SMT Nocturne HD Remaster Beginner Tips

Home»Game Guides»SMT Nocturne HD Remaster Beginner Tips

• We have a full YouTube playlist with all dungeons, bosses, and guides on how to complete them here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-Hm3rGMVE2udI8lFaIfvRA9wfksEkoou
  • We get ALL treasures in the dungeons as well
    
    
• Here’s a list of tips compiled onto one page to make your SMT Nocturne HD experience a bit easier. The original game was released in the early 2000’s and a lot of information is scattered all over the place on various forums.
  • If this is your first SMT game and you’ve never played Persona, you’re probably going to have a lot of learning to do, and it’s probably best for you to go to a Wiki and look up the naming scheme of the spells.
  • If you’re coming to this game from SMT4 and SMT4: Apocalypse, then there will be a lot less skills and a lot less conveniences in this game.

• A big change with SMT Nocturne HD over its original version is that you can choose your Skill Inheritance. You can freely pick your skills when you fuse demons together, whereas in the original it was randomly chosen skills and you had to go back and forth between menus, un-fusing and refusing until you got the skills you wanted (it’s like how in the original Persona 4 had random skill inheritance, then Persona 4 Golden had chosen skill inheritance).
  • So this version of the game is much better and easier to break by putting great skills on your demons.
  • Note that not all demons can use all skills of course, so keep playing around when fusing demons!

• You can choose at the beginning of the game between Raidou or Dante freely (assuming you bought the Dante DLC otherwise you get stuck with Raidou), they both have the same skills with different names, they’re identical to each other!
  • But, you can only choose for ONE of them to be in a playthrough due to the way they’re implemented (they’ll replace each other).
  • In the original game (not the HD remaster), Raidou’s version of “Son’s Oath” called “Raidou the Aeon” skill has a Pierce effect which Dante’s didn’t, BUT, they confirmed they fixed this issue in Nocturne HD so that Dante DOES have Pierce. This means Dante is now viable for the True Ending Route final boss if you want to use him!
  • Pierce in the context of Nocturne will Pierce through Resistant, Null, and Absorb, BUT Pierce WILL NOT pierce through Reflect. Say an enemy reflects physical, then even if you have Pierce and use a physical move, it’ll get reflected back onto you. This also applies if the enemy uses an Attack or Magic Mirror to reflect, Pierce does not pierce that.
  • In newer SMT games such as Apocalypse and SMT5, Pierce actually pierces through reflect.

• Keep your Pixie from the beginning of the game, you can fuse it into another demon and it’ll always be the first demon in your list of demons in your demon inventory, just make sure to NEVER DISMISS it. Make sure to say you want her to stay with you at Yoyogi Park, the reward for dismissing her isn’t worth it!
  • Having the Pixie or whatever demon you fused your Pixie into will let you open an optional door in the Amala Labyrinth, and it upgrades the demon into a level 80 Pixie with good skills and stats. But, it’s optional so no worries if you forget, it’s not game-breaking, just a bonus.
  • If your Pixie evolves it’s no problem at all, Pixie will naturally evolve into High Pixie and eventually into Queen Mab, but the game keeps track and the trick is that it’s always the first in your list of demons you’re carrying.
  • The easiest way to lose it is if you accidentally use it in a sacrifice when fusing, or if you’re cleaning out old demons and you manually delete it, so watch out.

• Get the Estoma skill as soon as possible, it reduces encounters but you will still need to grind eventually. Estoma will only prevent encounters lower than the MC’s level, so if your level is too low for the area you’re in, it won’t stop the encounters at all.
  • I like using Estoma because I prefer to concentrate my grinding sessions at once (I don’t want to solve a dungeon puzzle while having random encounters, but that’s just me).
  • Since it depends on your level, Estoma won’t work too well in areas where enemies have high levels, so in some places of Amala in won’t work too well because some of the encounters have very high levels, you may need to use Trafuri to run away from encounters in such areas.

