2026: Hollow Fragment

The next “big game” of the moment for me is Sword Art Online: Re: Hollow Fragment, a PlayStation 4 rerelease of an earlier Vita game, which itself was an expanded version of an even earlier PSP game. The Vita version had a notoriously dreadful translation, but I’m pleased to report that the PlayStation 4 version is at least readable — though the conversation system is still bafflingly nonsensical at first.

Sword Art Online, for those not into the animes, was a popular show a couple of years back. It was one of those “mainstream” shows that became really popular and which everyone subsequently decided they hated for one reason or another. I never quite understood the hate; sure, it was cheesy as fuck in places, but it was an enjoyable, beautifully presented show with an amazing soundtrack and a concept I’ve always loved ever since I played .hack for the first time: the MMO that is trying to kill you.

The Sword Art Online anime concerns Kirito, a protagonist who is a blatant self-insert for the writer, but I won’t hold that against anyone, since self-inserts can be a wonderful means of escapism. Kirito becomes trapped in the new virtual reality MMO Sword Art Online after the game launches out of beta and the “logout” button is removed by its designer, capturing all 10,000 launch day players in the virtual world. To make matters worse, said designer — the villain of the piece — informs the players of a little tweak to the rules of the game: if they are forcibly removed from their VR equipment, or if they run out of HP and “die” in the game, then their VR equipment will fry their brain with microwaves, killing them instantly.

There’s a get-out clause, though; if the game is cleared by someone defeating the final boss on the 100th “floor”, everyone who survived will be allowed to escape. After two years of the game, it becomes apparent that this goal is still a long way off, and player numbers are dwindling as more and more people either fall victim to carelessness or despair along the way. Ultimately, the first arc of the anime concludes with Kirito and his friends defeating Sword Art Online’s designer and freeing themselves from the virtual world of Aincrad, only to find themselves in numerous subsequent adventures in other virtual worlds. You’d think they’d learn.

Hollow Fragment, meanwhile, takes place in a reality where Kirito’s defeat of Heathcliff at the end of the first arc was not the end of Sword Art Online, and the players find themselves still trapped within the game. Moreover, they discover that once they pass the 75th floor — the floor where Kirito defeated Heathcliff — they are unable to return to the lower floors, and many of their skills and items become “corrupted”, mere shadows of their former selves. The game, then, continues; it looks as if the only way to escape really will be to defeat the boss on the 100th floor.

Except that’s not all, because clearing out 25 floors of dungeon would be far too easy a task. In the opening of the game, Kirito finds himself transported to the “Hollow Area”, an unexplored part of the Sword Art Online world where strange things happen and rare, high-level monsters and items abound. Acting as a sort of “testing area”, the Hollow Area allows Kirito to uncover a number of mysteries surrounding the virtual world of Aincrad as well as beef up his own character’s power significantly through various research trees. The flow of the game then becomes a journey back and forth between three distinct components, then: Aincrad, the Hollow Area, and what I like to refer to as Waifutown.

Aincrad is pretty straightforward. Upon arriving on a new floor, you’re shown a big tower off in the distance and informed the boss is waiting for you at the top of it. Between you and said tower are several overworld areas populated by enemies, so you’ll need to fight your way up to the boss room in order to challenge it. Along the way you’ll also need to gather intelligence on the boss by completing quests and defeating specific named monsters (NMs) as well as helping your fellow “players” to level up enough to take on the challenges ahead. Each “floor” is pretty linear in its design, though the dungeon at the end of it is more maze-like and unfolds across several levels, and you’ll be doing a fair amount of backtracking to complete quests.

The Hollow Area works a little differently. Rather than a linear sequence of areas leading to a dungeon maze, the Hollow Area is an interconnected network of zones more akin to a regular RPG or even MMO map. The Hollow Area is split into several different regions, each of which you’ll need to build up points in by completing “Hollow Missions” that appear and disappear in real-time as you play. While completing Hollow Missions, you can take on research tasks, which give you specific objectives to complete; once these are completed, you can then implement the research into Kirito’s character to improve it. You have to content with bosses here, too, though in the Hollow Area they guard region transitions rather than separate floors.

Waifutown, meanwhile, is what you do when you’re not adventuring. The town on the 76th floor that acts as your adventuring home base is home to most of the characters who got their own episode in the original Sword Art Online anime arc, along with a couple from the later arcs (Leafa and Sinon) who have been shoehorned in for the sake of having a few more waifus to pursue. In town, you can shop, upgrade weapons and hang out with your fellow adventurers. This latter aspect is important; by hanging out with your prospective adventuring partners, you can increase your relationship with them (up to and including sleeping with them) which subsequently helps them perform better in battle. By building up your relationship as well as “training” their AI by praising it when it does well, you can tailor each of the companion characters to your own liking. Or you can pick a waifu and spend the whole game with them if you so desire.

Sword Art Online is an enormous and surprisingly complex game. There are a lot of different systems at play — it’s going all-out with the “simulated MMO” aspect in this regard — and, while it’s daunting to begin with, the many different ways in which it’s possible to progress in the game make it feel like you’re always achieving something, and that there’s always a choice of things to do at any given moment. While its graphics look like butt outside of the beautiful 2D artwork — its PSP roots are very apparent — it really doesn’t matter all that much; it plays satisfyingly well, feeling quite like a high-speed Phantasy Star Online at times, and there’s a wonderful, constant sense of discovery and exploration as you work your way around this strange and wonderful virtual world. (And yes, I’ll probably make a video about this at some point so you can actually see how it plays.)

Also you can bed Lisbeth. 10/10

2005: Dan’s List of Vita RPGs

This is one of those posts I write specifically to respond to something someone asked me recently where Twitter or chat messages aren’t a particularly ideal solution to give an answer. In most cases, though, people other than the original person who asked can also get something out of my response, so I post it here.

In this case, my good friend Dan Lipscombe enquired as to whether I could give him any Vita RPG recommendations.

Well, of course I can!

Here goes, then. Some Vita RPGs that are either well-regarded or that I have personally enjoyed. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means!

Persona 4 Golden

This is the one everyone recommends, and with good reason; it’s great. Even if you played the original Persona 4 on PlayStation 2, Golden is worth playing due to its amount of additional content and tweaked gameplay.

