Work let out for the summer so I fiiiiiinally started Nocturne. Restarted my file after half an hour because I didn’t realize what the difference would be between my character’s name and nickname and I decided I didn’t want “Kenchan” on every battle screen. Also switched the voice acting from English to Japanese, not because the English VO is bad at all, but because the disparity of all the main characters avoiding saying each other’s names when they show up in the written dialogue was just too distracting in my native tongue.
I am digging the aesthetic so far! It feels like Atlus was really eager to see what the jump to full 3D assets could do for the game. The light cel-shading combined with Kaneko art and early PS2 modeling and textures makes the characters look vivid but also hits just the right level of uncanny valley. The usage of big empty spaces as 3D entry point 101 also seems very deliberately and cleverly handled, with the devs having cottoned on to the inherent creepiness of depopulated spaces that should have people in them (subway stations, hospitals) and deploying them even in the prologue for max atmospheric effect. The game is really eerie in a subtler way than I was expecting, even before but especially after human life gets wiped from the world a short ways in. And I genuinely wonder if the visually marvelous idea of warping the postapocalyptic Tokyo into a sphere was inspired by something as simple as, “What can we show with PS2 polygons that we couldn’t before?”
(I will say that as settings/openers go, I’m still very attached to IV’s slow medieval-kingdom-to-ruined-Tokyo transition, and find the inauguration as “Samurai” more interesting as a cast intro than yet another Japanese high school scenario. But that’s nitpicks.)
Time for the actual battlin’ and fusin’ action…