SMT Nocturne HD - Menu Shenanigans

Dismiss Demi-fiend glitch (AKA "Lunch Break"):
0. Make sure you have at least 2 demons summoned in the party and at least 1 unsummoned demon in the stock
1. Pause the game and go to Party > Return to Stock
2. Move the mouse cursor and hover over one of the demons in your stock
3. Now using either controller or keyboard controls, keep spamming down and A. When you back out of the Return to Stock menu, it should update the party so that Demi-fiend is now dismissed

What appears to be happening here is Demi-fiend actually occupies an invisible slot in the stock. The "Return to Stock" function is only supposed to allow you to return demons that are in your party. But on the PC version the mouse allows us to hover the selection into a spot where it doesn't make sense to be, the demons already in your stock. Scrolling through to the bottom of the list loops you to the top of the list where Demi-fiend's invisible slot resides. This glitch is only possible on the PC version due to the fact that it very briefly requires mouse controls. Another way of dismissing Demi-fiend without the mouse has been discovered too, but oddly it still also only works on the PC version (see below section on Alternate Dismiss Demi-fiend Method)

The reason 2 demons must be summoned in the party is because if there are no demons summoned then the game won't even let you try to Return to Stock, and if there is only 1 demon summoned then the game won't let you move up and down when you enter Return to Stock. One demon must be unsummoned in the stock so that you have something to highlight to get the cursor highlight in your stock instead of the party. But technically this glitch can be performed with only 2 demons summoned and 0 in the stock - if you enter Return to Stock, return one of the 2 demons to the stock, and then move your mouse cursor over the demon now in the stock.


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Quirks of dismissing Demi-fiend:
- If you enter a battle with 0 demons summoned, you will soft-lock the game.
- When Demi-fiend is dismissed, the demon occupying the first slot in the party is effectively the new "main character". If this demon dies or is dismissed while in battle then you'll either soft-lock or game over.
- The only known way to retrieve Demi-fiend is with the skill Beckon Call. Beckon Call is a move that can only be used in battle, randomly summoning any demon from your stock. Because it's random, it might not summon Demi-fiend when you want it to. But you could increase the odds by clearing out your stock of other demons.
- If Demi-fiend is summoned using Beckon Call, he will occupy a slot other than the first party slot for the rest of the battle. The demon in the first slot will still cause a game over or soft-lock if they die, and Demi-fiend's death will also still cause a game over. When the battle finishes, the game will automatically update Demi-fiend into the first party slot again.
- The game does not allow you to summon more than 3 demons into your party from the pause menu. But there are two known ways to bypass this and get a party of 4 demons. The first way is using the skill Beckon Call in battle and summoning a demon other than Demi-fiend. The second way is by using one of a handful of events in the game where a demon joins your party outside of battle. If you already have 3 demons summoned when they join then they'll automatically join the active party as the 4th summoned demons. Not all demon-join-events work for this.

Demon-join-events that DO add a 4th demon to your active party:
- Raidou / Dante
- Black Frost
- Uber Pixie
- All of the Shady Broker demons in the Labyrinth of Amala
- Pixie in SMC (if it were somehow possible to have 3 demons in your party before meeting her)

Demon-join-events that do NOT add a 4th demon to your active party:
- Samael (in Tower of Kagutsuchi on the Shijima route)
- Buying demons from Rag's Jewelry store
- Buying demons from the compendium
- Recruiting a demon in battle

For reference - the lowest level demon that learns Beckon Call is level 33 Baphomet. Beckon Call could be obtained earlier than level 33 with a Skill Mutation but the odds of that happening are extremely low. You could also summon 4 demons in the party as low as level 28 if you dismiss Demi-fiend and then buy the 1st Kalpa Shady Broker Pisaca, but without Beckon Call this will mean that Demi-fiend is essentially banished.


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Menu Storage (AKA "Menu Anywhere", AKA "Menu Shenanigans"):
0. Make sure you have 3 demons summoned and at least 6 unsummoned demons in the stock (so at least 9 total)
1. Perform the "Dismiss Demi-fiend" glitch to remove Demi-fiend from the party
2. Go into battle and use a demon with Beckon Call to summon a 4th demon into the party (pray Beckon Call doesn't accidentally summon Demi-fiend or else you'll have to dismiss him again). Retreat or finish the battle now that you have 4 demons summoned and 5 or more demons in the stock
3. Open up the pause menu. Try to summon a bunch of your stock of demons
4. Un-pause and re-pause. You now have a pitch-black pause menu. Listen closely to notice that in the overworld your character is still moving around accordingly when you move the analog stick
5. You can remove the pitch-black color by hitting either up 3 times or down 3 times then A to open the Magatama screen. Navigating to a demon's Stats screen also works
6. You now have a visible and usable menu and can simultaneously interact with the world around you

If the above is unclear in text, here is a video example of setting up Menu Storage from scratch. You'll see it can be all done fairly quickly. Included is an example of Transparent Menu Storage as well (see below section on Transparent Menu Storage for more details).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TylmZTkudCc

If you see a slightly darker dimmed pause menu rather than a pitch-black screen, it usually means that you either didn't have enough total demons in the stock (step 0) or didn't summon enough demons in step 3. Specifically, you must summon 4 demons in step 3 if you have 9 total demons, 3 demons if you have 10 total demons, 2 demons if you have 11 total demons, and only one demon if you have 12 total demons.

