The opening of Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne is one of the most appropriate of any RPG. Whereas many of its competitors can't wait to throw the player into the action, Nocturne has a slower, more disempowering opening foreshadowing its protagonist's lack of real agency. The player is misled, lied-to and deliberately stranded without purpose or direction, a design decision that perfectly sets the tone for the rest of the game.

This might seem like a confusing way to begin a story-driven game, but it's this feeling of powerlessness that helps the game stand out. By concealing information from the player, it gives them mysteries to solve. By leaving them alone and abandoned in a hostile environment, it forces them to learn how its systems work. Finally, by destroying the world and replacing it with a demonic dystopia, Nocturne tells its players to forget conventional JRPG wisdom and play the game on its own terms.

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Empowering the player at the start of a game isn't a bad design decision. The likes of Final Fantasy VII's bombing mission have done this to great effect, selling players on the world while dynamically teaching them how to play it. Even Shin Megami Tensei has done this in the past, with the first game giving players some freedom to explore Tokyo and the second challenging them to participate in a coliseum battle. Nocturne, however, takes a different approach.

As soon as the game boots up, a young woman tells the player that the world is doomed. They aren't told how or why, but the scene immediately conveys the setting's transience. Therefore, once the player names their character and takes control of them, they're filled with a foreboding sense of dread. Despite the uplifting Tokyo background music and relative friendliness of the other characters, the player already knows that this peace cannot last.

After the foreboding introduction, the player is told to visit their teacher in hospital, only to get side-tracked by news of a nearby murder. However, when they try to investigate, they'll find there's no way to do so. Instead, they'll be met by a conspiracy theorist claiming it was the work of a cult right before being pulled back to their original objective by friends that are frustrated that they haven't reached the hospital yet. The game has only just begun and, so far, all it's done is distract the player.

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This misleading direction continues when the player reaches the hospital. Their teacher isn't in any of the beds or rooms, and the lack of staff communicates that something is wrong with the place but, with no clues, there's no way to understand what. The player investigates the basement in a last-ditch effort to find their teacher, only to be confronted by a stranger who attempts to kill them by summoning a demon. In any other RPG, this encounter would typically serve as a combat tutorial. However, Nocturne again takes agency away from the player by having their teacher step in at the last moment. She leads you to the roof with nothing in the way of explanation, only promising answers if you can find her in the next world.

As an eerie light annihilates Tokyo, the setting the player was just getting to know disappears. Immediately after, they are condemned by a mysterious voice presence for their lack of principles before being forcibly turned into a demon themselves and stranded in the hospital's ruins. It's only at this point that the player can finally begin truly playing the game but, without a detailed tutorial, all they can do is figure out the mechanics on their own, mechanics that are still relatively atypical of most RPGs. If the player can survive all of that, only then can they really proceed to the game's first true dungeon.

Everything about Nocturne's opening, from its immediately-aborted quests to its lack of tutorials, sets the game apart from the more explosive power fantasies in its genre. Instead of a prophesied hero, the player is just a kid who wound up at the wrong place at the wrong time. Though disempowering, Nocturne uses this opening to sell its audience its raw isolation and foreshadow one of its biggest themes. As a demon, the player is forbidden by the rules of this world to recreate it. Whether or not they find answers to the questions they've been asking since the game's start, that fact won't change. All they can do is make the best of their circumstances by supporting those who can change them or lashing out at this twisted world and tearing it all down.

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