Atlus So I'm playing SMT: Nocturne

[CrimHead]

And my impressions are, so far, overwhelmingly positive. I'm 40 hours in and feel like I've only scratched the surface.

The fusion system (the crux of the experience) is incredibly deep, strategic, welcoming to creative experimentation, and most importantly, fun. I've already spent hours upon hours testing shitloads of combinations, trying to make a well-rounded, powerful party. And its not like you can just make a party and you're good to go, no, it's a constant, involved process. Adapt or die. P. hardcore.

The combat, in my limited experience playing on hard, is really just an arena where you get to see how well your party's overall build holds up-- your skills and stats, weaknesses and immunities. Basically strategic as opposed to tactical. If your build is optimized, you'll steamroll them; if your build is less than optimal, prepare to get your ass beat. I'm a customization whore, so having a game that requires this much experimentation to succeed is just like a dream come true. Haters will inevitably hate, but this is one of the more satisfying customization systems I've seen in an RPG.

The weeabooatry in the game is, for something with such a blatantly JAP title, spectacularly low, and I've even caught myself admiring the visuals from an artistic/aesthetic stand-point. From the absurdly fantastical architecture to the eerily surreal character designs (pale faces, lack of apparent emotions) to the dark, post-apocalyptic, yet minimalistic narrative, the game really presents itself as a unified piece of art, a coherent whole, the polar opposite of, say, New Vegas.

This is a damn fine game. Afterward I think I might try SMT 1 and 2. As I understand it the fusion system is even more complex (though obviously you don't get the satisfaction of seeing your creations being all badass in 3d)

4/5 flying dicks

Besides, you can summon this guy

How can you NOT like this shit

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Skip SMT1 SNES, the fan translation has bugs which prevent you from completing the game towards the end. I got permanently stuck in the very LAST dungeon thanks to this.

The first one is pretty easy, especially when it comes to the bosses. You simply breeze through all of them, and NONE of them prove to be any challenge. SMT2 is better in this regard, though 1 has the best premise.

And yes, best gameplay in a japanese RPG, bar none. Fantastic atmosphere too, and some of the best dungeon design ever.

It looks like they wanted to do the antithesis of 1 when it comes to bosses, because these are the HARDEST bosses in any RPG I've ever sen.

 

[Catalina]

Argh, I really want to play SMT:N so much. I even have a copy! Too bad the PS2's at my sister's house.

I hope you get around to playing SMT: Strange Journey for Nintendo DS. I think you'd like it, too. I hear it's sort of like if SMT1&2 were remade.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

The two SNES games really weren't that good, tons of annoying little flaws in the interface, and very cheesy dialogue.

Basically it was an excuse for the developpers to include as many references as possible to famous horror/sci-fi movies and it gets old fast.

 

[CrimHead]

Argh, I really want to play SMT:N so much. I even have a copy! Too bad the PS2's at my sister's house.

I hope you get around to playing SMT: Strange Journey for Nintendo DS. I think you'd like it, too. I hear it's sort of like if SMT1&2 were remade.

I'm playing it on PCXS2 and it runs perfectly. The FPS occasionally sporadically dips into the low 50's but as a whole it stays around 60 in 3072x3072. People constantly baw about PS2 emulation, but it's really not that hard provided you're not trying to run it on an ancient PC. You should try it out. As I understand, it's a pretty easy game to get running on it.

 

[deuxhero]

The 2nd Raidou does pretty well on the fusion thing, though be sure to pick "hard". The game is pretty easy outstde of a handful of bosses on normal.

 

[Overweight Manatee]

Truly, SMT3 is a masterpiece of tactical combat and customization. Pretty much every character build you can make is viable, almost every demon is either usable in combat or usable in fusion, and the character development and fusion systems combine to make two completely independent ways to power your party that complement each other.

Skip SMT1 SNES, the fan translation has bugs which prevent you from completing the game towards the end. I got permanently stuck in the very LAST dungeon thanks to this.

I had no problems with bugs. What was wrong with your game?

The first one is pretty easy, especially when it comes to the bosses. You simply breeze through all of them, and NONE of them prove to be any challenge. SMT2 is better in this regard, though 1 has the best premise.

I do agree with this, however. If you want tactical combat don't play SMT1/2. Combat in SMT 1 or 2 entails equipping all human characters with guns that attack multiple times along with bullets that inflict sleep/stone/charm and turning on auto fight mode, watching as even bosses struggle to get a turn off. The minority of foes in which this doesn't work, you use ice or electricity spells to do the same.