In general, the pause menu is much more stable if you take a moment to dismiss a few party members so that you're less than or equal to 4 demons summoned again. Some useful things might be usable with 5 or more demons summoned but you're much more likely to soft-lock the game. If you accidentally close the pause menu then you'll lose menu storage and you'll need to get greater than 4 demons summoned again to re-activate it. So if you plan on doing a lot of glitchy things then you should probably try to dismiss down to exactly 4 demons summoned so that you can unpause and re-enable menu storage whenever you like without having to go in battle and Beckon Call a 4th demon again. It can be kind of hard to tell exactly how many demons are summoned because only the first 4 summoned will be displayed, but you can tell when you're over 4 because a demon in your stock will appear highlighted. Example:
Exactly 4 demons summoned:
https://imgur.com/KBPUqXD.png
Greater than 4 demons summoned:
https://imgur.com/ubKpihH.png

You can rearrange your party but you have to be careful if you're trying not to go below 4 demons summoned. Whenever you dismiss a demon in the pause menu, all the other summoned demons will "slide up" a spot. So you can carefully summon and dismiss demons to slide them all into the order you want without going below 4 demons.

If you plan to interact with the game world while keeping the pause menu up, it's often convenient to place the pause menu at the Config screen or in the Key Item screen. In those screens your duplicated inputs of moving around and hitting A can't really do any harm. If you un-pause Menu Storage, the game world may be pitch-black. You can fix this by opening the map or pausing and unpausing again. There's no known way to get the pitch-black screen to go away if you unpause Menu Storage while in battle.

There are a few things going on that enable this glitch. Firstly, the game appears to have a check that disables Summoning from the stock in the pause menu when you have 3 demons. But it only checks for exactly 3 demons. The check DOES NOT stop you from Summoning when you have 4 demons. Secondly, the game just seems to have a lot of trouble loading the pause menu when you have a bunch of demons summoned and that's why the pause menu goes pitch-black and the overworld interaction never gets disabled. It's not super clear why you need to have a certain number of total demons in the stock for that to happen but that's how it is.

Because you need at least 9 total demons to do menu storage, you technically can't do menu storage until after the Gozu-Tennoh event where you go from the starting 8 demon stock limit to a 10 demon stock limit. It would be hard to get Beckon Call before then in a playthrough anyway though.

If you part with a demon from the pause menu while in battle you will likely hard crash the game.

Using Menu Storage you can heal your demons using items from the pause menu while in battle. Or you could use stock demon healing skills like media or makatora while in battle. With a healthy supply of items or healing demons in the stock, you really can't die unless the enemy one-shots or instakills you. See here for example (and as an example of cloning / transparent menu storage):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmzGUAJEHKk

There are other crazy things we can do with Menu Storage that may not be immediately obvious. These will be described in their own sections below - but summarily this glitch allows us to use items or skills from the pause menu while in battle, clone demons in battle, and load or suspend anywhere (which can skip some events and clip us out-of-bounds in some places).


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How to remove the pause menu's opacity ("Transparent Menu Storage"):
1. Perform Menu Storage in front of a door to the Cathedral of Shadows and navigate the pause menu to the Config screen
2. Enter the Cathedral of Shadows (you need to navigate blindly, so it's ideal if the door is immediately in front or behind you)
3. Navigate to the demon compendium and view a demon's stats here
4. The pause menu is now transparent. Try to navigate out of the Cathedral of Shadows without closing the pause menu

The reason to enter the Config menu before you enter the Cathedral of Shadows is so that when you need to hit B a couple times to escape the compendium you don't easily close the pause menu. If you accidentally close the pause menu it's not a huge deal - you can just stand in front of the Cathedral door and try again from step 1 here. Fusing a demon in the Cathedral, or even just viewing the result of a demon fusion, also removes the pause menu's opacity. It's up to you if you think that's easier than going into the compendium.

Here we're taking advantage of the fact that the demon view screen appears to use the same background layer graphic that the pause menu uses. When you exit the demon view screen it removes that background layer, which also permanently removes it for the pause menu until you unpause and repause again.

Transparent Menu Storage can be very useful for some applications of Menu Storage. Notably, anything related to navigating around the overworld while keeping the menu open. It's not generally necessary though. If you do load and suspend shenanigans right after activating menu storage then there's no need for it to be transparent. And you can do battle things without Transparent Menu Storage too if going to a Cathedral is too inconvenient. The battle menus and prompts like damage and effects are all layered above the pause menu - it's only the battle scene itself that will be blind to you.


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Load Shenanigans (AKA "Load Anywhere", AKA "Load Warp"):
Loading the game while in Menu Storage behaves differently than loading the game normally would. If you load the game in menu storage then the game will keep Demi-fiend's physical location but load in all other data of the savefile you load. This effectively means you can warp one savefile into the location of another savefile. This has a few interesting applications:

- Warping a savefile earlier in the game to the place of a savefile later in the game, skipping as many plot triggers as you like. You can load a level 1 Shinjuku Medical Center savefile to the top of the Tower of Kagutsuchi if you like.
- Warping a savefile into locations that are no longer accessible such as the Amala Tunnel segments or the beginning of the game pre-Conception (See below: Game Over Menu Storage)
- Warping a non-Raidou, non-Dante, vanilla playthrough of Nocturne into the Amala Labyrinth. This allows a vanilla playthrough to recruit Raidou or to see other Amala things it shouldn't be able to experience.
- Warping a playthrough into any dialogue event that is no longer accessible. This includes for example the 2nd Kalpa Ifrit who gives 250,000 macca the first time you talk to him (See below: Ifrit Dupe)
- Duping chests. To do this you would get menu storage and press A on the chest using the savefile that hasn't yet opened it and then load another savefile during the first dialogue that appears but before the prompt asking if you would like to open it. It's not clear where this would actually be particularly useful given the setup involved. Note that duping magatamas or key items doesn't appear to do anything.
- Warping a savefile into a bossfight that it's already defeated. May be useful in a speedrun to grind EXP on a particular boss that's quick to kill and near a savepoint. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noZ7brYe5Ug)

Because everything except physical location is loaded, load warping also notably resets the encounter rate. Load warps can therefore be chained together while traveling to continually avoid random battles. You would simply keep loading a save that has 4 or more demons whenever the encounter radar turns red. Kagutsuchi cycle is also changed to the spot it was when the savefile was saved, which may have uses for mystic chest or Bright Might/Dark Might things.

