![]() Time and again he encounters his old classmates Isamu and Chiaki, their former teacher Yuko, the doomsday-cult leader Hikawa, and the investigative journalist Hijiri. So the Demi-fiend explores the ruins of Tokyo in Nocturne. It’s a demon-eat-demon struggle from one save point to the next. Nocturne presents a ruined world with many possibilities for cultivating a new civilization in the subsequent political vacuum, but no clear path to global reconstitution. Nocturne is grim and sparse Persona is cute and groovy. Despite the demons and systems in common, Persona and Nocturne couldn’t be any more opposed to each other in terms of sensibility. Unlike Nocturne, your friends in Persona are, well, friendly. Yet Nocturne and the other SMT titles have been eclipsed in recent years by the spinoff series Persona, which appropriates the combat and occultism of SMT in service of a brighter and more sociable experience: high school heroes working part-time jobs, cramming for exams, and going on dates in between excursions to the underworld. It’s the most acclaimed entry in the Shin Megami Tensei series, which began with Shin Megami Tensei on Super Nintendo and will continue later this year with SMT V for Nintendo Switch. The soundtrack shreds-the series composer Shoji Meguro pumps a lot of metal and electronic influences into Nocturne-but otherwise this is a shockingly plaintive JRPG. Nocturne turns Tokyo into a crackling desert hellscape, but our stoic hero Demi-fiend rarely speaks. Henceforth, he’s known as the Demi-fiend. But Naoki can’t reverse his transformation. He’s able to regurgitate the parasite he’s ingested and consume the others that he acquires during his postapocalyptic travels. He’s now tattooed from head to toe in neon stripes. Down in the morgue, Naoki meets two mysterious figures who persuade him to swallow a large parasitic worm, called a magatama, which makes Naoki half man, half demon. But the Conception spares the hospital, and so the few humans there emerge unscathed into the new world. Gathered together in an abandoned hospital, Naoki, his classmates, their homeroom teacher, and a couple of mysterious strangers witness a global cataclysm known as the Conception, which wipes humanity from the earth. His friends aren’t very friendly, though, and their teen dickishness will prove disastrous in due time. The high school student Naoki emerges from a subway station as he’s rushing to meet his friends around town. ![]() The story opens in Tokyo on a sunny day that so happens to mark the end of the world. Released 18 years ago for PlayStation 2, Nocturne made for a challenging twist in the history of Japanese role-playing games with turn-based combat. This week, Japanese video game developer Atlus released a remaster for Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne for Sony PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
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