Long Post Ahead
All of these are copy-and-pastes of FacilityPro's messages.
I've been playing SMT: Nocturne almost exclusively over the last few days.
At its heart it's a basic RPG, with turn-based, menu battles (similar to FF I). The battle system has a few quirks, though. You get one turn for each member you have in your party. If you do a critical hit or attack an enemy with its weakness, you get an extra turn. However, if you miss an attack or attack an enemy with something it's resistant to, you lose a turn. Almost every enemy/party member has at least one strength and weakness, so you have to keep track of that stuff, especially if you're under leveled.
You recriut your party members from enemies. This involves talking to them, giving them what they ask for, and hoping they don't run off after you give them things. They sometimes ask you questions like "Is doing good a waste of time?" Most of the time you can guess the correct answer from they way it looks/talks. If you have party members in reserve, you can replace the ones that die in battles by using a turn.
You can also merge party members together to get new/stronger ones. At the point in the game I'm at now, making party member stronger comes from merging, since they need so many frigging exp points to level up.
Your character levels up quicker. You can also eat these spiral things (Magatmata?) to boost certain stats, change strengths/weaknesses, and learn new skills.
The dungeons started out slowly, but are getting better. the game seems to center on one freaking huge dungeon. You gain access to new parts of it as the game progresses. So far, its decent as far as dungeons go. (But I've seen better.)
....
So far, I think it's a pretty decent game. (And no huge cutscenes, either.)
...This game has some weird quirks. Many areas feature a mix of high and low level enemies. For instance, in the overwor;d, I'm still fighting some of the same enemies as I did the first time I ventured outside. Also, only the hero can use items in battle.
I haven't gotten many game overs lately. The first two horsemen of the apocalypse each gave me a couple. Even though I'm overleveled, I still have to make preparations for boss fights.
The dungeons have been getting better. There was one combination boss fight/puzzle that was pretty neat. The "big dungeon" (Amala) I referred to in an earler post has five parts, each called a kapla. I've cleared the first two so far. What's cool about this game is that if I get lost or stuck in the normal dungeons, I can go clear out some rooms of the Amala Labyrinth, then try again.
I also like the music in this game. It's pretty varied, and fits the areas well.
I don't know how people came up with 40 hours for Nocturne. I'm almost at 80 and I haven't even entered the 4th (out of 5) Kapla yet. This game is frigging LONG. And keep in mind the longest cutscene has been about 4 minutes. I poked around at a message board, and if I understand correctly, the whole Kapla thing isn't required to beat the game. If that's so, it may be the first sidequest that's longer than the main game. I'm still going to do it, though, as it's been a pretty good dungeon (or dungeons).
Dungeons: This is basically a dungeon crawler. (I like dungeon crawlers, because they tend to be more gameplay than story oriented.) Although there have been plenty of good dungeons in Nocturne, there are also some "eh" ones, without any characterization. I think this would have been a better game had they just used the better half of the numberous dungeons, and made the optional dungeon mandatory. If you don't like 1 way doors, I'd suggest you stay away from this game. Oh...the automapping feature is almost too good. It makes navigation about 10 times easier than if you in't have one or had to make your own maps (which would be a necessity if you didn't have the automap). So any complex dungeons layouts are more or less negated. I guess it could have been worse. You could have had the entire dungeon map from the start instead of getting it filled in.
Battles: This isn't a game where you can just level Curly, Larry, and Moe up to 99 and blast through the game. It's all about finding and exploiting enemy weaknesses and minimizing your own. Getting a game over on my first try on a boss is a regular occurrance at this point in the game. (Although once I see what his style is I can usually beat him on the next attempt.) Random battles are unbalanced, as many dungeons have a mix of very weak and strong enemies. I guess it's not as bad as fighting the same two groups of enemies for 50 battles in a row, though (a la Xenogears). At it's heart, the battle system is FF I. Your party takes a turn, then the enemies go. For the most part, you usually get the first attack.
Party development: You can get pretty much any enemy in the game to be in your party; but some are much more difficult to get than others. You can either recriut or fuse demons to build up your party. Fusing can be almost as addictive as the workshops in Vagrant Story. Since the abilities of the new demon is a random function, you can sit there for 20 minutes undoing and redoing the fuse choices until you get the abilities you want. This can get boring. Some abilities show up less than others. So if you want a demon with very specific abilities, prepare for a lag.
Finally, you get your abilities from eating magatama, which is more or less materia from FF VII. Your resistances and weaknesses, skills, and stat bonuses come from whatever you have ingested when you level up.
Overall, I think this is a good game, but too damn long. Getting rid of some of the more basic dungeons could have made this game more succinct. I have a feeling I'll be at 90 hours when I finish.
I'm in what I think is the last dungeon of Nocturne. 93 hours. ... I did a puzzle where you have to raise and lower blocks to get across and go under areas, as well as a puzzle with freakish one way invisible bridges. I just did the worst boss fight ever. It probably took me 15 minutes before I figured out his pattern. It was your basic battle of attrition, which was made worse when he started absorbing 400 HP at a time from my party members when I was doing 150 HP per round on him. After about 10 minutes, I put Dante in my party for his elemental attacks. He also had another ability that, up to this point in the game, seemed useless, but in this case worked wonders.
What a nightmare. I beat the last boss of Nocturne, but since I finished the Amala dungeon, I got to fight the "real" final boss after it. I wasn't prepared for it at all. I lost, of course, but the worst part was that I lasted about a half hour before I died. At one point, he confused one of my party members, who wasted no time in healing him completely. All 65,000 HP worth :( (Which is even worse since I was doing, on average, about 500 HP of damage on him each round.) Obviously, I need to learn more skills, level up, and prepare more. I just hit 100 hours. I looked at a walkthrough to see if there were any sidequests I missed, and found two. So I guess I'll do those now.
I finally finished Nocturne, on my last day of vacation. The clock was just shy of 114 hours. The last 15 or so hours were spent leveling/fusing/skill developing for the true last boss. (And I probably went overboard, because I wasted him.) Even so, 100 hours is way too long for an RPG. Even a good one. Maybe I took longer than most, but, when doing the optional dungeon (which is the whole point of the game), I can't see this being less than 80 hours. Anyhow, the ending scene was probably about 2 minutes long
I've had my RPG fix for a few months; that's for sure.
"..." means there was originally something there that I didn't feel was necessary to include, such as his work on the game, work on another game, or (rarely) a curse word.
Summing up what he said, it's a good game, just insanely long.
But hey, if you don't like it and you got the Director's Cut (it seems there's multiple versions of it, since mine says "Limited Edition Director's Cut" on the manual and includes the soundtrack), you can hold onto it for a while and hope it rises in price.
I did an eBay search for it, and the
overall prices actually aren't bad. It could have been like what I said earlier; that one that went for $91 was the "Special Edition", and these are originals. Or two people got into a bid war.
Where are these lemmings going? The
Super Nintendo Super Shire! Hop in line and follow them there!
[ March 13, 2005, 07:12 PM: Message edited by: CodieKitty ]