Trying to load a savefile during any sort of complex cutscene tends to soft-lock the game. However going to the load savefile screen and then backing out from the load savefile screen during a complex cutscene enables Cutscene Storage (see below: Cutscene Storage)


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Game Over Menu Storage:
If you get (Transparent) Menu Storage, enter a battle, then game over, you will find yourself on the title screen with Menu Storage still activated. You can then start a new game or load into another savefile from the title screen. This effectively allows you to activate Menu Storage on a savefile that doesn't otherwise have the ability to activate Menu Storage (for example, because it does not have enough demons or doesn't have a demon with Beckon Call)

In theory you could Suspend a savefile near a boss, load in another savefile, activate Game Over Menu Storage, and reload the suspend savefile from the title screen so that you can easily use Menu Storage during the boss battle. But unfortunately for some reason, Game Over Menu Storage doesn't let you use items or skills from the pause menu. So you lose a lot of the use. You can still dismiss demons from the pause menu so this still works to help enable Cloning, but the Clones will be more fragile when you can't heal them from the pause menu (See below: Cloning)

Game Over Menu Storage does still let you load and suspend in any place. It is interesting to activate Game Over Menu Storage and start a new game. You'll see that the main character's default nickname is シュジンコウ and his default government name is たろう あとらす.
https://imgur.com/K6DDsNF.png
https://imgur.com/nUqAXBy.png

You can also use this to load any savefile into the pre-Conception world but there won't really be anything to do. All of the pre-Conception events you saw the first time will still have been seen. Going to the roof of the hospital will re-activate the Conception cutscene and then place you in the Vortex World Shinjuku Medical Center at the end as it usually would. The Shinjuku Medical Center and everything else is the same as it was in the savefile you loaded from at that point.

Using either Game Over Menu Storage or Battle Interruption to Title Screen have been found to enable Early 5th Kalpa. See below section on Early 5th Kalpa to understand how.

See here for an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvi6jeGi04Y


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Battle Interruption to Title Screen:
1. Activate (Transparent) Menu Storage and then enter a battle
2. During the battle, go to the Load savefile screen from the pause menu, but instead of loading a savefile just back out. For some reason the game will kick out to the title screen but Menu Storage is still activated and all of the battle graphics are still overlaid on the screen
3. If you load a savefile from the title screen you'll see all of the models and graphics and the demons in your party and the enemy's party are still present wherever you go in any room or in battle

In terms of practical use, this has the exact same effect as Game Over Menu Storage and this is also much quicker to do than getting a Game Over would be. And this has the added benefit of looking much, much sillier.
https://imgur.com/vy8M7zY.png
https://imgur.com/DeEGQxp.png
https://imgur.com/LvGu5Hu.png
https://imgur.com/sEFVqMA.png
https://imgur.com/TRxyt9t.png
https://imgur.com/bSGdkoK.png

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyVjBnulj_0

You can enter a battle and repeat the interrupt to the title screen and stack a bunch of party and demon graphics on the screen as much as you like.

Using either Game Over Menu Storage or Battle Interruption to Title Screen have been found to enable Early 5th Kalpa. See below section on Early 5th Kalpa to understand how.


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Suspend Shenanigans (AKA "Suspend Anywhere")
Menu Storage lets you hit the Suspend button in places you shouldn't be able to. This has some surprisingly large implications.

The way that Suspend appears to work is that it simply checks the Demi-fiend's physical location before exiting to the title screen. The game will not save anything else like ongoing dialogue events, etc. If Demi-fiend is not currently on the map then you will soft-lock. This happens, for example, if you try to Suspend while in battle or while in any complex cutscene that doesn't actually take place on the regular game map. If Demi-fiend is in a legal physical location then the game will back out to the title screen and place you in that exact spot when you reload the Suspend data.

Because the game doesn't check if other actions are ongoing, you can Suspend and reload into places you shouldn't be able to access. For example, you can suspend and reload and physically walk around in places like the Puzzle Boy room, or the room Futomimi was held in at the top of Kabukicho Prison, or in elevators.
https://imgur.com/3UE5t42.png

Suspending in elevators will let you go out-of-bounds. It appears that elevator rooms are physical locations on a floor's map, but they are typically far away from where the elevator actually would be and far away from solid ground in general that it doesn't appear possible to get back in bounds from any of them. (https://imgur.com/8TUqWdG.png)

We can also Suspend during dialogue events that occur right before some boss battles. Suspending during these dialogue events lets you skip the boss battle trigger. So far this has been found to work to skip:
- Mizuchi (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tA_Z1LBzzVU)
- Mitra (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHp1NXsqY6A)
- Thor (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yspco7yjaJI)
- Sui-Ki, Kin-Ki, and Fuu-ki (by suspending while trying to enter the Ongyo-Ki room before the other 3 oni's are defeated) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLNZcQ1ijzs)

Other boss skips might be possible but haven't all been tested, especially those at a point in the game where it's not feasible to have Beckon Call yet. The most important point determining whether the boss skip is possible is whether or not Demi-fiend is physically standing somewhere on the map during the dialogue event before battle.


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Ladder Suspending:
The most interesting aspect of Suspend Shenanigans is Suspending while Demi-fiend is climbing up a ladder. Demi-fiend's physical location appears to be placed above the ladder and slightly out-of-bounds during the ladder climb animation. Suspending and reloading during a ladder climb will allow Demi-fiend to walk out-of-bounds. Something similar can also be done with the moving blocks in the Obelisk and the Tower of Kagutsuchi, but these haven't been found to be useful. Ladders in the Amala Labyrinth seem to be better for this than ladders elsewhere.

