1106: Nepgagaga Complete… Mk2

I beat Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 tonight, and have now seen one of its seven endings. The one I got tonight was the most fiddly and awkward to get — those who have played the game will know it as the “Conquest Ending” — and was also very, very, dark. Said darkness was all the more effective considering how light and breezy the rest of the game had been; after some 20-odd hours of all-female yuri moe shenanigans in the party, to suddenly be confronted by something that was quite genuinely emotionally affecting was testament to what a good job the game had done in building up its characters’ personalities and relationships.

But I shan’t talk too much more about the plot for fear of getting into spoiler territory. I do, however, want to make a point of talking about the game itself a bit more, and reiterating a few things I have previously said about it.

The main thing that I would like to say about it is that it’s quite possibly the most fun I’ve had with a JRPG in ages. It was consistently fun, didn’t outstay its welcome (a single playthrough clocks in at under 30 hours on your first time through and is considerably quicker if you New Game+ it up after that) and made use of some great (and quite original) systems. It then wrapped the whole experience in a plot that, while a little preachy at times, provided a great opportunity for the characters and setting to shine and show that the world of Hyperdimension Neptunia was far more than just a one-trick pony of self-referential humour relating to anime and games.

It’s a stark contrast to the first Hyperdimension Neptunia; I had a huge amount of fun with the original game, but any time I talk about it I feel the need to add a disclaimer that I’m aware of all its flaws and that it was critically panned on release. And that’s at least partly justified; if you don’t get into the plot, setting and characters of the first Hyperdimension Neptunia, there’s little more than a mediocre dungeon crawler with an interesting combat system underneath — probably not enough to hold the interest of someone who is not fully invested in the experience.

The second installment, meanwhile, is quite simply a good game. While it’s still got its cheeky, innuendo-filled self-referential sense of humour intact and its tongue firmly planted in its cheek for most of the way through, it doesn’t rely on cheap gags and references alone to carry the experience. Beneath the silliness is a rock-solid JRPG with some really cool mechanics.

Let’s start with the combat system. Unlike the previous game, which followed a fairly conventional turn-based system coupled with a Xenogears-style combo-making mechanic, Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2’s battle system brings in some additional tactical elements that really change things up.

In the first game, each character had a set amount of “action points” (AP) to expend on their combos each turn, and various achievements such as breaking an enemy’s guard or performing a special “combo link” move would give some of these points back, allowing a single turn to last for longer. You could also switch the currently-active member with one who was in the off-screen “back row” using certain special combo finishers, effectively allowing you a free turn if you were careful about your AP expenditure.

The second game maintains the AP system, but provides a degree more flexibility. Each character has a base amount of AP that top up to full at the start of each turn if they used them all the previous turn, but AP can also “overflow” over their maximum if the character deliberately finishes their turn early. This is a necessary tactic to unleash some of the more effective “EX combos” — special moves triggered by specific button combinations, some of which require more than a full AP bar’s worth of AP to use.

Alongside the AP system is a new stat called Skill Points (SP). This is a mechanic in which hitting an enemy and taking damage adds to a bar which gradually counts up to 300. Characters’ unique skills — now selectable from a separate menu rather than having to be incorporated into a combo — all cost a particular number of AP and SP to unleash, with the more devastating moves requiring more SP. SP skills vary from powerful attacks on a single enemy to area or line attacks, or buff/healing skills to benefit the party. Protagonist Nepgear and the other “CPU Candidate” characters can also transform into their “Hard Drive Divinity” goddess forms by spending 100 SP, but the remaining SP after the 100 ticks down each turn, and they revert to human when SP runs out completely.

There are three different types of move that can be performed in combat: fast moves hit multiple times and thus build up the SP bar faster, hard moves inflict more damage and are often magical in nature, and breaker moves concentrate on damaging the enemy’s “guard” bar, which, when depleted, allows the player characters to do more damage than usual. Fighting effectively is a case of knowing what moves to use when — some enemies are more susceptible to magical hard attacks, for example, while others take more damage from multi-hit combos. Building up a big combo also helps Nepgear and her friends to maintain their goddess forms for longer.

