2299: The Sprawling Endgame of Dungeon Travelers 2

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I must admit, when I first started playing Dungeon Travelers 2 I was concerned that its dungeons were a bit on the small side compared to the dungeon crawler I had previously played, Demon Gaze. As the game progressed, however, it became apparent that I didn’t have anything to worry about.

And then I heard about the post-game content. And then I got into the post-game content.

Demon Gaze had a certain amount of post-game content — most notably a fairly straightforward dungeon where you re-fought all the bosses from earlier in the game, then a horrendously difficult true final boss right at the end. It took me quite a while to plough through it, mind you, though this was partly due to the fact I was also chasing the Platinum trophy, which necessitated a certain amount of grinding on the random number generator in the hope of getting some of the best item drops in the game.

Dungeon Travelers 2’s postgame is on a whole other level, though. It’s practically a whole other game’s worth of content; you finish the main story of the game around about the level 50 mark or so, and the postgame will take you to 99 (and beyond, if you level reset in the hope of “crowning” your characters through permanent stat bonuses) across a number of different dungeons.

What I find most fascinating about Dungeon Travelers 2’s postgame is how much effort has been put into it. I find myself wondering how many people will beat the final boss of the main story, watch the credits roll and then put the game down. It would be perfectly valid to do so, after all, since the game is technically “complete” then, even if you haven’t even seen half of what it has to offer. There aren’t even any specific trophies for the postgame — the only trophies you’re likely to see pop in the postgame is the enormous grind that is “kill 20,000 enemies” (you won’t even have killed 10,000 by the end of the main story, but you most certainly will have at least 20,000 under your belt by the end of the postgame) and the Platinum. In other words, the only reward you’re going to get from seeing the game through to its true end is the satisfaction of having beaten it.

But boy, is that going to feel good when it happens. The postgame dungeons are significantly more challenging than their main story counterparts, and in some cases make use of mechanics that haven’t been seen anywhere else in the game. There are dungeons where you have to contend with the relationship between several different floors, dungeons where you have to flip switches to open coloured doors in the right order, dungeons where you have to bring certain classes in order to pass through certain doors (bet you wish you’d leveled Tsurara now, huh) and dungeons that are just a single floor, but absolutely enormous.

Each of the dungeons has two or three bosses to fight as you progress through them, and a level 99 God boss at the very end who will most likely destroy you if you charge in there when you first reach them. Instead, what you’re supposed to do is explore each dungeon until you reach a trigger point (normally just before the door to the God battle) which opens up the next one. In a couple of cases, you have to increase your Quest Rank to a certain level before the next dungeon will open up, too, so hopefully you’ve been paying attention to the Quests as you go through the game!

I’m currently on the second-to-last dungeon, Gear Castle. This is a five-floor futuristic tower with a lot of puzzles. The first floor featured switches that opened blue or red doors (and closed the others), while the second was largely based around conveyor belts that you could switch the direction of with levers around the level. The third, which I’m currently on, features a mix of these two aspects, and I’m yet to see what the fourth and fifth floors offer.

Once I’m through Gear Castle I’m on the home straight: all that stands between me and final victory — aside from that 20,000 kills trophy, which I have no idea how close I am to — is the 30-floor Tower of Bogomil and whatever lies at the very top. I understand that reaching the 26th floor of Bogomil is a significant moment, as it’s at this stage your party should be levelled enough to take on the Gods, so I’m looking forward to that with a certain amount of trepidation.

All in all, the clock is going to be well over 200 hours by the time I’m finished with this beast, and I have absolutely loved it throughout. It’s seriously one of the best dungeon crawlers — if not RPGs, generally — that I’ve ever played, and more people need to play and love it.

Assuming I make it to the end by then, I’m planning a month of coverage on MoeGamer next month. There’s certainly a hell of a lot to write about.

2099: Further Travels in the Dungeons

I’ve played about twelve hours or so of Dungeon Travelers 2 so far, and despite my relative inexperience with the genre, I’m inclined to agree with those people who describe it as one of the best dungeon crawlers on the Vita. The really exciting thing about it is that I know I haven’t seen everything the game has to offer, and that it’s gradually increasing in depth and complexity as I progress.

This is a good structure: it keeps a challenging game accessible and easy to understand, and allows the player to spread their wings a bit as they become more confident with the various systems.

