2/5 ★ – truewalrus's review of Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster.

Shin Megami Tensei: III Nocturne - HD is hitting on all cylinders when puzzling through boss fights, theory crafting MC and demon skill setups, discovering interesting fusion targets, or unlocking a new Magatama. The demon collectathon is somewhat enjoyable as well, but negotiation is pretty limited here and a lot of the QOL features introduced in HD seem fairly lacking after a Shin Megami Tensei: V Vengeance playthrough as they are still far behind the modern innovations in the series. But all of that is irrelevant. How much you enjoy Nocturne is entirely dependent on how able you are to stomach the random encounter bullshit. And there is a lot of bullshit. Random encounter bullshit point #1: Frequency. Nocturne's frequency of encounters is frankly, insane. There's an indicator in the bottom right that's supposed to go from blue to green to yellow to red the closer you get to hitting an encounter, but it's irrelevant. You're just as likely to hit an encounter on green as you are on red. You can hit an encounter, walk 2 steps and immediately hit another. Dungeon design in Nocturne is almost entirely long windy mazes with frequent dead ends and long walks between puzzles or save points, so to make encounters so frequent is an incredibly frustrating occurrence. Sometimes so many encounters would happen between where I was and where I was going that I would forget how a puzzle was supposed to work or which way I was supposed to go and end up needing to re-trace my steps to figure it out. Eventually you do get a skill, Estoma, that reduces encounter rate by about 20%. Even the Estoma encounter rate is still too high and it's still practically a necessity to carry an Estoma demon at all times to keep from rage quitting. Frustrating. Random encounter bullshit point #2: Difficulty. To make this frequency of random encounters even more annoying, random encounters are not freebies. In fact, it's frequently the case that you will die in a random encounter, and, since save points are few and far between, the end result of this death is, of course, a long walk back, chock-full of more random encounters. Die. Loop. Repeat. Frustrating. Random encounter bullshit point #3: Ambushes. It's not enough that the encounters already are challenging, it's also entirely random whether your team gets priority, the enemy team gets priority, or you are ambushed. In an ambush, your team begins combat facing the wrong direction and enemy attacks will automatically crit for the first turn. This is practically a death sentence if they focus the MC. You just die without having a chance to act. So ambushes act as a nice random % chance of death whenever a random encounter triggers with no input from the player. Frustrating. Random encounter bullshit point #4: Run Away. Why is the "Run Away" option available? Selecting Run Away essentially passes your turn to the enemy, as the chance to run away is literally 0%. It does not matter how much lower level the enemy demons are, it does not matter how much faster you are, or how much slower they are. All that matters is the chance is 0%. You will run away 0 times using this option. So, the game has frequent, difficult, random combat that cannot be escaped from (without Trafuri, another skill), with a % chance of death without acting. Frustrating. I apparently enjoyed this spectacular set of combat conditions back in the early 2000s when I first played Nocturne, but I can say that the me now found this playthrough miserable, and boy is that final dungeon poorly designed. At least I got the achievement for winning on hard though. Playtime: 57.5 hours, 41.3 hours in game. 16 hours spent walking in circles (use a map guide, I didn't, it was a mistake)