This is the SRPG of the Neptunia series. It is also the second spinoff, though the first one most people will have access to since Producing Perfection is Vita locked. This is also the second time the main character isn’t Neptune, the other being Nepgear. Noire takes center stage in this adventure through Gamarket.

Story- 4

So the second spin off is focused on Noire, where she is basically winning the Console War. The game starts in a standoff similar to the one Re;Birth 1 starts on, with three of the CPU’s against Noire. Unlike Re;Birth where the one loses, Noire beats the three down, gloats a bit and watches the three run off, leaving Histoire behind.

After a bit of warning about not being careful near the top, Noire meats Arfoir calling herself Eno who then tricks Noire into triggering something with the Sharicite(which was a story gained accessory in the first game with some of the best stats) This causes a blackout and all the people in Lastation’s capitol to disappear. Noire wakes up and finds monsters in her town instead of people and loses hope in herself only to be saved by a random guy who just showed up. Our player surrogate who Noire never asks for the name of, is this random dude. In the non combat stuff he is technically the player character, though as far as the story and fights are concerned that is still Noire.

Some things happen and the four Goddesses team up to figure out what happened and fix Gamarket and re-recruit their generals who for some reason aren’t listening to the Goddesses anymore. A bunch of one to two note video game inspired girls who I’m pretty sure are only in this game, making it have one of the largest unique rosters in the whole series. Now for a while you just go around and beat up their old teammates and add them back into the party while dealing with their silly antics. Kinda villain of the week, except replace villain with idiot.

One thing to note, that is more of a minor detail then anything, but this game doesn’t take place in Gamindustri like Re;Birth or most of the rest, but Gamarket. The difference? In Hyperdevotion the world is just 1 floating continent in the sky instead of four. That might also explain the generals, whom appear to be linked to the individual cites, though that never really matters much other then why they are aligned with the different CPU’s.

The general sense of the plot is Noire starts as a dictator, thinking people like her for her but they don’t. When she realizes this in chapter 4 it becomes her quest to make friends… except all her friends are still made by beating people up. Sometimes I learn the weirdest lessons from video games… Also, the romance thing doesn’t go anywhere. Not that you should expect it to, but it is kind of disappointing that the Tokimeki girl gets farther in her romance with the main character then the actual main heroine does.

Gameplay-7

So this is an SRPG, the only one in the series. It’s… not easy? It starts simple enough but it jumps difficulty and don’t think easy mode is a get of jail card to beat the game, you will die if you don’t grind or play smart. That’s the sense I got from reading some comments on the game, and they are mostly right. The game definitely jumps in its unfairness a few times, and I feel I should highlight that a bit before talking about the core game.

So the core reason the game is hard is how enemies just get really powerful attacks that hit massive areas and are thrown at you more and more. Some levels just have a bunch of boss tier enemies, each with the ability to take your entire team down in 1 hit. Now from my play I found out they don’t generally do this unless you get them close to dying and then give them a turn. Basically you want to 1 turn bosses so they don’t desperation attack your entire party to death in 1 hit. The suicide ghost enemies are kind of a soft tutorial on this idea, since they only blow themselves up and kill half your party if you failed to kill them but did a sizeable amount of damage. Also, I think the game gives you less xp and money in easy mode, so the game might actually be easier to get through in hard. Not 100% on that, but it is possible and wouldn’t be the first time I found a game that screwed up and made progressing through easy more difficult then getting through hard.

As for the actual game, it’s a grid based SRPG with a focus on traps, facing and elements. For around half the game the main story levels will introduce a new movement based trap or obstacle each level, so the way you move is important. Unlike most other SRPGs, the game doesn’t ask if you want to move before you walk on a mine or fall to far and lose the rest of your turn, so you need to pay attention to the movement arrow for a character. Depending on which direction you are facing, how your character moves is affected. For example, if you face up and move up left, you will go up first and then left but if you were facing left you will do the opposite. This is vital for how movement works in this and thankfully you can change facing while deciding where to move. You also cannot place waypoints or control movement in any other way. Except the CPU’s can fly when transformed, letting them ignore a bunch of gimmicks. Enemies and your own characters when they are not under your control also ignore traps, which is probably just laziness on the devs side of not wanting to make the enemies dodge them. Some levels have trap set ups that are infuriating, and watching enemies just waltz right over and start beating you down while you can barely move is definitely not one of the game’s better points. Thankfully so long as someone is alive you can summon through your entire army so both sides are unfair.