• After the Matador fight, you’ll be able to enter the First Kalpa in the Amala Labyrinth. You can buy a Pisaca for 15000 Macca and it’s extremely worth it to keep this.
  • It has all the useful exploration skills including Estoma, Liftoma, Lightoma, Riberama, and Trafuri.
  • Liftoma lets you float to avoid floor damage tiles.
  • Lightoma lights up dark dungeons such as the Asakusa Tunnel.
  • Riberama is the opposite of Estoma and lets you get more encounters, it’s useful for grinding levels in one session.
  • Trafuri is a skill that lets you have a 100 % chance of fleeing from a battle.
  • These skills are much handier than buying the item versions of these skills, letting you save a lot of Macca. Don’t dismiss this Pisaca or screw up its skills, keep it as-is on your team!
  • Each of the Kalpas in the Labyrinth of Amala has its own broker, meaning there are 5 brokers in total. I recommend you buy all of their 5 demons and keep them a copy of them in your Demon Compendium.
  • The Second Kalpa has a Nue with healing spells. The Third Kalpa’s broker has different demons depending on your light/dark alignment. Mothman is in the Fourth Kalpa broker and you can buy has all of the –dyne spells which you can fuse onto your other demons. The Fifth Kalpa has a Girimekhala with Pierce, which can be fused to other demons and is handy for the True Demon Ending final boss, BUT, you need to fuse a Metatron to get into a door to see the broker there (which itself requires fusing many demons and leveling to 95+).

• You CANNOT re-learn Magatama skills if you choose to replace them! Be extremely cautious about the skills you choose to forget and replace, you can really screw over your MC!
  • On my first run I was extremely stupid and threw away Pierce while going for the True Demon Ending! If you’re not sure about a skill, Google what it does!
  • The same goes for Dante/Raidou’s skills.
  • Interestingly, re-learning forgotten skills was meant to be put into the game if you data mine the game, but they cancelled the idea at some point and never put it into the game. They even planned to have spells to disarm treasures that were trapped at one point. If you look at the next title the developers made, Digital Devil Saga, they fixed being able to re-learn skills.

• Doing a physical build (leveling your strength stat a lot) is strongly recommended due to the nature of the game.
  • This game has Focus, which lets you deal 2.5x physical damage on your next turn. BUT, this game DOESN’T have Concentrate, which lets you do 2.5x magic damage, unlike SMT4 and SMT4: Apocalypse where it is present.
  • If 2.5x damage doesn’t sound like much, that’s just the base damage, if it’s critical and the best physical moves have a high critical chance, then that gets multiplied even further!
  • The best physical skills your character can get such as Freikugel are much more powerful and accurate compared to the magic skills. Heck, Freikugel is an almighty physical move. Some physical skills have a very high critical rate as well.
  • On the other hand, a lot of good magic spells are signature spells locked to certain demons only. Worse is that leveling scales down your magic power, for example, a level 40 MC with a 20 Magic Stat using Bufudyne does more damage than a level 90 MC with a 20 Magic Stat using Bufudyne, it’s incredibly stupid. Whereas with increasing MC level your physical attacks keep getting more powerful.
  • You can still use magic spells to target an enemy/boss’s weakness, but I really would suggest to newer players to just do a physical build for their character and let your demons use magic.
  • Agility is a good stat to level up a bit early on because you don’t want to be missing often. You can level up Magic a few times to increase your MP pool too, if you’d like, and leveling Magic very early-game can help you get past random encounters, but past early-game stop it.
  • Luck DOESN’T affect critical chance, it’s stupid programming unfortunately so don’t even spend a point in it. I could go into the mathematics behind it, but basically the game is programmed poorly and Luck is pretty much a waste. You do need a certain amount luck to get into one branches of a Kalpa in Amala if you want to do all Burial Chambers.
  • If you do a physical build and face a demon immune to physical, just get demons with strong spells and pass the MC’s turns.

• Buffs and debuffs are extremely important in this game, but be cautious not to waste your time doing too many buffs. Sounds strange?
  • Don’t waste too much time on buffs because the enemies can use Dekaja to undo your buffs, and Dekunda to undo their debuffs. I prefer to mix attacks along with using buffs and debuffs.
  • Here’s a trick though – earlier bosses will only use either Dekaja OR Dekunda, so figure out which one they use and use the one they can’t undo.
  • For example, Matador will spam his special move, Red Capote, if you debuff him, which is equivalent to 4x Sukukaja OR he will just use Dekunda which undoes his debuffs.
  • Instead, it’s best to use 4x Sukukaja on your team because he doesn’t have Dekaja. If you and him both have 4x Sukukaja, you’re on an even playing field!
  • You can even buff your team with 4x Rakukaja and 4x Tarukaja too and he won’t be able to do much. (He does have Taunt that increases your attack and decreases your defense, but you get my point, other than removing your defense he can’t remove your attack nor evasion buffs)
  • If you spend too much time debuffing him too much he’ll just Dekunda it away easily and your MP is wasted. Play smart and see what the enemy does. Later in the game you get Debilitate and you’ll have higher MP pools to spend…
    