A case in point is the party formation and progression systems, which gradually introduce you to core concepts of the game a little bit at a time, then present you with more and more unusual cases, then open up progression a bit, then a lot, then give you more party members, and so on.

You start the game with just two characters: a Fighter (tank) and Magic User (damage dealer/healer). Shortly afterwards you’re joined by a Spieler (essentially a damage dealer, but with many skills relying on RNG), then later by a Maid (a support class that doesn’t use “TP” to power her skills) and a Scout (a high-speed damage dealer that can either be a melee or ranged combatant).

Once each of these characters hits level 15, they can move up a tier of classes, with each class splitting into two or three alternatives, then each of those splitting into another two possibilities further down the levelling track. Fighter can become either Paladin (damage-soaking tank) or Berserker (damage-dealing tank), for example; Magic User can become a Sorceress (straight damage dealer), Enchantress (buffer) or Priestess (healer). The interesting thing is that changing class in this way doesn’t prevent you from accessing the skill tree of the old class; it simply adds a new skill tree, offering you more choices to spend your skill points on with each level up. In this way, you can customise each character significantly — and, importantly, there’s the opportunity to undo things if you made a mistake, though this does involve resetting their level to one of the significant milestones (level 1, level 15 and so forth) and levelling them again.

I like this approach; it’s a little different from the Demon Gaze/Etrian Odyssey approach of allowing you to create your own party completely, because it means that you’re eased into the game’s systems with a proven, workable party lineup that you get more and more freedom to play with as the game progresses. The drip-feed of new characters into your party is entirely deliberate, too; in total, there are 16 different playable characters in the game, but rather than overwhelming you with endless possibilities from the outset, you’re introduced to these characters and their classes one at a time, giving you the opportunity to get a feel for how they work in a party situation, then by the end of the game you’ll have a complete lineup of available characters to pick and choose for your active party as you see fit. Given the apparent complexity of the game’s systems, this seems like an eminently sensible way to do things, striking a good balance between accessibility for genre newcomers and flexibility for veterans. True dungeon crawler vets will doubtless be most interested in the “endgame” dungeons, anyway, by which point any frustration they might have felt at the artificial limitations imposed on them in the early game will have been removed entirely.

So the systems are good, then — at least, they certainly appear to be from my experience thus far. What I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see alongside these solid mechanics is some decent writing, story and characterisation. Dungeon crawlers are often designed in such a way that the story just sort of happens with or without the player character(s) having an active role in the unfolding narrative, but Dungeon Travelers 2 makes a point of making each and every party member — including your protagonist — into a human being rather than a set of stats and abilities. This is achieved in a variety of ways: interactions and conversations in the story scenes between dungeon missions; one-liner comments as you explore the dungeons; and “sub-events” that are triggered by the actions you’ve taken in the dungeon and in battle. This latter aspect is particularly impressive; there are sub-events for a wide variety of different situations and events, ranging from equipping a particular item to a character getting knocked out in battle, and as well as being entertaining and amusing, they can also help you figure out things about the game systems for yourself. When Melvy the Magic User complains that her spells were being interrupted by heavy hits, for example, you then become aware that you, too, can interrupt enemy spells if you hit them hard enough — and that you need to shield Melvy from attack when she’s chanting.

The other good thing about this part of the game is that it gives a strong sense that the game world is bigger than the part of it that you see. As the name suggests, Dungeon Travelers 2 unfolds almost entirely in dungeons, with story scenes confined to menu screens and visual novel-style talking head segments. Despite the lack of an “overworld” and “towns” to explore, you get a very clear sense that the writers have thought about the game’s overall context, including off-screen characters, how society works, events that occurred prior to (and during) the game’s narrative and relationships between characters. You see all this through the eyes of just one individual, but there’s a strong feeling that you’re part of a much bigger world, even if you won’t see most of it in the game itself. This is good; it gives your actions in the game context and meaning, and helps provide some impetus to keep pushing forwards. It’s no good being told to save the realm if you don’t know anything about the realm in question, after all.

