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Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne may be one of the most disappointing games I've played in the last years.
When I started playing I expected a game with philosophical elements that made me think and good plot, due to all the praise SMT gets for being more "serious and dark" and the praise for the good writing, but I can't say I got what I expected.
I'll talk about four elements: gameplay, characters, technical side and narrative.
Gameplay: the core gameplay concept in Shin Megami Tensei is really good. Shin Megami Tensei III grabs the more clunky gameplay in previous SMT games and completely shakes the foundations introducing the press-turn combat. This adds dynamism to the core gameplay concepts in other JRPGs, from turn management, to buffs and debuffs, etc. I love demon fusions, it really adds a new layer of strategy to the gameplay. Instead of simply capturing demons with better stats, you can fuse demons and get a more powerful one with the best elements of two or more. The game also has a Magatama system, which makes the gameplay even more dynamic and fun. All of this eliminates almost all grinding from the game and it has good pacing. But not everything will be praise and pretty words for Nocturne's gameplay. The core gameplay is good, but the execution is bad. The game has a really present RNG, so, instead of feeling like I died due to a mistake I made, it's like I died because the game decided so by rolling a dice. The dungeon designs are also a major letdown in Nocturne. The dungeons have a lot of dead ends and insufferable dungeon gimmicks, like teleportation, which really makes a part of the game that should be fun and challenging tedious instead. Bosses are also a deception, most of them don't really take advantage of the unique and dynamic mechanics of Nocturne and are mindless buff and debuff spamming.
Characters: characters are yet another letdown of Nocturne. They are completely devoid of humanity, being containers for ideologies. Humans are not this simple, the process by which a human reaches their ideological positions is a complex mixture of personal, social conditions, etc. which end up mixing in a whole. The fact that the characters are a single idea foolishly stretched to a ridiculous level is unrealistic and really wastes an opportunity of exploring more complex human psychology caused by the apocalypse.
Technical side: technically speaking Nocturne is a really polarizing game. While the game doesn't have a soundtrack that lives up to the standard set in previous games, Shoji Meguro is a great composer. The combat music was just made to have something sounding on the background, and it really does accomplish that. Music outside the battles isn't bad but isn't memorable either, it's good. The main problem with Nocturne's soundtrack is how compressed it is, the audio quality is utter garbage and that really makes the soundtrack simply bad. The demon designs are really good and I like how they are based on mythological creatures , gods, demons, etc. The atmosphere in Nocturne is also really good.
Narrative: a common mistake is to think that Nocturne has no plot or story or that it doesn't have much. This is incorrect. However, it's not the player's fault to not understand its story, it's the game's fault by assuming that the player has a previous knowledge of mythology to understand it, this is terrible storytelling. Nocturne gets rid of the alignment system and introduces its brand new reasons system, which consists of characters being one-dimensional and representing a superficial understanding of philosophy.
Nocturne is a 4/10. I personally enjoy SMT and Nocturne isn't an exception, but this game has shallow characters devoid of all humanity and an equally shallow and pretentious storyline. Core gameplay is good but execution is awful, soundtrack quality is bad but ambient and creature designs are good. The game gets points for re-inventing SMT's gameplay and therefore having a different approach to the formula, so I am accounting for the historical context, if not, it would be a 3/10.
4/10
