GuestLog in

Warning, Spoilers ahead!

If you're interested in pushing your knowledge about this game to its max, this is definitely the mod for you. I wouldn't recommend playing this mod if you are new to the game or aren't familiar with its mechanics. Every minute detail is important to getting past some of the obstacles that come your way. If you're not familiar with how skill mutations work, how to farm specific gems for Rag's Jewelry, or how to exploit sacrificial fusions for level skipping, I'd definitely try doing a normal playthrough on Hard or several Normal playthroughs before getting a rude awakening from it here.

When it comes to my experience with the mod, I'd say it was mostly enjoyable. As of writing this, I've just finished the True Demon Ending on Hard with 113 hours logged on the save file. Throughout those 100 hours, I would say my playthrough ranged from being extremely fun, gruelingly difficult but satisfying, gruelingly difficult but annoying, and downright abysmal. Some of the issues I had with the mod aren't the fault of the mod itself and more on Nocturne while others unfortunately were a result of a Hardtype change.

First, the good: I can't think of a single quality-of-life change that was added that I disagree with. Everything that got put into this hack is amazing and allows for so much more strategy and planning that wasn't doable in the base game. Basically everything under that category was amazing/extremely helpful to my experience with this mod.

As for the fights themselves... when they were good, they were REALLY good. Honestly, it's amazing at how increasing the HP on a boss can flesh it out to be something so much more than what it was in the base game. Most late game bosses that would end up becoming pissing matches for the souped up characters we'd have at that point have gotten to whole new levels of challenge that were sorely needed. This is especially true for the fiends. Almost all of the fiends were amazing to fight, with Dante attaining new levels of challenge that he definitely deserved and Trumpeter becoming a lot more crafty to deal with now that you were almost guaranteed to have to deal with Holy Melody more than once.

A more unique angle to some of the changed fights that I found only came up thanks to Hardtype were the fights that I wouldn't say were memorable and amazing like the fiends, but were extremely satisfying hurdles to get over. These are the fights I'd classify as the "gruelingly difficult but satisfying" fights. Metatron is definitely one of them. Metatron is probably one of the scarier fights in this mod. Each phase of his fight gives him new ways of one-shotting your party if you aren't above a specific HP threshold or didn't run your buff/debuff cycles right. It never felt grossly unfair, though, which made beating him all the more hype.

Another fight I'd put in this category would be Lucifer. Lucifer is an absolute asshole in this mod. But, depending on your build/demons, you can basically prevent him from really being too much of a hassle. At this point in the game, he's the final final challenge you'll ever have to face after the all new Kagutsuchi fight so I think it's fitting that he really tests your skillset by throwing everything at you at once. You need to be decked out with all the right items, all the right resistances nulled (repelled in this case), and a strategy for dealing with everything he throws at you. While I was honestly tired at the time of fighting him because of reasons I'll get into soon, I think the fight was overall pretty satisfying for what it was.

Now for the bad: there are two stages of badness that plague this mod. One has to do with some of Nocturne's shitty design decisions and two has to do with the mod itself.

It should go with out saying, but random skill inheritance is the bane of my existence. You need to squeeze as much potential out of your demons as possible in this mod and, even with the QOL updates to weighted skills, it is still a massive pain in the ass to keep rolling for the skills you need. Some fusions near the end of the game took me 1-2 days of hopping on, rolling for the build, then getting off when I didn't get it after 7 hours of attempts. Lucifer was the straw that broke the camel's back for me because I had to refuse my entire team to get the repel skills off of 4 different demons and combine them into one. It was a nightmarishly awful experience of 3 days worth of prep for one fight. It honestly made the boss seem somewhat worse than he actually is because of how tired I was after not only fusing a whole team for him, but having to redo all of Kagutsuchi to even see if the time I spent paid off. Things didn't get any better when, in order to make some fiends viable at a certain point in the game, I had to snag a bunch of void/anti skills off of other demons and mash them into each other to make them usable.

Another annoying, but not as problematic, part of Nocturne were the Deathstones. The Deathstones would fuck with certain fusions I had to make during Full Kagutsuchi because you were forced to use them before you were allowed to fuse what you actually wanted. Daisoujou and Matador were two bastards who would lurk among the fusion list every now and then to the point where I'd be relieved when the fusion path I was on didn't intertwine with one that would lead to one of them appearing again. Thankfully, this wasn't too prevalent, but it was still annoying to see every now and then.

Now for the problems that stem from Hardtype itself. I have a lot to say when it comes to criticisms of this mod. My arguments are very disjointed, so I'm going to make bulletpoints that'll rapidfire through them so they're somewhat organized:

• There were multiple points where the damage calculation would outright break. I had multiple instances during the game where sometimes skills would vary in damage to ridiculous degrees. This includes moments where Magma Axis would go from 1k damage to 100 damage, or some spells would be repelled for 50k damage instead of 500-600 like you'd expect. It didn't happen frequently or impact any of my fights negatively, but it's definitely a bug worth noting.