If you’re unfamiliar with Persona 4, it’s a combination of murder mystery, school life simulator, dungeon crawler and Pokemon. Taking on the role of a transfer student to a school out in the sticks of Japan, you start investigating a spate of strange murders that sees people disappearing then showing up a few days later hung upside down from television aerials. It’s up to you and your school friends to discover the truth behind what is going on, which is far stranger than you might expect.

Persona 4 Golden is an excellent game that has transcended its originally niche appeal to become a truly mainstream title that most people have heard of by now. It’s well worth playing through to completion — though be warned, it is long. Like, 80+ hours long, even if you don’t do much of the optional side content. It’s a journey well worth taking, though, and the lengthy slog makes the characters’ personal journeys all that more meaningful.

Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth

There are three Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth games on Vita. There’s no real requirement to play them in order, since they’re self-contained stories that don’t really have anything to do with each other, but playing them in order will give you a better understanding of the characters — plus an appreciation for how the series has continually grown, developed and changed for the better over time.

Neptunia’s concept is based on anthropomorphised game consoles going about their business in the land of Gamindustri. The three games’ stories veer off in different directions, but there are usually strong anti-piracy messages involved, along with commentary on not forgetting the past, the futility of fanboyism and general satire of both games industry and anime culture.

The Neptunia games are occasionally clunky, sometimes balanced questionably and not the most technically impressive games you will ever see — but my God, are they ever charming and delightful, not to mention rare examples of comedy and satire in games actually working well.

Hyperdevotion Noire

A spinoff of the main Neptunia series, Hyperdevotion Noire focuses on PlayStation personification Noire and gives the tsundere princess her own personal story. Unlike the regular Neptunia series, Noire is a strategy RPG a la Fire Emblem and Final Fantasy Tactics. A wide cast of characters, each of whom personify a well-known Japanese game series (such as Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and Resident Evil) all have unique abilities, strengths and weaknesses, and “gimmicks” in each stage force you to think a lot more strategically than “charge at the enemy and cut them down in order”.

I’m not normally very good at strategy RPGs, but Noire is accessible, fun and enjoyable — plus it continues the series tradition of good humour, charm and satire, and Noire is absolutely a strong enough character to carry her own game.

Demon Gaze

If you liked old-school dungeon-crawlers on PC — I’m talking stuff like Wizardry, Lands of Lore and Might & Magic — then you might want to give Demon Gaze a shot. Creating your own custom party of adventurers, you venture forth into an array of dungeons to battle terrible demons, capture them and make use of their power.

In between your adventures, there’s a delightful little soap opera going on in the inn that you and your party call your home, with a cast of colourful characters getting up to all manner of mischief. It’s a lovely blend of the narrative-centric approach that more conventional Japanese RPGs tend to take, and the mechanics-centric, challenge-heavy nature of first-person “gridder” dungeon crawlers. It also has absolutely gorgeous artwork, and an unconventional but enormously catchy soundtrack that makes use of Vocaloid voice synthesisers.

Operation Abyss

I haven’t actually played this one yet, but it’s on my shelf; given that it’s from the same folks who made Demon Gaze, though, it’s a fair bet that it will be similarly good, and the people I know who have played it have enjoyed it a whole lot.

Trails in the Sky

Technically a PSP game, this is downloadable and playable on Vita, and well worth your time. Following the adventures of Estelle and her adoptive brother Joshua as they attempt to become full-fledged “Bracers” — essentially state-supported mercenaries — Trails in the Sky is a sprawling adventure with a beautifully crafted world, some wonderful writing and a fun battle system.

The game blends the sidequest-centric nature of Western RPGs with the more linear storytelling typically found in Japanese RPGs to great effect. The sidequests each have their own little stories and characters to explore, and really help the world to feel truly alive.

Criminal Girls

This one won’t be for everyone due to its relatively explicit sexuality, particularly exploration of sadomasochistic themes. If you can deal with that sort of content, though — along with the fact it’s very obviously a PSP port — Criminal Girls tells a fascinating tale of personal redemption for a colourful cast of characters as they come to terms with traumatic experiences from their past and attempt to move beyond them.

Criminal Girls is noteworthy for its exploration of “trust” through both its narrative and its mechanics — I wrote in more detail on this topic here.

Akiba’s Trip

Not an RPG in the typical sense, Akiba’s Trip is most akin to Sega’s Yakuza series in that it provides an open world that covers a relatively small geographical area — in this case, Tokyo’s Akihabara district — and a ton of things to do, plus a nigh-unparalleled sense of atmosphere thanks to its detailed world.

Thrown into the underworld by your discovery of — and recruitment into — the ranks of the “Synthisters” (essentially synthetic vampires), it’s your job to find out where this scourge has come from and put a stop to it — while simultaneously keeping your little sister happy, taking photos for tourists and attempting to end up in the arms of one of the game’s lovely leading ladies.

Akiba’s Trip has fun brawler-style combat with a huge selection of upgradeable weapons ranging from baseball bats to bus stop signs and computer monitors. Combat involves smacking Synthisters around a bit until they’re in a position where you can grab their clothes and rip them off them, which exposes them to sunlight and, in true vampire tradition, causes them to combust.

Steins;Gate

This isn’t an RPG at all, but if you own a Vita (or PS3… or PC) and haven’t read this extraordinary visual novel, you need to right now. Blending real-world urban myths (such as the legend of John Titor and questions of what CERN are really up to with that big underground particle accelerator) with a creative yet plausible interpretation of how time travel and parallel worlds might work, Steins;Gate follow the adventures of an impressively unreliable narrator as he tries his best to stop something horrible happening to someone he cares about.

Here’s a full review of it.

There are tons more great RPGs and visual novels available on Vita, but I’ve rambled on for over 1,200 words now, so that should be enough to get you started. Hope you enjoy at least some of these!

1990: Idols’ Journey

Having finished the main story of Heavensward, I returned to Omega Quintet this evening in the hopes that I would be able to polish off the “true ending”. I succeeded, though this isn’t the end of my time with the game just yet: there’s the optional “training facility” dungeon, which features some of the toughest monsters in the game, and there’s a bunch of sidequests that open up even after the “final” boss. I’m undecided as to whether or not I’m going to pursue the Platinum trophy, as a few of the trophies are a bit grindy, but I probably will end up going for it.