As you can tell, then, I’m having a real blast with the game so far. After my initial embarrassing death in just my third fight, the game hasn’t kicked my ass too severely, though it is pretty good at sending clear signals that Now Would Probably Be A Good Time to End This Expedition and Go Back to Town, usually by flattening one or more party members unexpectedly. It never feels cheap, though; any and all character KO’s are usually the result of overextending yourself and getting a bit ambitious, and as I recall from my tentative first steps into Demon Gaze, dungeon crawlers are all about being cautious as well as killing things and taking their stuff.

I’ve no idea how long the game is or indeed how large the dungeons get. I’m hoping this is a game that’s going to last me a while, though; I have every intention of trying to see everything it has to offer.

1881: Path to Redemption

I’m in the process of finishing up Criminal Girls: Invite Only on Vita, and I’ve been really pleasantly surprised how good it ended up being. I’m planning on writing something a bit more in-depth for MoeGamer when I’ve beaten it properly, but I thought I’d share a few thoughts on here for those who don’t visit MoeGamer, or for those who just want to hear some disjointed ramblings about it now.

It’s easy to write Criminal Girls off as an oversexualised mess of an RPG, with a gratutiously exploitative minigame in which you spank, electrocute, drip liquid on and tickle a series of young women posing in suggestive positions. And indeed, even with the “pink mist” censorship introduced in the Western release of the game (and the loss of the girls’ voices in these sequences) these sequences are pretty clearly sexual in nature: everything from the poses they’re in to the provocative outfits they wear and their reactions after you’ve, uh, finished — all point to something that while it isn’t outright explicit, is certainly rather close to the, if you’ll pardon the expression, bone.

But, as with most material of this nature, it bears further exploration, and doing so reveals something a lot more interesting. Why are these sequences there in the first place? From a gameplay perspective, you’re expected to complete them in order to unlock the girls’ new abilities through five different “tiers”, with each tier involving a slight variation on the touchscreen-based minigame. From a narrative perspective, you’re “motivating” these girls — who are dead and in Hell, but being given a second chance — to try harder in their struggle for redemption, though in the original Japanese script, still audible through the Japanese-only voice acting, the wording was おしおき (oshioki: punishment) rather than “motivation”. If we’re being super-picky, we’re not actually spanking, electrocuting, dribbling on and tickling the girls themselves; in the minigame you’re removing “temptations” from their bodies via various means, and the removal of these “temptations” allows them to take a step closer to being free of sin and becoming “Blameless”.

Interestingly, the girls’ reactions to this treatment changes significantly throughout the course of the game. Early on, they react with fear and anger when you approach them with the intention of indulging in some “motivation time” and clench their teeth in pain afterwards; by the end of the game, however, they’re starting to sound like they’re actually enjoying themselves, even going so far as to praise you in some instances.

This can be interpreted in a number of different ways, not all of them positive, but given the themes of the game’s narrative as a whole, it’s pretty apparent that this is symbolic of the growing level of trust between these “delinquents” and the player-protagonist self-insert character. By the end of the game, they trust the player-protagonist completely, and are aware that the removal of their temptations brings them closer to redemption, in turn making them more powerful and more likely to succeed. A turning point in the story comes with all of the main cast confronting the sins that landed them in Hell in the first place, and it’s only through the bonds of trust they’ve built between one another and with the player-protagonist that they’re able to make it through this experience unscathed.

I’m yet to see how the story reaches its several conclusions, but I’m very interested to find out. It has been, for sure, one of the most unusual role-playing games I’ve played for a long time, both in gameplay and narrative terms, and one that I feel I’ll be remembering for quite some time after it’s left my Vita.

And no, not just for the kinky pictures.

1859: Invite Only

Been playing a bit more Criminal Girls this week, and I’m enjoying it a lot, despite its flaws. (Said flaws, if you were wondering, include somewhat repetitive dungeon design, an encounter rate that is a little too high to be comfortable, battles that take a little too long/move too slowly/both and the strong necessity for grinding that will be required to unlock all the girls’ abilities.)

The absolute best thing about it is its atmosphere. Although the in-game visuals are PSP-level pixel art (sharply contrasting with the high-resolution character portraits, battle graphics and other visuals), they’re evocative and distinctive, and the individual sprites have a lot of character about them, particularly in idle animations. When combined with the music and background sound, the game has a wonderfully palpable sense of menace about it — entirely appropriate for a game set in the depths of Hell.