• Some fights were given more health and were just awful or boring as a result. Spectre 3 is one of the worst fights in this mod. If you don't have high-damage all-hit physicals that can wipe them all in one fell swoop, it is just the longest and most boring fight in the game. I spent so long wiping out the different versions of himself he kept respawning that I ended up earning 19k XP from this fight which is several times more than what you'd get if you one-tapped all of them.

Other examples of notable bad fights due to the health inflation were Girimehkala, all the Reasons, Mithra, Mada, all the Amala Temple fights, and Beelzebub.

Girhimehkala was just a long, boring slog of a fight where you just pump him full of magic and respond to his wild physicals every now and then. After the nightmare that was Hardtype Yoyogi Park, he was not a welcome conclusion to it all (Sakahagi was fine, though, the 21k HP is a meme, but it's manageable).

The Reasons were wildly boring in their own unique ways. Ahriman is cool in that you get to play his game to the fullest, but becomes a slog when he just becomes a healthtest to see if you can survive Apocalypse + Megidoloan for the duration of 55k HP. Noah is a meme and is a victim of the power of Pierce. It's interesting that you hit a point in the fight where you have to memorize his elemental script, but it goes on for so damn long that it loses its pizazz for me after a certain point. Chiaki, on the other hand, is a seismic nightmare of a fight. Baal's Bane is so random and she can sometimes just fly-ify your whole party during a turn if she feels like it. The fight is so long since you have to kill Flauros and Ose first which is kind of annoying, but B. Bane takes it to a new level. If it were more scripted, it'd be a better fight, but damn is it annoying.

Mithra is another HP check of a fight where it's a test to see if you 1. repel expel and 2. can survive the strongest Megidola in history. It's honestly very boring and very simple. You can tell he's one of the filler bosses they made in the game because of how simplistic his moveset is. Making Megidola do humongo dick damage was a clever idea for making sure players are levelled properly, but the inflated HP did NOT make the fight any better.

Mada is in a similar boat where, instead of testing my party's HP, he makes sure you have someone with Prayer, Phys Drain, and the ability to sit through an army of Pazuzu's being muted while you pummel him into the dirt. It's a unique way of evaluating the player's skillset, but ultimately it wasn't very fun to go through and felt like a slog.

The Amala Temple fights were also wildly boring. Their AI is not complex enough to do anything interesting throughout the duration of the thousands of HP. With the fiends and other late game fights, they were all multi-staged or provided you with a very unique scenario you had to work around. With the Amala Temple fights, though, they're honestly just 3 separate fights meant to act as one big fight to get to Isamu. It's once again partially a limit of Nocturne and partially the fault of the mod for artificially extending these fights where you get a gist of their scripts after the first 3 turns.

Finally, we have Beelzebub, who is probably the most unfortunate late-game boss ever. The poor bastard can get broken in so many ways to where he won't do any of his scary moves, it's kind of sad. I had someone who repelled electric, so I just didn't buff myself to prevent his Dekaja + Focus combo, leading him to spam Maziodyne/Mazandyne and end his turn immediately. He got stomped on to the point where the added HP only served to elongate the stomping rather than just letting me put the fly out of his misery.

• The inflated HP of random encounters could honestly be daunting to the point of leaving me speechless as to why certain QOL changes were made. One of the cool things Hardtype changed was that it increased the Mana Pool of your demons which is great, but it's not great when enemies are Health Glutton Meat Cannons who make the change feel almost pointless because you're expending so much MP just to deal with their 100-1000s of HP. The same goes for some boss fights where I'm sitting there wondering why there's this change that gets nullified by the fact I keep needing MP restore items because shit is going on for so long. A minor gripe because this does make the game harder in a mod meant to, y'know, make the game harder, but it's still grossly annoying none-the less (especially with the Trafuri removal and Estoma nerf).

• Another minor gripe, but some nerfs to demons only went as far as me having to spend 10 more hours in the fusion blender to undo it and didn't really amount to anything other than that. This mainly applies to fiends. I'm fine with nerfs to fiends like removing Prayer from Daisoujou and replacing it with Amrita, but stuff like giving the Harlot a weakness to ailments is just annoying. Her weakness to ailments didn't stop me from using her, it just made sit there mashing XXOO like an idiot trying to move Anti-Ailments onto her on top of the several other skills you have to transfer to make her viable. Again, it's a nerf so this type of stuff was intentional and it's a staple of SMT to have to put extra work in to cover weaknesses, but it's still slightly inconvenient, so I'm going to mention it here.

• I think magic could use a bit more tweaking to be slightly more viable. I ran a magic build in my playthrough and it was nice to see Magma Axis Pierce Lucifer, but I could still really feel it pale in comparison to a Focused Physical. There were so many bosses in the late game where my damage dealer with Focus + Dark Sword was doing so much more than I was with Magma Axis + Fire Boost + Magic Boost that it was kinda silly. One thing to also note is that your final Demi-fiend build also drastically changes based on if you run Physical or not. The only skills you need to run a Freikugel set are Freik + Focus + Pierce. Magma Axis requires M. Axis + Fire Boost + Mag. Boost + Pierce. That's one more skill slot you could use to fit in Phys Repel from Masakados, which would've been really helpful during Lucifer by comparison to a Magic build.