Oh, you can move around in combat, too. It’s surprising what a huge difference this makes; the simple addition of a mechanic whereby attacks affect a physical area rather than a specific enemy/character means that positioning is very important.

So that’s the combat system. The other interesting mechanic is the “shares” system, which was also present in the first game but never explained at all, despite its manipulation being necessary to attain the “true” ending. The amount of control the game’s four “friendly” nations and the antagonist faction have over the game world is reflected by the shares, and forms an interesting (if lightweight) strategic metagame atop the whole experience. There’s an overall “world control” chart, which shows which faction has the upper hand — initially the antagonists by a considerable degree — and localised charts corresponding to each nation’s capital and smaller, non-interactive towns around their landmass.

You can manipulate the shares by doing quests. Each quest has a sponsor city somewhere on the map — either one of the four capitals or one of each nation’s smaller towns — and will increase one faction’s shares in that area while depleting another’s by the corresponding amount. By manipulating the shares, you can effectively change which faction controls each area, and which area has greater dominance over the world as a whole. It’s not always simple, though — sometimes you’ll have to run one quest to wrest an area’s control away from the antagonists and into its native hands, then another to give these shares to another territory if necessary.

While it may be tempting to simply plough all your efforts into increasing Nepgear’s native Planeptune shares as high as possible, this isn’t necessarily advisable — controlling more than 55% of the world by a particular point in the story unlocks the aforementioned “Conquest” ending, which is rather traumatic if you’re not ready for it!

The shares are used for a number of different purposes. Firstly, they affect various characters’ stats — if you’re using one of the “goddess” characters from the land of Lastation, for example, increasing Lastation’s world share will make these characters stronger while others become weaker. It is possible to keep things nicely balanced if you want to use all the goddesses in your party — you’ll just have to eradicate the antagonist’s faction altogether to do that.

The second function of the shares is to help determine the ending you get. I’ve already mentioned the 55% world share that Planeptune requires for the “Conquest” ending; that’s by far the hardest one to get, as it involves effectively taking over the other countries through a whole bunch of careful questing. Other endings have less stringent requirements; faction-specific endings simply require that particular capital cities have a strong majority control by their native territory as well as Nepgear having a good relationship with the goddess characters of the area, while the “human” ending requires that you avoid any sort of dominance whatsoever. Finally, the “true” ending, which goes on for a whole extra chapter after the game usually ends, requires that the world is divided up nice and neatly between the four factions, and that the antagonists are wiped out as much as possible.

You’ll notice I’ve barely mentioned the plot at all in this post, and that’s because I want to make a point about Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 — even without its big-eyed anime girl shenanigans, it would be a rock-solid game. It’s a crying shame that so many people I’ve spoken to won’t even consider playing it because of 1) its predecessor’s poor reputation and 2) its aesthetic and character design. Hopefully the things I’ve said in this post have at least piqued your curiosity a little — it’s a great game and genuinely well worth your time, and if you don’t feel like you can stomach the first in the series (which I maintain is fun and entertaining despite its myriad flaws) it’s perfectly accessible to newcomers.

I’ll see you in Gamindustri!

1103: One Hundred Percent

I very rarely “100%” the games I play. The reason for this is that in many cases, doing so involves a lot of abject tedium and just stops being fun after a while. Often it requires the systematic use of a walkthrough to find all the hidden packages/shoot all the pigeons/see all the events, and once you start playing with a walkthrough next to you, I often feel you’re missing out on part of the game’s fun — discovery.

And yet I find myself tempted to pursue all of the endings in Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 simply because it’s one of the most enjoyable, entertaining games I’ve played for a very long time. Whether or not this means I will actually play through the whole thing enough times to get each separate ending or just cheat the system with a well-timed save I haven’t decided yet… but I do sort of want to see all the different endings and all the content on offer.

