Fantastic so far! Picked up about 7 demons- conversation is great fun. Amazing art direction. If anybody has any specific questions, ask away!
Mark L
Good game with really shitty camera angles that combine with the overly dark levels to make for some frustrating gameplay. The Stranger is a fucking badass though and I’d like to have his manbabies.
I think he means Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne.
Who cares, Nocturne looked badass.
Interestingly, there is a note on the title screen that the name “Nocturne” is used with permission of Terminal Reality.
He does mean Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, and it just keeps getting better and better. The atmosphere seems to be a cross between Serial Experiment Lain and David Lynch. I already feel like this one’s worth the price of admission. Traded in Shadow Hearts: Covenant to get it and don’t regret it in the slightest- found the latter to be kind of boring and ordinary but this…this is great stuff.
Mark L
Just over an hour in and I agree with Mark. I’m pretty blown away. The game feels pretty damn uique among RPGs (and most other games for that matter).
Sold. I’m off to the store…
I hope so, or I’m dubbing Mark L. the Brian Koontz of computer game playing.
The original “Nocturne” still kicks ass. Everyone on QT3 who is into good game manuals ought to have picked it up. Great fuckin game (with shitty camera angles).
edit: This one’s for Dave Long, who liked my pic of Genghis Khan. :wink: Note the manual size (length and width as well as thickness) as well as the original unaltered old school EB price tag of $39.99.
Damn it! Here I am, biding my time, tapping my fingers on the desk for a firm date with all the delays and hearing all sorts of different things, waiting for the week before it releases to send my second column of this game to Tom and its already out. Grrr. Oh well. Same with Paper Mario 2. I can’t keep up with American release dates! Ack!
Shouldn’t there be some sort, you know, bells ringing or party in the streets? This is like a momentous event. This was one of those, “Hell will freeze over before this happens things.”
Oh and what’s with this?
ark L wrote:
He does mean Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, and it just keeps getting better and better. The atmosphere seems to be a cross between Serial Experiment Lain and David Lynch.Sold. I’m off to the store…
Figures! After all those posts and such about how good it was all it takes is two sentences from Mark L and you go to get it! Psshaw!
;)
In any case, ProTip: For the love of god, play it on normal first. Hard will smack you around pretty…well, hard.
ProTip #2: Make sure, you do the whole re-roll the stats thing min/max thing with demon fusion in the blasphemy manor, don’t just take what you get the first time.
ProTip #3: Don’t assume just because you can go somewhere, its safe. This is NOT your average sissy, hands-off the hard stuff until you handle it RPG.
ProTip #4: That one dungeon, it seems too huge to be true, doesn’t it? Take it one piece at a time and go and do other things while you tackle it slowly, that’s the way I like to do it.
ProTip #5: This was going to be in the article, but brush up on your mythology when you think hear a familiar name or face, and make sure you know how the demons rank in their hierarchies. That can really help when they are supporting you in conversations. Also, the conversational skills use traits, like whether someone is young or old, girl or guy, in case its not noted somewhere.
That brings me to my questions, how’s the translation? If you’ve even only played this game a little, I think you can devine the original writing was pretty nice to go hand in hand with the absolutely amazing art direction (best this generation if you ask me). Atlus is usually good, but tales of how Persona turned out and the way they only translate the Pokemon clones scares me a bit…
Just so you know, if you’ve never been to the places featured in this game, in some cases (it depends) they are really pretty good representations of the places to the point where you can say, “Hey I’ve stood on that street before.” Of course, only geographically, though we always called that one teacher who took us on field trips a demon, still…
-Kitsune
PS How about that opening, eh? :shock: Ever since I saw that last year, I’ve been waiting for an RPG opening to top it…no such luck. Avatar Tuner is pretty tame by comparison. And what is it with MegaTen and hospitals BTW?
Also, the DoubleJump guide is well worth picking up. Not only is it exceptionally detailed and well-written, but it has a ton of production and character art scattered through it.
I was going to hold off and list this one as a Christmas present, but with all the rave reviews flying around (including our own - 5/5), I may have to jump the gun and get it now.
The translation’s more or less top-notch. I was pleasantly surprised.
(ObPlug: I edited the official strategy guide. Please pick one up if you’ve the means.)
Terminal Reality should have made them put The Stranger into this instead of/with Dante as a stipulation for using “Nocturne.”
Does anyone else feel a sense of loss now for Terminal Reality’s missed opportunity??? :?
Kitsune wasn’t kidding when he said this could be difficult! I’m readily getting my ass handed to me (just got to the “network” for the first time). I’m calling it a night but it looks like I’ll be poring over the strat guide in the morning.
Got it. This game is pretty damn cool so far. Neat premise, neat characters, wonderful art direction, and an interesting combat system. I’m out of the hospital and wandering around Tokyo, post-Conception, now. I have four demons with me, so far, and Pixie just transformed into a High Faerie. Neato.
One question, for those of you who have played the game: I’ve noticed that if you talk to demons in combat when you have one of their bretheren in your party, they will generally leave you alone. Is that a viable option, or am I missing out on important experience points here? It seems cool that you sometimes have a peaceful alternative to combat.
The strat guide is good. As for the translation though…I dont know. Its not bad, I mean I havent seen any horrible grammar or obvious misspellings. But its not great either. Some of the stuff people say is just…off and you can definitely tell the source material is not from native speakers. I thought Disgaea, and probably even SH2, were translated better.
olaf
Its not only quite viable, its a tactic that has been invaluable throughout the series and that I’ve used many times. Keep in mind however, that you must be at the level of the enemy or higher in order to convince them to join your side. Personally, I think big fights come down more to forming a good team and taking advantage of press turns than level strength, its very possible, through a lot of tinkering and manipulation to make a newbie demon almost invincible to a boss’s attacks.
Anyone had a demon beg for mercy or have you asked to borrow money from one yet?
-Kitsune
I’ve used the Begging skill once or twice, and I’ve had demons offer to join me out of the blue (this seems to be the only way to recruit some of the less intelligent demons–the ones that normally can’t speak to you), but I’ve never had one beg for mercy.
I am getting a little annoyed with my demons’ apparently unquenchable desire to trade their good skills away for useless ones. Three times I’ve had demons request to make a skill swap, and three times they have traded away highly useful skills (in two instances, their only damage-dealing combat skill) for relatively pointless skills like Begging. Now I’m a bit wary of allowing skill trades at all–do you ever get anything good out of it?
Fortunately, I was able to take the two demons that traded away their combat skills to the Cathedral and fuse them into something far better, so it all worked out in the end. Still, I dread allowing more skill trades for fear that my High Fairie will trade away Wing Buffet for, say, Thumb-Twiddling.
Great game so far, though. It’s utterly Bizarre, with a Koontzian Kapital “B.” But I mean that in a good way–it’s a very creative setting.
I’ve had demons beg for mercy on multiple occasions, in one case joining my party, and in others giving me stuff. I just got my face smashed in in the game’s first real boss fight. Consequently, I am realigning my party so as to have immunities and skills more in line with the opposition. My only question is this- is it worth levelling up demons? It seems as I grow stronger it is easy to just fuse them with something else…are the skills they get through levelling worth it?
Mark L