Hyperdimension Neptunia: The Animation - Anime Review

Hyperdimension Neptunia: The Animation by David Production—Anime / PC (Steam) review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

If there's one series that has really come along over the past decade it's Compile Heart and Idea Factory International's Hyperdimension Neptunia. From the PS3 to the Vita, with the Rebirth Series, before jumping over to the PS4, PC and soon to be PS5, there's one thing they all have in common. Other than the retcons, each adventure is loaded with over the top video game nonsense that if you were to take out the adventure and combat? You would have an anime which is exactly what happened several years ago. Back and in a new format, Hyperdimension Neptunia: The Animation is now available on Steam.

The list of our almost two dozen Neptunia reviews can be found in our Reviews and Previews Database by searching for Neptunia.

While still available for purchase in DVD + BluRay and streaming on Funimation's online service, the re-imagined stories of MK2 / Rebirth 2 and Victory / Rebirth 3 have been repackaged into three separate viewings. Now, instead of either sitting through or skipping opening and closing credits, you can sit back and just enjoy a full amount of non stop video game homage nonsense from the CPU Goddesses.

Having done away with the opening and closing credits really makes for a much more cinematic experience which I found myself rather enjoying. Where things may be a bit odd however, is in the packaging of these cinematic packages which are broken down as follows:

• Hi Light: Crystal of Light (episodes 1-6, 11 and 12);

• Hi Light: The Blazing Bifrost (episodes 6-10, 13 (OVA)); and

• Neptune’s Summer Vacation,

For anyone watching for the first time, the order may not seem that bad though some questions may arise during Hi Light: Crystal of Light when it hits the content of episode 11 and 12 where you start to ask yourself, who are these people? With how short the overall anime is though, the lack of context is immediately made up for in a huge Dragon Ball Z type fight scenario that makes up for it. Once you finish though, the context will soon become available in The Blazing Bifrost that covers that in between and who some of the out of context characters are.

From a "packaging" standpoint inside of Steam, the set of videos could have been cleaned up a bit as for the three videos I was looking at eight separate files in which five of those were listed as (Deleted). I’m not quite sure what happened along the way for that, but it may not be a bad idea in order to clean those out.

In regards to the animation itself, it plays rather smoothly in the browser and offers a few options to help you along. Voiced in Japanese, there are options for English, Simplified and Traditional Chinese subtitles. Changing between these is as simple as clicking on the Closed Captioning option that opens up a window allowing you to pick the font, size, color, if you want shadows, the line height and background colors before worrying about the opacity and text wrapping on your screen. Having watched this on both my 34” curved monitor and then just my 17.3” Laptop screen, there’s an appreciation for these options as reading text from left to right over an ultra-wide is a lot harder than a standard widescreen even for someone used to subtitles.

Otherwise, the player has a few other options such as moving back or forth 15 seconds in case you missed something or wanted a replay. Pausing and playing is fairly easy too with the standard option to hit the spacebar as your play and pause button. Perhaps my only “issue” isn’t with the player itself which loads rather fine in the browser, but more along the lines that you couldn’t just download and take one of the three or all three parts with you if you wanted to. You have to be connected to the internet in a steaming fashion.

Summary

Hyperdimension Neptunia: The Animation does a fairly good job at capturing a couple of the high impact moments of the Goddess’ of Gamindustri lives especially considering that most of the main line JRPGs are at least 40+ hour adventures. With a total runtime of about 3.5 hours? That’s not bad considering. So if you’ve been wanting a return to Gamindustri but didn’t quite have the time to sink into one of the Re:Births or the recently re-released Megadimension Neptunia VII for the Nintendo Switch, Hyperdimension Neptunia: The Animation should have you covered with plenty of shenanigans from our lovable protag NepNep and the three other much more reliable Goddesses like my Lady Vert!

Score: 8 / 10

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Megadimension Neptunia VII - Switch Review

Megadimension Neptunia VII by developer Compile Heart, Idea Factory and publisher Idea Factory International—Nintendo Switch review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Existing in a subset of reality is this wonderful world known as Gamindustri. Split into four separate masses in which the only important one is that of Leanbox and my lady Vert, our tale brings us back to this land controlled by four CPU Goddesses and their hijinks through various realities and their fights for survival as things have gone very sideways once again for our four heroines.

Megadimention Neptunia VII for the Nintendo Switch is a return to the original that had graced the modern era on both the PS4 and the PC. Not including any of the VR enhancements as the switch doesn't have any form of it, I found it a bit odd that they weren’t adding in anyways as you could still play through without a headset. That said, it was nice to return to a pre-rebirth treatment that I felt more natural with than that of VIIR which changed things up, not in a bad way, but in a way that required pressing more buttons and doing a lot more mental math.