In fact, the atmosphere and presentation bring to mind another game: Corpse Party. Criminal Girls is a (relatively) traditional RPG compared to Corpse Party’s visual-novel-that-looks-like-an-RPG nature, of course, but in terms of atmosphere the two are quite similar. There’s a sense that something unpleasant could happen at any moment, and a lovely juxtaposition between the often light-hearted banter between characters and the unpleasant things that are going on around them.

The characters keep things interesting, too. At the beginning of the game, you don’t know anything about them, aside from their personalities. Initially, there’s Kisaragi, who is seemingly full of rage and obsessed with materialism; there’s the shy, childish Alice, who is one of the most adorable characters I’ve ever had in my party in any game ever; there’s the determined, tomboyish Sako; and there’s the obviously older, man-hating Ran. As the game progresses, additional girls join the group, and they each have their own distinct personalities — and, presumably, dark pasts — to discover.

The setup is immediately intriguing. Why are these girls in Hell? Why are they getting a chance to redeem themselves? Why have you been brought in to lead and “motivate” them? What do you get out of the whole situation? (Aside from being able to perv at the girls in a variety of costumes while you spank, electrocute and do various other S&M-ish things to the “temptations” that infest their bodies, of course, which is probably reward enough in itself for many people.)

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions yet, but I’m enjoying the process of discovery. And this is one thing Criminal Girls does well. The dungeons may be somewhat blandly designed, but it’s satisfying and fun to explore them and find their hidden treasures. Discovering how new skills work after a successful “motivation” session is enjoyable and interesting — particularly with the game’s idiosyncratic battle system, in which you simply take suggestions from the girls rather than micromanaging them. And discovering more about what is shaping up to be a very interesting cast of characters is providing plenty of incentive for me to want to push onwards and find out the truth.

I’m enjoying it a lot, then. It’s keeping me entertained enough that I now have copies of both Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth2 and Hyperdevotion Noire — both highly, highly anticipated games for me — and haven’t yet popped them in my Vita for even a quick look yet. And I fully intend to see it through to the end before I indulge myself in more Neptunia than I know what to do with!

1855: Redemption

Having Platinumed Akiba’s Trip — and a lot of fun it was, too, thanks very much — I started on my next non-Final Fantasy XIV game, Criminal Girls.

Criminal Girls drew some attention when it was first announced due to some seriously lewd scenes in which the player character “motivates” the titular girls through some touchscreen-based S&M play. It then drew some further attention when it was revealed that the localisation would seemingly obscure these scenes with pink fog and cut out the somewhat… suggestive voice acting. (As it happens, the voice acting is indeed gone, but as you progress the pink fog does fade away, revealing what’s underneath.)

As so often tends to be the case with games that draw attention for their pervier elements, however, Criminal Girls has plenty of interesting stuff going on that doesn’t involve spanking. It’s a 2D, retro-style RPG of the 16/32-bit mould, and thus far — I’m only an hour or two in so far — it seems to be most intriguing.

At the game’s outset, you, as the participant narrator-protagonist, find yourself newly employed by the forces of Hell and presented with a selection of young female “delinquents” who have the opportunity to be redeemed and resurrected if they can successfully pass the “four trials” and climb the tower in which they’re incarcerated. It’s your job to escort them on this journey and see where things go from there. Along the way, you’ll fight monsters, solve puzzles and, as previously mentioned, indulge in a bit of naughtiness in the name of “motivation”.

So far so Japanese. Thus far it’s an intriguing setup, with the four initial girls not immediately revealing why they have been incarcerated or what their “delinquency” involved. There’s also a suggestion early on that things are not quite going as expected in Hell, with the “convict” monsters showing up in places where they’re not supposed to. Doubtless all will be revealed — in narrative terms, pervert — as the story progresses, and I’m interested to see how it goes.

What’s probably the most interesting thing about Criminal Girls is its combat system. While nothing particularly fancy presentation-wise — in fact, it’s one of the most visually bland combat systems I’ve seen, although the chibi representations of the girls are cute — the execution is the intriguing thing here. Unlike most RPGs, where you have the opportunity to micromanage what every party member is doing, in Criminal Girls you only have four options each turn, and that determines what the whole party will be doing. The available options are determined by which abilities the girls have learned through “motivation” sessions, and simply what they feel like doing on any given turn. Initially, the girls will simply refuse to do anything, but as they’re motivated they’ll unlock more and more abilities, and each turn it’s simply a case of deciding which of the four suggestions the girls offer you is the most appropriate: do you go for an all-out attack with multiple members, or do you allow an individual to do something a little more special? So far it’s simple, but I anticipate it becoming a very interesting system as the game progresses and more abilities open up.

