Hyperdimension Neptunia - Game consoles personified

Never heard of it.

edited 16th May '18 4:17:02 PM by PhysicalStamina

Odd name change, not fond of it.

Let me put it like that: has anyone played Blazing Souls?

No.

You're going to get nos for everything besides maybe Fairy Fencer, so you might want to quit while you're ahead.

Yeah, you may get an Omega Quintet, or a Fairy Fencer F, maybe even God of Destruction, but that's about it. Nep fans tend to stick with Nep, IF/CH seem happy to focus on Neptunia for the most part as their flagship series.

It still amazes me that this franchise has... become a franchise.

15 games in, and still going strong.

I have my opinions on Neptunia. They don't seem positive.

What do you mean they don't seem positive? You don't know your own opinions?

edited 17th May '18 10:52:52 AM by PhysicalStamina

I do know, I'm just not sure if it would cause a Flame War, were it be posted here.

No use to keep talking about this, you guys can resume your current thread.

edited 17th May '18 11:29:42 AM by ZeroDozer

Well don’t get heated and throw insults and it should be fine. You have played the games though?

The series actually sells more in the West than in Japan and according to NISA the demographics were at least 1/3rd female in the west. So those typical arguments really don’t work quite well.

edited 18th May '18 1:18:59 AM by Memers

Sorry, I never had interest, despite knowing what it's about (Did a small research on TV Tropes). The games for some reason never sat with my taste. I only discovered Neptunia was made by Idea Factory when I was researching on the company after playing tons of Blazing Souls.

...But really (About 1/3 of the customer base being female)? One second, something's quite wrong here. My head isn't doing the equation.

edited 18th May '18 2:09:19 AM by ZeroDozer

Think about it. This is a series where the women are in all of the positions of power, and in general isn't very sexist while having an Improbably Female Cast. The cast of this series have many fans who they like specifically for their personalities and in-jokes, not for fanservicey reasons.

Also, the lead character designer and producer for the series are both women.

edited 18th May '18 2:48:10 AM by burnpsy

It struck me how quickly this grew.

I definitely think the T&A had a larger appeal than we give it credit for, but while I can see why a female-dominant/empowered game would have similar appeal, the first game came out, what, 8 years ago? The only other, non-mobile, non-indie franchises I've known to grow to 15 games at this pace are Mario, Call of Duty, and Assassins' Creed. Mario is made by the gaming company, Call of Duty has been handled by different studios and its mission statement was "new game every year", and AC's was too - and they took a break recently to do a film before the next game.

Now a really good game is a really good game and will hopefully receive the sponsorship it deserves. But I've heard nothing great about the first couple of games. In fact, they were remade hella quick. So are these games cheap to make? Because you've got triple A franchises like Final Fantasy that were definitely popular and yet it took us more than a decade to remake the originals, heck, to remake the arguably most popular one, FF 7.

Neptunia seems to have hit a real niche - it's not particularly strong on story but it's characters are likable. It changes gameplay genres constantly without throwing off it's fanbase, it's unabashedly focused on moe archetypes but it doesn't share the clout of games like Dead Or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, or the Senran Kagura series. I've not even heard of it's developer prior to the first game, but they seem to be doing well enough to continually make new games - I never see these trailers in E3 presentations, heck, I rarely see any news for this series unless I come to this thread. It's personifying the gaming industry and making fun of it simultaneously, and yet no company's come after it for defamation. For all of its cheeky humor and nonsensical mechanics, it's moved from system to system, genre to genre, medium to medium, and even become a VR title.

Until I heard that, I've had absolutely no idea how this series stays afloat.

The only one of the original games with huge, sweeping changes in the remake was Re;Birth1, which ended up basically unrecognizable.

