2218: Megadimension Neptunia: Report from 21 Hours In

Good Lord, this game is good.

As I mentioned the other day, Megadimension Neptunia V-II marks something of a watershed moment for the series in that it’s no longer “good, but [insert caveat of your choice here]” and is just plain good. Great, even.

I’m about 21 hours in so far. I’ve finished the first of the three main stories that make up the complete experience — Zerodimension Neptunia Z — and am now in the second, Hyperdimension Neptunia G. This part — at least the first bit of it; I don’t know how long it is in total — is split into four distinct scenarios, each of which focuses on one of the four main goddess characters (and one of the four new “Gold Third” characters, who personify various Japanese game companies from Capcom to Square Enix), and so far I’ve played through Blanc’s route from start to finish.

Like Compile Heart’s previous game Omega Quintet, MegaNep spreads out its mechanics over the course of quite a few hours. 20 hours in, I’m still getting tutorial messages when I’m afflicted with a status effect I haven’t suffered before, though I think that most of the main core mechanics of the game have now been introduced by this point. Unlike Final Fantasy XIII, which often draws the ire of commentators for taking a similar approach to spreading out its new mechanics, MegaNep never feels like it’s artificially constraining you, though; the new systems I’ve seen so far were all introduced at the changeover between Zerodimension Neptunia Z and Hyperdimension Neptunia G, which was an eminently sensible way to do things, since it allows Z to stand by itself as a complete-feeling experience, then G to move on and feel distinctive in its own right thanks to the additional things you have to juggle.

What of those additional things, though? Well, aside from the things that Z already shook up — the world map is now node-based a la Final Fantasy Tactics, and you can have random encounters while moving from place to place; the battle system has been completely revamped from previous installments — G introduces (and, in some cases, reintroduces) a number of new systems.

First is the Scout system originally seen in Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory. Essentially, this is a small army of chibi characters (series veterans will recognise them as the “Chirper” characters who fulfil the role of incidental NPCs) that you can send out to dungeons, and they will then report back with what they find. Whereas Victory’s Scout system simply required you to enter and leave locations a certain number of times before the Scouts would return, MegaNep’s Scouts head out in real time and then report back with items, money, new dungeon features (boss monsters or clues to hidden treasure) or whole new dungeons. There’s still a heavy degree of RNG involved, but it’s a fairly painless process, and the real-time element means you can easily leave it running while you’re doing other errands in-game. Scouts also provide passive bonuses to you if you’re exploring the same dungeon they’re deployed to, so they’re helpful in ways other than just finding stuff, too.

Next is the Investment system, which allows you to develop towns by spending your hard-earned Credits in three areas: Commercial, Industrial and Public Relations. Upgrading Commercial increases the stock in the shops; upgrading Industrial gives you access to new crafting recipes; upgrading Public Relations triggers events that can reward you with items, new Scouts or simply an entertaining scene. That’s pretty straightforward.

Then you have the Route Building system, which is also reasonably straightforward. Discover a new dungeon and you can’t just click on it on the map like in the older games; you have to build a node-based pathway to it first, which costs money.

Then you have the Hidden Treasure system for each dungeon, which replaces the old games’ spamming the “sonar”-type ability to find invisible items. Here, to find a hidden treasure, first of all you have to have a Scout discover a clue to its location, then fulfil the conditions in the clue, then collect the treasure. Sometimes dungeons have more than one treasure, which means you have to do the process twice, though the conditions are usually different. The conditions make the dungeon-crawling a bit more interesting, because they have a decent amount of variety in them: some require you to collect all the regular treasures in a dungeon (some of which may be in awkward places or behind barriers that require the “Breaker” ability to smash) while others require you to execute 8 “Symbol Attacks” in a row without getting spotted by any enemies, which challenges your stealth and pattern-spotting skills. Others still require you to defeat each and every enemy symbol in the whole dungeon at least once — they don’t all have to be dead at the same time, but you do have to keep track of what you’ve already killed and what you haven’t.

In Blanc’s route, we get a number of different characters to play with, each of whom handles rather differently, fixing the issue from the older games where most of the characters felt rather interchangeable with the exception of their special skills. Blanc herself has a marked disparity between her physical and magic defense, for example, while her sisters Rom and Ram have half of Blanc’s HP but much stronger magic resistance and the ability to attack both at range and over a wider area. The brief time you get to play with Capcom personification C-Sha is a ton of fun, too; her combo skills are all named after fighting game terminology, and it’s more fun than it should be triggering Rush attacks called simply “PPPK” then seeing her doing a punch-punch-punch-kick combo on the enemy.

The story is proving to be surprisingly compelling so far, too. The Zerodimension episode had a mixture of lightheartedness and post-apocalyptic bleakness and worked well. Blanc’s route of the Hyperdimension story deals with a plausible view of a dystopian society where everything and everyone is controlled by the state, and how revolutionaries fighting against this sort of regime aren’t always in it for the right reasons. Neptunia’s stories have always been far more clever than most reviewers give them credit for, being heavily allegorical for the most part, but so far MegaNep seems to have taken things to a new level. The writing and localisation is good (aside from a few easily ignored typos here and there) and, crucially, the new characters — of whom there are quite a few — fit right in to the world without breaking a sweat.

It does feel very different to previous Neptunia games, but after the three Re;Births that all had the same basic mechanics, it’s refreshing to have a game that feels both comfortingly familiar and fresh at the same time. I’m delighted with the experience so far, and am looking forward to playing it to death over the course of the next few weeks. Expect further reports to follow.