The Neptune spinoff I played for 2023. It’s basically Action U 2. Or more like Action U: Another Take.

Story-3

It’s unique. That’s the closest thing to praise I can give it. The CPu’s are attending a highs chool to learn about humans, but declining birth rates means the school is going to close. Neptune tries making a movie to raise the school’s popularity to save it, and ropes Blanc in as the screenwriter. It just so happens an actual magical zombie outbreak happens at the same time, so they have a convenient set of extras to make their movie.

So the game technically has two plots. The actual get the gang together to stop the zombies, which is very much an after though even when the source is revealed. Plus the making the movie with it’s B plot nonsense part. Replace movie with idol and I’ve seen this concept in a few shows before.

Not much happens. You get a few jokes about character traits. They rope the new CPU’s from 3, making me wish I had played that first. Before battles you get some arguments about shooting the movie then purposely bad zombie movie plot staring Blanc and Neptune. If you play the right girls you can get alternate takes, where they just insert the girls you are playing as into the movie part of the cutscene. These feel more like collectibles then anything else. There’s also backstage talks, which are triggered the same way and just kind of exist as extra to unlock.

So it’s short, is silly bad on purpose, has half of it’s cutscenes just be insert a different character saying basically the same lines, and all the fluff is it’s only real unlock-able other then costumes. I’d say it’s better presented then Action U, but it says just about as much.

Gameplay-4

So I’m scoring this based solely on the single player mode, as this is the first Neptunia to have multiplayer. The core game is not much better then Action U. It changes some progression system and there are some more unlocks based on who you bring to fights for the extra cutscenes and some missions drop unique items that when you gather a set unlock costumes, mostly recolors and old costume sets from Nep 1 and 3. Enemy medals were tossed for a basic currency shop, mostly filled with cosmetic accessories.

The fights were made way shorter. A majority of the missions take around a minute to beat, meaning load times can feel longer then the play time of a session. You also have access to items which are fairly cheap to buy, which use of makes the game a joke. Just spam ultimates and you win against anything remotely threatening, you can bring in 6 instant ultimates into any level.

Leveling gives you points to upgrade HP, Atk, Def, and Tech. The last one unlocks more combo strings and the other three are self explanatory. You can respec at any time. HP is also useless. If you max defense enemies can’t hurt you. It took the final two big bosses to move my health bar once I got to max defense, and I was using a low defense girl with no other upgrades. You can attach parts to your weapons to change attack types and up your stats, which stronger weapons can equip fewer of these upgrades. These upgrades get used up per mission, so outside of boss farming for costume drops I never used them.

So yeah, story mode is honestly boring. No big fights until the end, a lot of loading since the fights are so short, and honestly the story isn’t that compelling. There’s a decent number of game mechanics you don’t even need in story mode since it’s so easy. Multiplayer on the other hand is like throwing a Monster Hunter onto Neptunia/Senran. It’s still not amazing, but its way more fun then the base game.

Multiplayer can be played solo, which I did. It has star ranks for quests in a system similar to Monster Hunter’s. At first it’s very similar to the story mode quests with a few more enemies. Then the big guys show up. Giant soldiers, huge wolves and a bird god. These are a lot more fun to fight and at first required me to learn how to dodge and block finally. Spamming skills for invul frames, using upgrades to use the enemies weaknesses, bringing items to heal. The game finally was hard enough for its systems to matter.

As noted above, eventually you get the defense to take 0 damage from all but the strongest things so that feeling didn’t last long, but it was a better point then the rest of the game. If I scored the game based on the multiplayer, I’d likely give it a 5 or 6. It’s just far more fun. Short lived, but fun.

As for why I did multiplayer, those unique bosses to the mode have special drops called processors that each girl can equip that are visual and give stats. These are random drops unlike the story mode drops. Each girl also has a unique transformed state processor that also drops from fighting some other unique bosses to this mode. Had to grab those so I figured I’d do each mission at least once and then grind the drops.

Lewdness- 2

It kept the broken costumes from Action U, but threw out the costumes breaking and win poses. The only vaguely pervy thing you have left from Action U is that when you pause you have full camera control. I guess this is the girls first appearance in high school uniforms?

The game also added back in cgs that Action U tossed for some reason, but only has 5. 3 of which come from the backstage talk feature. Rom + Ram being cornered by a zombie, Tamsoft just standing there, Blanc and Noire as magical girls, Blanc in a school gym uniform to small for her, and Vert+Ram+Tamsoft in school swimsuits are all the cgs in the game. Being honest, the Blanc cg is really the only one that is at all going for sex appeal, but I don’t find Blanc attractive so the game essentially has nothing.

This game might have less sex appeal content then the Senren Kagura spinoff… That’s amazing in a sad way. Can’t say I’m incredibly surprised. Making Blanc and her sisters the core cast does make lewding awkward except for one specific crowd and honestly they don’t lewd Blanc much at all anywhere else in the series.

Final Thoughts

Yet again, why is this so empty? I get the joke of the story likely being fun to work on, but as a reader it’s just pointless. Other then the schoolgirl outfits nothing else in the game is really new and the few cgs aren’t really a treat. The combat, the main focus of the game, is way to easy for a majority of it to be fun and is over to quick for the feeling of being overpowered to be enjoyable.

Like, did the devs not realize having the spinoffs be so pointless would hurt the series, or was having their zombie game so important that it didn’t matter what was in the zombie game?

Save for MegaTagmension Blanc + Neptune Vs Zombies

Has all aesthetic gear unlocked and all story segments unlocked. All quests have been completed at least once. Every girl has enough level points to get their full combo strings,

Gameplay: 4/10 Eroticness: 2/10 Story: 3/10

Completion:

I mostly focused on getting all story and aesthetic things, which for story meant replaying like half the story missions 2 more times with specific girls. Then using a guide for the backstage talks as the hints for those in game are terrible.

As for the other items from multiplayer, you can thankfully fight the weakest versions of the bosses to get their drops. I think the most refights I ended up doing was 12.