1688: Rebirth

The nice thing about having an uninterrupted hour for a lunch break — something which I have at my new job (yes, I’m going to keep mentioning it while the novelty is still there), and something which I often did not have when I was working in schools, retail and even games journalism — is that it provides the ideal opportunity to get in a bit of handheld gaming time.

I have quite the backlog on both 3DS (well, DS if we’re being completely honest about it) and Vita, and just recently I added another game to the latter’s collection. I couldn’t not, though; if you’re a regular reader you will, of course, know that I couldn’t possibly let a new Hyperdimension Neptunia game pass by without immediately purchasing it — even if I knew I wouldn’t get to it immediately.

The game in question is Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1, the curiously punctuated remake of the game that started the whole series off. I’ve played a little over an hour so far, and predictably, I’m totally in love with it.

The original Hyperdimension Neptunia was a funny game. I’d be wary of calling it “good” or recommending it even to the most open-minded, fanservice-positive players out there, but despite its many, many flaws I liked it enough to play it all the way through, then move on to its sequels Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 and Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory. (And the Vita dating sim Hyperdimension Neptunia Producing Perfection, which I’m still yet to beat properly.)

Hyperdimension Neptunia was effectively a visual novel punctuated by repetitive dungeon-crawling sequences that ran at an appalling frame rate and featured a genuinely interesting but somewhat clunky battle system. I actually rather enjoyed this latter aspect a lot more than many other people; I appreciated the puzzle-like nature of setting up custom combos that you could chain endlessly — perhaps swapping back-line characters in and out along the way — and I was fascinated by manipulating the AI-driven in-battle item “crafting” system. This latter aspect was just plain bizarre — you had to set percentage chances that characters would use specific items upon meeting trigger conditions, and there was no means of just manually using an item.

The former aspect — the visual novel-style story sequences — proved to be the real draw for me, though. They were what kept me coming back time and time again, more than happy to endure the dungeon-crawling in the name of advancing the story and seeing what Neptune and her friends were up to next.

Hyperdimension Neptunia’s story wasn’t particularly complex, but one thing the series has been quite consistently throughout its surprisingly short lifespan is clever. Yes, that’s right, clever. On the surface, it might seem like moe anime fluff full of squeaky-voiced girls squeaking at one another. And to a certain extent that’s true. But beneath that candy-coloured exterior lies some clever, well-written satire of the ridiculousness that is gaming. Not the stupidity we’ve seen around gaming in the last few weeks, mind; rather, a series of on-point observations and sidelong glances at the way the different “factions” of the industry have behaved over the years. The way Sony likes to believe it’s the best; the way Microsoft has habitually catered to specific types of gamers; the way Nintendo handles business with ruthless efficiency, even when it doesn’t make any friends while doing so.

Not only that, but the series has been packed with plenty of references to numerous video games — through its dialogue, through its incidental recurring characters and even through the monsters you fight, which include space invaders, Pac-Man ghosts and sentient dating sims. All this added up to a considerable amount of charm that far outweighed its technical and design shortcomings.

Re;Birth1 had a lot to live up to, then. And based on an admittedly short amount of time with it so far, it appears to be living up to expectations. Rather than word-for-word recreating the original with the modernised, much better gameplay systems of Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, it instead acknowledges (and frequently lampshades) the fact that it is a remake. Basic story beats have so far been similar, but the specifics of how you get to them are a bit different. And the gameplay has been totally revamped, featuring Victory’s fantastic combat system — now explained far better than it has ever been in any previous installment — plus some interesting new tricks such as the “Remake” system, which allows you to “craft” everything from items to be sold in shops to new gameplay mechanics.

Amusingly, it runs far better on the Vita than it ever did on the more powerful PS3, too, and despite making use of a lot of the same audio-visual assets and even maps from the previous two games, it feels like a pleasantly fresh experience to be able to carry it around in your pocket.

If Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory was anything to go by, I expect Re;Birth1 to keep me busy for a very long time indeed. Now, if only there weren’t a zillion and one other brilliant games out now all vying for my attention, too…