Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne is a Japanese role-playing video game first released in 2003 by Atlus for the Playstation 2. After all these years, it’s beloved for its challenging gameplay, chilling atmosphere, and unique post-apocalyptic story. The game is a puzzle box of strange people with strange ideas under strange conditions, with unsolvable questions—perfect for getting into the player’s head and never leaving.

(I first played Nocturne for none of these reasons. My sister likes the series, and I wanted to have something to talk about since we started getting lunch together after a long stretch of not really being in each other’s lives.)

The player controls the Demi-fiend, a Tokyo high school student who survives an apocalypse called the Conception. The young man is singled out from the other survivors by the childlike fallen angel Lucifer, who forces upon him the powers of a demon. Lucifer, apparently, needs to be amused while the new world is birthed from the remains of the old.

It’s no by-the-book apocalypse: the Conception lifted Tokyo from the crust and shaped it into a hellish Dyson Sphere called the Vortex World, with the godlike-but-not-God Kagutsuchi in its center, in place of the sun. Most of the city has been blasted into desert and unquiet void, but some urban centers still stand. Almost everyone is dead, and Tokyo is now populated by figures from global mythology, folklore, and esoterica interpreted through pop culture. These demons all seem to be hungry for Magatsuhi, a brimming red energy extracted from the remains of humanity, that grants them untold power.

The other survivors are his two friends and classmates, Chiaki Tachibana and Isamu Nitta; the two who brought about the Conception, their teacher Yuko Takao and a tech mogul known only as Hikawa; and occult magazine writer Jyōji Hijiri investigating Hikawa’s activities. The Demi-fiend learns that the new world will be shaped by an ideology, or Reason, born from the chaos of the Vortex World—and witnesses how the fight to shape the new world changes the people he knows.

The game has been rereleased several times and was remastered in 2021, receiving, most notably, updated game mechanics and Japanese and English voice acting. Unless noted otherwise, I’ll be talking about the 2021 English HD Remaster edition, as common ground. While I have studied Japanese, I am nowhere near fluent enough to engage with the nuance of the untranslated text at a level that would serve the game’s religious and philosophical themes. I carefully trust that the 2021 remaster’s translation and localization faithfully capture the game’s complexity for a western, English speaking audience. Some things are lost in translation, and some things are gained; while the worth of loss versus gain is difficult to determine, it makes this version its own text.

Last, a note on the Lady in Black. She is closest to an informed source on the workings of the Vortex World, and will be cited often, but it must be remembered that her master Lucifer’s motivations make her unreliable.

Continue exploring below:

CAN YOU LIVE ON YOUR OWN? ALIENATION IN SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI III: NOCTURNE

PRESS TURN PROVIDENCE: POWER AND DIVINE VIRTUE IN THE REASON OF YOSUGA