Review by: James Fudge

After playing Hyperdimension Neptunia for more hours than I would like to admit, I Imagine that Japanese girls probably prefer Hello Kitty to Sailor Moon. After all, the Hello Kitty crew is never asked to shake their goodies or partially expose themselves to titillate what game developers assume is a sex-crazed pubescent male audience. While the game is certainly a slice of Otaku culture and pays homage to the 8 and 16-bit era of video gaming (with a focus on Sega’s contributions in the late 80’s and 90’s), it comes off as exceedingly masturbatory. In many ways, anime and certain types of video games serve as this generation’s National Geographic.

The sheer volume of insipid character dialogue, meandering storylines, and depictions of teenage girls with gigantic jiggling breasts, overshadows everything else. While the developers of this game certainly put a lot of effort into telling the story of this strange game industry-inspired world, the actual gameplay is neglected. If Hyperdimension Neptune’s gameplay were a toddler, it would be malnourished, filthy, and wandering into traffic dragging a shitty diaper. If you strip away the superfluous story, Hyperdimension Neptunia is a mediocre action role-playing game that cannot stand on its own two feet.

Even though it is obvious that a lot of energy went into the story, it ultimately caves in on its own weight; there is too much back and forth in this game and most of it leads to nowhere. Characters prattle on about nothing, and encounters with NPCs that you think are important lead you nowhere. The constant barrage of distractions detracts from the gameplay. Perhaps this is a good thing because the gameplay is mediocre.

The concept for the game is at least interesting. You play as the clichéd amnesiac goddess who is rescued by a kind soul human named Compa (a plucky nurse who fights with a gigantic syringe).The two become fast friends and form a party with another girl named IF, who joins them on a perilous journey to investigate escalating monster attacks in the civilized areas of the world.

Neptune is one of several goddesses that preside over a world where console systems such as Sega's Neptune, Sony's PlayStation 3, Nintendo's Wii, and Microsoft's Xbox 360 represent different lands. Unfortunately, players will have to wait until the end of the game to play the other goddesses, and any other interesting extra characters you can get to join your group only serve in support roles (a future DLC release will make them playable for a small fee). That means you will be playing the same three main characters for most of the game. Like Trinity Universe, a number of different developers contributed characters to the game. For example, Compa represents Compile Heart and IF is the manifestation of developer IDEA! Factory. Even NIS Americas and GUST contribute to the cast...

The best way to describe the gameplay in Hyperdimension Neptunia is to call it watered down Trinity Universe. While there are some interesting elements at work in the game, many of them come off as half-done and poorly implemented. All of the most popular elements from Trinity Universe were stripped out to tailor the experience to this new reality. The basic flow of the game is simple enough: players engage in story events, unlock an area and then explore it to defeat a boss, trigger more events or find a specific item. Like Trinity Universe, combat is delivered in a third-person perspective. Combat is a mix of turn-based and real-time action that uses action points (AP).