Even if you don't abuse this there is almost no customization system to speak of, at least compared to SMT3. Demons fuse but don't gain skills (except possibly 1 pre-determined skill in SMT2). So there is no real decision in what to fuse or when, you just check every possibility randomly and find what new demon has decent skills and stats. The only thing really more 'complex' is that there are a lot more different demon races, but that only really makes things more complicated to fusion guide writers and not to the player. There is also no compendium so unless you have a guide you are basically playing blind collecting random demons and seeing they fuse into, not really making strategic choices.

Also, (human) character development is limited to simply increasing stats, of which only 2 or 3 are of any importance and so its also a big step back.

I hope you get around to playing SMT: Strange Journey for Nintendo DS. I think you'd like it, too. I hear it's sort of like if SMT1&2 were remade.

Strange Journey is pretty good. Not really a remake of SMT1/2 other then that they have a similar 2.5D-ish perspective, though.

Devil Survivor I also highly recommend. If you are getting off SMT3 its probably better to try DS before SJ, as its gameplay is a bit different so you are less likely to be burnt out on playing nearly exactly the same game as SMT3. It also has a slightly more inventive plot that is much less of a SMT3 rehash then SJ was.

 

[CrimHead]

Pretty much my only gripe with the game is that you can't choose which skills you want to transfer when fusing demons. It's completely random, so if you have 2 skills you want from one demon and one from the other, you have to keep entering and exiting the fusion screen until it randomly produces the desired combination of skills. I mean, I'm gonna get those skills anyway, I NEED THEM, so it's just tedious.

Or maybe I'm retarded and there's someway to do this of which I'm unaware?

 

[Overweight Manatee]

Pretty much my only gripe with the game is that you can't choose which skills you want to transfer when fusing demons. It's completely random, so if you have 2 skills you want from one demon and one from the other, you have to keep entering and exiting the fusion screen until it randomly produces the desired combination of skills. I mean, I'm gonna get those skills anyway, I NEED THEM, so it's just tedious.

Or maybe I'm retarded and there's someway to do this of which I'm unaware?

It is random, though chances depend on demon. Holy demons don't take death skills well, fire demons won't easily take ice skills, etc. More importantly, they have a very high chance to take skills that align with their preference. If you want to get a debuff onto a fire magic caster and have multiple fire spells in your fusion components its going to be fairly hard to not get fire spells, and if you are trying to get a physical attack or an ice spell good fucking luck, its like trying to reroll in D&D games until you get 4 18s.

Best way to ease the pain is to fuse good Mitama or fuse any low level fodder and use them as a sacrifice. Fusing Mitama onto a demon wont change the demon, just add stat bonuses and fill up whatever skill slots you have unused. Sacrifice fusions with cheap low level demons that have good skills also helps you spread more good skills around and give the demons some extra starting experience, costing less Macca but not giving your demons stat bonuses. I prefer the low-level demon strategy, but both work. Basically what I do is fuse always-useful skills like buffs/debuffs/mana refill/dark might/avenge/watchful onto things like Pixie and Will o Wisp. Keep them out of the active party, let them gain easy XP through watchful, level up a lot and you get tons of free items (including incense!). When you go to fuse, use them as a sacrifice and the new demon gets all those cool skills plus an XP bonus equal to 1.5x what the sacrificed demon gained as XP. Then just pull out another of the low level demon from your compendium and relevel them again before the next time you fuse stuff.


One really nice thing about SMT Devil Survivor is no more of the fusion BS. You directly select the skills to pass on (along with tons of other improvements, such as a built in fusion guide telling you what + what = the demon you are looking for). Strange Journey takes the opposite route, the skills to be passed on are auto selected based on the preset tendencies, which is kind of annoying and prevents a lot of fun powergaming.

 

[Frau Bishop]

So I'm playing SMT: Nocturne

Good luck! You will need it.
I still have to eat some Besen to make up for the last time I quitted.

 

[KalosKagathos]

Skip SMT1 SNES, the fan translation has bugs which prevent you from completing the game towards the end. I got permanently stuck in the very LAST dungeon thanks to this.

The squid bug, right? It only happens in the Law route (you can get a squid at a different place if you're Neutral- or Chaos-aligned), and even if you're Law, you can unload the translation patch, select the right dialogue response, then load it again. Annoying, but nothing more.