Out-of-bounds behavior in Nocturne is such that if Demi-fiend is not physically standing on a floor then he will descend vertically with each step he takes. Fortunately most floors in a room extend slightly further outward than the room's walls. So you can walk around out-of-bounds as long as you stay close to the room itself. If you stray too far from the room then you will most likely descend into a black abyss and be soft-locked without a way to get back to solid floor. Most walls in Nocturne are only one-way-solid, so you can re-enter in-bounds from any wall.

Different floors load rooms differently when you're out-of-bounds. On some floors you might find that all rooms are loaded and can be accessed out-of-bounds. On some floors you may find that some rooms are physically loaded but not graphically loaded (and so can still be traversed carefully). And on some floors there may be a mixture of rooms that are physically but not graphically loaded and other rooms that are completely unloaded (much of the golden door floor in the 5th Kalpa is like this)

In regards to Ladder Suspending to go out-of-bounds, it is specifically climbing UP a ladder that is useful. This is because climbing DOWN a ladder appears to place Demi-fiend slightly below ground and out-of-bounds rather than slightly above ground and out-of-bounds. So when you reload you'll be unable to return to solid ground.

Ladder Suspending has one interesting quirk. If you time the Suspend at a certain moment in the ladder climb animation the game will create the Suspend save but the back-out to the title screen will get interrupted by the room transition. Therefore you will still be in game but also have a Suspend save created. Effectively this lets you have a sort-of-savefile in a place that you normally wouldn't be able to save and this quirk is useful for Ifrit Duping (See below: Ifrit Duping)

Skips that have been found with Ladder Suspends include:
- The locked door at the end of the 4th Kalpa, effectively skipping Beelzebub and the entire Star Key sidequest (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0oVPvmiytU)
- Metatron's boss room in the 5th Kalpa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdIhxr3xqyE)
- The golden door in the 5th Kalpa that asks for Metatron, which gives you access to the Shady Broker Girimehkala with Pierce without having to fuse Metatron (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxCXADUaKWE)
- The golden door in the 5th kalpa asking for a demon with great magic, but not the stat doors after it
- The Dante/Raidou bossfight in the 3rd Kalpa, but you still need their Menorah to enter the 4th Kalpa anyway so this isn't very useful
- Quick access to the switch at the end of the 1st Kalpa, but it's not yet clear if this would save time in a speedrun


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Ifrit Duping:
Navigating past the cursed hallway in the 2nd Kalpa and talking to Ifrit gives you 250,000 macca if it's the first time you speak to him. This is a one-time event and it is missable if you never talk to him before defeating Beelzebub. However because of load-warping we can experience this event as many times as we like, and Suspend Warping allows us to duplicate the event much faster.

The strategy in a speedrun is as follows:
1. Navigate through the cursed hallway and go down the ladder leading to Ifrit's room
2. Face the ladder you just came from and activate Menu Storage
3. Run toward and press A on the ladder and Suspend the game while Demi-fiend is climbing the ladder. Time it so that you get the title screen interruption
4. Go back down the ladder. Talk to Ifrit and get 250,000 macca
5. Go up the ladder, exit the cursed hallway, and make your way to the table girls nearby on B2F to warp to the beginning of Amala Labyrinth and save
6. Exit to the title screen and reload the interrupted Suspend save you made earlier. You're now back in the Ifrit room and this savefile hasn't collected the 250,000 macca yet
6.5. If you want to keep duping Ifrit, make another interrupted Suspend save on the ladder
7. Face Ifrit and activate Menu Storage
8. Run toward and press A on Ifrit to begin the dialogue. As he's talking but before he hands the money over, load the savefile you just made at step 5
9. Your save has now gotten his 250,000 twice. If you want to keep duping it, repeat from step 5

Following the steps, you only ever have to traverse forward through the cursed hallway once and you can repeat the event as much as you like. The only hard part is that, in a speedrun, the suspend interruption timing should be practiced a little bit to be consistent. If you miss the suspend interruption it's not a huge deal though. You would just load the suspend from the title screen and try again.

The steps above start from the perspective of never having obtained the money from Ifrit on any savefile yet, but obviously you could load the money on to any savefile with the same principles. You could also skip the Ladder Suspend step, but you would otherwise have to navigate all the way back down through the 2nd Kalpa and through the cursed hallway again. So the ladder suspend saves a lot of time.

As mentioned in the Load Shenanigans section, every time you load warp it resets the encounter rate. So you can chain load warps together to altogether avoid battles. This might be very helpful in avoiding all of the dangerous encounters you would see in the cursed hallway and if you're about to Ifrit dupe then you probably already have Menu Storage set up so it fits in extra well here.
See here as an example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d4f2gl60wE (slower but safer version)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClEPykGPZaw (faster but riskier version)

One interesting quirk that likely has no real use - for some reason the Ifrit event doesn't really behave correctly on a non-Raidou, non-Dante vanilla playthrough of Nocturne. If you use Load Shenanigans to get that sort of playthrough to Ifrit then you can just talk to him over and over and collect the 250,000 over and over. For some reason it'll always be treated as the first time you've talked to him so you can very, very quickly get max macca from him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzLfkUh0mfE


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Cloning:
1. Get (Transparent) Menu Storage
2. Enter a battle where either a Beckon Call demon or Demi-fiend is in the active party, and the demon you want to clone is in the active party
3. Dismiss the demon you want to clone using the pause menu. The actual demon active in the battle will not be unsummoned when you do this from the pause menu
4. On Demi-fiend / Beckon Call demon's next turn, you will be able to summon that demon from the stock even though they're already in the battle

This works because Demi-fiend's Summon / Beckon Call seems to simply look at the stock data when it determines which demons can be summoned. It doesn't look at who's actually summoned in battle.

Clones share HP/MP among each other. Party-wide attacks will therefore effectively do double damage to the clone if there are 2 of them in the battle. Triple damage if there are 3 of them in the battle, etc. Interestingly, a clone will only die if an attack is an instakill or if the attack individually does damage greater than the clone's HP. Which is to say for example, if a clone indirectly gets to 0 HP only because a party-wide attack inflicted double damage, the clones will still be alive at 0 HP. A demon sitting alive at 0 HP will immediately die after the next action that you or the enemy make. If you can heal their HP before that happens then they'll survive.

