at its level, its not a unique reaction. Weve all been spellbound in the same way, the game is designed to do it.
How is it designed to do this? Basically, in every conceivable way! The music and sound composition, the moment-to-moment battling, the environmental art and location choices, the progression systems for both the protagonist and demon fusions, the scope and method of storytelling, the density and depth of the mythological references, everything fits together like a symphony to inspire these feelings. Tension, immersion (lol), and utter absorption. Nocturne is a clinic in how to structure every aspect of your game around a unified vision (finding the strength to survive in a cruel and barren land) without hugely compromising ambition. That this level of design can be sustained over the course of 50 hours for the average playthrough and 70 for those of us determined to reach the lowest depths of the games enormous optional (!) Amala dungeon is insanely remarkable.
Some of the more adolescent-minded fans of the Shin Megami Tensei series and the broader Megaten franchise lionize this one in particular as being the most dark but thats a kind of stupid and narrow way of looking at it. If youre a cool person you dont love Nocturne because its dark you love it because the game makes you feel like youre hallucinating. SMT3 is unconcerned with providing detailed exposition and light-hearted character moments, but its a game that is overrun with story at every turn. And not just in the environmental, piece-it-together Souls series storytelling sense people love to talk about, there are actually a bunch more NPCs around straight up delivering dialogue for you than youd think! Pair that up with the demon chatting, the compendium entries, the audiovisual cues and the gorgeously directed cutscenes, and the common complaint that SMT3 has no story just seems like nonsense to me.
The game isnt necessarily just dour or unambiguously somber either. Megami Tenseis roots are in the pulpy trash of 80s light novels, and you see this in some of the humorous demon-focused crassness, the bits of comedic negotiation dialogue, and the seeming mish-mash of myth as aesthetic influences. But the funny paradox of SMT3 is that its a game built on a punk-rock foundation of rebelling against whats proper and mainstream (see any interview with the creators) that is also simultaneously downright austere by todays standards. Grand and lonely and visionary in tone, careful, measured and meticulous in its design, without an ounce of bloat, nothing wasted or incoherent, its just so impressive on every level (I promise Ill get more specific with my gushing soon).
Theres an attitude among some Megaten fans that Nocturne is the one that doesnt fit in the series, that its too different from previous Shin Megami Tensei games, but I dont think thats right. To me theres a very clear throughline, its just Nocturnes antecedents arent necessarily found in its immediate numbered predecessor. When it comes to the main and numbered games in this series, you can very easily see the path from Megami Tensei 2 -> Shin Megami Tensei 2 -> Shin Megami Tensei 4, all of which begin years after the apocalypse has occurred and concern themselves with how society persists and political factions collide decades and even centuries into the aftermath. They are the three most readily described as cyberpunk, theyre chattier, theyre a bit more clichéd in their own ways (amnesiac gladiator and military academy recruit openings for SMT2 and SMT4 respectively), and their general sensibilities are similar.
SMT3s lineage is, I feel, more directly traced from two other games. SMT1 and (hear me out!) Revelations: Persona. I think its easy to link these three games together for several reasons. In all three you begin in relative peace in a current day city, in all three the inciting incident is an occultist ritual, and interestingly in all three the hospital is your first dungeon, deliberately chosen for its uncanny familiarity to create an immediate sense of unease (and also the pretty obvious birth/death location symbolism). These are games centered around the immediacy of disaster and apocalypse, and take modern day locations that are meant to be familiar and subvert them to make them unnerving. Atmosphere is a word I see frequently used to praise all three games (yes there are at least 1 dozens of us, [dozens!] who like Persona 1) and the dream-like, surreal atmosphere in these three games can be strikingly similar.
So yeah, good lord, Nocturnes atmosphere. This game is simply filled with astonishing imagery at every point. The art directors managed to make each scene feel somehow weighty and mesmerizing, with aesthetic choices made throughout that are just so thoughtful and cultured. Angels and demons look terrifying and awesome, in that they inspire terror and awe. Gods and goddesses appear benevolent, their facial expressions neutral and lacking in human emotion. Jack Frost remains the best mascot in videogames. Theres well-researched details in the animations and all aspects of appearance (see here for a bit on Baphomets posing). The vocal and sonic choices are perfect, like that unsettling blaring soundblast when the statue of Gozu-Tennoh speaks, as if a great and mighty terror is deigning to communicate across worlds.
There are posts that dissect the spiral imagery of the vortex world that repeats over the course of the game. There are entire sites devoted to breaking down the wide range of inspirations for the game's transcendental demon design. Random tumblr people compare the cutscene direction to Ingmar Bergman films, and its interesting to see how the cutscenes are frequently in first person or otherwise hide the protagonist, which not only hearkens back to series roots (while saving budget $$$) but also conveys solitude and makes the scenes with multiple demons and figures appear that much more spectacular. On any given day youll find a tweet or two or three of people overwhelmed by the games aesthetic choices, its virtuoso game over sequence, or title sequence, or pretty much any sequence. Its the purest expression of a world class artists singular vision and is the reason why all of us sound so annoying whining for Kazuma Kaneko to return from his flower field exile.
Theres also a very ingenious way SMT3 supports its themes and that is through the combat. Nocturne is a game about stealing turns. Its the fundamental principle of the battling, its why everyone tells you to keep the skill Fog Breath, and its a carryover from the simpler system in SMT1 where the method of stealing turns was using charm bullets or casting Zio to paralyze the enemy before they even have a chance to act. The battle system has a famous Engrish name called Press Turn, which is distinct and not to be confused with the One More system from newer Persona games or the alignment based combat bonuses of Strange Journey.
