Megadimension Neptunia VII is the first game in the Hyperdimension Neptunia series of JRPGs for the PS4. The title is pronounced “V-two”, given that it s a sequel to Victory on the PS3. Being the first game for the PS4, you would expect graphical improvements, and there are some, just not a lot. The game still has that low budget feel to it, even more so when you consider the amount of reused assets. At least the 2D character models and backgrounds look very nice.
The game play is familiar. The battle system is turn based. Characters can move around on the battlefield, positioning themselves given that attacks have a limited range, attacking an enemy’s back deals greater damage, and there are position requirements for certain special moves. Depending on the weapon a character has equipped, they can chain up to five hits in one go. Attacks are split into three types, Standard, Power and Rush. Power focuses on higher damage, Rush on the number of hits, and Standard is between the two. In addition to physical attacks, characters can use skills which require SP, and items.
The world map is a big 2D map, although now, there are routes between each dungeon or town. The routes are comprised of points and there is a chance that there will be a random encounter. This is a terrible change given that is becomes very annoying when you just want to get from point a to point b and you’re constantly stopped by these encounters, forcing you into the battle screen only to fight some weak enemy that you’ve out-leveled a long time ago.
Dungeons on the other hand are free-roam 3D areas. Unfortunately, the game reuses a lot of dungeons from previous games, so can feel stale in that aspect. There are still new dungeon designs, which can be confusing given that there’s only a mini-map that you cannot expand. Similarly, enemies are quickly recolored, which is disappointing. They roam the battlefield and getting into contact with one will start a battle on a separate screen. You can attempt to get the first turn by hitting them, but in another annoying chance, if the enemy touches you before your character finishes their attack on the field, all the enemies get first turn instead.
Further changes that make the game more annoying, and harder, is that the enemies usually either hit really hard, or outnumber your small party. While the maximum party size is four, you’ll rarely have that, so it sucks when two characters are fighting against five enemies. To make matters worse, leveling up does not automatically recover your health and SP. What this means is that you’ll rely heavily on items, or jumping in and out of dungeons to heal. The game is actually hard in this aspect, and forces you to spend SP just to quickly wipe out enemies before they wipe you.
Every dungeon and boss requires grinding, as you cannot get enough levels just by defeating all the enemies on the way. And you’re only able to save at save points in dungeons, so if you die, you’ll have to reload your last save. Even if you think your level is on par or slightly above, and that you easily dispatched the enemies and dungeon boss, the next story boss might be a difficulty spike and kill you in two hits. The game’s difficult is uneven this way, which can really sour the experience at times.
The story follows Neptune and her sister Nepgear as they are thrown into another dimension, the Zero Dimension. It’s a post-apocalyptic world and there, they meet Uzume, the only sole remaining human. This world is constantly being attacked by monsters, and with only one continent left in the world, Uzume is fighting to protect it, and its inhabitants. The story is filled with fourth-wall breaking dialogue, as well as random jokes and gags. Nothing is taken seriously and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
Due to the decisions made during development, the game’s story is split into several sections. They’re each somewhat self-contained and as such, can feel truncated and isolated, with the whole game lacking cohesion. Sure, there are references and the events follow each other but they’re not closely linked. Combined with the fact that your party changes in each section, meaning that they start from a weak state every time, and it's not the best formula. As is customary for the series, there are a lot of cutscenes. When you’ve finished one, it’ll be another one, and you’ll chain four to five back to back.
In addition, there is tendency for your party to constantly change, even in the final section of the game. You’ll lose and gain party members, and while eventually you get a huge amount of playable characters, you don’t get to really train them up and spend a lot of time for most of them, which makes the game feel a bit more disjointed. Leveling up is also very slow, you gain pitiful amounts of experience points from normal enemies, so it can be very frustrating when you hit a powerful boss that you need to gain several levels for in order to overcome.
The game attempts to tie the various plot threads in the previous arcs into the third and final arc, and it succeeds, to a degree. It’s not a super clever or interesting way to do it, but at least it works somewhat. It’s doesn’t justify how the story was structured though because it was still a slog and mess to get to that point. The game has two endings, a normal ending and a true ending, where the latter has some requirements that are easily missable. It takes about 20 hours to get to an ending, and if you do the true ending in New Game Plus (where you get to basically carry over everything), by skipping all the cutscenes, you can get there within four hours.
The game is designed to be grindy and that’s basically all the postgame content. There are several optional dungeons. One of them is designed to be hard with no in-game map and containing some powerful bosses. While another takes inspiration from another game (a collaboration actually) and focuses on the platforming aspect, which isn’t the greatest idea given the terrible jumping physics of this game. There’s the usual Coliseum where you can fight opponents of escalating difficulty, and that’s it.
Overall, Megadimension Neptunia VII is an average JRPG. Despite being on “next gen” systems at the time of release, it wasn’t really that much better than the PS3 games. It retains that budget look given the liberal reuse of dungeons and enemies, making the latter parts of the game feel repetitive and too familiar. The weird difficulty spikes, amplified due to the way the game is broken into pieces, along with party restrictions, make it a frustrating and tedious game to play at times. It gets better at the end once you get all the characters together but even then, they’ll come in and out as the plot demands, doesn’t really quite tie the whole game together.
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