Cloned demons will go away after battle. Thus, cloning must be set up individually for every battle you want to have clones. This is because in general Nocturne will not ever allow multiple of the same demon to be in the demon stock or party menu at the same time.

It is possible to clone Demi-fiend himself, but it is much harder and not likely worth it. This is for a few reasons. First, Demi-fiend is harder to dismiss from the pause menu than other demons (he can only be dismissed using the Dismiss Demi-fiend glitch). And second, because Beckon Call is the only way to summon Demi-fiend and Beckon Call is always random.

See here for an example of cloning and using items from the pause menu in battle:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmzGUAJEHKk


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Early 5th Kalpa:
1. Make a savefile at the beginning of the game in Shinjuku Medical Center before you've done the tutorial battles
2. On a different savefile, activate Menu Storage or Transparent Menu Storage (Transparent Menu Storage will make this much easier)
3. Go into a battle and perform either Game Over Menu Storage or Battle Interruption to Title Screen (Battle Interruption is faster)
4. From the title screen while Menu Storage is still activated, reload your savefile at the beginning of Shinjuku Medical Center
5. Navigate over to the grapefruit juice tunnel tutorial area (which is why the menu being transparent helps a lot)
6. As soon as you enter the area, use your menu storage to load your savefile from later in the game
7. Run through the tutorial area until just before the final room, then activate Menu Storage again
8. Enter the room and Suspend your game while Lucifer is talking

When you reload your game, you will find that you're at the bottom of the 5th Kalpa. The room at the end of the tutorial is apparently the same exact room as the 5th Kalpa version. So from here you can either go down the elevator and lock yourself on to the True Demon Ending, or make your way backwards up through the 5th Kalpa and recruit Dante/Raidou.

It is very fortunate that the Metatron room only activates the boss fight if you enter from the normal side of the room, so you can just walk right through his room while you're traveling the 5th Kalpa backwards. After you've gotten to the top, you can say no to Dante, place your Menorah of Sovereignty in the room to legitimately unlock the 5th Kalpa, and proceed to duplicate Dante multiple Dante's if you like (see: Cutscene Storage, or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5oq_exfqbY)

For a full demonstration of Early 5th Kalpa, see here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJQfK5gobvs


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Cutscene Storage (Out-of-bounds Anywhere):
1. Stand as close as you can to a wall or door that you want to clip through. Then pause the game and Suspend
2. From the Title Screen, load into a different savefile
3. On this savefile, activate Menu Storage and then enter a complex cutscene. More specifically, the cutscene should be the sort of cutscene that clearly doesn't take place on a regular game map. For example, examining the peephole at the entrance to the Labyrinth of Amala to bring up the cutscene where the Lady in Black talks to you works perfectly.
4. During the cutscene, go to the Load savefile screen from the pause menu, but instead of loading a savefile just back out. For some reason the game will kick out to the title screen but Menu Storage is still activated and the cutscene is still playing
5. Close the menu by pressing B a few times, then Continue your earlier Suspended save
7. When you load in you will notice that you can move around and all collision appears to be disabled. This includes floor collision! So inch just a tiny bit forward into the wall or door that you want to clip through without falling too far below the floor
8. Pause and Suspend the game before the cutscene finishes. This will now cancel the cutscene
9. From the Title Screen, Continue the Suspend save
10. You should now be slightly inside of the wall, and as long as you didn't melt too far into the floor the game should also have generously placed you on solid ground

Using this you can clip through just about any wall or door in the game. Out-of-bounds behavior in Nocturne is such that if Demi-fiend is not physically standing on a floor then he will descend vertically with each step he takes. Fortunately most floors in a room extend slightly further outward than the room's walls. So you can walk around out-of-bounds as long as you stay close to the room itself. If you stray too far from the room then you will most likely descend into a black abyss and be soft-locked without a way to get back to solid floor. Most walls in Nocturne are only one-way-solid, so you can re-enter in-bounds from any wall.

Different floors load rooms differently when you're out-of-bounds. On some floors you might find that all rooms are loaded and can be accessed out-of-bounds. On some floors you may find that some rooms are physically loaded but not graphically loaded (and so can still be traversed carefully). And on some floors there may be a mixture of rooms that are physically but not graphically loaded and other rooms that are completely unloaded (much of the golden door floor in the 5th Kalpa is like this)

Cutscene Storage is a huge improvement over our other ways of going out-of-bounds due to two reasons. First, it can be performed almost anywhere in the game (no ladders required). And second, it doesn't require that the savefile going out-of-bounds sets up Menu Storage itself. Rather, Menu Storage can be set up on a different savefile that you can use to load in and watch a cutscene as needed. For example, you can have one savefile that has 4 or 5 demons summoned at the entrance to the Labyrinth of Amala. Then whenever you need to clip out-of-bounds, just make a Suspend near a wall, load the Labyrinth of Amala savefile, store the peephole cutscene with Lady in Black, then resume the Suspend and clip out.

Cutscene Storage doesn't work everywhere. The rooms where Cutscene Storage does not work appear to be rooms that have their own cutscenes that can play in them. For example, Tower of Kagutsuchi 3-D, all of the Menorah rooms, and the main kila room in Assembly of Nihilo will all soft-lock if you try to use Cutscene Storage.

Cutscene Storage does not work the same way on certain World Map areas but can be made to work. Specifically, the World Map where Ginza and Assembly of Nihilo are, the World Map where Ikebukuro and Kabukicho are, and the World Map area where Amala Temple and Diet Building will soft-lock if you try to do Cutscene Storage. This appears to have something to do with the fact that these locations have multiple variations (for example, Amala Temple looks slightly different on the World Map before and after you complete the dungeon). But for some reason you can make Cutscene Storage work if you first load warp a savefile that has never been to that specific World Map area, then perform Cutscene Storage.

