I’ve been following the Hyperdimension Neptunia series for a while now, and for the most part I’m pretty positive on the experience. There’s a lot of how they approach the series that I really like to see, though I have to admit if I take a step back and look at the series as a whole the quality is collectively… Iffy?

Most of the goodwill I’ve built toward the series is kind of due to the Re;Birth trilogy and VII (just to get this out there, that’s V-short-for-“Victory”-Two, and not a Roman 7) serving as enjoyable, light adventures that tangibly improve as they go on aside from some odd steps back in Re;Birth 3’s battle system. Generally though, each time I started a new one there’d be some moment that made me think “Huh, I was actually hoping they’d fix that.” All of them are a marked improvement on the original PS3 games, though Victory comes very close to the game engine used in the Re;Birth games. VII is just… a genuinely good game. The story feels like it has some stakes to it for once, the ‘combo’ system is actually extremely important and satisfying to learn, and it’s easier to pull off your flashy moves again. I’d like to see another ‘mainline’ game follow up on it, though I kind of feel like the good ending feels cheaper than the downbeat ones given the buildup.

I’ll admit up front I totally understand why people don’t get into the series since it relies on fanservice, winking constantly at the fourth wall, characters who never really develop much, and the entire premise of the setting is more or less the gimmick of “what if we made a video game about the gaming industry? Wouldn’t that be WACKY?” But sometimes you just want a nice big bowlful of junk food, and the angstless, hapless heroines of the series going on quests to fight software pirates and anonymous internet forum users fits the bill pretty well.

Most of the missteps the series makes are relegated to spinoffs which almost all take more experimental approaches ranging from hack and slashers to an idol-raising sim that’s apparently so bad it hasn’t been ported to Steam. I found U: Action Unleashed pretty dull, Neptune and Blanc vs Zombies was essentially a cuter Oneechanbara game, and Hyperdevotion Noire was a STING co-developed tactics RPG that relies a lot on terrain gimmicks. (You would think the last one would be totally my bag but the addition of a player insert character always sours me on stuff like this.) I haven’t gotten to play much of 4 Goddesses Online but it seems like an okay action-RPG in the fake MMO dot hacky sort of tradition.

This is all more or less filibustering the focus of this spiel. Last year was the US release of Brave Neptunia, under the far worse title of Super Neptunia RPG. Drawing heavy inspiration from Valkyrie Profile and coming out sort of suspiciously close to Indivisible but likely unrelated, I was really looking forward to this one. The 2D graphics look really nice, which is unsurprising since the series has pretty much always had cute hand drawn art locked down tight. The end result though, is a game I’ve been frustratingly unable to ‘click’ with for the most part, even as I’m considering starting the whole thing over to try and play it ‘right.’ After buying it on or near launch day I have just shy of 8 total hours of play and am alternately breezing through or getting completely ruined by random encounters, so I feel like I’ve missed something essential in the battle system.

I should probably mention at this point this is a Rambling post and not like, a review. As mentioned above, maybe my eyes just glazed over a tutorial somewhere because IF games just love to front load tutorials including mechanics you won’t even be able to access for hours in-game in codex or full-screen splash graphic form. Missing a tutorial somewhere doesn’t fix some of the other issues I’ve had come up, little trinkets of Jank that crop up regularly enough that they kind of wind up congealing into a layer of Vaseline that was smeared on as a creative interpretation of “polish.” Long load screens, minimalist maps that show you how to get around but not where towns are or what connects to the next area, oddly unresponsive menus at times. Also, on every other bootup the Compile Heart jingle plays in a harsh, corrupted version for some reason I hope is a genius intentional move and the later chapters turn into creepypasta material or something. The voice clips available to the characters in English seem really limited as well, leading to weirdness like Neptune yelling “Yess! A crit!” when she crits using Poison Strike followed by “Yess! A crit!” every time the poison status causes damage, or equipping Noire with a multi-targeting, multi-hit attack making her exclaim “A gra-A graceful strike!”

The most obvious change to this game is that it’s been turned into a side-scrolling, Valkyrie-Profile inspired format where Neptune has to navigate interconnected areas via running, platforming, and some limited traversal items like a pudding she can bounce off of. In battle, each girl is tied to a face button and does different actions based on what position they’re in. It’s customizable, but you’re sort of stuck once battle begins and I haven’t successfully run from one yet. I’ve been stuck many times in a fight where my characters didn’t have anything the enemy was weak to or even stuck healing the enemy. I think there may be a touch of SMT weakness exploiting going on since it seems like once someone hits a weakness the rest of the fight turns into a curb stomp endlessly spamming the same move- for you or the enemy.

I can’t deny though that the game succeeds in being very pretty, and I can’t see the plot coming hours in advance for once. Maybe I’m a sap but it’s hard for me to stay mad when I enter a new area like the coral reefs outside Planeptune and it’s so darn nice on the eyes I’m not angry again until I meet a dopey looking underwater knight who can relentlessly hammer the team into nothing because he got a weakness off first. But for those three minutes, I was really into the reef, okay?