Yep, you guessed it, it's time for the super-referential RPG that picks apart the video game industry
for fun and profit, and then covers that with a layer of stuff you really don't want anyone
seeing you play.
It's Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, Idea Factory and Compile Heart's latest iteration
of... oh, why bother explaining.
You either love the series for jamming in Keiji Inafune's face and having the mascot
characters from Famitsu and Dengeki scattered about, alongside Snake Hayter and The King
of Some Cosmos and Mariyo and his brother, Player 2... or you hate it because you're
just not that into the aesthetic (that is to say, you have a functioning social life
and are not a sex-starved hikikomori with more money than scruples).
The fact that the actual RPG mechanics feel almost punitive doesn't help.
I didn't know if this was a game, or justice for my experiments in Pokemon eugenics what,
in a more civilized time, would've just landed me arraigned at Nuremberg.
So after bringing the player up to speed on this world populated by scantily-clad girls
representing Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft, and Sega... and explaining why our titular hero
Neptune is back at level 1 like a schnook... and doing an arbitrary fetch quest because
that's apparently what personifications of major video game companies do, a woman advocating
for a government free from the rule of these goddesses gets some dark matter jammed down
her throat in an alleyway (and don't think that's not creepy) which she uses... somehow...
to throw Neptune back in time, to about 1989 or so.
Here she encounters Plutia, apparently meant to be the representation of... well, I couldn't
figure out if she's supposed to be the Mega Drive or the Master System.
But, wait.
Noire's here, and she's supposed to be the Sony character, which doesn't make any sense.
She should've been just a software publisher at that point, punching out classics like
Sewer Shark and Johnny Mnemonic and 3 Ninjas Kick Back, so what the hell?
They relate the story that the only country that exists right now is Lowee, AKA Nintendoland,
and that the now Famicom-styled Blanc is in cahoots with a shadowy organization called
the Seven Sages, AKA Shichi Genjin, AKA PC Engine, AKA the Turbografx-16, a reference
that doesn't get paid off until waaaaaaay later in the game, and even then it kinda
gets lost in translation.
Yep, it's another standard CompileFactory half-tactical RPG, where you run around on
the battlefield and try to align your attack area so you can hit two things, which I believe
takes about 40% of the time you spend playing this game in total.
Look, I could probably spend about twenty minutes just going off on how frustrating
and non-intuitive the mechanics are, starting with the Lily system that's supposed to buff
your party but just gives you less of one during the early game, to where if you're
using it while fighting the first real boss, you've got essentially a zero percent chance
of winning.
Enemies that hit you for massive damage in your normal form might do absolutely nothing
if you transform into boobs-form (because, let's face it, that's the general idea, else
they wouldn't be showing you so much of 'em)... unless they go viral without any particular
provocation, start doing exponentially more damage, and get a full HP reload.
The map in this particular era of Gameindustri is broken up into regions, which must be traversed
by running through certain dungeons to get from place to place... which doesn't seem
too bad.
That is, until you're told at point B to go back to point A, just to be told to go back
to point B. That's not gameplay, that's **** BUSYWORK, from a game that fosters such imbalances to
the point where even clearing an entire map of mobs twice isn't enough grinding to get
through a given boss.
C'mon.
We've moved past this, haven't we?
Want another?
Here's Virtua Forest.
Here's Bandicrash.
THEY'RE EXACTLY THE SAME MAP.
The writing tries desperately to salvage this thing, but is a few thousand ping-pong balls
short.
I appreciate a game that's willing to drop a Resident Evil or Shinobi III reference at
the drop of a hat, just for entertainment's sake, but much of the rest of the text reads
like a desperate attempt at recreating Excel Saga's level of absolute absurdity and nonsense,
and coming nowhere close.
Play with the Japanese vocal track, and you immediately wanna kick Plutia in the face.
Play with the English track, and you'll be almost spared - almost - but miss out on a
couple of the deeper references that weren't actually localized, including a Hatsune Miku
allusion completely lost in translation.
The majority of the problem with the Neptunia series, as I see it, is this: Anyone who actually
"gets" this game's idea and appreciates all the backhanded and sideways references...
knows games well enough to expect better.
Much better.
And preferably without the super-creepy sexual innuendo that doesn't really appeal to, y'know,
functional human beings.