by Yes, I believe I can just quote Yhatzee on this one. *ahem* “Bosoms, melons, milk factories, busts, funbags, knockers, ballistics, boobies, jugs, nipples, jubblies, STONKING GREAT TITS!”
This is the part of the article where I tell some anecdote. Sometimes it’s interesting. Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes it’s like 90% of the episodes of Inuyasha and just exists to take up space before getting to the point. This time I’ll just give it to you straight; a while back I played a game called Fairy Fencer F. I really liked it and it restored my faith in the JRPG genre. It had just the right amount of anime, relationship simulation, fan service and interesting-yet-gratuitous mechanics that had me yearning for more when I finished. That’s when I found out that Compile Heart had made a whole slew of games under the Neptunia franchise. Excitedly, I purchased a few and dove into Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 1. It was not good.
The problem inherently lies in that whereas Fairy Fencer F could be viewed as a decent JRPG with a bit of fan service, Neptunia is a ton of mediocre fan service with a bit of JRPG. Let me be clear with what I mean by “mediocre” fans service as well, as its distinction is important to understanding the problem. You see, Neptunia doesn’t go far enough in any direction to be good. If they went further down the JRPG route it would be more fun to play. In its current form, the battle system, mechanics, balance, equipment and abilities are all a complete mess. There’s no real tactical skill to any of it–just get stuff equip stuff wreck stuff. There’s about a billion characters to play as by the time you get to the end too, but there’s no real reason to use any of them over another (aside from Yellow Heart and Black Heart, the two even-more-broken DLC characters). True, I guess they are all waifus trying to shotgun-appeal to at least one kink in us but ultimately it comes off as a wasted effort. In a game with over a dozen playable girls, you’re drowning in so much fan service by the time you get to the end of the game that you suffer from stimulus desensitization–when everything is fan service, nothing is.
I think Goku said it best in Dragon Ball. Oolong suggests to Goku that they use the Dragon Balls to wish for a room filled with women. Goku, having only Bulma (a mood-swinging prone-to-anger adolescent) as his only basis of comparison for what a “woman” is takes a moment to think. He then turns and asks Oolong why the heck he would want a room filled with Bulmas. Oolong pauses and then concludes that Goku is correct. A room full of women would be horrible. That’s what Neptunia is.
Getting back on track to the “it doesn’t go far enough” concept, it doesn’t go far enough in the other direction to be any good either. I’m not talking about making things more X-rated either; the T.V. show Archer is probably the best example I have of this. For many reasons, Archer is hilarious. One of those reasons are the absolutely ludicrous sexual situations all of the characters find themselves in. Robot vaginas, threesomes with the Yakuza, sexual intercourse with non-physical holograms–you can’t help but laugh at the ridiculous scenarios that unfold, all without the need of censorship, as nothing censor-worthy is actually ever shown. The problem with Neptunia is that in spite of how obviously sexually oriented all of its *ahem* “assets” are, nothing is ever directly addressed… they’re just implied.
It’s implied that Vert and IF have a lesbian relationship but… that’s it. It’s just sort of implied. It’s suggested that Tekken likes pain but it’s never important to her character or any plot surrounding her. Purple Heart’s lines and costume are that of a dominatrix, but it never matters. It’s implied that Compa practices medicine on Nep-Nep… but once again–the whole thing is just implied, never directly visited. In fact, in a game completely filled with scantily dressed teens and women from the start to finish, I don’t think sex is ever brought up once, and aside from a few scenes involving Vert and IF, relationships friend, hetero or homo are never even discussed. The whole things just feels very… lukewarm. And look, I’m not saying that I want to play a game where I can get my sexual jollies off on. Frankly, to quote Bob from Bob’s Burgers, “The internet is… vast.” If that was my bag, I wouldn’t need to buy and play a game to do it. My problem is that the designers aren’t bold enough to jump the shark, even though they’ve dug out the pool, filled it with water and the shark is sitting in the middle of it going, “Hey… we gonna do this or what?”
This leads us to Neptunia 2, where sadly, nothing has changed. In fact, the games were speed-released back to back so quickly that it might as well just be an expansion upon the original game, considering the huge amount of reused assets. What’s worse is… the story just sort of flops out with no real introduction and barely a tie-in to the original. I finished Nep 1 in its entirety… and the beginning of Nep 2 still doesn’t make sense to me. 3 Years have passed since the defeat of Arfoire, the villain from the first game. But… nothing you did in the first game MATTERS I GUESS. Arfoire is back, she defeats the five goddesses from the first game and no one believes in Nep-Nep anymore. Oh… I should probably explain that.
It’s one of the vaguely clever and almost funny concepts in Neptunia. The “console wars.” You see, aside from being a vehicle to provide sweaty-palmed teens a front-seat access to titillation town, the game also sports a story involving a constant fight between game consoles and developers that parallel our world’s financial and business struggles of the same entities. Each playable character in the Nep games represents either a console or game company. Nep herself is supposed to be Nintendo, Black Heart is supposed to be Playstation, etc. The big five (the goddesses) all draw strength from their worshipers. They measure this worship in a unit called “shares.” So as you can see, the whole thing is a play on how fans of our world will buy certain consoles over another and their investments impact the shares of gaming companies.
The problem is, this is just a sloppy backdrop to everything else going on. It’s almost novel at first, but it gets old rather fast. When everything is a parody, nothing is a parody; and I didn’t think I could get tired of somewhat snide video game remarks. But I can. And did. Anyway it gets worse because, the plot of Nep 1 is retconned because OH BY THE WAY Nep has a sister now I guess. And here existence is not explained at all. And Compa and IFfy know her. Oh, and Compa and IFfy are also level 1, which I call foul, as they were level 90+ IN MY LAST GAME. I killed goddesses with them. Now look me in the eye and tell me that they are level 1 Compile Heart. Look me in the eye. Do it. I wasted 49 hours hoping Neptunia would be as good as Fairy Fencer and it wasn’t and now you’re telling me that my heroes from the first game have inexplicably lost all of their powers? Now they struggle to kill Dogoos. Dogoos! Do you know how demoralizing that is?!
… jeez, I am a nerd.
Look, let’s just wrap this up because my ramble meter is going off the charts. This game is Tier 3 like its predecessor which is just sad. Even if you’re a teen desperate to explore the world of teenage girls, I would have to imagine that there has to be a better way to do so. Like… almost anything. Maybe even actually interacting with a real girl if that’s why you’re playing. As it is, Neptunia isn’t fun enough to be a good JRPG and it doesn’t go far enough in it’s fan services to…
…right, like I was saying, it’s just not bold enough to…
…*cough cough* look, it’s just that… that…
Oh, forget it. Just click on something else before your mom walks in and go play Fairy Fencer instead of this.
