So I recently beat SMT 3: Nocturne, using the Hardtype hack of the game, and I had some thoughts about it. specifically, attempting to sort out my thoughts on whether or not it's good. All thoughts are on the original PS2 release of the game, unmodded.
SMT Nocturne is an anomaly of a game on a lot of levels. it was the first fully rendered 3D title in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise*, it was the first Shin Megami Tensei game to be localized without censorship, and it has become infamous through discussion of its difficulty, memes about its music, and one very special skeleton.
I will tell you my opinion of the game right now. I don't think Nocturne is a good videogame. it's incredibly outdated, its story leaves much to be desired, and it feels like everything in the game that you need to succeed is a knowledge check.
but despite my opinion on it, I'm continually fascinated. Nocturne is a game with so many layers to it, and as you dig deeper, you learn more and more about this strange little game from 2003, and how insanely complex it is. how Magic's formulas are fucked up. how the Labyrinth Of Amala, the Fiends, and Lucifer weren't even in the game originally. how insanely challenge-runnable the game is, with people coming up with new ideas seemingly every week. seeing how the game can be broken in so many different ways, learning all the ways it can be beaten, and busted open, so on and so forth. it's so fascinating in a way that few games can ever dream to be, just by how unabashedly strange it is
I think the best way to explain Nocturne is to explain a part of my own personal lexicon. the "stupid gnome trick" is something I believe I picked up from the blogger Toskarin, but I can't be entirely sure. A Stupid Gnome Trick, in my eyes, is actively bad game design that is meant to hurt the player, but done in an endearing way that keeps you interested in the game. some other examples would be things like Fear and Hunger's Rusty Nails, or Daggerfall throwing you into an insanely hard dungeon that you will never be able to beat unless you were powerleveling like crazy for the sin of following the main questline too hard. design quirks that fascinate me to no end, how a game can do something so actively harmful, but still endearing.
Nocturne as a game feels like a stupid gnome trick. it's a bag of terrible programming, bad game design, cryptic puzzles, and mediocre atmospheric storytelling. but it's so endlessly fascinating and endearing to me, that despite my dislike of it on a critical level, I can't help but love it.
*there are several caveats to this but NINE is a glorified tech demo and uses VN style portraits for its dialouge and Ronde doesn't exist
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