The largest skips using Cutscene Storage that we know of are inside Diet Building, the World Map near Yoyogi, and the World Map near Amala Temple / Diet Building. Inside the Diet Building, you can skip essentially the entire dungeon by clipping out-of-bounds on the second floor near the savepoint and walking around the walls to the elevator on the other side. On the World Map near Yoyogi, you can clip from the west side of Yoyogi Park to the east side of Yoyogi Park - potentially skipping multiple dungeons. On the World Map near Amala Temple / Diet Building you can skip to Diet Building early, skipping the Mifunashiro and Yurakucho Tunnel dungeons. However, you do still need to complete Amala Temple so that you can place the Yahiro no Himorogi later.

Cutscene Storage can be used to duplicate the Dante / Raidou join event and get multiple Dante's / Raidou's in the party. This is ideal over Cloning in battle (discussed in Cloning section above) because Clones are temporary and go away after a given battle. These Dante's would be totally separate characters in the party. This is done by storing the Dante join cutscene, loading another savefile, then hitting yes to join him while the dialogue continues to play in that save. You must then interrupt the cutscene before it totally finishes by Suspending, but when you resume the Suspend you will have Dante safely in your party.

If you let a cutscene end, it tends to boot you out to the Title Screen for some reason. That's the main reason why we need to interrupt the cutscene by Suspending and resuming once we're done using it to clip out-of-bounds. The other way to interrupt the cutscene would be to enter a battle, but you need to run around to get a battle and running around during a cutscene will inevitably cause you to melt too far into the floor to recover from.

Trying to store some cutscenes can easily soft-lock the game. It seems like it can happen if the cutscene requires some complicated extra loads and animations after you've already backed out to the Title Screen. The game might not know what to do when all of the models and assets are unloaded and so it soft-locks. The Dante and Raidou join cutscene does this toward the very end. The Lady in Black cutscene at the Labyrinth entrance peephole can play all the way through without issues though.

- Duplicating Dante / Raidou with Cutscene Storage - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5oq_exfqbY
- Skip all of Diet Building - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOjldPkE8zw
- Skip Ongyo-ki to get Murakumo in Ikebukuro Tunnel -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0UmTTljvIs
- Skip STR stat check door in Mantra HQ to get Gaea - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTRZinru-5U
- Clip through wall in Hell's Vault - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRz0HVDtWoU
- Clip through 5th Kalpa Beelzebub treasure room - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmyolNsDYgc
- Clip through 5th Kalpa Black Frost treasure room - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b84wf9RQFA8
- Clip through 2nd Kalpa Moon Key door - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FxKlLN8eho
- Metatron Skip using Cutscene Storage rather than Ladder Suspend - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuVA2YqHPAY
- World Map clip to get to east Yoyogi Park early - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5N_zKLcvyg
- World Map clip to get to Diet Building early - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5OWQ0013zo


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Debug Objects:
There are a handful of development debug objects out-of-bounds in Nocturne that remain in the game. Some of these are accessible using glitches (namely using Cutscene Storage) and some of them are actually extremely useful!

1. Amala Temple - There are two debug objects in the entrance room - one on the west side and one on the east side. These set the state for the Amala Temple dungeon to be in. In a speedrun this leads to skipping the entire dungeon by using the "Set Pyramidion" option on the western debug object.

This is easily accessible using Cutscene Storage to clip into a wall and go out-of-bounds.


2. Labyrinth of Amala - There is a debug object at coordinate 0,0,0 (basically inside of the peephole trunk thing) which controls access to the five Kalpas. In some speedruns this will likely be useful to quickly unlock the 5th Kalpa. Although there is also another way to skip straight to the end of 5th Kalpa (See the section on "Early 5th Kalpa")

This is accessible using Cutscene Storage to go out-of-bounds, but the savefile used to access this debug object must specifically be a savefile that has not yet used the peekhole to unlock the door in this room. If you use a savefile that has used the peekhole already, you will likely softlock.


3. Tower of Kagutsuchi - The first room of Tower of Kagutsuchi has a debug object at coordinate 0,0,0 (in the center of the room atop the obelisk thing) which sets your Reason to one of the five non-TDE reasons. This is not very helpful in a speedrun. TDE runs will still need to get TDE the usual way, and any% runs will likely just get the regular demon ending without the need for this debug object. You'll notice there are two "Yuko Good" choices. The first Yuko Good is actually the regular demon ending and the second Yuko Good is the Freedom ending. This is actually a mistranslation. In Japanese, the choice for regular demon ending actually says "Yuko Bad".

This is easily accessible by using Cutscene Storage to clip off the higher section of the floor. However, it will be difficult to get back on solid ground once you've gotten to the debug object. The elevators won't be in place to bring you back to the ground floor. The one way you could use this debug object and recover is by clipping off the higher floor, load warping a savefile that hasn't yet been to Tower of Kagutsuchi, touching the debug object, then Suspending the game. When you resume the game, it would play the initial scene that plays when you first enter Tower of Kagutsuchi and put you back on solid ground.


4. Shinjuku Medical Center (post-conception) - The first room of SMC has a debug object at coordinate 0,0,0. It appears to be used to test giving the player the Marogareh magatama. This debug object's text is broken in English, but in Japanese you can see what it says. Needless to say, this is useless because you will always have Marogareh and getting a magatama a second time doesn't do anything. This debug object also exists in the "Where the Demi-fiend was Born" DLC map area, because that area is basically copy-pasted.

This is far out-of-bounds, but it's accessible if you use Cutscene Storage and then load a savefile that's saved at SMC (this places you at 0,0,0 for the given area). It's also simple to recover back to solid ground because saying Yes to the debug object places you outside the first room of SMC.