As for the true ending — oh, spoilers ahead, by the way — it was a satisfying conclusion.

For context, the “normal” ending was surprisingly downbeat, even bleak, leaving the story with a somewhat bittersweet ending that didn’t really leave any of the characters in a situation that could really be called “happily ever after”. Aria was revealed to have become a Blare when she was attacked prior to the events of the game, with the Blare in question effectively devouring her emotions and turning her into the seemingly morose individual she is depicted as throughout the main narrative. Said Blare is revealed to be the cat-like creature that had been following her around for the whole game, and this obnoxious little creature “awakens” Aria to her true Blare self.

This sets up the final confrontation of the normal ending, where the depleted ranks of the Verse Maidens, now a quartet rather than the quintet they had been for the majority of the game, have to strike down their former friend, who is, it becomes clear, utterly beyond help. But even after she’s defeated, the people of the city no longer trust the Verse Maidens thanks to Aria having tricked them for so long, and as such they’re doomed to a life of unappreciated toil, fighting back the Blare for a populace that hates them.

The true ending takes this as a starting point but makes a few changes. When the time comes to fight Aria, she doesn’t completely lose herself and transform into the “Avatar of Destruction” she becomes in the normal ending. Instead, the Verse Maidens strike her down but refuse to eliminate her, instead dragging her back to their headquarters despite her protestations — but not before “Pet” has revealed its true nature and threatened to bring even greater chaos to a world that is already practically in ruin.

It’s a slow route to healing for the populace, but eventually they come to accept and support Aria once again, as her mysterious nature had always meant she was one of the more popular members of the quintet. Ultimately, the girls discover that Pet’s plan is to gather as many Blare as possible in one place and attempt to control them in the name of “fun”; Pet, having consumed Aria’s original cheerful personality but lacking the emotional maturity to know how to handle it correctly or appropriately, is more concerned with entertaining herself than any great master plan, and it eventually transpires that she neither knows what to do with all the Blare once she gathers them in the city’s Central Tower, nor is she really able to control them effectively.

Thus begins the true final battle, first against Pet, who eventually admits defeat and volunteers to try and get rid of the trouble she caused following an epiphany brought on by having the shit kicked out of her, and subsequently against a gigantic, horrible monster that appears as Pet allows herself to be completely consumed by the Blare she summoned. The Verse Maidens are ultimately triumphant over this fearsome foe, and a convenient side-effect of the fact that it was made up of so many Blare concentrated in one place means that their conflict all but frees the city itself from the oppression of the Blare.

The world still has some healing to do, however; the story ends with protagonist Takt and one of the five girls (you get to choose) setting out on a grand journey into the wider world, clearing out the Blare as they go and discovering a new-found appreciation for one another. The post-final boss gameplay, meanwhile, unfolds before this happens, and sees Takt and the Verse Maidens — plus their predecessor Momoka, who manages to come out of retirement thanks to a useful bit of experimental technology — attempting to clear up the last few stragglers around the area of the city and continuing their work as Verse Maidens, bringing hope to the people.

It was an enjoyable ending and the final boss battles were pretty great; the last one in particular had some superb music. I’m interested to see what the post-game has to offer now; the Training Facility dungeon promises to be a stiff challenge, and there’s proficiencies to level up, affection to increase, archives to find and quests to complete, so I think even though I’ve technically “finished” the game there’s still probably a fair amount left to do!

To cut a long story short, Omega Quintet is an excellent RPG that I’m very glad I took the time to play. It’s another in a long line of titles from Compile Heart that has helped cement this quirky Japanese developer’s position in my mind as one of my absolute favourite game makers out there, and I have to feel a little sorry for those people who can’t find joy in their colourful, humorous, witty games that are absolutely bursting with character and soul.

1964: 95 Hours With the Idols

My game clock in Omega Quintet now reads somewhere in the region of 95 hours. I’m now about three-quarters of the way through my New Game Plus run and attempting to get the True Ending, and then there’s a bunch of post-game stuff, too, so that timer’s going to tick well over 100 by the time I’ve finished, I’m sure. This officially makes Omega Quintet certainly the Compile Heart game I’ve spent the longest on, and probably getting on for the overall RPG (Final Fantasy XIV excepted, of course) that I’ve spent the longest on. The previous record holders were Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory from Compile Heart, and I think I took slightly longer than the 100 hours I took for Victory over Xenoblade Chronicles on Wii — and didn’t see anywhere near everything.

Anyway. I don’t want to dwell on how long this game is — I could have been done long ago, since I’ve technically already “cleared” it once and I’m doing all of the optional side quests — but rather on something that I noticed as I was playing today: after nearly 100 hours, I’m still spotting new things about the mechanics and working out ways to leverage them to my advantage.

Compile Heart games are often quite mechanically interesting. The original Hyperdimension Neptunia, for example, featured a combat system in which I spent hours assembling combo attacks that would neatly chain into one another, swap out characters mid-combo and do all sorts of other cool things. The later Neptunia games took a different approach to battle, with freedom of movement, area-of-effect attacks and different types of strike. Hyperdevotion Noire is a solid strategy RPG with easy to understand but tricky to master mechanics involving elemental affinities, range, height and areas of effect. Moe Chronicle — my copy of which arrived today, hooray! — sees you equipping stereotypically moe traits onto a range of monster girls to give them various special abilities. And there are a few I’m still yet to play, too.

One thing that the Neptunia series in particular lacks a bit, though, is customisation. The characters aren’t completely fixed in their abilities — you have some flexibility in the combo attacks you can equip each character with, and it’s possible to customise the special attack combo-finishers they use, too — but so far as their main special abilities go, they’re fixed.

Enter Omega Quintet, then, which offers more customisation than I think I’ve ever seen in a Compile Heart game, with the possible exception of the original Neptunia. And it’s far, far slicker than that game — much as I love it, it was very, very flawed in many places.

The early part of the game sees you assembling the titular Quintet, and various mechanics are locked out until you’ve assembled them all and you’ve read all the tutorials (which are thankfully skippable, so you don’t need to read them again on a second playthrough). When the team is assembled and all the mechanics are in place, the default setup gives each of the five girls a different weapon and a basic few skills that they’ve already learned.