Like Neptunia 1, crafting is fairly important to this game as it adds better items to the shop and for the generals is the only way to get them better weapons. Every time you kill an enemy it will drop an item, but each enemy has two drops(end game have three and it is infuriating as the middle drop tends to the one you want). The rarer one will drop if you overkill the enemy by having it die at -50% of its HP or more. Missions will also always award 3 set items and chests have 3 items in all of them as well. An item guide can come in quite handy to keep track of what to kill, though the ingame bestiary also works. Overkill actually was something of an issue in my run since I completely ignored it in favor of grinding more attacks and other actions. I had to NG+ anyway to get the full gallery(2 endings, and the gallery is linked to the save not the game) so it wasn’t a huge issue for getting everything, but I definitely felt some issues when it came to damage from some of the generals.

Elements play a big role in this and they work a bit differently then in most games. You actually have an equippable slot on each girl that exists solely for an elemental orb thing that has different tiers. This affects any attack that doesn’t have a set element and changes the damage formula when dealing with the elements strength and weakness. Higher tiers make the math more ridiculous. It’s a huge change if you actually counter an enemy versus not, and enemies can one shot you if you are weak to them. There’s also elemental chests that only open when normal attacked by someone with their counter, so you can’t really ignore elements all together if you want crafting materials.

So for side mechanics borrowed from the main series, we have character challenges and lily ranks. Character challenges get introduced in the third game so I don’t know much about them there, but here they are useful. Basically every action in combat is tracked and once you hit milestones that character gets a stat boost based on the action they did. The stat bonuses aren’t huge but are nice and worth paying attention to in this game at least. 20+ in a stat is basically a weapon upgrade in this game and a challenge can give that. You can also unlock some bonus voice mode stuff from three of the challenges, more on that in the completion section.

Lily ranks are actually incredibly important in this game. As part of the game’s focus on positioning and movement, being next to a girl when you use skills or specials affects the damage and cost of the move. Higher tiered ranks make the moves do more damage(aka the more they like each other the bigger the boosts) so having your team bunched together is not only useful, you are likely to do it all the time. Which explains the unfair difficulty a bit, since the entire group will often be sitting ducks for AOE’s. Anyway, lily ranks with Noire specifically also unlock bonus scenes with the generals(which often don’t even involve Noire, instead being the secretary aka you and the girl in question or between the generals) and to get the true end requires 70+ ranks with each other girl to Noire, and 100 to get all their scenes. You get 1 rank per using a move right next to them. There’s also an achievement for getting everyone to 100 with each other, which no way I’m bothering with. The game’s already grindy enough.

The way the lily ranks and the system’s involved with it work though, two stats in this game become kind of useless. Tech and Agi affect hit rate, dodge rate, and counter rate. Skills don’t use any of those. Skills always hit, and can’t be countered. Crit is based on luck, so tech and agi don’t really matter. As for dodge rate, most enemies also only use skills. You want to be spamming skills as they are more powerful, give you points for the top right gauge which lets you ultimate, deploy units to replace active ones, and HDD the CPU’s. Higher lily ranks also means more damage, so normal attacks are actively pointless for anything other then opening treasure chests and stage gimmicks.

CD’s also make a reappearance, and are somehow even less useful then in Neptunia 1. Just like in Nep 1, they give bonuses based on what you craft into them, but since there’s not that many super bosses and most of the other bonuses aren’t needed(drop rate up? Crit resist? Those aren’t that useful…) the cds kind of just got forgotten in my run. Until the end game, where the final true challenge of the game is a map with 4 dragons of each element that each gets two turns a round and are level 99. Then I needed cds. They do provide nice bonuses, but since you can’t remove the bonuses from cds without destroying them, I never really felt like using them. There is a new mechanic where certain combo’s of effects make super good or bad effects, aka kamige or kusoge. Some of those are nice, specially the immune to all ailments one.

Last meaningful mechanic that adds to the unfairness thing is the the leader choice. Each mission you select a leader which basically decides a unit you can’t switch out and two passives all your units get. A lot of units have ignore status effects of a large variety and some have pretty big stat buffs. In hard though I found myself using Blanc’s all the time. She lowers your magic defense by 10% in exchange for 1.5 HP for everyone, which is huge. This fixes the survivability problem a good half your army is going to have. Is it the best one? Probably not, but it’s the most one size fits all of the whole list. Now if only the game didn’t take your units away all the time and didn’t keep giving you new units up until the second to last chapter to grind with… I’m not joking in the story segment that almost the entire game is just recruiting the generals.