Now for those that may not know this niche, yet popular niche series, Hyperdimension or Megadimension Neptunia is the story of the main “protag” Neptune, aka Nep-Nep and the Goddess Purple Heart of the landmass of Planetune. Accompanied by Noire (the Goddess Black Heart of Lastation), Blanc (the Goddess White Heart of Lowee), and Vert (the Goddess Green Heart of Leanbox (aka the best Goddess)), these four Goddess are both rivals and close friends as they fight to keep their countries safe from those that would disrupt the peace. Basically an anthropomorphic approach to the physical consoles and the console wars, this RPG series spends most of its time making video game references and breaking the fourth wall for some entertaining shenanigans.

Megadimension Neptunia VII is still the latest core entry in the series and in a new approach, had split itself into three unique chapters each with their own title screens, intro videos and almost self contained storylines. Starting off by finding a console that our video game savvy protag had never seen before, Neptune and her sister Nepgear get pulled into another dimension that physically resembles their own yet on the verge of destruction. Having nothing better to do, the sister team up with the resident and only Goddess left Uzume (Orange Heart) in order to fight back the destructive forces closing in to finish the job.

The one thing that hasn’t changed over the years is that this is an awesome story in the Neptunia universe. You get your doom and gloom with plenty of doses of video game related fourth wall breaking nonsense, you get a full chapter where you get to take turns in which each Goddess becomes the protagonist and not simply second fiddle to Neptune,. Finally, you get plenty of good old fashioned RPG goodness with plenty of combat, tough boss fights and re-exploring areas in order to find everything as you unlock upgrades that let you do more to the environments.

What unfortunately doesn’t work so well for this latest re-release is the performance. Even if it came out years after the PlayStation 4, the Nintendo Switch doesn’t quite have the same power under the hood even if it has much more versatility. The reason I’m saying this is because the Zero Dimension chapter took a lot out of the Switch and honestly I was very happy to be able to turn off certain rendering features because otherwise it was almost unplayable with how slow and choppy everything was. Once you leave the Zero Dimension, both in its chapter as well as into the second overall chapter with the Golden Third, everything runs smooth and the rendering features can be turned back on, but it still makes for a good third of the game that was hard on the system to run.

As this is basically our fifth review of the title, I’ll leave it to a past me, Nick and Richard to go over all of the little tidbits from the PS4 and PC versions of both the gameplay and the story between the original VII and the revamped VIIR

• Megadimension Neptunia­ VII - PS4 (Nick 2016)

• Megadimension Neptunia VII - PC (Richard 2016)

• Megadimension Neptunia VIIR - PS4/PSVR (Pierre-Yves 2018)

• Megadimension Neptunia VIIR - (PC/VR 2018)

Summary

Overall though? If you’ve been wanting to return to Gamindustri as it’s been a while or you want a solid RPG for your Switch that you want to bring around with you or play comfortably while out on a balcony during this social distancing time, Compile Heart and Idea Factory’s Megadimension Neptunia VII is a great choice and one that you should really look into.

Score: 7.75 / 10

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Megadimension Neptunia VIIR - PS4 Review

All hail Lady Vert! Honestly if you don’t then we may have an issue. Declaration for CPUs aside, the girls are back again and this time in more than 2D with the latest entry of the series being re-worked from the ground up as well as for the PSVR. Now while I wish I did have a PSVR, headset-less players are still in for a treat as nothing will be missed out on AND the systems make it worth playing through this three chaptered entry once again.

The original release of Hyperdimension Neptunia VII was an ambitious one. Split into what are essentially three very well self contained chapters each with their own continual plot lines, it was well worth the time put into it. With new elements and lots of quality of life additions to the series, it was not easily one of my favorites, but a very well received one making it accessible for both veteran fans of the series (cringes at the original) and new ones alike.

VIIR does this ALL AGAIN. Essentially giving a console release the Re:Birth treatment, VIIR revamps all the systems again making it feel more like Hyperdimension Neptunia MK2, but done well. Characters still have their hit points but gone are massive SP bars in which a battle can be done within seconds with super destructive abilities. Now? Now you have to accumulate enough SP in order to perform an ability and more than that, AP comes back into the equation meaning that just because a character has enough moves to fill up a weapon type, doesn’t mean that she can use them all.

Combat had been rather streamlined but with the revamp it puts things back into a very hands on approach no longer allowing you to simply spam through a move set to continue. Keeping part of the new design, weapons, and not characters, affect which type of abilities are available for use. Weapons will have either one or more Rush (lots of attack little damage), Power Attacks (heavy hitting but harder to land) and Break Attacks (designed to remove protection for maximum damage) available for use.