Skills fall into three broad categories: Elemental Skills (or E Skills) are magic-like abilities that either attack with elemental affinities or provide beneficial effects such as healing or buffing. Mic Skills — the weapons are known as “Mics”, because they’re idols, after all — are attacks that are tied to an individual weapon type, so the character must have the appropriate weapon equipped in order to use them. And Special Skills are character-specific attacks that require “Voltage” built up through performing well in combat to be able to pull off.

Of these abilities, only Special Skills are fixed on a per-character basis; everything else is fully customisable. The girls each clearly have a favoured weapon — the one they start with — but there’s nothing stopping you from levelling their proficiency in other weapons, too. In fact, it’s beneficial to do so, since levelling up a weapon proficiency provides you with additional “Disc Analysis” points besides those you already get from increasing the character’s overall level.

Disc Analysis is Omega Quintet’s main progression and customisation system. Each character has a large diamond-shaped grid with lots of nodes on it. Each node represents a new skill, an upgrade to an existing skill or a buff to the character such as additional E Skill slots or increased stat growth when levelling up. Spending the Disc Analysis points acquired through levelling and increasing in proficiency unlocks new abilities and opens up new nodes, since some nodes have prerequisites before you can use them or require you to “approach” them from a particular direction on the grid.

In my first playthrough, I wasn’t terribly careful with how I organised my characters’ development. I kept long-term goals in mind — “I want that ability that’s all the way over there” — and attempted to take the most direct routes across the grid to where I wanted to go, picking up any necessary prerequisites along the way. This mostly worked, but it left each character feeling fairly “generic”, since a lot of them had ended up learning the same or similar skills, and none of them were particularly playing to their strengths.

This second playthrough, I’ve been more focused, since I’m playing on the Advanced difficulty. (It hasn’t been too difficult yet, but that may be something to do with the fact I carried over my weapons and items from my first playthrough, making me a powerhouse in the early game) I’ve been specialising my characters and paying more attention to the “Chain Skill” system, which allows multiple characters to trigger more powerful special attacks if they perform the right skills in the right order using the “Harmonics” (simultaneous turn) system.

Kyouka, for example, has high Vitality — Vitality in this game is your speed stat, for some reason, rather than its more common usage as “ability to take punishment” — which means she usually acts first in a fight. This puts her in an ideal position to be a “buffer”, so I’ve given her all of the stat-boosting spells and, using her four actions per turn, she can increase any four of the party’s Song Power (physical attack), Stamina (physical defense), Knowledge (magical attack), Divinity (magical defense/healing power), Technique (accuracy) or Vitality (speed). Alternatively, she can use her spear skills to attack; she has a couple of useful area-of-effect attacks as well as one which draws enemies closer, helping to negate the damage penalty for attacking something at the “wrong” range for your weapon or ability.

Aria, meanwhile, has high Divinity, putting her in a good position to be a healer. So I’ve given her the healing spells. Her high Divinity also means that she can shrug off magical attacks quite easily — sometimes they even miss her altogether, and she has good resistance to status effects. When she’s not healing, her combat fan skills have some large area-of-effect attacks as well as two skills that steal items from enemies, making her very useful indeed for farming items.

Nene has the highest Knowledge in the party, making her the “mage”. Most of the other characters have fairly woeful Knowledge stats, making their E Skill attacks next to useless for anything other than the status effects or stat penalties most of them come with. Nene, however, probably does more damage with her E Skills than with her gun, so I’ve given her the most powerful, most costly area-of-effect offensive E Skill spells, making her a powerhouse for blowing things up. She’s also very useful for item farming, since her Special Skill comes with a “Rare Steal” effect attached, allowing you to acquire items that you can’t get otherwise. In the case of the powerful bosses in the Training Center optional dungeon, these rare items are extremely profitable, though you can seemingly only fight each of these bosses twice before they’re gone for good, so no endless farming!

Otoha and Kanadeko are more “average” characters, with their main strengths stat-wise being Song Power, Stamina and, in Kanadeko’s case, Vitality. This makes them solid physical attackers, and in Kanadeko’s case, her high Vitality means that she usually acts immediately after Kyouka, allowing for some quick hits before the enemy gets started on pummelling the party. The two of them are distinguished by their Mic Skills, however; Otoha has two large area-of-effect attacks and a huge area-of-effect Special Skill, while Kanadeko has some smaller area-of-effect attacks and a single-target Special Skill, but does considerably more overall damage and also has the ability to delay enemy turns with many of her skills.

Things get even more interesting when you throw the Chain Skills into the mix. Because Chain Skills necessitate each “step” being performed by a different character, this makes each individual character’s arsenal of E Skills important to consider to give access to the widest possible variety of Chain Skills at any given moment. But then you need to consider that character acting by themselves, too, since you can’t always guarantee you’ll be able to get the turn order to line up just the way you want it in order to pull one off.

Then you have the Neptunia-esque guard break system, whereby each enemy has a “magnetic field” surrounding them that weakens to varying degrees with each hit they take, and which replenishes fully when the enemy’s turn next rolls around. When the field is broken, not only does the enemy take more damage, but certain abilities — particularly Chain Skills and Special Skills — activate a special mode called Pursuit, which extends the usual animation for the skill and does additional hits, usually for quite a bit more damage. As such, it’s in your interest to try and batter the magnetic field down as efficiently as you can with low-cost skills, then unleash the powerful Chain Skills and Special Skills when the field is already broken, since Pursuit will only activate if the field is broken at the start of the move in question.

Sound complicated? It kind of is; the game does explain each of these individual elements to you on your first playthrough, but it doesn’t really tell you how to apply them to your advantage. That part is entirely up to you to figure out, and after nearly 100 hours I think I’ve pretty much cracked it. We’ll have to see if these tactics will take me safely to the end of the game and beyond, or whether I’ll have to have a strategic rethink at some point!

Anyway, I’ve been playing the damn thing all day so I’m going to bed now.

1933: #WaifuWednesday: The Girls of Omega Quintet

One of the central themes of Idea Factory and Compile Heart’s new PlayStation 4 RPG Omega Quintet is the contrast between the private lives of those looked up to as “idols” and the public face they put on display.