5. Shinjuku Medical Center (pre-conception) - the basement here has a debug object at coordinate -3408,-100,-1012. It appears to be used as a way to advance the pre-conception plot faster. The debug object's text is broken in English, but in Japanese you can see that it basically describes you found the ID to the door, and also that you felt like you met Hikawa. Therefore if you could access this debug object then you could go straight to this after entering the hospital, and then straight to the roof to see the Conception. But there's no way to get to this debug object without hacking and certainly no way in a speedrun.

Video of all of the known debug objects:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68CNRxAA0mw


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Auto Memory Storage:
For some reason if you load a savefile during battle, the game will immediately use the Auto action stored for the character whose turn it is. This is true even if that Auto action is a move that shouldn't be usable in the battle. There are two known uses for this: Escaping boss battles and using Pots of Death in boss battles.

To be clear on how to perform Auto Memory Storage:
1. Go to Config and make sure Auto Memory is set to ON
2. Go into any battle and, with a specific demon you'll use in the boss battle, use the action you want to store so that it's now in Auto Memory
3. Win or exit the battle without changing the stored Auto Memory action
4. Save the game
5. Activate Menu Storage
6. Enter the boss battle and on the turn of the demon who has the stored action you want to use, load the previously saved game (it helps to click the left stick to "freeze" the UI while you're navigating to the load savefile so that you don't accidentally do some other action on this demon's turn. Just make sure to unfreeze the UI before you hit "Yes" to load the savefile or else you might softlock)
7. The stored auto action will immediately be performed (you may need to hit A once if the action needs a confirmation over the enemy). Your party, items, story progress, and everything else will also be reverted to what it was on the savefile you just loaded

There are some nuances to be aware of. First, if the demon that will make an auto attack on the file you're loading from isn't in the party or stock at all on the file you're loading, then the game will softlock. It appears the game will be trying to use Auto but won't have any Auto data to use.

Second, you can hard crash the game in the case that the two files have a different number of demons in their stocks, especially when the savefile you're loading has a lesser number of demons. This appears to happen because loading a savefile while in battle will replace the demons that are currently summoned in battle using their stock number placement. If a demon in Stock Placement #10 is summoned in battle, for example, but the file you're loading had no demon at all in Stock Placement #10, the game will be confused on what to do and crash.

The Escape action, Trafuri, and Smoke Balls are all functionally identical for this except that the Escape action won't work on boss battles on Hard Mode. So on Hard Mode you need to use either Trafuri or Smoke Balls to escape from bosses.

Not all boss battles have been tested but more often than not, escaping usually isn't helpful. The battle usually isn't considered won when you force an escape so it usually either replays the pre-battle cutscene or places you right in front of the boss with the boss trigger still active. But there are some triggers that might still activate upon the battle finishing.

Bosses where Escaping DOES work in a speedrun include:
- The Amala Temple bosses Aciel, Skadi, and Albion. The bosses aren't defeated but the Isamu cutscene does play afterward and then you can leave the room without needing to battle the boss.
- All three Reason bosses in Tower of Kagutsuchi. The bosses count as defeated
- Lucifer. Counts as defeated

The other use for Auto Memory Storage aside from escaping is using a Pot of Death. The Pot of Death is a somewhat obscure item that can be purchased in Rag's Shop for 1 Emerald + 1 Coral. It acts as the boss-only move Sol Niger and sets all enemies' HP to 1. Normally the item is simply grayed out in boss battles (just like a Smoke Ball would be). If the boss has multiple phases, the Pot of Death will only be useful to finish off the phase you're in. For example, using Pot of Death at the beginning of the Kagutuschi fight will get you straight to Phase 2, but in Phase 2 he has his usual maximum HP. Unlike Escaping, Pot of Death could be useful for almost every boss battle. You would be limited only by the number of Pots of Death you can gather.

If you do perform Auto Memory Storage on Lucifer it means you can't use Auto Memory Storage on Kagutsuchi. This is because loading a savefile ends Menu Storage and there would be no way to re-enable Menu Storage between the two fights. You could still use Menu Storage to clone and use items from the menu during the Kagutsuchi boss fight to make it easier before you get to Lucifer though.

Notably, you can use a stored item action even if the savefile you're loading from doesn't have any of that item. Which is to say, a stored Pot of Death will still activate even if you don't have any Pot of Deaths. However, extending Pots of Death like this comes with the caveat that when you load a savefile in battle, you are loading everything about it - its demons, items, story progress, etc. Therefore you can't just have a Pot of Death savefile you load from for every boss or else you might also be rewinding parts of your story progress and EXP progress. This could still be useful though for situations where the progress of beating the boss isn't as important as physically getting past the boss is. Just as an example, if you used a Pot of Death, saved at the beginning of the Diet Building, then loaded that one savefile over and over for each Diet Building boss. Each boss you load it in would erase the progress of defeating the earlier Diet Building bosses, but you would also be physically past their hallways and wouldn't need the game to remember that you beat them for anything anyway. The biggest thing you'd lose might just be EXP.

You could also stretch one Pot of Death into multiple boss battles if you save between the boss battles and make sure nothing overwrites the Pot of Death in auto memory until your next boss battle. For that reason, it might be ideal if the boss battles are close together when you do this.

- Escaping from Amala Temple bosses - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDYGgLfAmkQ
- Escaping from Lucifer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJZYe-IzwVE
- Pot of Death on Kagutsuchi - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bMOb4jJiHb8


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Alternate Dismiss Demi-fiend Method

Another way to dismiss Demi-fiend was discovered some time after the original method described here, and this second method does not require the use of the mouse. This method simply takes advantage of some buggy behavior with Nocturne HD's menu. But even though it doesn't require the mouse, this still only works on the PC version for some reason. The mouse method is also simpler and quicker to do, so this alternative method doesn't appear particularly useful.