All the stuff about status effect ammo completely ruining the balance is true, though, especially for SMT I. You don't get good guns in SMT II until about halfway through, and Zio and Bufu spells were nerfed heavily, so you can't abuse those quite as easily.

One really nice thing about SMT Devil Survivor is no more of the fusion BS. You directly select the skills to pass on (along with tons of other improvements, such as a built in fusion guide telling you what + what = the demon you are looking for).

While welcome, I thought it made creating munchkin demons too easy. Ideally, Atlus should keep manual skill selection, but reintroduce limitations and make them even more severe - so that fire demons wouldn't be able to inherit ice skills at all.

 

[Catalina]

I'm playing it on PCXS2 and it runs perfectly. The FPS occasionally sporadically dips into the low 50's but as a whole it stays around 60 in 3072x3072. People constantly baw about PS2 emulation, but it's really not that hard provided you're not trying to run it on an ancient PC. You should try it out. As I understand, it's a pretty easy game to get running on it.

That's actually a really tempting idea. I've been wanting to start playing around with PS2 emulators.

However, if I wait for my sister to come home with the PS2 for Christmas, I can have the amusing option of playing it in front of my mom, who will watch pretty much anything I play, but still will criticize how incomprehensible she finds it, in the most mom way possible.

Of course, her TV has a PC hookup....*strokes chin*

 

[CrimHead]

Best way to ease the pain is to fuse good Mitama or fuse any low level fodder and use them as a sacrifice. Fusing Mitama onto a demon wont change the demon, just add stat bonuses and fill up whatever skill slots you have unused. Sacrifice fusions with cheap low level demons that have good skills also helps you spread more good skills around and give the demons some extra starting experience, costing less Macca but not giving your demons stat bonuses. I prefer the low-level demon strategy, but both work. Basically what I do is fuse always-useful skills like buffs/debuffs/mana refill/dark might/avenge/watchful onto things like Pixie and Will o Wisp. Keep them out of the active party, let them gain easy XP through watchful, level up a lot and you get tons of free items (including incense!). When you go to fuse, use them as a sacrifice and the new demon gets all those cool skills plus an XP bonus equal to 1.5x what the sacrificed demon gained as XP. Then just pull out another of the low level demon from your compendium and relevel them again before the next time you fuse stuff.

Word. Thanks alot. I'll try that out.

 

[Crooked Bee]

eh

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Didn't like Devil Survivor, usually I don't have too many problems with Japanese teenage emo bullshit, but I couldn't suffer through it in this case. Didn't like the combat too, the mix of tactical + blob I found unfullfilling and it slowed everything down to a crawl.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Didn't like Devil Survivor, usually I don't have too many problems with Japanese teenage emo bullshit, but I couldn't suffer through it in this case. Didn't like the combat too, the mix of tactical + blob I found unfullfilling and it slowed everything down to a crawl.

Hmm, I actually found it pretty fun, but whatever. And what do you think of Strange Journey?

 

[Humanity has risen!]

Good game from what I played but only three hours of it.

 

[deuxhero]

It is random, though chances depend on demon. Holy demons don't take death skills well, fire demons won't easily take ice skills, etc. More importantly, they have a very high chance to take skills that align with their preference. If you want to get a debuff onto a fire magic caster and have multiple fire spells in your fusion components its going to be fairly hard to not get fire spells, and if you are trying to get a physical attack or an ice spell good fucking luck, its like trying to reroll in D&D games until you get 4 18s..

I think it's entirely random beyond a few rules (see down) in Nocturne. Inheritance types aren't till Persona 3

Only demons with hands can learn claw skills. Only demons with weapons can learn weapon skills. Only demons with mouths can learn breath skills. A handful of moves are exclusive to the fiends.

Pretty much my only gripe with the game is that you can't choose which skills you want to transfer when fusing demons. It's completely random, so if you have 2 skills you want from one demon and one from the other, you have to keep entering and exiting the fusion screen until it randomly produces the desired combination of skills. I mean, I'm gonna get those skills anyway, I NEED THEM, so it's just tedious.

Or maybe I'm retarded and there's someway to do this of which I'm unaware?

