First, an introduction to the game, and somewhat the Shin Megami Tensei series: It's post-apocalyptic Pokemon smashed together with mythos from around the world. Instead of capturing cute, cuddly beasts, you talk, bribe, and intimidate demons, angels, monsters, and figures from myth into fighting for you, and when you're done with them, you fuse them together to make even stronger beasts. To be fair to Atlus, the SMT series has been doing this much longer than Pokemon has.
I feel like most of the hype for the game's difficulty actually comes down to traditional JRPG conditioning. Status effects, buffs, and debuffs tend to be worthless when the player use them, either because the fight will be over quicker without them or because bosses are immune. In Nocturne, status effects aren't just effective when used by the player, they basically make every single boss roll over. Maybe half a dozen bosses in the game use spells to take off the buffs or debuffs that the player casts, and access to some of the strongest debuff spells comes very early in the game. Maybe if I hadn't played other Shin Megami Tensei games, I wouldn't have latched on to every buff and debuff spell I could find and spammed them at the start of every fight? But other games make the spells harder to access or bosses tend to get rid of them more frequently. I kept waiting for the boss that would smack me down for defeating it with stat buffs/debuffs, but it never came - including the final bosses of the game and the optional boss. Every single boss fight came down to my main characters spamming the strongest physical attack he had, in the end. Where a physical damage dealing MC is, unfortunately, the only optimal build. Other builds work, but they don't work as well, which is a bit silly.
That isn't to say there aren't difficulty spikes, but I feel like it comes down to sucker punches. A lot of early bosses, you'll have to go into twice (or look the boss up, to be honest) because that way you know what the boss is weak to and what element / ailment the boss uses - but once you know that, the boss is easy. And then there are the things that are impossible to completely prepare for. Large groups of foes ambushing you and killing your full HP Main Character (and the Main Character dying is a game over, no chance to revive him) before you can act, instant death spells before you can become immune to them, and a certain boss that can give himself infinite turns at will come to mind as things that frustrated me when I lost progress for things that were basically entirely out of my control. This isn't something that other JRPGs don't have... but it seems to pop up a bit more in SMT games.
This isn't to say the game is entirely a pushover or bullshit - the dungeons of the game are still very well designed. The SMT series started off as a first person dungeon crawl, which is a genre that survives on the dungeons being interesting. Nocturne's dungeons are a bit of a breath of fresh air, compared to most JRPGs. They tend to be more about how long your party can survive between healing, which makes normal encounters more impactful than usual. The mazes, puzzles, pitfalls, teleportation points, damaging floors, and other traps make dungeon trips feel more like the meat of the game, rather than what's stopping you from advancing in the plot.
And yet, despite all my complaints about the game, I actually really enjoyed the game. Nocturne's story is somewhat thin, in a conventional sense, but it makes up for it in presentation. The game takes place in post-apocalytpic Tokyo and Atlus manages to capture the feel of being alone in a wasteland, being in a world that's hostile to your very existence pretty well. There are very few conventional NPCs - most of the idle dialogue is provided by ghosts or demons. Not even towns, or the ruins of, are safe from random encounters or even boss battles, in a couple situations.
Atlus also eschews the normal good vs evil conflict and instead has the player choose who they wish to align themselves with, if they want to align with anyone at all. There's 6 endings, which correspond to the various beliefs as to how the world should be, as championed by the few remaining humans left. Most of the important NPCs you interact with end up dead or disillusioned or both - depending on the path you take, maybe even by your hands.
So, the atmosphere and the aesthetic really save the game for me, though I probably would have finished the game even if I didn't end up enjoying it, thanks to the hype.
Finally, my total hours tally on the game, according to my save, is 140 hours. Add maybe 10 hours for game overs and things I had to redo, subtract maybe 30-40 for the game sitting idle (I'm bad about that). Safe to say, the game is a looong game. That's doing all the optional content, though.
Now what the hell do I do with my