To end, this game is just as grindy as Neptunia 1, which for an SRPG I just don’t get. You basically need to do every quest to keep up with the scaling and crafting, which means after every story mission you do 1-2 side missions and then repeat the story mission in simulation mode to get the rewards, and then go on to the next actual story bit. Then when you reach end game you are likely going to need to do another round of a bunch of the end game missions to get enough stuff just to gear out your main characters. That last bit isn’t mandatory, but comes in very handy as the last few missions jump the scaling by quite a bit.

Lewd- 5

Technically this is the 5th game in the series, so it is about time it started really earning the fanservice/ecchi reputation that the Neptunia series has had, and it does. The second cg you get in the game is a bikini contest, the the next is Noire showering and there’s a few more in that vein. Basically every time you recruit a new girl into the party, you get a cg usually with Noire and the new girl doing something themed around them. There’s a few themed around friendship and cute moments, and a couple that are basically just lewd things like wardrobe malfunctions. More then half of them are fetishy in some way.

Note that if you don’t like Noire lewds, this game isn’t going to have much for you. She’s in all but 1 cg. It’s her game after all. Plus the game uses these kinda adorable chibi models for gameplay so there’s not much for fanservice there, though Vert’s chest does still sway as she moves.

Verdict

So going through the main game, it was fine. A bit grindy as repeating story maps for a different reward was kind of silly, but as I was playing Agarest Zero at the same time this had nothing on how grindy that game is. The humor was still quirky enough and I liked how creative they were with the generals gimmicks. I laughed a few times at least.

End game is a whole different beast. For most of the game they hand out a few recipes per chapter, but the final few missions hand them out like candy and they all need items you only get from overkilling high tier, rare monsters or from completing end game missions. Blanc’s last hammer needs 3 of an item you get 1 of from the third hardest side quest in the game. Completionist in this is just annoying, which I guess shouldn’t surprise me. Neptunia 1 had the same issue where it seemed simple enough until you are grinding super bosses 3+ times to make a sword and need to beat the game again and again for a goddamn recipe item.

Also, a personal gripe is that Vert is useless in this game. Even transformed her attack stats are so bad she barely does anything. Like in my replay against the final boss in easy, Vert still does 1 damage with everything other then her ultimate. Her 1 non attack debuffs agi and tech and move range, which are useless. Also, spears are the worst weapon in the game because any elevation change means they can’t hit things so they can’t use height damage bonuses. I tend to want to use Vert as she’s the most my type of the four, and it kind of sucks that she is be far the worst character of almost the entire cast.

I think this will sound broken record like by the end of this series, but completion is just not worth it. The main game is a bit grindy, but I liked what it did. It really kind of reminds me of Agarest in how much positioning matters and crafting is super important to keep up, but unlike Agarest you don’t have 30 minutes of filler fights between every event. As far as SRPG’s go, I think this is fine. A bit unfair at points but if anything that made me enjoy it more over the whole thing just being a joke.

PC Save for Hyperdevotion Noire

All cgs and all bonus voice files unlocked. All gear crafted, so all in game weapons(which show up on model) and CPU HDD form pieces(which are the only costume like thing in this game) are available Save without dlc girls and with.

Gameplay: 7/10 Eroticness: 5/10 Story: 4/10

Completion: What it took- 4 playthroughs(one of those was becasue of how the dlc gets added to the game), because the game doesn’t save things to a master or outside save you need to beat the game with both endings to have everything in the gallery. Minimum lily rank is 100 for each girl to Noire, only other thing related to that is an achievement for maxing everyone with everyone which I decided against. There is a dlc that unlocks everything in this step, as usual I ignored that.

Then it’s voice files. Each girl has 3 bonus voice files unlocked in their bio page for doing certain character challenges up to level three. These are move around, use skills, and throw things. Not complicated, but the last one did involve grinding since boxes aren’t that common and you need to throw 30 per character when most fights only last 5-7 rounds and you are trying to up lily ranks for true end and get the other bonuses. These voice files are also the only reason I bothered with any dlc, and why the unlock dlc isn’t enough as it doesn’t unlock the voice files(or the CPU HDD costume bits or weapon skins…). I just don’t get why the Neptunia series never had cgs in the dlc, would have been a reason to charge more and actually get some bang for my buck instead of filler dungeons and challenge fights.