50 hours deep in Megadimension Neptunia VII and I’m just starting the third and final “episode”, Heart Dimension Neptunia H. So far I haven’t set foot in the titular Heart Dimension, but the plot has been set up; in the meantime I’ve been doing a little bit of questing and grinding with the CPU Candidates, who are the focus of the initial part of the H arc.

The game continues to be the most enjoyable Neptunia game yet. Everything about it is honed and refined to round off the scrappy edges of the previous installments; while the Re;Birth remakes provided small, incremental improvements on the format set in place by Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, MegaNep is, as I’ve previously noted, a complete overhaul of pretty much every system in the game, from the battle mechanics to the way “shares” work.

Perhaps one of the best changes is how unique each character now feels to play in battle. Rather than all essentially working in the same way outside of the SP-powered special skills and super-powerful EXE Drive attacks, now each character very much has their own distinctive feel and circumstances in which they are useful. This is achieved in several ways, largely to do with the weapons and combo attacks they are able to use.

Each weapon in MegaNep not only has the usual stats, but it also has a specific arrangement of combo slots, split into three categories: Rush, Power and Standard. (Break attacks have gone the way of the Guard Points bar that they were used to damage; I can’t say I miss the system, since it became largely irrelevant after a certain power level in the old games.) As in previous games, Rush attacks focus on a high hit count, with less power per individual hit, and also have a more significant impact on the EXE Drive meter, which now, incidentally, resets between every battle rather than carrying over as in the previous games. Power attacks, meanwhile, have fewer hits, hit harder and in many cases carry an elemental affinity, allowing you to exploit weaknesses. And Standard attacks are somewhere in between the two.

Where things get interesting is in trying to arrange these combos optimally. Characters learn new combo moves as they level up, but each can only be put in a single slot. Moreover, the first attack a weapon performs is fixed and not tied to the character’s unlocked skills; this comes into play when considering the individual combo moves’ Combo Traits, which, if fulfilled when you use them in battle, means that the combo move that triggered it will 1) be guaranteed to hit and 2) be guaranteed to crit with every hit, increasing overall damage considerably. Combo Traits vary from “All previous attacks did not use a Combo Trait” to “Haven’t used Power attacks” and numerous others besides. The challenge when customising a character is to give them as many workable combos with Traits as possible, enabling them to respond to different situations in an optimal manner. It seems to be impossible to build the “perfect” combo — every move triggering a Combo Trait — at my current level, but I wonder if it will be an option with later weapons and/or combo moves.

Anyway. Given that each character has their own set of combo skills and their own set of weapons (each of which has its own arrangement of combo slots as well as its own area of effect) there’s a considerable degree of flexibility in how you set up your party, particularly with the sheer number of playable characters on offer in the game. And you’ll want to rotate them around, too; back-line characters no longer gain experience points (with a couple of exceptions) and there are certain circumstances where you’re obliged to use one or more specific characters in a fight, so they better be suitably set up when that time comes! The series’ Lily Rank system is back, too, only this time Lily Ranks are gained by characters fighting together in the front row, making them somewhat easier to gain — at least it feels that way so far — and in order to max these out you’ll need to tweak your party arrangement every so often, particularly if you’re Trophy hunting.

Elsewhere in the combat, while there are a lot of disposable popcorn enemies — particularly on the world map, where after a certain point random battles become more of an inconvenience than an actual hazard in getting to your destination — the highlights of the game are the boss fights. The game knows this, too, presenting you with unique interface elements, including one thing that I oddly like very much and can’t quite explain why: the boss HP meter with multiple bars. Yes, rather than depleting one bar very slowly while battering down a boss-level enemy, MegaNep takes a Final Fantasy XII-esque approach of having a number of “lights” beneath the main HP bar for a boss, with a light dimming each time you empty the bar. Dim all the lights and you’ve won. It’s essentially a variation on the system that was used in titles like Shining Force and Senran Kagura, where different coloured HP bars represented how many “extra” bars a character or enemy had over the maximum possible to display on screen proportionally.

Outside of my rather specific, peculiar tastes in HP meters, though, back to the boss fights themselves: a lot of them are pretty good, and this is largely thanks to a couple of new mechanics introduced in MegaNep. One is the “Parts Break” system, whereby certain enemies have breakable sections with their own durability counts. In order to damage the part, your character needs to be standing in an appropriate place when they either unleash their combo or a special move. Break the part and you get extra XP, credits and a chance at some extra drops. In many cases, breaking the part also has an effect on the boss, either reducing an aspect of its defences or removing the capability for a particular attack. In one particularly memorable confrontation, a boss is completely immune to all damage except Parts damage until you break the cape on his back — to make matters more challenging, the cape can only be damaged by attacks with an elemental affinity. The fight quickly turns into an entertaining dance as you decide whether to try and break his gauntlets and the horn on his head to cripple his special attacks, or whether to focus on trying to get behind him to destroy his cape and be able to deal some real damage.

The new EXE Drive system works well, too; rather than encouraging you to get into a bunch of random fights in a dungeon just to charge it up before a boss fight, the fact it 1) resets at the start of combat and 2) fills much more quickly than in past games means that you’re much more likely to be using the spectacular, entertaining EXE Drive moves, which is good, because there are a lot more of them, including several multi-character ones that necessitate surrounding an enemy in appropriate formations. Transforming the CPUs and their sisters into their HDD (and, later, their Next Form) incarnations also costs a bar of EXE Drive rather than SP, meaning you can pretty much guarantee the ability to transform in every fight if you need it — to discourage spamming this, however, transforming now costs Shares, though getting KO’d costs significantly more Shares, so you’ll want to weigh up the pros and cons before doing anything rash. Shares work like their original intention in the first Hyperdimension Neptunia game: the more shares one of the nations has, the stronger their CPU (and her sister) is. They’re no longer a zero-sum game, however; increasing one nation’s shares no longer means taking them from someone else; it’s possible to have all four nations with maxed-out share bars, all enjoying the benefits of being Top Nep.

Anyway. I’ve waffled on for over 1,300 words on the systems in this game and not even mentioned the story and characters, which are still my favourite bit of the series. I’ll save that for another day, though, perhaps when I’ve finished my first playthrough: there’s a lot to talk about, with this being by far the most interesting Neptunia game story-wise as well as in terms of mechanics.

It’s pretty good, in other words. Very good, in fact. Buy it. Support it. I want to see more Neps. (At this point, I don’t think we have a lot to worry about there.)