In SMT3, any given press turn encounter depends upon the party composition choices youve made, not only the resistances and repels/drains you enter with (two very different things in terms of battle consequences!) but also the moment to moment decision-making of turn management, weighing how to strategically pass to maximize damage output over the course of the fight. Every battle is an opportunity to demonstrate your efficiency and mastery of the systems, and the goal of each encounter is to use foresight and preparation to demolish your foes before they have the chance to even act. Steal turns and survive in a barren land of death upon death, this is the elegance of Press Turn. Youll hear endless discussion around this games difficulty, and encounters generally have teeth to them yeah, but there is a very principled fairness to the battling where combat swings do not occur as dramatically as they do in say, SMT4. SMT3 is balanced perfectly by virtue of its lack of save anywhere option, providing you with tension at all times but also most importantly the tools to mitigate disaster over the long term, which is a deeply deeply rewarding way to survive.
Press Turns UI really adds to this rewarding feeling. How terrifying is it when a boss casts Beast or Dragon Eye, and suddenly a string of new turn icons appear? How satisfying is it to see a row of flashing turns, knowing that youve fully exploited your enemy? The enemy composition really accentuates this as well, with encounters often designed to avoid easy spam of single elements or physical skills to mindlessly coast to victory. SMT3 doesnt want you taking any shortcuts, if you want to take advantage of a given demon or magatamas skillset, you need to pair your choices to mitigate the corresponding weakness, or the enemys AI will press their advantage in the exact way you would. Its a really satisfying symmetry.
There are also other paths to battle that are just as viable. Exploiting weaknesses with a multipurpose magic build is another way to steal turns. Building battlers around skills that maximize critical hits is another way. And if you are terrified of the infamous one-shot deaths that people like to say are the franchise trademark? Equip null-death magatama in between level ups. Raise your luck. Resolve battles before enemies even have the chance to use the spell against you. Raise your speed so enemies dont get the chance to go first. Get endure as soon as possible. The tools for success are all right there for you! Nocturne tasks you with growing strong enough in this world to ascend to creation, and it provides you with multiple paths to reach this goal.
So, about these multiple paths, let me talk to you a bit about SMT3s famously unique alignment system. Other games are lauded for their ultimately fairly stupid morality systems but Nocturne breezily operates on a completely different level. Instead of RESCUE and HARVEST in dumb giant gothic font or literally color-coded paragon and renegade meters, in SMT3 you align yourself naturally through story progression with factions concerned with stillness, power, solitude, freedom, or rebellion. Instead of the grand binary moral choice being telegraphed through hideous-looking Little Sisters (god I hated that stupid name haha) theres a rough analogue in the actually sympathetic but far more complex unsettling-looking Manikins, whose character motif is described by the creators as representing those who lose themselves to the strength of numbers. Theres unfortunately a tiny amount of material in the game to support extremely tedious canon discussion, but the game actually works best and most purely as an abstract, impressionistic vision of grand universal themes. Playing through any one of SMT3s six endings makes the universe feel vast and overwhelming, and asks you to contend with a broader suite of philosophies than good or bad, and thats ultimately what I think the developers were most interested in going for.
Something about the prose in Nocturne is also special in a way that is extremely difficult to accurately describe. Like everything else in this game it feels elegant and detached, gods and goddesses are appropriately otherworldly without sounding like haughty stereotypes, lower demons are funny and crass in a way thats not so on-the-nose. Again its very difficult to pinpoint but something has been lost in the writing of the newer games, even a bit as small as how angels and demons in the game actually never name anything directly as God, but instead refer obliquely to a Lord, an Absolute, or a Great Will, Nocturne just gets all the little details right.
As I run out of steam from this braindump, I notice theres still an essays worth of observations in so many other topics that deserve to be discussed. The Tokyo-focused but somehow universal theming of the games alignment principles and locale visuals. The insanely expansive but unfortunately compressed soundtrack (see over three hours of unreleased material alone here), where dungeon music regularly evolves to indicate progression, and battle and boss music quantity is generously varied both between and within song. The extremely rewarding fusion system can be plumbed to frankly insane depths, with a demon bestiary that is reasonable to 100%, and the lack of use it or lose it demon quality that hits other SMT series games contributing to a better feeling of progression and customization opportunities. The demon negotiation, which rewards your knowledge of mythological connections among pantheons with unique one-time only dialogue. The dungeons, the DUNGEONS. With the exception of an early set of sewers, an apparent shitty dungeon theme RPG tradition, each of these are little masterpieces of aesthetics and design, with their own thoughtfully introduced and iterated gimmick, planned wonderfully for both third and first person, often wrapping in and around themselves in spirals in that very Shin Megami Tensei-specific way.
Even if you think a game like Nocturne seems too dense or impenetrable or boring or random-encounter filled or whatever, its worth giving it a real shot for yourself to see if it manages to grab you. Were no longer in those days in the late 2000s where the game cost exorbitant amounts of money to get, a digital version can be found on PS3 for $10 (with only rare emulation issues in certain dungeon sections), and the disc itself was reprinted and can be found brand new on Amazon if you have a PS2 or want to emulate on PCSX2, where the game looks even more breathtaking. Either way, find a way to treat yourself to an RPG where it is actually appropriate to throw around the term masterpiece. I didnt really write any of this text no ones going to read to make a persuasive case to anyone, but sometimes games will inspire you and it feels good to ramble about them, and playing this again helped me determine that this actually really is the best RPG ever made. Games like this one are nearly impossible to make nowadays, and SMT3 is something worth cherishing.
...