Anyway, I'm getting tired as I'm writing this. I'm just rambling at this point, so I'll wrap things up by saying that a lot of my gripes with this mod come from limitations with Nocturne modding itself. I'm sure these types of things will be ironed out in the potential PC modding scene that's sure to follow with the HD remake. Overall, this mod is pretty fun and I look forward to seeing how it evolves as you or others improve upon it in the future. I'd recommend it if you go in knowing there's going to be a lot of CBT here and there, but it'll be mostly worth it in the longrun if you're willing to take on the challenge.

Also, use a Physical build, magic isn't worth it (but don't tell anyone I said that shshshs).

If you're here, you're most likely familiar with SMT Nocturne, so I don't need to talk about how great this game is. I haven't played this game in probably 12 or 13 years, so I am a little rusty. The patch actually seems obnoxiously difficult early game, as a good chunk of my money goes to being healed, when what I want to do is save to buy the early magatamas, not die because I don't heal 100% or close to it after every battle. However I am only just at the beginning, and have just gotten to the point where I am able to challenge Matador. The skill info that has been added to the UI has been at the least interesting but generally useful, as the information was absent in vanilla. Its probably just me, but the status ailment skills seem actually useful (I'll admit I haven't studied the patch notes) but that may have more to do with my own lack of experimentation as I never put much stock in them when I played this game years ago. I have always been reluctant to depend on status ailment skills in RPGs because I am old school, and over the years and consoles status ailment skills don't tend to work as often/well as they should regardless of title or series. "Sexy Gaze" proved invaluable for the Amala Network on the way to Ginza.

Die hard fan of this game. I spent an insane amount of days doing nothing but playing this game after I purchased it around 04 or 05. Pardon my ego temporarily because this is important to state; I never played the game on normal mode even though I completed it at least 3 times, so trust me when I say the difficulty increase of this patch is no joke. Almost from the beginning, your kaja/nda spells become indispensable, when in vanilla that was only the case in the latter half of the game at best, and these skills were really only "necessary" when trying to attain true demon ending, extra press turn, freikugel. Mastery of the press turn system and knowledge of or willingness to learn and exploit enemy weaknesses is required; the enemies are as relentless as you'd imagine if the story of this game was your real life struggle. I feel that currently, I am OVER levelled, and I am still struggling and will most likely lose to Matador at least once if not 3 or 4 times when I get back to the game. If you love this game as much as I do, but completed it 100% years ago and let it go since then, I highly recommend this patch. I have been frustrated, but not disappointed. Big thanks to zombero, I didn't even know I wanted this.

From the original concept, it seemed that this hack was simply going to be a harder game. Which could have been easily done by increasing damage taken by 100%, decreasing damage dealt by 50% and what not. But since that wouldn't necessarily make it more fun, entire mechanics were reworked, to give the player all the tools needed to face the bigger challenges.

This resulted in an improved Nocturne in every way: broken mechanics were fixed, grinding was decreased, prices were reduced and the experience plays out as organically as the original Nocturne.

Despite all of this, the game is still way harder: managing money early game is really hard and it's a lot easier to get wiped out. It's a success in becoming a harder experience: every improvement to the gameplay in favour of the player simply gives them the tools to fight such strong enemies without it becoming frustrating or too time consuming.

It took me just as much time to beat the hack as regular Nocturne so it's clear it was carefully crafted into being the amazing experience it became. Similar to regular Nocturne, late game becomes much more manageable since the demons start getting the best skills in the game, such as repel physical and debilitate.

Therefore, I consider it the definitive Nocturne experience: it works out just like regular Nocturne but much more interestingly and allows players to dominate the battle system to an extend the regular game didn't allow, while still keeping a greater challenge.

Even though I'm excited for the rerelease in HD, I'm pretty sure even if a harder difficulty is included, it will be a simple damage multiplier instead of completely reworked sets and encounters (specially since some of the encounters in the hack go against the plot). Therefore, I would encourage anyway to play this hack.

Nocturne is already one of the best games ever made that is still relevant through sheer quality so this hack took this game way over a 10/10.

THIS is the way the game should have been!! "Normal" is cute and funny to play, easy once you get the hang of it "Hard" is AWESOME!!! Fearsome and just. Each boss is a challenge that leaves you ubersatisfied :D and the gameplay is SO much better

Coming from SMT IV and being disappointed by the lack of its difficulty after the initial rough beginning, I decided to get into SMT Nocturne using this romhack. And oh my does it deliver.

It's fairly obvious that the person who created this didn't just bloated everything to high heaven while nerfing everything to the bottom. I had my fair share of game over screens but outside of the usual first fights on Hard mode (which is true even if you're playing without the hack) every loss was entirely my bad management of MP or bad call to take a risk that had small return.

If you're one of those who play turn-based JRPG because they enjoy the challenge, planning ahead, budgeting and decision making even when the worst thing is happening, this is the game to play and this is THE hack to use even if it's your first playthrough.

This version of SMT - Nocturne addresses all of the problems I had with the vanilla version, and adds so many interesting changes, that I honestly can't play the vanilla version anymore. I haven't experienced any negatives while playing this at all. Highly recommended for anyone who'd want a fresh SMT experience.