This concept is actually, to some observers, a key aspect of Japanese culture at large. It’s known as honne and tatemae and, specifically, describes the contrast between your true feelings and desires (honne) and the facade you put up to the public (tatemae). It accounts for a lot of things, particularly in popular culture — media like anime and video games are, among other things, a means of exploring and engaging with honne without having to crack tatemae.

It may sound like a strange concept, but in fact a lot of us do it without even thinking: ponder, if you will, the things you’ve looked at on the Internet in the last week, and how likely you are to talk about them with other people. It may be that you’re fortunate enough to have open-minded friends and relatives who are more than happy to discuss anything and everything with you — or perhaps you simply don’t care what people think of you — but there are bound to be at least some situations where you know to keep your mouth shut about things you find interesting, whether they’re some form of fucked up pornography or unpopular sociopolitical ideas. Any time you bite your tongue and think better of “oversharing”? Well, that’s the closest we have to tatemae in the West.

But I digress. We’re here to talk about the Omega Quintet girls, and I did have a point to make: each of them display both honne and tatemae to varying degrees, and, through necessity, in a far more exaggerated manner than your average citizen. Due to the protagonist’s role in the story as the girls’ manager — and the player’s adoption of that role — you get to see both sides: the honne aspect when they’re hanging out and talking among themselves, and the tatemae aspect they display when they’re being broadcast to the public.

Otoha is arguably the “leading” heroine in the story due to the fact that she’s introduced alongside the protagonist Takt. Otoha is a cheerful, positive, upbeat young girl who has always looked at idol culture — or, in the context of Omega Quintet, “Verse Maiden” culture — with starry-eyed awe. Although Omega Quintet’s world is post-apocalyptic and in many ways both bleak and dystopian, Otoha’s infectious energy allows her to bring a sense of brightness and lightness to even dark situations; fellow Quintet member Aria even says as much in a rare moment of lucidity.

Otoha struggles the most with honne and tatemae. She’s a ditz, to put it bluntly, and she often lets this aspect come across even when she’s on camera. The first time she attempts to make her “debut”, she is literally pushed to the ground and upstaged by Kyouka, who is, at this point, working independently. She struggles for the longest time to get the Verse Maidens’ fans to even remember her name and, over time, comes to recognise that her talents don’t always match up to her enthusiasm.

That doesn’t stop her, though; despite numerous setbacks, she remains determined to realise her dream of being a successful Verse Maiden, and her determination proves inspirational and infectious to her comrades. Even the rather dour Takt is swept along by her energy at times, though he’d never admit it; after all, in the game’s earliest moments, it is Otoha who saves Takt from an unpleasant end at the hands of the Blare.

Kanadeko, meanwhile, is another energetic character. While Otoha is passionate and determined, Kanadeko is more concerned with having fun and being friends with everyone. This is reflected through everything from her perpetually wide-eyed facial expressions to her seeming inability to stand still and her loud voice. She’s keen to do a good job as a Verse Maiden not because she’s especially passionate about it in the same way as Otoha — though she is dedicated to her work — but because she thinks it will be a fun thing to do.

Kanadeko is the most naturally at home on stage, too. She has natural presence and an energetic aura about her, and in fact she is, in many ways, the character who displays the least difference between her honne and her tatemae. Both on and off the stage, she’s confident, loud and, while she recognises that she may not be the best at what she does, she both enjoys it and is keen for others to enjoy it along with her.

Kanadeko’s perpetual companion is Nene, who in many ways is the polar opposite of her loudmouthed counterpart. Nene is shy, awkward and has a tendency to babble incoherently when she’s feeling nervous — which is quite frequently. In extreme cases, this trait exhibits itself through her blurting out some things that make people feel a little uncomfortable — such as her enjoyment of and enthusiasm for firearms — usually closely followed up by some embarrassed awkwardness as she apologises for saying “strange” things.

In contrast to Kanadeko, Nene has probably the largest difference between her honne and her tatemae. On stage, she almost becomes a different person. She channels her nervous energy into projecting a confident appearance to the world and, despite both her own shortcomings and her lack of belief in her own abilities, she does a good job. Off the stage, meanwhile, she struggles with depression and anxiety, particularly in social situations, and tries to stick close to Kanadeko whenever she can for two reasons: she trusts Kanadeko, as the two have been together for some time at the story’s outset, and she knows that Kanadeko is more than capable of distracting people so she can slip quietly into the background.

Kyouka, meanwhile is the character that is probably most directly concerned with her honne and tatemae. As a “class president” sort of character, Kyouka is serious and determined and almost painfully tsun at times, but she sees her lack of confidence in her performance abilities as a failing, and consequently tries to do something about them. She is also very concerned with what people think about her; she spends quite some time worried that her former mentor Shiori hates her for coming to join the other Verse Maidens, and it takes a reluctant intervention by Takt to help the pair at least start to realise that neither of them really resents the other, though they both find that impossible to admit.

Kyouka wants to be the best, and she finds it inordinately frustrating that Aria is a more natural performer seemingly without realising it or even being aware that she’s doing it. She channels that frustration into working herself hard, and indeed it’s this determination that brings her together with the other Verse Maidens in the first place: her desire to be the best even at the expense of her own personal welfare sees her throwing herself into a battle she can’t possibly win alone, only to be helped out by her soon-to-be-friends.

Kyouka’s harsh exterior occasionally slips around the other girls and Takt, however; the first time Takt comes to her room, he’s surprised to discover that it’s a mess, with notes pinned to the wall, clothes on the floor and rubbish overflowing out of the bin. Kyouka initially thinks nothing of this until it’s pointed out to her by Takt and some of the other girls, then becomes extremely embarrassed about it. Several days later, Takt returns to her room only to discover it’s in exactly the same state as the last time he saw it; she admits that she eventually concluded it wasn’t worth the hassle and that she was more comfortable this way. It’s a rare moment of clarity and honesty from Kyouka, and helps to humanise her a great deal.

Finally, Aria is the most enigmatic of the Verse Maidens. Initially introduced as a happy-go-lucky, cheerful girl whom Kanadeko and Nene knew when they first joined the group long before Otoha and Takt came along, we subsequently discover that she suffered greatly at the hands of the Blare and went into hiding. When she re-emerges, she’s seemingly emotionless — but not cold — and seemingly not quite aware of everything that’s going on around her. The damage to her mind by the Blare, it seems, was severe.