• If you’re facing an enemy that keeps using Dekunda and Dekaja to remove their debuffs and your buffs, you should try mixing buffs and debuffs and spread them out.
  • For example, for the True Demon Ending final boss, say he removes all debuffs and buffs before your turn. Instead of doing 4x Debilitate, do 2x Debilitate and 2x Rakukaja.
  • This is because he will have multiple turns his entire turn, so he’ll Dekunda and do a big move to kill you OR he could do a Dekaja and do a big move. But if you spread out the buffs and debuffs, you’ll still have at least 2x Rakukaja.
  • A lot of people email me about how to even survive the final boss’s attacks because he undoes buffs/debuffs and attacks with very hard-hitting move at all once – this is how you survive by spreading it out.

• Get Debilitate as soon as possible, it’s an all-in-one debuff that does 1x Sukunda, 1x Rakunda, and 1x Tarunda to the enemy in one turn. It costs a lot of MP, but it’s worth it because it will save your turns and you can debuff the enemy quickly and easily.
  • You can get it from Loa in the Yurakucho Tunnel at level 53. Then you can pass it onto other demons you fuse.
  • It’s possible to get lucky and have a demon’s skill randomly mutate into Debilitate too, but the MP cost may be too much for early-game.
  • Consider getting Fog Breath (2x Sukukaja in one turn) and War Cry (2x Tarunda in one turn), but they do have steep MP costs early-game. Taunt does 2x Tarukaja and 2x Rakunda onto the enemy, it’s risky, but if you pair it with Tetrakarm (reflect physical attacks) it can work sometimes.

• Unfortunately, this game has no “Luster Candy” skill that buffs you all at once (the opposite of Debilitate), so you will need to buff your characters with Rakukaja, Tarukaja, Sukukaja and Makakaja individually.
  • That’s often too much to do, so if I’m going for quick damage I’ll Debilitate the boss, and Tarukaja or Makakaja my team, then spam attacks. Sometimes I’ll do one of Sukukaja and Rakukaja too.

• Speaking of which, Tarukaja and Makakaja are different spells, the former is for physical attack and the latter is for magical attack, unlike SMT4 which combines both physical and magic attack buffs into the one Tarukaja spell. SMT4A returns to having Makakaja, though.
  • Rakukaja/Rakunda is for both physical and magical defense, you don’t need to buff/debuff physical and magical defense separately.
  • Some very old games used to have a Makanda spell that reduced an enemy’s magical attack, but that is not in Nocturne, nor in more recent games. Tarunda will always reduce both an enemy’s physical and magical attack.

• Also, Makakaja affects the strength of pretty much ALL spells, not just offensive spells.
  • So use it and your healer can actually heal for higher numbers, don’t forget this! I’ll use Makakaja once or twice in the Matador fight to let my Uzume use Media and with just Media she can now heal my party’s HP completely. Matador cannot debuff Makakaja.
  • As well, spells such as Mana Drain or Meditation (it steals an enemy’s MP and gives it to the user) will be able to steal more MP each turn after using Makakaja buffs.

• Don’t forget to try to get the elemental affinity skills onto your demons!
  • These skills include Fire Boost, Force Boost, Ice Boost, and Elec Boost, which each increase their respective type of elemental attacks by 50 %. There are no tiers of these skills, it’s all there is in the game.
  • It’s an easy way to get some extra damage done that many people forget. For example, Surt is a demon that specializes in Fire spells, but why not have Fire Boost to maximize his specialty? Surt is also an exception, his regular physical attack is fire-based so Fire Boost stacks it.

• If you have a demon you really like and you really want to buff its stats, fuse Mitamas onto it.
  • Fuse two elementals together to make a Mitama (you can fuse elementals from certain types of demons, look up the exact recipes, different kinds of Mitamas will increase different kinds of stats for your demons).
  • When you fuse a Mitama onto the demon, it doesn’t result in a new demon, it results in the same demon, but with increased stats and you can get skills inherited from the Mitama if you want.
  • If you have a lot of money, do this, and you can increase a demon’s stats by a maximum of 2x its original stats.
  • The exception is Dante/Raidou, unfortunately you cannot fuse him with Mitama! You’ll have to just grind levels with him instead! He’s pretty strong as-is though.