Finding what works for you or a character can take some time but newly added is once the combo is done in regards to the AP, you can do it again. Until the AP is out, a characters can perform any moves as long as she has the necessary points to do so. Once she's done, then you get to select where she stands in regards to her movement left, where she's facing and what kind of defense posture she'll take. It adds some time to the battle but the change up works.

Taking things a step even further is that characters no longer simply learn a new move upon leveling up. Instead money now plays a major factor in the equation as each new ability must be bought in order to be used. Used to have problems with too much money? Don’t worry about it! It’s no longer an issue.

But how does this all relate to a story that you may have already explored? That’s easy. With the new systems in place the adventure feels both familiar and new. Sure you’ve seen the cutscenes but the adventure up to those points makes things different enough that you’re not simply playing the same game over again. Adding an extra element to that, is the VR.

Now because I don’t have a headset, I fall into the category of players that must press and hold “X” in order to load up the events on screen. These events essentially put you, the player, in the nice comforts of your bedroom / living room bachelor pad. You can look anywhere you want in the room, zoom in, pan around, but you don’t move from wherever you are sitting.

Now there are two types of visits. The first and the ones that you are introduced so are the four goddesses that will visit you to hang out one by one. Each is pretty much as you would expect and they are aware that you are there and that you at least know who they are. As “you chat” you can nod your head to answer yes or not but unfortunately for Noire, when she said if I minded and I said “no” I should have said yes because she got mad at me. I was trying to say that I didn’t mind her doing something so thinking along those lines carefully is a bit important.

The second type of visits are the “other” Neptune that will come around between chapter segments to say hi whether or not you like it. What were great about these visits compared to the ones that you planned, is that it works very well with the overall story progression. She’ll be saying something, dimensional hop to do something else, and next thing you know she’s talking about it to one of the other characters. It works and it fits into the overall experience as it doesn’t feel tacked on as much as it feels part of everything.

If you haven’t yet had the chance to jump into the latest part of the main series, or have even played through HN VII, Hyperdimension Neptunia VIIR is worth it. With a revamped system, smoother gameplay and new VR elements, there are plenty of reasons to come back for another run of Neptune’s antics. Plus it has Lady Vert. There’s no downside!

Game Information

Platform:
Sony PlayStation 4
Developer(s):
Compile Heart
Publisher(s):
Idea Factory International
Genre(s):
RPG
Mode(s):
Single Player
Other Platform(s):
NA

Source:
Provided by Publisher

Article by Pierre-Yves

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Megadimension Neptunia VII - PC Review

Megadimension Neptunia VII (Vee two) is the latest installment of the Neptunia franchise, a turn-based JRPG with more references than you can shake a dogoo at, and now it’s available for PC. I’m going to have to start off on a bit of a rant here, because I had a lot of issues trying to even start playing the game. First of all, even though I have the system requirements to play VII, whenever I used my own computer I wasn’t able to play in full-screen mode, otherwise only half the screen would display, and even in windowed mode I’d still get random images flashing across the screen. Thanks goes out to P.Y. for letting me use his computer to play, as it worked fine on his. Second part of the rant is more about controller functionality. I would really like to know why the Xbox One controller on windows 10 doesn’t work properly on the default settings, but any other controller, or the Xbox One controller on any other Windows OS worked fine. I’m not sure if I should fault Microsoft or Idea Factory for this, but someone somewhere needs to question some piece of code. Now that the rant is over, let me give a brief summary of the differences between the console and PC release for those looking for it. The only real changes I noticed were the smoother looking graphics and I’m pretty sure they fixed some spelling mistakes. That’s it, really. With those out of the way? Let's talk about what went right with this game - because there is a whole lot that did.

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Megadimension Neptunia VII heats up Steam this Summer!

We were fans of this title when it released on console, so we're excited to see it coming to PC sooner than later.

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Megadimension Neptunia­ VII - PS4 Review

To its credit, Megadimension Neptunia­ VII is the best game in the series to date. It benefits from the hardware boost from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4, with a better framerate that takes advantage of its fun, colorful graphics. More importantly, it takes some chances with its story and narrative structure, and these risks pay off leaving me to wish just a few more innovations had been drummed up along the way.

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Megadimension Neptunia VII has a release date

We were just talking about this title the other day, and now we have even more (good!) news for you.

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Megadimension Neptunia­ VII screens

We follow the Neptunia games around here quite a bit, so you can imagine we were excited to see some new screens and information about the upcoming Megadimension Neptunia­ VII.

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