Or was it? The interesting thing about Aria is that despite her habits of speaking very slowly and hesitantly or referring to people she’s talking directly to in the third person, she’s clearly one of the more insightful members of the cast, often pointing out things the others don’t see. And, because the damage to her mind also seemingly removed any sense of tact, she’ll say things bluntly and honestly, sometimes without realising that they might be interpreted as hurtful. At the other end of the spectrum, she frequently tries to make jokes, but her stony-faced expression and emotionless voice often make people misinterpret them as something rather more horrifying — particularly when she jokes about subjects like suicide.

Aria’s intriguing to me because she presents an interesting reflection on what it’s like to live with depression. Nene does this to a certain degree, too — I find her social anxiety particularly relatable — but Aria’s floating through life in her own little world, observing and commenting on things and seemingly being surprised when people notice or acknowledge her, is actually a fairly accurate (if exaggerated) representation of what it feels like some days when depression takes over your perception of the world. You don’t quite feel “connected” to anyone; you don’t quite feel “real”; sometimes you’re not even sure how to interact with others — or if you want to. It’s likely no coincidence that her colours are the darkest of all the Verse Maidens — black and purple — and that these colours are shared with the Blare, the source of her trauma.

I’m yet to beat the game so I don’t know how these girls’ personal stories continue and conclude, but I’m very interested to find out. It’s a great ensemble cast overall, and one from which it’s very difficult to pick a favourite.

If I had to be pressed for one, though? Nene. Even if she is occasionally terrifying.

1930: Fun with Harmonics

Spent some more time with Omega Quintet today, and I am, as I may have mentioned a couple of times already, absolutely thrilled with how enjoyable it is — and that it’s much more than a reskinned Neptunia. Don’t get me wrong, you know how much I love me some Neptunia, but I’m glad that Compile Heart and Idea Factory weren’t resting on their laurels with this one; it would have been very easy indeed for them to simply lift Neptunia’s admittedly very fun combat system and plonk it in Omega Quintet, but instead Omega Quintet has something all of its own.

Perhaps “all of its own” isn’t quite the right description, mind, since Omega Quintet’s combat is executed as something of a curious blend between the battle systems from the Atelier series, the Ar Tonelico series, The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky, Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XIII. That’s quite a mixture, but it works really well, particularly when you pull off something as enjoyably silly as this:

The above sequence was recorded at just level 20, by the way; I shudder to think what numbers the girls will be putting out by the end of the game.

Interestingly, the game doesn’t bombard you with the complete combat system right from the get-go; it gradually increases in complexity over the course of the first few chapters at a fairly sedate pace, allowing you to get comfortable and familiar with each new concept before a new one is introduced. Ultimately, by the time the complete battle system has unlocked, you should be well familiar with all the possibilities it has to offer. At about 15 hours or so in, I haven’t seen everything the system has to offer, yet; for some, this may draw unfavourable comparisons to Final Fantasy XIII, which was lambasted for having a “20 hour tutorial”, but it’s worth noting that Omega Quintet does sidestep this issue a little by being somewhat less linear than Final Fantasy XIII was; at any given moment, there’s a bunch of sidequests to do, hidden treasures to find, new areas to open up, items to craft, special items to unlock and all manner of other things to do. (And besides, there was nothing the fuck wrong with the way Final Fantasy XIII did things, anyway. So there.)

Here’s roughly how the system works. Like the Neptunia games, you can get the advantage at the start of combat by attacking an enemy before they come into contact with you; conversely, letting an enemy touch you from behind will give them the advantage. How battle begins sets the opening initiative order, and from there the game follows a clear to understand turn order system, reflected by a graphical representation down the side of the screen.

Each party member has a number of actions per turn, increasing as they increase their overall proficiency with each of the game’s five weapon types — axe, gun, spear, fans and gauntlets. These actions can be used to attack, use a skill or use an item, and when all the actions have been chosen, the party member performs each of them in sequence before the turn order moves on to the next combatant. Of key consideration when choosing skills is the “wait time” — more powerful skills will push the party member’s next turn further down the turn order, potentially giving enemies the opportunity to attack several times before she can go again. Conversely, certain skills increase the enemies’ wait time when they successfully land, so you can manipulate the turn order yourself to a certain degree.

Attacks, skills and even items have an effective range, represented by coloured lines on the ground. Do something to someone in the green area and it will be most effective; then comes blue, yellow and finally red, which means you either can’t do the action at all, or it will be at severely reduced effectiveness. Certain attacks and skills also have a radius, either circular or a range of “tiles” horizontally, vertically or both, meaning you can hit multiple enemies at the same time. At the start of a party member’s turn, you can move them forward or backward in the formation, allowing you to manipulate the positioning to your advantage. There are also “knockback” skills, which are self-explanatory, and “reverse” skills, which… uh, I’m not entirely sure what they do.

Here’s one thing I have to nitpick slightly; there are certain aspects the game doesn’t explain very well or, indeed, at all in some cases. The stat names, for example, don’t take the usual Attack/Defense/Magic Attack/Magic Defense/Accuracy/Agility format from other Compile Heart games; instead we have Song Power/Stamina/Knowledge/Divinity/Technique/Vitality. You can work out what they are from a bit of experimentation, but it takes a bit of adjustment. Likewise, some of the status effects and added effects (such as the aforementioned “Reverse”) aren’t made very clear at all, though again, you can probably work these things out for yourself.

Personally, I’m actually all for games encouraging you to figure out some of their mechanics for yourself. You don’t need to understand these things to get a kick out of Omega Quintet, but if you’re the sort of person who likes to min-max your characters and have them fighting at maximum effectiveness, be aware that you’ll need to get your hands a little dirty — particularly as the characters in Omega Quintet are significantly more customisable than, say, the Neptunia girls, who don’t allow you to take any control over their development at all, though they do allow you to set up your own custom combos according to how you like to fight. In other words, Omega Quintet’s apparently deliberate obtuseness at times will be a turn-off to some people, but personally, I actually like not being spoon-fed absolutely everything.

Anyway. It’s good. Real good. And I can’t wait to play more. So I’m probably going to do just that right now; I’ve got a combo record to beat, after all.

