Persona LARPer plays Shin Megami Tensei 3: Nocturne for the first time
This is one of the few JRPGs that's entirely built on its mechanics rather than its story and it does indeed have really good mechanics. It's one of the few JRPGs out there where if you're having trouble with a boss, you need to come back with a better plan rather than grinding. I liked the nuances of the Press Turn system compared to the blunt simplicity of One More and Baton Pass in Persona, as well as the fact that you get to actually engage with this system against bosses when you really don't with One More.
It does have a few shortcomings, tho. After like the awakening of the god Noah 3/4ths of the way into the game, you can basically become immune to everything except for Almighty no matter what, meaning the bosses need to devolve into just mashing out big Almighty attacks so they don't just immediately die, meaning you also need to start mashing out big almighty attacks because nothing else deals a relevant amount of damage all while curbstomping random encounters, and then once you get demons that know Victory Cry, a skill that fully refills their HP and MP at the end of battle, random encounters may as well not even happen. I was also not a big fan of there not being any kind of Heat Riser move that buffs every stat for the party when there is a Debilitate that debuffs every stat for the enemies. It also just in general has that JRPG problem of enemies die just as easily to regular attacks as they do to status ailments and all of the bosses are immune to status ailments so why would you ever want these?
This game also contains Dante from the Devil May Cry series sporting his Devil May Cry 2 design as a mandatory boss near the start of the game and then an optional one later. He's the easiest boss in the game, but he's cool enough that it doesn't matter. You even get him as a party member near the end of the game assuming you've been doing the optional Fiend fights so far. I liked the reference to Devil May Cry 2 where he asks you to call a coin flip to determine how much you pay him to join.
The story exists mostly in theming and symbolism. The literal plot is a lot of you being told to go somewhere and listen to three dudes talk about their equally shitty ideologies. The world has ended and is about to be remade, and now you need to choose a Reason, a way of thinking that will shape how the world is remade. You hear the three main Reasons all throughout the game. The reason of Musubi is about total solitude. The world is absolute and everybody will be able to shape their world to their personal paradise. The reason of Shijima is about stillness. It's a world where there is no conflict, no destruction, and no misery. The final reason of Yosuga is about power. The strong rule the weak through divine right. And the final part of the game explicitly criticizes all three of them when you choose to go against them. Isamu of the Musubi reason is pissed off you won't join him in his quest for solitude, Hikawa of Shijima is pissed off and fights you in his quest for a world with no anger or conflict, and Chiaki of Yosuga cries when she loses despite believing the strong have a right to do as they please.
There are also three other secret endings, one of which I got. The ending I got is the one where you get your own reason sponsored by Lucifer to destroy the world and lead Lucifer's armies into heaven to fight God. I'm pretty sure this is considered the true ending as this is the one is achieved by fighting a bunch of optional bosses and going through the optional dungeon called the Labrynth of Amala.
The symbolism has that characteristically Japanese lack of subtlety to it. The world-ending calamity is called The Conception and the "vortex world" that Tokyo is inside of is the inside of a sphere. Wonder what that means. The leader of the Manikins conceives a Reason where everybody lives in equality and harmony, but is killed by Chiaki and her goons, which are the angels. Not sure what that means either. I could go on, but this is a great game that you should play for yourself, so I won't.
There are a few gripes I have with the game's exploration. There's basically no place where you cannot get random encounters for like 10 hours of gameplay. The first city you get to where there are no random encounters is the Manikin hideout underneath Ginza and that doesn't have a healing fountain. The second is 10 hours later at Asakusa and that eventually does become a place you can get random encounters (maybe only if you support the Yosuga reason like I did idk). It still became my go-to fast travel point for when I needed a healing fountain or the Cathedral of Shadows because they're both immediately in front of the save point you warp to, but still I would like to not always be at threat of random encounters.
The far bigger problem I had is with demon fusion. This is not like Pokemon where you are intended to bond with and carry your favorite demons throughout the game. They are not going to keep up either in terms of stats or skills and you need to fuse them into better demons. However, you may still want to keep some of those earlier skills, and you do get to pass along skills during fusion. However, what skills carry over is entirely random, so if you want specific skills to carry over, you need to select the fusion, check if the right skills carry over, and, if they don't, go back and select it again. Maddening. I did this for 10 minutes trying to get a Metatron that knows the skills Prayer and Samrecarm for the final boss fight because he doesn't learn either of those skills naturally. I was told this was fixed in the HD version, which I didn't play as I didn't know it existed until I was already halfway through on an emulator.
Overall very fun game for people that like JRPG combat but want a seinen anime plot instead of a sounen anime plot.