I can’t say a lot more about it yet as I’ve only played the opening section. I’m looking forward to discovering more about it, though; perviness aside (which I have absolutely no problem with, as you know) it’s shaping up to be one of the more unconventional takes on the RPG genre I’ve played for quite some time.

1546: Gaze This Way

Been playing an unusual Vita game for review recently. Normally I wouldn’t blog about games that I’m reviewing, but I already wrote a “first impressions” piece about the game over on USgamer a while back, so, well, these are some second impressions, I guess.

The game in question is Demon Gaze from Kadokawa Games, brought to the West by the ever-reliable NIS America. I didn’t know a lot about this game prior to starting to play it save for the fact that it had upset a few people — as many Japanese games tend to — by featuring a selection of pretty anime-style girls with artwork that is occasionally on the suggestive side.

What I wasn’t expecting from it was an old-school dungeon-crawler of the Wizardry mould, right down to creating your own party bit by bit as you can afford to, We’re talking manually choosing race, class and appearance for your characters, then heading out into a grid-based dungeon to fight lots of monsters, solve some rudimentary puzzles and ultimately complete some quests.

What I also wasn’t expecting was a rock-hard level of difficulty almost from the outset. Unlike in some other Japanese role-playing games, a level 1 character in Demon Gaze really is utter shit. Their stats are poor, their HP is low and it’s very rare for them to have any useful abilities from their class. This makes life interesting when you can finally afford to recruit an additional party member and they have to start from this position of non-power while the rest of your adventuring brigade are happily chopping the heads off monsters left, right and centre. You have to take care of the newbie until they find their feet a bit, and then only let them step into the front lines when you’re absolutely sure they can handle it.

Because this isn’t a game that is afraid to kill you and dump you back at the title screen without any ceremony. Step into a fight you can’t win and fail to get away quickly enough and there’s no “retry” option, no fade-to-black-then-wake-up-back-at-the-inn, it’s just Game Over. Reload. I hope you remembered to save every time you get back from an adventure because the game sure as hell isn’t going to auto-save for you.

The other thing that is a bit of a culture shock is that the game doesn’t hold your hand with regard to quests at all. “Go find this dude,” the game will say. “Where are they?” you’ll ponder. “Oh, you know,” replies the game. “Out there. Somewhere. Come back when you find him.” Cue plenty of enjoyable exploration and risk-taking as you search every nook and cranny to complete your objectives. Can the party survive trudging through that poisonous swamp? Only one way to find ou– oh, they’re all dead.

In some senses, this old-school difficulty and unforgiving nature is going to put a lot of people off. But that’s fine; titles like Dark Souls have proven there’s a market for unforgiving games in which you have to take a bit more care than in many other modern titles, and Demon Gaze is seemingly designed along these lines. (That’s not the only similarity, either; both Demon Gaze and the Souls series allow you to leave messages for other players that are then shared on the network, though the former lacks the latter’s ability for true multiplayer.)

I’m a relatively short way into the game so far, but I’m really enjoying it. It’s the sort of thing that feels like it could be a “long-term project” of a game; it’s fairly light on the story side of things (though it does have some seriously adorable characters who often greet you and have their own silly little side-plots when you get back from an adventure) and surprisingly friendly to quick play sessions, making it an ideal handheld game for a bit of grinding on the bus or over lunch.

Full review coming towards the end of the month; for now, suffice to say, I like it a lot.

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.

1092: Modest-Breasted Heroine

The title of this post is taken from a trophy I attained in Hyperdimension Neptunia today celebrating my acquisition of the character “Nisa”, an embodiment of the game’s Western publisher NIS America. (“Nisa”, geddit?) Nisa wears a Bayonetta-style super-revealing leather catsuit unzipped to beneath her bellybutton, but is constantly ridiculed for having small breasts. She doesn’t seem to mind too much, to be fair, even when surrounded by the heaving bosoms of squeaky-voiced Compa and Neptune in her, I quote, “magical boob girl” form.