Both Raidou 2 (haven't played 1. Pyro demons can't get ice spells, ice demons can't get fire spells and breath spells need a mouth, but I think that is it.) and Devil Survivor allow you to choose what is inherited (with no rules whatsoever in DeSu, DeSu also allowed you to just give a known skill to any demon every so many kills) and Strange Journey has only one possibility for inheritance per fusion (it's just as annoying as it sounds before you have the funds to fuse elementals and mitamas really late game)

 

[Overweight Manatee]

One really nice thing about SMT Devil Survivor is no more of the fusion BS. You directly select the skills to pass on (along with tons of other improvements, such as a built in fusion guide telling you what + what = the demon you are looking for).

While welcome, I thought it made creating munchkin demons too easy. Ideally, Atlus should keep manual skill selection, but reintroduce limitations and make them even more severe - so that fire demons wouldn't be able to inherit ice skills at all.

I'm not as much of an expert as KK is, but I'd like to second this. Devil Survivor was relatively a breeze combat-wise, precisely because fusion was too easy. A very good game nevertheless, one of my favourites.

Really? I found everything in Strange Journey pretty easy except the final boss which just required a bit of level grinding so that it didn't 1-shot me (And the attack that specifically discouraged what you were supposed to be doing the entire rest of the game, assembling demons of the same alignment for a party attack, was complete bull shit). Devil Survivor on the other hand was completely brutal on a few of the routes.

I think the standard randomized skill would have been really bad for Devil Survivor. Since you gain a level pretty much every other battle in Devil Survivor you need to refuse demons a ton more often then other SMT games and doing it for 8+ demons would have been ridiculous. I thought it was restricted well enough since you couldn't change the demon's inherent skills and their auto-benefit thing which played a huge part in the overall strategy.

It is random, though chances depend on demon. Holy demons don't take death skills well, fire demons won't easily take ice skills, etc. More importantly, they have a very high chance to take skills that align with their preference. If you want to get a debuff onto a fire magic caster and have multiple fire spells in your fusion components its going to be fairly hard to not get fire spells, and if you are trying to get a physical attack or an ice spell good fucking luck, its like trying to reroll in D&D games until you get 4 18s..

I think it's entirely random beyond a few rules (see down) in Nocturne. Inheritance types aren't till Persona 3

I'm nearly 100% certain there is some kind of preference system. Certain combinations of skills show up much too often when rolling for fusions at times. I think the effect was just much more pronounced in Persona 3. Granted, non-statistical personal experience with fusions is a huge sampling bias.

 

[Crooked Bee]

eh

 

[KalosKagathos]

Didn't like Devil Survivor, usually I don't have too many problems with Japanese teenage emo bullshit, but I couldn't suffer through it in this case.

Really? I thought DeSu was very light on the emo, with Yuzu being the only whiner (which was the whole point of her character). Other characters tried to keep their cool, admittedly with varying results. Compared to Persona 3, Devil Survivor is an ode to mental fortitude.

 

[denizsi]

Embarassing confession: I tried to play this game for 10 minutes and didn't get shit about the game, couldn't do anything.. In my defence, I was going through the heaviest flu ever, I was knocked in bed for nearly two months straight. The game looked very pretty, though.

 

[deuxhero]

The thing that guarded the gate at the end of the garden sector was pretty hard, though it could just be my party sucked.

I'm nearly 100% certain there is some kind of preference system. Certain combinations of skills show up much too often when rolling for fusions at times. I think the effect was just much more pronounced in Persona 3. Granted, non-statistical personal experience with fusions is a huge sampling bias.

The skills themselves have some form of tiering (I recall there being at least one rather useless passive that had an insane rate of carry over) but the demons do not have a preference IIRC.

 

[KalosKagathos]

The skills themselves have some form of tiering (I recall there being at least one rather useless passive that had an insane rate of carry over) but the demons do not have a preference IIRC.

They definitely do, especially in P3, as OM said. Igor even tells you about different inheritance types. The effect is present in Nocturne too, I remember one time it took me an hour of re-rolls to fuse Orthrus that wouldn't inherit any Agi spells, even though he had plenty of other skills to choose from. That's not just an isolated case, either.

 

[CrimHead]

Is it just me is or is creating specialists beyond the MC hard in this game? I just try to get all the skills I want on my demons. What I'm doing right now is to make sure I can buff and debuff attack, magic, agility, and defense, have at least one spell for each element, can defend against instant death skills, can remove all buffs from the enemy, can remove all debuffs from my party, and can perfom single and multi person heals. If I tried to really focus the skills of any of my demons, I'd be in the fusion menu all day. I want to have a set up wherein no matter what demon I pick from my roster, I'm covered on all fronts.