An exception to the 100% rule is visual novels. I’ll usually try and see everything a visual novel has to offer before moving on, because it’s often quite straightforward to do so — though in games with a huge number of decision points like School Days HQ, it’s often quite a time-consuming process. I have, to date, 100%ed several visual novels, though, including Katawa Shoujo and Kana Little Sister. When I finished them, I did feel satisfied that I’d seen everything the game had to offer because, in those cases, very little felt like filler.

In the case of RPGs, though, a lot of that additional content to push you up towards the magic 100% figure is very grindy, rather dull and has nothing to do with the story. But in some cases, the game can wrap you up in its world and its systems enough for that to not matter. Final Fantasy VII is the earliest example I can think of that my friends and I worked all the way through and acquired (almost) all of the secret stuff — all the hidden materias, all the nightmarish Chocobo breeding and at least a good attempt at the secret areas and bosses. We loved that game so much we didn’t want to stop playing; pursuing these time-consuming, ultimately irrelevant and often game-breaking sidequests meant we could continue playing for longer, so we did. Then we played it again. To date, I have no idea how my friends and I found time to complete Final Fantasy VII as many times as we did.

So far as Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 goes, a single playthrough is apparently relatively short (for an RPG, anyway) and thus charging through it multiple times isn’t out of the question. The advent of the “New Game+” mode means that you can carry a bunch of stuff over from game to game, too; given that a number of the endings are dependent on some gradually-increasing relationship statistics that will likely be a bit of a pain to achieve in a single playthrough without some serious grinding, it almost makes sense to play it through several times to make building up these values a more natural process. Hmm. Hmm.

Oh, what the hell. I saw all four endings of Nier (and had my save file deleted by the game to prove it) and enjoyed the experience hugely. (Yes, I enjoyed Nier.) It is but a small jump from four different endings to seven, right?

Right?

Place your bets now on how many I get through before I give up.

1099: Nep-Nep-Nep-Nep

It’s another Hyperdimension Neptunia post, I’m afraid. Normally I’d make an effort to try not to talk too much about the same thing several days in a row, but having started the sequel to Hyperdimension Neptunia (imaginatively titled Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2) this evening, I felt compelled to share some of my first impressions. (Besides, this is my blog, dammit.)

That first impression can largely be summed up by me nodding and smiling at developers Compile Heart and Idea Factory and going “Good job, guys.”

You see, Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 takes all the things that were good about its predecessor — an amusing but oddly well-realised world; some excellent, memorable characters; some lovely 2D art — and ditches all the things that were a bit rubbish. Consequently, out go the endless cookie-cutter dungeons, out go the PS1-era random encounters, out go the weirder aspects of the battle system (like the bizarre mid-combat “item crafting” system and the seeming necessity to skip animations to take full advantage of the “guard break” mechanic) and out go the sequences that served no purpose (waiting for landmasses to approach and then having to run an insultingly easy dungeon every time you wanted to travel anywhere).

In comes a game which is not just a dream come true for a Hyperdimension Neptunia fan, but a game which actually appears to be a very good JRPG generally. Okay, you’re still controlling an all-female party of candy-coloured self-referential anime archetypes so if you’re not on board with that you’re never going to be on board with this series, but almost everything about the first game that sucked a bit has seemingly been rectified with this new game. It’s still not perfect and it’s still rough around the edges — the in-engine graphics are still a bit PS2-ish in quality, riddled with jaggies (can’t remember the last time I wrote that word!) and the frame rate still blows, but just like the original managed to be entertaining despite its flaws and technical shortcomings, so too does its sequel. Only said sequel is, as I say, a much better game on the whole, too.

The biggest overhaul to the game’s base can be seen in the battle system. It’s still focused on making combos, but there’s no longer the need to micromanage every possible combination of three different buttons pressed up to four times. I actually quite liked this aspect of the original, as it gave the game a fun puzzly mechanic as you attempted to make combos that flowed nicely in to one another, but it did make getting a new character a bit tiresome, as you had to spend a good 10-15 minutes setting up their button combinations — usually only to discover in a boss fight that you’d done something wrong somewhere. (Fortunately, it was possible to rejig combos in mid-fight, which was nice.)

Nope, what we have now is a much more streamlined system — triangle button does multi-hit attacks, square button does powerful attacks, cross button does attacks that prioritise damage to the enemies’ “guard gauge”. Like before, each attack costs a certain number of Ability Points (AP) to perform. An initial attack is of a fixed type, but from that point on, you can customise the specific “move” (and AP cost) that is assigned to each of the three buttons depending on if it is the second, third or fourth attack in a combo. Characters unlock “EX” attacks as they level up, requiring that the player use both a specific button combination and expend a particular number of AP during a combo before triggering a more powerful special move. Each character has their own suite of “skills” outside the attacks, too, which cost a combination of AP and Skill Points (SP, which charge up through attacking enemies) to perform. These vary from special attacks to support buffs and healing skills, and mean there’s no longer the reliance on random chance when attempting to keep your party at full health.

Combat now allows characters to move, too, giving the whole thing a light strategic feel, as all attacks cover a particular area, and characters clustered together can all feel the brunt of one enemy’s attack if you’re not careful. The whole thing is way more fast-paced than the previous game — a feeling helped even more by the fact that the load times between field and battle screens are lightning-fast.

I’m not far into the story yet, but it’s been enjoyable so far, despite what essentially amounted to an extremely mild tentacle scene approximately five minutes into the experience. (Said “tentacles” — actually cables — weren’t doing any more than just holding the previous game’s “CPU” goddesses prisoner, but it’s very clear that it was a reference to… well, you know.) New protagonist Nepgear (hah) is appealing and endearing, and successfully distinguishes herself from her ditzy sister — the previous game’s protagonist — by basically being the exact opposite in terms of personality. Where Neptune was loud, brash, confident and, let’s not beat around the bush, endearingly stupid at times, Nepgear is much more reserved, rational, intelligent and innocent. There’s a lot of scope for her to grow as a character — particularly when accompanied by the increasingly world-weary IF (rapidly becoming my favourite character in the series) and the ever-optimistic Compa — so I’ll be interested to see how she develops as her journey progresses.

There’s still a heavy focus on non-linear and repeated sidequesting in the new game, but it actually explains what effect doing quests has right from the beginning this time instead of, you know, not at all. Yes, the “shares” system from the previous game is back again, but it’s integrated into the story this time, representing the world’s level of belief in the “good” goddesses and the evil forces of “Arfoire” — the previous game’s villain and a thinly-veiled reference to the popular Nintendo DS storage device that was often used for piracy. Essentially, doing quests now wrests back “control” of particular areas from Arfoire’s followers, allowing you to strengthen an area’s belief in the goddesses and ultimately turn things around for the world, which has seemingly gone to shit in the intervening time between the end of the first game and the start of the second. Manipulating the shares is also key to unlocking certain events.

Oh, and there’s a whole relationship system between Nepgear and her party members now, rather charmingly called “Lily Rank”. (For those who don’t get why it’s called this, the Japanese word for “lily” is “yuri”, which is a word also often used to refer to same-sex romantic and/or sexual relationships between women — rather appropriate for describing the relationships between members of an all-female party, particularly as within the first three hours Nepgear has already been kissed by one of them, ostensibly to shock her into transforming into her “goddess candidate” form for the first time since escaping captivity in the intro.) Characters with a better Lily Rank between them provide bonuses to one another in combat, and can be paired up to do various joint special abilities. Naturally, a better relationship between them also results in more scenes between them, too.

Also the music’s much better by about a thousand percent.

Also it’s just great. I like it a lot. Actually, I liked the first one a lot, despite its flaws. I can see myself really loving the second one. And the third one’s coming in March! Yay!

I’ll shut up now.