I want to be fully clear; I was able to max Luck by level 42. It’s my 7th playthrough of Nocturne from the point of view of having played 4 full playthroughs of Nocturne in its PS2 form on my 60 GB PS3 back in the early 2010s and my third playthrough of the PS4 version of the HD Remaster. I had to level up vitality for the hospital to clear the hospital dungeon faster, but after that I only ever increased Luck and relied upon NG+ bonuses of higher level demons to get through the game. So, by level 42, Demi-fiend had a maxed out Luck Stat.

I decided to do this partly out of curiosity for why the announcer of Nocturne HD Remaster decided to only level up Luck during her Live Youtube playthrough of Nocturne HD Remaster, I was convinced from what various people on the megaten discord had told me about Luck only decreasing back attacks from random encounters because the guy who made Hard-type “looked into the game files” and “confirmed” it, and I wanted to try creating the weakest Demi-fiend possible in terms of Stats for the fun of it while going for the Neutral Ending.

Here’s the changes I observed:

+ Major increase in Demons randomly trying to negotiate with you in random battles. It’s almost one in every three or one in every five battles where they ask you for items instead of it being a rare occurrence. Interestingly, they actually seem significantly less likely to attack you and more likely to just leave the battle if you don’t give them an item.

+ Major increase in your demon companions giving you items and the higher the luck-stat seemed to correlate with the increase in the rarity of the items given to you. So, this is actually useful for the latter parts of the game to sell items to more quickly complete the compendium on the third Tower of Kagutsuchi terminal. It’s also incredibly useful prior to endgame due to the items usually being Light Balls, Bead chains, and Chakra Pots that you can either sell for more Macca or use for battle or if you don’t have a demon that illuminates dark areas.

+ This one was the most surprising and might be an argument that Luck is possibly the most broken Stat in the game: An increase in Demi-fiend’s Magatama “shaking” and when allowing it to continue to shake, an increase in the shaking giving you a free extra stat boost distributed randomly between Strength, Magic, Vitality, and Agility. This typically rare occurrence happened for three straight level-ups in a row with Demi-fiend after Luck was maxed. The only time it doesn’t give him an extra stat boost, it heals the party or Demi-fiend himself.

Assuming Atlus didn’t change anything about this game between the PS2 and PS4 versions, and all available information shows they didn’t. I feel so embarrassed having played this game with nearly 7 full playthroughs now and allowing other people to convince me that some guy who created Hard-type actually knew what he was talking about. Evidently, he was either lying, didn’t know what he was talking about, or – more than likely – people took his words way out of context from whatever it was that he had actually said. So anyway, for those of us who like maxing out Demi-fiend for TDE, it seems we’ve all been mini-maxing Demi-fiend wrong and it was never a slogfest of grinding to maximum stats. We were suppose to max out Luck and we’d have gotten stat boosts for the other Stats. So, for example, if you’re going for a physical-pierce Demi-fiend, it would have been better to balance stats between Strength, Vitality, and Luck and you’d more than likely maximize Demi-fiend faster than if it was just Strength, Vitality, and another Stat. Atlus evidently gave us an entire Stat attribute to help us level-up Demi-fiend without any nonsensical DLC even prior to the HD Remaster and nobody paid attention to it. Don’t worry, I feel more embarrassed than any of you, since I literally am on my 7th full playthrough of this game, and if I count the two files where I chose to do Yosuga on the PS2 version instead of TDE, then I’m technically on my 9th playthrough and it took me this long to be curious enough to see what the Luck stat would actually change.

The playthrough in question: