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!