• The rectangular chests (not the floating cube-like treasures) will have its contents change depending on the moon phase in the upper-left hand corner of the screen.
  • Always open these chests on a Full Moon phase for the best treasures such as Incenses and Gems!

• Farm Chakra Drops early-game from killing Pixies in Yoyogi Park.
  • MP management is tricky early-game and sometimes you’ll go stretches without finding a healing fountain, so it’s good to have extra MP recovery items on-hand.

• Having a “healing slave” demon on-hand is useful.
  • Have a spellcaster demon that has healing spells, don’t use them for battles, and when your random battles end have that healing slave demon heal your party.
  • Healing during the battle when it’s not necessary takes up turns you can use to defeat the enemy.
  • As well, even for boss fights, if you see the boss demon doing a “weakened” animation, you can even try to quickly kill it off.

• Another underrated spell I like is Makatora.
  • It lets you transfer 10 MP from one demon to another demon.
  • It’s such a low amount and NOT useful in-battle, BUT, you can use it out-of-battle, and just spam it 10 times quickly to transfer a large pool of MP between demons.
  • As well, have Mana Drain on this demon, and use it in-battle strengthened with a Makakaja spell to steal MP and fill up its own MP, then out-of-battle give the MP to other team-members.
  • Also have Mana Refill on that demon and while it’s in your main party, you’ll get more MP while simply walking.
  • Having Mana Aid will restore MP after battles.
  • Mana Surge will increase a demon’s MP by 30 % as well.
  • That’s why being able to choose the Skill Inheritance can really break the game, you can combine all of these skills together!

• You don’t get access to the Demon Compendium until after the fight with Matador!
  • The Compendium lets you trade Macca for a demon you previously owned. But without it, you will have to recruit a lot of early-game demons to fuse better demons or else you’re going to be stuck early-game.
  • And then after fusing demons, you’ll need to recruit more. Sadly, the game doesn’t tell explicitly the tricks with recruiting demons.
  • For example, two of some of the earliest demons you can recruit in the Shinjuku Hospital, Preta and Will-o’-Wisp, can only be recruited on a full moon or with the “Jive Talk” skill because they’re Foul/Haunt/Wilder demons, so keep running around until you can get an encounter on a full moon, then you recruit them easily.
  • You’ll need these to fuse good demons to beat Matador! Will-o’-Wisp can learn Makakaja, and Preta learns Sukukaja, and after they learn those skills you can pass it onto other demons when you fuse them.
  • If you don’t want to wait for a full moon to recruit Foul/Haunt/Wilder demons, you’ll need the “Jive Talk” ability, but it’s a Demifiend exclusive skill you only get at level 51 from the Satan Magatama, so that may be a waste of a skill slot and way too late in the game to be useful.  

• Also, it’s easier to recruit demons if you take out all of the other demons around it.
  • It’s still possible to recruit the demon with other ones around it, but it’s easier if they’re not there because the other demons have a chance of “blocking” your recruitment.
  • For example, if you find two Pixies in a battle and try recruiting one of them, there’s a chance the other Pixie will yell something such as “What are you doing to my friend?!” and block the recruitment.

• Also, recruiting a demon is random.
  • The choices you make don’t matter, but in general I’ll let the demon have my life/MP/items as long as they don’t ask for rare items such as gems.
  • The dialogue choices don’t matter at all, the demons in Nocturne will have dialogues for all situations so I just randomly choose them.

• I like the recruit enemy skills such as Seduce, Mischief, Scout, Kidnap, Brainwash, Gonnection, etc for early-game, and I think they’re quite underrated! (Note: Gonnection’s name was changed to Kinship in Nocturne HD)
  • Remember, early-game you don’t have the Demon Compendium until after Matador, so you have to recruit a lot of demons to fuse and then you need to recruit more demons!
  • The recruiting skills are highly contextual, but it’s usually obvious to figure out how to use them, but you can always Google them quickly.
  • For example, you make a female demon use the Seduce skill for recruiting male demons. Scouting is using an adult demon to recruit a female demon (think of “scouting” in the context of hiring a woman for a modelling agency). Kidnap is using an adult demon to recruit a child demon. There’s a lot more of these kinds of skills I’m not listing, but I like them because it makes the recruiting have a higher chance!
  • The other kinds of recruiting skills such as Gonnection are passive; if your recruitment fails, Gonnection has a chance of making it succeed anyway.
  • People often said to me how Persona 5 social links makes it easy to recruit demons and they like that game far more, but when I actually used a few of Nocturne’s recruitment skills I think the recruitment became almost as easy as in Persona 5.
  • One major change in Nocturne HD is that you can choose your skills. In the original game when you fused demons your resulting demon would have random skills from each of the demons so you’d have to unfuse and refuse it to see new skills on the demon (you’d do this hundreds of times for an hour); however, in this game you can freely choose the skills in your fused demon. In the original game, recruitment skills had a chance of appearing in the fused demon and would often mess up your builds for your demons. Since that’s not a problem anymore, give recruitment skills a chance.

