Superdimension Neptune Vs. SEGA Hard Girls (PC) Review

Superdimension Neptune Vs. SEGA Hard Girls at its core is not going to come as a surprise to any of the series' fans. This is going to come as mostly a mixed blessing, as fans will know what to expect, but there has been little overall change other than a general improvement to the formula.

In this game, the main character is IF (Idea Factory personified), a human girl traveling a wasteland. There was a cataclysmic battle of the goddesses that nearly destroyed everything. She finds a library that allows her to travel back in time. The role in the game is to go to various "eras" of gaming and to do small quests to undo the damage to the world.

The flow is very much like the more recent games of having an overworld that is menu-driven, quests, and individual dungeons. The typical flow might be something like getting a quest to kill five of an enemy, going to the right era, hunting down the enemy, and reporting the results. During this, there will be random characters to get quick little jokes or quips out of, and eventually story segments trigger.

Dungeons have improved a large amount, especially considering the rather dismal level they started at in the first game of the series. There are now multiple levels, jumping, climbing, and crawling. A lot of this feels tacked on, but is a very nice step in the right direction for the series.

For better or worse, if you have played one of the later Neptunia games, you have played them all. The style of jokes are going to be the same, such as breaking the fourth wall, or making sexual innuendoes. The rinse and repeat quest/dungeon system is almost completely unchanged. It is cool having new characters and seeing what they are about, but on some level, seeing some of the old ones starts to become grating after a while.

One of the annoying aspects is the very odd things they explain and the things they don't. The entire first hour is filled with mind-numbing stupidity of "Press X to jump. You can reach high levels doing this!" kind of explanations. They go through all of this when it is all pretty obvious, yet fail to explain things that might actually be useful, such as what exactly the TEC stat does.

This goes into the battle system, which is pretty interesting, but again a little unclear. Essentially, during a character's turn, they have an action bar that increases the more attacks they do, and depending on how high it goes, it makes their turn take longer to come back up. It is a pretty cool idea of a risk versus reward system, but in the end, it usually is simply maxing out the bar without going into the red. Again, it is unclear if the battles are everyone gets one turn each and it is simply based on actions, or if someone is fast enough if they can get multiple turns in.

The Steam port gives a load of free DLC, but has some problems. This includes boosters to EXP and gold, which appear to be a 10x factor, and will allow players to fly through the game if they so wish. Two major problems is adjusting the controls is oddly aggravating, with some bad glitches. If a command gets mapped to a button with something else already on it, there is no way to fix this short of resetting to default. Furthermore, while playing, it detected two separate controllers, and scrolling to the correct one, it passed over the wrong one, and once in a mode, it cannot be switched out of the mode unless you have that specific controller. That means tracking down the PS4 controller and plugging it in, simply to press left to go to a different controller. Lastly, the game is oddly demanding on the computer, and there were multiple times it simply froze and crashed unless all resources were devoted to the game.

For the series as a whole, it is coming along. People who have played all of them in the past know what to find here. There are little things strapped on, like a very simple class system, but other than a skill or some stat changes, it does not do much. The story feels refreshing, being told from IF's point of view for once. The talking portraits now look much smoother than the odd "jelly" effects they used to have from the old days. Overall, fans will want to check out the game if they did not get it on console.