The bug here is that for some reason the Return to Stock command in the pause menu doesn't work correctly right after you turn on the game. If the very first thing you do after turning on the game and loading your savefile is Return to Stock, then you can get the Return to Stock cursor into the demon stock. And from the demon stock, you can hit down and A repeatedly to dismiss Demi-fiend. The specific behavior of the Return to Stock command after turning on the game depends on the demon in your first stock slot:

1. If you boot up and load the game and the demon in Stock Slot #1 is not in the party, then the Return to Stock command will immediately put the cursor in the stock

2. If you boot up and load the game and the demon in Stock Slot #1 is summoned in Party Slot #2 then Return To Stock that demon, and it'll immediately put the cursor in the stock. Backing out and Return to Stock again will also keep putting the cursor in the stock

3. If you boot up and load the game and the demon in Stock Slot #1 is summoned in Party Slot #3 or Party Slot #4 then Return To Stock that demon, back out, then Return To Stock again and it'll put the cursor in the stock

Hitting the Summon or Part With button at any time seems to break this (or fix this, depending on how you look at it) for the remainder of the game session. But no other actions seem to break it as far as we can tell. It's not clear what's happening but it seems like it's just poor coding on Atlus's part and something in the menu that does get instantiated with the Summon / Part With actions isn't getting instantiated when the game starts.

If you want to dismiss Demi-fiend doing this you need at least 2 demons of any kind summoned when the file loads. This is because if there are no demons summoned then the game won't even let you try to Return to Stock, and if there is only 1 demon summoned then the game won't let you move up and down when you enter Return to Stock.

It's believed that one or more streamers have done the Dismiss Demi-fiend glitch on accident around when Nocturne HD was first released in 2021 and given how simple this method is, it's likely that this is how they did it.


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Terminal Room Out-of-Bounds:
Menu storage allows you to get out-of-bounds with Suspend Shenanigans in certain places, but there is also another way to get out-of-bounds.

Activate Menu Storage and then enter a large or small terminal room. Exit the terminal room and with very specific timing close the pause menu while the game is room transitioning. For some reason, closing the pause menu at a certain time will interrupt the game placing you in the correct location on the map outside of the terminal room. The location it places you is consistent on a given floor and we're guessing it's probably the 0,0 origin coordinate point for that floor. Generally when doing all of these glitches it's recommended to dismiss down to 4 demons after activating Menu Storage to mitigate potential soft-locking - but this particular glitch appears to be more consistent with 5 or more demons summoned at the time you close the menu to interrupt the load.

This hasn't been as thoroughly tested because it's very inconsistent, not really well-understood, and almost always places you in a spot on the map too far away from or below solid ground to do anything. It doesn't seem to work on all terminal rooms as some of them seem to just soft-lock instead.

Examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJcq4DDeQpM

Shinjuku Medical Center 1F - https://imgur.com/HGBlFnk.png
Shinjuku Medical Center Annex - https://imgur.com/o497Yaq.png
Ginza - https://imgur.com/RoTMgZr.png https://imgur.com/ahfQ7Xz.png
Great Underpass - https://imgur.com/xUDo5Ch.png
Asakusa - https://imgur.com/vG3RyLG.png
Mifunashiro - https://imgur.com/dx67MAE.png https://imgur.com/VJywUsN.png


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Weird things with Dummy's:
It's been known for years that there is a placeholder "Dummy" demon in Nocturne which appears like the Demi-fiend but has weird stats and behavior. There's no non-hacking way found to summon one yet, but if we could summon a Dummy then it might be very useful so it's worth documenting what has been found.

If you perform Load Shenanigans while talking to Shige, the digging guy, in Yurakucho tunnel then you can get his dialogue to ask you for a Dummy demon. This happens when the original savefile used to initiate dialogue with him has an unequal number of demons to give him than the savefile loaded in during his dialogue has. There's no apparent effect of giving him a Dummy though. He'll treat it like he would any other regular demon with a low STR stat and use it to dig the tunnel.
https://imgur.com/MlY2sUt.png

You can also see Dummy's from the pause menu. Summon greater than 4 demons, save the game, then completely close Nocturne. When you reload the game, pause, and make the pitch-black screen go away by going to the Magatama screen. You'll see a bunch of demons in the stock who's stats are all 000. There's no clear way to summon one of them though. They appear to only be there graphically, as going to the Summon and Return to Stock screen just summons or returns the real demons that would be in your stock.
https://imgur.com/WiDjZnG.png


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Skips/tricks we still wish we could find:
- Getting Menu Storage earlier than level 33 or level 28. The simplest way to activate Menu Storage is with Beckon Call, and unfortunately the lowest-level demon that learns Beckon Call is Baphomet at level 33. It is possible to get Menu Storage earlier at level 28 too, by having 3 demons in your party and then purchasing Labyrinth Pisaca, who will join your 4th slot. But no Beckon Call means there's no easy way to get Demi-fiend back in the party after you've dismissed him, and it would be nice if there was something even earlier than level 28.
- Finding a way to manipulate Skill Mutation such that we can consistently mutate into early Beckon Call. Aquans' Anti-Expel or Dis's Makajam appear to be the best candidates for mutation, but the chances of it happening in a run are extremely low.
- Sequence breaking in Obelisk Tower to somehow get the Tower of Kagutsuchi event early (unlikely, because it appears the game checks for hard plot triggers)
- Finding a way to somehow trigger the extra press turn event in a Burial Chamber without being on New Game Plus


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The "Lunch Break" glitch (or "Dismiss Demi-fiend" glitch) was found in late October 2022 by Kard Fett. It's believed that one or more streamers have done the glitch on accident around when Nocturne HD was first released in 2021, but it wasn't clear what practical use it would have and it wasn't at all clear how the glitch was performed until Kard Fett rediscovered it and did more testing.

The "Menu Storage" glitch was found soon afterward in late October 2022 by Brotodile and most of the variations and applications of Menu Storage were discovered with more testing in November-December 2022.