2 and 3 were just handheld ports with refinements and some additions. This is why, unlike 1, they share their trope pages with their PS 3 versions.

edited 18th May '18 6:57:19 AM by burnpsy

Not even the devs were expecting Neptunia to take off the way it did IIRC. I read that the made the first game on gas money because they thought it'd be funny.

edited 18th May '18 6:58:13 AM by PhysicalStamina

IIRC it also took its characters from a cancelled game. Noire originally had a red color scheme and was not a Sony reference.

I think it was mentioned in an LE artbook or interview or something. Can't find the source ATM so don't quote me on that.

edited 18th May '18 7:13:35 AM by burnpsy

One other thing that helped the franchise a ton in the west is that it was one of the first JRPG series to go full throttle with releasing stuff on Steam.

That led to many, many YouTubers looking at the series on their channels, which was better advertising than the developers could have ever imagined.

edited 18th May '18 8:04:11 AM by justinkal

And then the relative success of the first game led to more Neptunia titles being released in the west which were also successful, which showed JP devs and localization studios that there's a market for hyper-moe animesque games over here after all, which led to a flurry of games getting western releases that we would've never seen 15 years ago...

Yeah, Neptunia was kind of a game changer.

PC helped expand it, but the fanbase was already there beforehand.

I just realized I still haven't responded to the "15 games so fast" point by Soble above. The Call of Duty comparison is apt, because only 6 of the titles were made by Compile Heart: The first 3 PS 3 games, both versions of VII and the Chaos Champuru spinoff. Other companies did literally every other entry.

edited 18th May '18 8:16:12 AM by burnpsy

When you look at the characters they are basically superheroes without any guys around, literally it took 3 games to have a guy with an actual portrait and the only playable one is a Seaman like fish.

The 4 of them are all Otaku Surrogate for many common otaku traits as well.

• Neptune is the lazy troper who describes everything in tropes and 4th wall breaks.
• Noire is the closet Cosplayer, straight laced but quietly has otaku hobbies.
• Blanc is the shy one who loves to read and get involved in stories, later a writer of fan fiction/ light novels.
• Vert the unabashed Fujoshi and MMO gamer.
• And on the lesser side you got Iffy being the closet or ex-Chunni, depending on the game.

Most of the actual content of the games are clean, costumes on the rather fanservicey side but not normally out of the realm of superheroes. In most games there is exactly 1 lewd CG and those are always framed in a comedic situation such as Compa going Bandage Mummy on Neptune.

No one playable in the series is Faux Action Girl and Girl Power is so heavy that Neptune lampshades it multiple times.

That's true, I've not seen too many girls play the games myself, but as I understand it, the strong personalities and femalecentric stories where they're not just shoving each other under the buss is refreshing. It's true what I've suspected, cutting the typical harem lead and leaving females to do their thing strips out a lot of tired tropes, they're not obssessing over a guy, not getting jealous all the time, and when they do, they always make up as friends, they stick together specifically because of their differences, and there's a positive current of sexuality, sapphic themes, and embracing differences that'd resonate with female players.

It also helps the series has had a strong localization and energetic dub cast since day 1, which brings in a lot more casual anime fans who might've been turned off with Japanese-only audio.

Also as an aside, the first light novel's been translated, it's up on the Gamindustri reddit. It's an interesting concept to justify the highschool setting.

• All CPU are born as blank slates with amnesia first.
• Compa and Nep are childhood friends.
• It takes place in Histoire Memorial Academy, she's the top goddess and the CPU are considered CPU Candidates until they receive Histoire's blessing in Celestia.

Cyberdimension Neptunia is on sale on Steam for 19.99. Is it worth it for that price, and how does it compare to the other games? The combat seems a bit different.

Combat system is completely different from the other games, and each character plays differently from the others.

As a game it's better than the majority of the franchise’s spinoffs.

It's also the first time that Vert is actually funny, because the whole 'everyone in the story is playing an MMO' aspect means that they put a lot more emphasis on her MMO junkie side than her siscon side (although that is still present).

VIIR PC release is this fall. Compatible with Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.