• If you know for a boss fight that the enemy will spam instant-kill light or dark spells such as Hama or Mudo, restart and equip the Magatama that nulls that element, BUT, if you don’t have one of those or don’t want to use them, then you can use the Tetraja spell, which protects your party from instant-kill attacks until they are used against you, then you’ll need to cast the spell again afterwards.
  • Tetraja is very handy against the Kaiwan boss fight for example who spam Mudo spells.
  • Tetraja Stones are items that do this too, but the Tetraja spell is low cost at 15 MP.

• Endure is a useful skill for your demons and for you too, you can revive from death once per battle with 1 HP. Good for emergencies, but if you don’t mind reloading, you don’t need this skill.

• There are “Anti” skills such as Anti-Force, Anti-Ice, etc, and they’re NOT good.
  • They prevent you from taking half of the damage of those kinds of attacks, but the enemy still gets their extra press turn even if you’re weak to, say, Force and have the Anti-Force skill, so they’re not useful at all.
  • Look for Void, Absorb, or Repel versions of these skills which are actually useful and take away the enemy’s turns. Repel skills are VERY useful in Nocturne because enemies will NOT absorb repelled elements they’re strong against unlike other games! (Having repelled attacks get absorbed by enemies is one of my greatest fears.)
  • At the same time, you have very limited skill slots, so I usually try to get the Void/Absorb/Repel to cover the demon’s weakness and that’s it.

• The boss demons you fight are NOT the same as the enemy version of those demons.
  • So for example, if a demon is weak to ailments, it’ll work in the random battles, but in a fight with the boss version of that demon, it probably won’t work because all bosses have an increase in resisting ailments.
  • There are exceptions though.
  • The bosses may have the same elemental weakness as the regular version, but it varies sometimes, so be careful. Just remember the boss versions of demons may be different!
    
• In general, don’t let skills change when your demons level up. Most of the time it’s worthless. Yes, sometimes you can get useful skills, but generally you end up getting skills that don’t fit the context nor scope of your build.
  • If you want though, you can purposely save your game before your demon levels up, then level it up in a battle and keep saving and reloading until your demon’s skill changes to what you want your skill to be.
  • You can break the game early by doing this, but you’ll need to look up a chart on which skills change into which skills.
  • I’ve gotten lucky and got Debilitate on level 15 demons, but the MP cost was too substantial to be worth it.

• The regular “Might” skill is NOT useful! It says it increases your chance of getting critical attacks. The problem is that it only applies to regular attacks only! But for our MC build we’d be using physical skills (like Deadly Fury for example), not regular attacks, which would be doing far more damage than a critical regular attack. Besides, there are many physical skills for the MC that have a high critical chance.
  • There are also Bright Might and Dark Might skills, these make your normal attacks critical 100 % of the time, but only when the moon phase is full and new, respectively. If you purposely enter boss rooms on a full or new moon phase, then these skills can let you cheese your way through the bosses easily. You can use Estoma and run in circles before entering rooms that look like boss rooms.

• There are 3 Counter skills in the game, but in this game the counter chance is always a 50 % chance. Instead, the better Counter moves deal more damage. The order of Counter moves from best to worst are: Avenge > Retaliate > Counter.
  • They’re free damage to the enemy, if you don’t have anything better go for these skills.

• For the Rider boss fights that have a Fiend on a horse (Pale Rider, Red Rider, etc), sometimes they’ll spawn in enemies with them. Don’t actually kill the enemies because it triggers the Fiend to do Dragon’s Eye, which gives the boss more turns, which they’ll simply use to respawn more enemies, it’s a big waste of time. Focus on killing the boss and using buffs/debuffs.
  • For White Rider, he has Virtue enemies he spawns, you can just use a stone move such as Stone Gaze on them to petrify them, then don’t attack them or else they’ll shatter in one hit triggering the boss to use Dragon’s Eye.
  • Same for Red Rider, you can petrify the Power enemies.