Hyperdimension Neptunia revels in the sort of innuendo and playful, childish humour prevalent in a lot of anime, particularly of the moe variety. In many ways, it’s quite refreshing to play a game that doesn’t really hold back on the boob-related humour, but it’s also easy to see how some might take issue with the game and its all-female cast’s shenanigans. Having played it for more hours than I’d care to count (the game doesn’t include the usual timer seen in most other RPGs) I can say with a fair degree of confidence that the game certainly doesn’t mean any harm by all this — it’s being bawdy and lewd for the sake of getting a few cheap giggles out of the player (regardless of gender) rather than explicitly “sexy”, a few fanservicey “event” pictures and costumes aside.

More importantly, though, said bawdy humour is but a small part of the game as a whole. After a while it just becomes the way things are in that world; part of the aesthetic. The characters all do plenty more than comment on the size of each others’ jumblies; they’re all actually rather well-realised, if a little reliant on rather conventional anime tropes. (I swear this game has more tsunderes per square foot than anything else I’ve ever played… b-but it’s not like I’m complaining or anything!) That said, the game often lampshades said anime tropes with the characters calling each other on when they’re falling into particular stereotypes, and there are several who have occasional surprises up their sleeves.

IF/Iffy/I-chan is a case in point. Initially appearing to be your stereotypical sour-faced textbook tsundere, Iffy quickly reveals herself to be quite an interesting character on the whole, particularly if you pursue the story arcs of the two DLC characters 5pb and Red. In the case of 5pb, we see Iffy acting as a confidante and counsellor to the chronically-shy idol, who is immensely insecure in herself when not hosting her radio show or performing her songs for fans. In the case of Red, we see Iffy humouring a childish girl’s fantasies and showing a softer side to her sometimes gruff-seeming exterior. It would be easy for Iffy to tell Red and her “Wifey number 1!” babblings to take a hike, but instead she plays along, even going so far as to award her “charisma points” any time she does something good.

The “goddess” characters are something of an enigma at this point in the story, but it’s quite amusing that the grumpiest of all the tsunderes in the whole game is the one supposed to be representing the Nintendo Wii, the happiest and most sunshiney of all consoles. The land of “Lowee” is a fantasy kingdom filled with houses that look like cakes, rainbows, mushrooms and bizarre, surreal happenings, but its ruler is a sour-faced, foul-mouthed young girl who would much rather lock herself in her room and read a book rather than have to deal with any of the events that are transpiring in the world. The PlayStation-themed goddess, meanwhile, is rather Gothic Lolita in her stylings (and very tsundere when in her “CPU” form) while the Xbox goddess is a sleepyhead blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl (anime shorthand for “foreigner”) who is addicted to online games.

It’s been a pleasure to discover the various layers this game has as I’ve progressed through it. The dungeon crawling is still very straightforward and unlikely to change significantly for the rest of the game, but the moves the characters are unlocking are becoming increasingly ridiculous, the time-attack dungeons are fun to challenge and the growing party means that I can start to take advantage of interesting mechanics such as the ability to switch party members in mid-combo.

The pacing is such that you never spend too long battling through endless random combats, either; each dungeon is short (if you know what you’re doing and skip the excess of the attack animations you can clear each one in 3-5 minutes tops) and you’re often rewarded for making progress with additional entertaining scenes between the girls. And as the game’s narrative has continued, these characters have started to show that they have been crafted with what seems like genuine affection from their creators. There’s a good sense of them being friends with one another, though the various “optional” characters don’t put in nearly enough appearances in the story scenes. I guess that’s understandable, though. The “core” of the game is the way the three contrasting characters of Nep-Nep, Compa and IF behave around one another; the others are relatively incidental characters whom you just happen to be able to take into batle.

I’m a little under 50% done with the game according to the menus, and I have no intention of stopping until I’ve finished it. Whether I tackle any of the free DLC dungeons (many of which have obscenely high “recommended levels”) remains to be seen, but I certainly intend to see as much of the core game as possible. And then move on to the sequel.

So yes. I laugh in the face of Hyperdimension Neptunia’s sub-50 Metacritic score. I’m having a blast, and you can’t stop me! MWAHAHAHA!

