I’ma get the ball rolling.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne

Genre: JRPG

Premise/Story: Your well-like teacher is in hospital, you go to visit her. The place is abandoned, and you find a creepy dude who wants to destroy the world or something. Your teacher saves you from the demon he summons. Then the world ends, and you become a demon. In the first 5 minutes. You get to find out what the **** happened, how to rebuild the world, and ultimately, what sort of world to make it into. The story generally takes 2nd place to the gameplay throughout the game, but often is rather interesting during its high points.

Gameplay: I despise the analogy (the SMT series did the idea of ‘recruiting almost any enemy’ first, and better IMO), but think Pokemon with demons. You get one ‘turn’ for each person in your party, but can use only half of one for striking a weak spot, lose 2 for missing/ineffective attacks, or all for having attacks reflect on you/get absorbed. So naturally, exploiting weaknesses and protecting yours plays a BIG part in strategies.

This game is hard. VERY hard. It’s not unlikely that you’ll lose the very first fight, despite only being able to attack. The game explains stuff well, but loves to throw curveballs at you and force you to think carefully rather than just recklessly using your strongest moves. If your main dude ever dies, you lose. Given the prevalence of instant-death spells and strong-bum enemies, this happens a lot, especially if you’re not careful about which set of strengths and weaknesses you set. Don’t expect any pity here. However, the game’s so damn fun you’ll keep wanting more.

You can recruit almost any demon you encounter, provided you’re at an appropriate level. You can them fuse them to make more badbum ones, or to refine traits to aid against certain bosses. There are a total of 6 endings with a fair few sidequests, leading to some decent replayability. This is a LONG game, will easily take about 50 hours at least, probably more if you get stuck on certain bosses (which you WILL).

Graphics: As you can imagine, this is not a happy cheery game. It’s all done in a cel-shaded look, and is generally rather oppressive and gloomy-looking. The art direction is fantastic, the enemies generally look pretty awesome, and there are some dungeons that will make you want to just sit around and admire the scenery. The game has a great atmosphere to it, especially if you find occult-themed stuff kinda cool.

Music/Sound: Sound effects are pretty standard fare, nothing groundbreaking, but effective for how they’re used. No voice-acting is present. The music, however, I just love. Like the graphics, it contributes a lot to an oppressive, gloomy atmosphere during general exploration and story parts, but during battles is a different story. Think a sort of Japanese-centric techno-rock hybrid with a demonic feel to it. I don’t think my description does it justice, but it’s just awesome to hear and I don’t recall it ONCE getting old. There are some really nice piano-heavy pieces too.

TL;DR Version: If you like RPGs and can take a decent challenge, I almost guarantee you will love this game. I think the SMT series is easily one of the most underrated RPG series, and shining examples of GOOD JRPGs.

Oh, and watch out for stupidly-dressed skeletons. Seriously. Log in to see images!