Spin off 3, game #6 of the Neptunia series. The first hack and slash, and also the first to be made by the Senran team. I was kind of hoping this game would blow the brand new Senran x Neptunia game out of the water. I ended up wondering how with that team they ended up with something this lifeless and bland. Like if the rest of the spin offs are like this, I get why the series is dying.

So I rate ecchi game’s on three metrics. Most games usually try to do at least one of these metrics well as it’s actual selling point. This game doesn’t. I think it’s selling point is fanservice, but that’s actually one of it’s weakest aspects for me. It’s gameplay, which makes up 99% of your playtime, is really the only reason to play this, and really I just wouldn’t recommend it for that either. This feels really budget, more so then the usual Neptunia fair.

Gameplay-4

Senran Kagura styled beat’em up, but without bosses that matter and maps are all reused dungeon maps from Neptunia 1 and 2. It kind of feels like what if instead of random encounters you could just beat up the enemies directly. A lot of the combat animations feel lifted straight from the RPG’s, which makes sense but just adds to how lacking in original anything this has.

Pretty much every mission boils down to kill everything. Enemy counts range from 100-2000. Even when the mission is kill a boss, you have to kill a few hundred enemies to make them spawn. There’s about 70 some missions in the story mode, and only around 5 of them do anything different. Chapter 2 has a select number of missions that don’t tell you the requirements, but most of them are still kill everything. It’s very simple, and that’s kind of the issue. There’s nothing else to make your brain work. Most maps you don’t even move around in, they are just arena’s.

Once you beat story mode you unlock the Gauntlet, which is an actual tournament thing for some reason. You control one character and select the other 7 and listen to Compa and IF talk about the matchups. You fight 4 battles and done. This is the best place to mention the weirdness of how this game counts it’s characters. You have the 4 CPU’s and 4 Candidate’s, plus the two journalists I’ll mention in story. The two journalists can HDD, but these aren’t considered separate characters while the the other 8 are considered separate in the Gauntlet. Basically the game has 20 playable characters(10+ 10 transformed) but the Gauntlet only has 18. You get an accessory for each unique clear and a cheat unlock for clearing with everyone. Those cheats are the main unlockable in the game, as they are really the only end goal the game has other then achievements I don’t care about.

After beating Gauntlet you unlock waste of ti… The tower mode. A fifty floor tower of fighting smaller numbers of the same enemies you have been beating up the rest of the game. Just like story mode you can take two characters into a run and switch as you please, and characters can only access floors they themselves have reached. You only get anything out of tower when you beat it with all 10 girls, so 5 total runs of the place. 250 floors. Other then leveling and lily grinding, this place is just boring. No narration, no conversation, barely a challenge, just more fighting. At least the load times are basically nonexistent.

Anyway, clothes ripping as a game mechanic. Yes it is important. When a girl gets hit to many times or uses her strong attack a lot, you get her clothes to shred. When this happens you get half your HDD bar filled and your defense goes down. This means it’s great for getting to HDD quickly, and since basically every character plays better in their other form anyway, I intentionally let their clothes shred.

Other things… enemies drop medals. These are your main… currency? I guess that would work. Every enemy has a medal count and getting enough medals lets you claim weapons, accessories and full team stat ups from the claim shop. In theory you can grind a mission to get the medals for your favorite girl to get her weapon. Also, while all accessory unlocks are for everyone they all get their own list. So no needing to worry about who gets the good stuff, everyone can have the exact same loadout with no issue. The two forms can even get different accessory loadouts if you wanted.

Lily ranks are just small things. Increased xp gain, faster gauge charging and such. Nothing major and nothing else is locked behind them other then an achievement.

Story- 3

I really want to say nonexistent and just move on, but there is one. Technically. Dengikko and Famitsu, two of the biggest game related magazines in Japan, are given big roles in this, as their job as characters is to write articles on the CPU’s and the Candidates. So they go up to them give them some quests to go beat up some monsters, and then write some stuff on them.

It’s a smash hit for some reason and the higher ups in the one magazine company decides to give the two devices that let them mimic HDD mode and go write another article. That’s basically the goal of the rest of the game. Do quests as the 10 total characters so that the two reporters can write an article at the end. There’s a final boss with some vague alluding to some company behind the scenes setting up the whole(probably the magazine company) and that’s it. No crisis really and the total number of lines in this game equals like maybe 2 chapters of Neptunia 1.

There’s not even critique on game reporting. Jokes are made about going for risque shots and how much money that could make them but also kill their job… and I think that’s all the reporting focused stuff really. That’s not even about game reporting even, it’s about sex appeal. Which despite the clothes ripping and increased jiggle, this game does not really want to do anything with either.

Lewd-3

The lewdest thing this game has is a set of shots of the girls you get every time their clothes rip. Usually a shot of their chests, their waistline, and then a whole model shot. If you wear the swimsuits, you don’t get clothes ripping at all.

The next lewdest is the combat camera. In the menu you can pause the entire game and enter a mode where you can just look at the battlefield and move the camera around. It’s like a photo mode before those started cropping up. So of course you use these to get good shots of the girls.

That’s basically it. The game has no cgs. All the alternate costumes other then swimsuits are recolors or just some variation in rip easier/don’t rip/already ripped. They wear very un-erotic panties.

I guess I want to point out that if the arena mode, if you hit confirm after winning a fight you stop the camera early but the girl goes through the rest of her win pose without any UI blocking anything. Probably the best place to make gainax gifs… if more then 5 of the girls had boobs that bounced. Way to many of the core cast of Neptunia have small bodies. Out of the eight core, it’s 5. 4 when Neptunia is Purple Heart, and back to five if Uni is transformed since she shrinks. For a gainaxy Senran Styled fanservice game, that’s not the right proportions to work with. The two new girls are both basically flat to, so they don’t really work with this style of game either.

Verdict

I think people who like Dynasty Warriors have far to many games to choose from for this to have any appeal. It’s just to simple and the strengths of the Neptunia series aren’t really used do to the lack of an actual story. The Senran elements it borrows aren’t strong enough to save it from being just a boring romp. If this is the quality I can expect from the rest of the spinoffs, no wonder the series is dying.

PC save for Neptunia Action U

Unlocking all the cheats is the only real completion metric outside of achievements, so I did that. I have a save ready for the 100% story scene achievement, one for quest completion+final medal reward, one for tower completion, and a finished save. No idea if the achievements will work, but that’s about all I can do.

Gameplay: 4/10 Eroticness: 3/10 Story: 3/10

Completion:

All cheats is 100% here. Only other unlockables are the variations to clothes ripping and weapon skins, which are easy enough. Just use everyone and get the medal rewards.

For cheats you get all medal rewards, beat the game, beat the Gauntlet with everyone, and beat the Tower with everyone. So 18 runs of the Gauntlet, 5 of the 50 floor tower, and story mode.