1084: Darkdeath Evilman

So, I seem to have jumped down something of a rabbit-hole with regard to my current gaming. Specifically, I seem to have jumped down the NIS America rabbit-hole, which means lots of brightly-colored anime-style JRPGs with heavy degrees of ridiculousness. Hyperdimension Neptunia, which I discussed yesterday (and which I’m aware is developed by Idea Factory rather than Nippon Ichi themselves), is a fine example of said ridiculousness being taken to the extreme with its personifications of gaming platforms and companies as cute anime girls with a habit of flashing their panties.

I decided to start something on portable in parallel, though, so I had something to play on the toilet/in bed/in coffee shops. I wanted to pick something that was portable-friendly — i.e. something you could dip into in short sessions rather than feeling like you need to spend hours at a time playing, but which would last a good long while in total. The game I picked for this purpose was the rather gloriously-titled Z.H.P. Unlosing Ranger vs. Darkdeath Evilman for the PSP/Vita, a game from the Disgaea team and one which wears its influences on its sleeve.

Z.H.P. (as it shall be known from hereon) is an isometric-perspective tactical roguelike RPG that plays somewhat like Disgaea (which is normally a strategy game somewhat akin to Final Fantasy Tactics, if you’re unfamiliar) would play if you only controlled one character and could only move them one space at a time per turn. It follows the traditional style of roguelike gameplay, in other words — you move, the enemies move, but between moves you can stand still and contemplate what to do next without fear of getting twatted while you come to your decision. As per usual for the genre, you find yourself exploring a series of increasingly-difficult, increasingly-complex randomly-generated dungeons in an attempt to become as strong as possible and eventually take down the titular bad guy Darkdeath Evilman.

There’s a bit of a twist on the usual formula, though. Rather than featuring a permadeath system that forces you to start over when you bite the big one in a dungeon, Z.H.P. instead features a rather odd levelling system whereby each time you enter a dungeon, you start at level 1, but your total levels gained over your lifetime playing the game determines your base statistics. If you die, you lose all the loot you acquired on that particular dungeon run, but any levels you gained are added on to your total level count, boosting your base statistics by a little and meaning that the next time you start a dungeon run, you’ll be slightly stronger even though you’re still technically level 1. If that makes your head hurt, don’t worry — it starts to make sense after playing for only a short period.

The eventual aim of the game is to work your way through the story and make the nameless, voiceless protagonist (who, rather endearingly, is canonically named simply Main Character) into the hero he was supposed to replace — the Unlosing Ranger, the only one who can defeat Darkdeath Evilman. Every so often in the story, you’ll find yourself returning to Earth from the Bizarro Earth in which you’ve been doing all your dungeon-crawling, and thrust into a traditional JRPG-style battle against Darkdeath Evilman, who is your stereotypical “final boss” sort of character. As the game progresses, these battle sequences become increasingly elaborate — they start with a first-person 8-bit sequence somewhat reminiscent of the end of the original Phantasy Star and gradually progress to… well, I’m not sure yet as I haven’t got that far.

There are some fun additions to the basic roguelike formula, and it’s here that the Disgaea influences are apparent. You can pick up enemies and fling them around, for example, though disappointingly you can’t simply lob them off the edge of a precarious platform into the lava below. You can also throw items from your inventory, many of which have special effects. It also provides a use for items that have degraded to a durability level of 0%, meaning that the bonuses they normally provide are completely ineffective until repaired. If you don’t want to spend your limited funds on repair bills, simply throw them at the enemies.

Then there’s the guest appearances from the Prinnies, the weird explosive penguin-like things from Disgaea. Early in the game, you inexplicably find yourself married to one and gain the once-per-expedition special ability to summon your “wife” and have her bring you a lunchbox to restore your endurance points.

I could go on, but I would like to play the game a bit more before I talk about it too much. Early impressions are very positive, though, and if it’s anything like Disgaea this will be a game designed to keep one occupied for a frighteningly long time. If you’re looking for something endearingly bizarre but which backs up that bizarreness with solid gameplay and good presentation, you could do far worse than check out Z.H.P. — it works on Vita, too, so you can just download it from the PSN store rather than attempting to track down a physical copy.

See you in the dungeon, dood!