1895: More Noire

Been playing some more Hyperdevotion Noire today, so I make no apologies for spending another post talking about it.

I am enjoying it a whole lot so far, and although I’m still relatively early on in the game, the interesting mission and map design is starting to shine through as the game adds more and more map gimmicks and mechanics to take into account while playing.

Of the last few missions, I’ve played, for example, one saw my party of four (Noire, Neptune, Vert and Blanc) fighting against the emphatically-not-Chun-Li-oh-wait-she-clearly-is “road pugilist” Lee-Fi. She was on the far side of a large arena whose walls were electrified, which means that knockback attacks had a use beyond simply getting enemies away from you. Some of the floor was electrified, too, necessitating careful route planning and an understanding of the game’s “orientation” system, whereby the direction a character is facing when they start moving (you can change it freely) determines the initial direction they move if the target space is not in a straight line from their current position.

This was followed up by a fight against the emphatically-not-Solid-Snake-with-tits-oh-wait-she-clearly-is superspy Lid, whose battlefield was riddled with booby-traps, necessitating, again, careful navigation while fending off her supporting units. Two strips of the battlefield are also covered by large, heavy damage-dealing cannons, too, though once you notice that they can only fire in a straight line immediately in front of them it’s easy enough to avoid them.

This was then followed by a battle against the Agarest-inspired character Resta, who was on the other side of a huge chasm, the only means of traversing which was a rickety railway carriage that could only hold three of your four party members at once. Resta also has an absolutely devastating super-move which obliterated my party in a single turn by dropping giant explosive bunches of bananas on their heads, so after my second “Game Over” of the game (the first being not paying attention to the cannons in Lid’s stage) I realised that it was essential to take her down in a single turn and not get distracted by her supporting units, since the mission objective was simply to defeat her, not everything on the map.

Thus far the game has put up a reasonably stiff challenge. The first couple of missions are deceptively simple, but beginning with the Lee-Fi fight, things have been getting noticeably more difficult — and a little more gradually than most Neptunia games, which are somewhat notorious for inconsistent difficulty spikes throughout most of the experience, then becoming ridiculously easy once you pass a particular level threshold. The difficulty hasn’t been insurmountable, though, and the new mechanics have been introduced gradually enough that I haven’t felt as overwhelmed as I have done in similar games like Advance Wars and Fire Emblem, where I often can’t work out why my strategy failed when it inevitably does. Here, failure seems to generally be the result of not paying enough attention — and given that you can examine all the units on both sides of the battle before you start fighting, there’s really no excuse for the mistakes I have made up until this point; I’ve certainly learned to carefully survey the battlefield before charging in now!

I’ve always quite liked tactics games and even finished Final Fantasy Tactics way back in the day, but Hyperdevotion Noire is the first one I feel like I’m understanding a little better. It’s designed well, plays well, looks great and features probably my favourite cast of characters in gaming. What’s not to like?

1551: Late-Night Dungeon

I’ve been dipping in and out of Demon Gaze since I wrote about it a few days ago, and while it has a few issues here and there — the discussion of which I’ll save until my review on USgamer, coming next week — I’ve been really rather impressed with this game.

In fact, that’s a bit of an understatement; on more than one occasion now the game has kept me up until well past 3 in the morning after I thought I’d just flip the Vita on for a “quick” game in bed before I went to sleep. (Granted, the last occasion this happened — last night — I had had far too much caffeine throughout the course of the day and was consequently finding it very difficult to sleep, but I could have done anything else with that time, and I chose to spend it lying in bed playing Demon Gaze.)

I’ve been trying to pin down what’s so enjoyable about it and it’s honestly quite difficult. It’s not that there’s no obvious good features about it; it’s that they blend together somewhat, and different aspects of the game appeal in different ways according to the conditions under which you’re playing.

Playing late at night, as I was, I was particularly enjoying the dungeon-crawling aspect of it. It’s not quite as hardcore as the 3DS series it’s taking pot-shots at, Etrian Odyssey in that you don’t have to map the damn thing by hand, but it’s still a game that, from the very outset, doesn’t hold you by the hand and expects you not only to work things out for yourself but also to experiment with the mechanics just to see what happens.

The core game structure is based around capturing demons. In order to do this, you must explore the dungeon that is the demon’s domain and capture all of the “circles” throughout by tossing a gem into them and then fighting the slobbering monsters that come out. Win, and you’ll capture the circle as well as receive an item according to the gem you tossed. Lose, and, well, you’re dead and better hope you had a recent save.

For the most part, this isn’t an issue. The monsters that come out of the cirlces are usually the same monsters you get in the rest of the dungeon, though sometimes in considerably larger numbers. As such, if your party is well-equipped to batter its way through the monsters in the dungeon, they can probably deal with the groups that come out of the circles.

Until the demon master of the dungeon shows their face unexpectedly, that is. You’re set up to believe they won’t turn up until you’ve captured all the circles and found the boss fight location, but in actuality what happens is some time around when you capture about half of the circles in the dungeon, the next one you try for will summon the demon. And it’s entirely possible they will smash your face in and then wear your buttocks as a hat, particularly in the first dungeon where your characters likely still aren’t all that powerful or well-geared.

The first time this happened, I thought I’d done something horribly wrong. Surely the game balance couldn’t be that broken? I experimented a bit; did the demon only come out of one circle, or all of them? (All of them.) Was it every time? (No, but seemingly most of the time.) Did using special abilities help? (A little.) Did levelling up help? (A lot.) Did better equipment help? (Also a lot.) By the time I’d reached my own conclusions — I should have just run away the first time I encountered Mars, then come back better-equipped and better-trained a little later, and probably with a healer in tow — it felt enormously satisfying to take the demon down and effectively clear the dungeon.

There are more subtle things, too. Occasionally you’ll find “Loot Maps” as random treasures in battle, for example, and these will give an area name, an X and Y map reference and the name of the “power” you need to reveal the hidden treasure at that location. Trouble is, the area name never matches the actual area names — “Garden of Thorns” becomes “The Vine-y Land” — so you have to use a bit of your own brainpower and deduction to figure out what it’s referring to. (Pro-tip: if the grid reference the map is pointing to appears to be a solid wall miles away from anything, you’re probably looking at the wrong area.) You also have to figure out which of the demons the “power” names refer to — rather than saying “you need Comet, Mars or Chronos” it’ll say something like “requires Dragon power” or the like. Again, there’s a wonderful feeling of smug satisfaction when you successfully decipher a map and uncover the treasure hidden in the location — particularly when the treasure in question is something that you’ve been searching for for hours for a quest.

Demon Gaze doesn’t give up its secrets easily, then, but for me, this is proving to be one of the best things about it as it makes your victories feel like genuine accomplishments. I’m looking forward to working my way through the rest of the game not only to see how the interesting story proceeds, but also for more sweet old-school grid-based exploration and treasure-hunting.

It’s bringing back fond memories of old titles like Lands of Lore, it of the Patrick Stewart-voiced intro fame, and will be a solid investment for any Vita-toting players who have a penchant for traditional dungeon-crawling. Watch out for it — and my full review — this week.

1174: The Second Tower

I beat Ar Tonelico II: Melody of Metafalica this evening. Or, more accurately, I saw one of its four endings. Two of the other endings won’t be particularly difficult to obtain with the tactical saves I made on the way to the finale, but the last remaining one will require playing about 80% of the game again, albeit with a completely different second “phase”. I’ll probably take care of that last ending alongside a new game, which will either be Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory or the third Ar Tonelico game, both of which I anticipate I will be enthusing about considerably on these pages in the very near future if previous instalments in their respective franchises are anything to go by.

Anyway, Ar Tonelico II. It’s… well, fantastic. I must confess to having not been as immediately smitten with it as I was the first game, as the conflicting art styles between the field and battle sprites (and between the field sprites of the first game and the second game) were initially a little jarring. (Seriously, everyone has really, really big hands and massive feet on the field maps and it’s very disconcerting to begin with.) But after not very long at all, I found myself looking past this rather superficial consideration and immersing myself in what turned out to be a very pleasingly deep and meaningful story packed with good characterisation and questionable translation from the original Japanese. (On that note, though, the translation was at least understandable despite a few errors, and certainly no worse than some visual novels I’ve played.)

Spoilarz Ahead

Ar Tonelico II stands on its own, but also fits into the current “trilogy” as the sort of “dark middle episode”. Whereas the first Ar Tonelico was rather bright and breezy most of the way through, the land of Ar Tonelico II is a bit bleaker. The people are struggling, there isn’t enough land for everyone and everyone is clinging to the seemingly hopeless desire that the land’s Holy Maiden will be able to create “Metafalica” — a verdant green land summoned through the use of Reyvateil Song Magic. Plenty of political machinations and backstabbings threaten to fuck everything up completely (and pretty much do on several occasions over the course of the entire narrative) but, this being a JRPG, our plucky band of heroes are there to wander the lands, right wrongs and eventually figure out how in the world they are going to help everyone find hope for the future.

Ar Tonelico II’s story is nice in that it isn’t quite the clichéd “Big Bad wants to destroy the world” business. Sure, there’s world-threatening stuff going on and the eventual aim of the game is to save the world from an unpleasant fate, but it’s not quite what you might expect. For starters, you spend most of the game not being quite sure who the “good” and “bad” guys are. There’s no sign of a single easily-identifiable antagonist who is fucking shit up and needs a good Omnislash to the face; no white-haired pretty boy accompanied by tubular bells and organ music every time he appears. In fact, over the course of the narrative, none of these characters are presented as one-dimensional — most of them go through some sort of change and/or growth as the story progresses.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Ar Tonelico II in this regard is the fact that the final boss “Mir” from the first game is actually a party member in the second — though you don’t know this when you first meet her, and in fact it’s entirely possible to go through pretty much the whole game without noticing this or figuring it out, depending on the choices you make and the optional events you witness. Not having played the first game won’t affect your enjoyment of the second, but if you have played the first game, the moment where you find yourself going “Wait… OH. Mir?!” is a “big reveal” on a par with Darth Revan in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic or SHODAN’s first appearance in System Shock 2.

Herein lies one of the interesting things about the first two Ar Tonelico games in general: “good” and “evil” aren’t absolute. In Ar Tonelico, we get some insight into why Mir is the way she is and why she is so angry about everything — and it’s easy to find yourself sympathising with her rather than just wanting to kick her ass. In Ar Tonelico II, by spending some time with her as a (relatively) normal person, we get to find out a whole lot more about her — what happened to her in the distant past, what led her to her actions in the first game, and how she feels about what has happened to her then and since. If you follow her “route” through to its complete conclusion in Ar Tonelico II, it’s a really wonderful story arc for one of the most interesting, troubled characters I’ve encountered in a very long time. I don’t yet know if she shows up in Ar Tonelico Qoga, the third game, but I’ll be very happy to see her again if she does.

The overriding theme of the Ar Tonelico series is that of bonds between people, and this is particularly apparent in the second game. The main theme of Ar Tonelico II’s story is that the more intense a relationship between two or more people, the more painful it is. The more people you surround yourself with, the more “alive” you feel from being part of something bigger than yourself, but the more pain you suffer when you lose those precious people. The world-ending chaos at the end of Ar Tonelico II is not brought about by a desire for dominance or a display of power, but instead out of a simple desire to not feel that sharp pain of loss any longer. If everyone was able to abandon their physical bodies and live on purely as an individual spiritual entity, the primary antagonist’s theory goes, no-one would have any need for other people, no-one would feel the pain of loss, and everyone would be happy in their complete and total individuality. But, responds the protagonist, no-one would be truly alive then. Life would not have meaning drawn from the people around you and the hardships you work together to overcome. You’d be little more than data.

It’s an interesting and somewhat bittersweet message, but it works hugely well in the context of both the overarching plot and the smaller, individual character-led stories that unfold over the course of the whole game. I’m all for exploring deep and thought-provoking themes through interactive entertainment, and Ar Tonelico II successfully achieves that without sacrificing the “spectacular” side of its overall experience. It’s still recognisably a JRPG with all the over-the-top pyrotechnics and anime-style special attacks that entails, but at the same time it’s a complex and emotional tale far beyond the “Evil Guy Is Over There, Go Stab Him” trope that people (largely incorrectly) assume still characterises the genre.

In other words, just go play it, all right?

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!