Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 2 Review

Title: Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 2 Sisters Generation
Genre: RPG
Publisher: Idea Factory International
Developer: Compile Heart (Idea Factory)
System: Vita
Release Date: 27-01-2015 (NA), 20-03-2014 (JP)

The upgraded Vita port of the PS3 game Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2. It’s the same story and script (minus a couple of lines here and there), and the battle system changed to that of Victory’s.

For those unfamiliar with Hyperdimension Neptunia, they’re a series of RPGs that parody the console wars with each of the major players personified into a cute girl, along with some game companies that also get personifications based on their flagship franchises. They tend to have very typical join-powers-with-everyone-and-save-the-world stories, but fans stay for the character interactions, video game references, and the comfortable atmosphere that feels like a picnic in the park even during major events. There’s also a bit of fanservice in the beginning CGs, but it’s more of a moege than a tits-and-ass game. Also fun yuri subtext everywhere.

In the world of Gameindustri, four nation co-exist. Planeptune, Lastation, Lowee, and Leanbox are each rule by a CPU, who are powered by ‘Shares’, or people’s faith in them. They represent the 7th generation of consoles (you can guess who’s who), with Planeptune being the protagonist nation because they technically don’t exist in the real world, since Sega quit making consoles long ago. In Planeptune, Lastation, and Lowee, there are CPU Candidates, the CPUs’ little sisters, to represent the handhelds. Three years ago, the four CPUs and Nepgear, Planeptune’s Candidate, went to fight against the evil organization ASIC (meant to represent piracy), but they lost and were held captive in the Gameindustri Graveyard. In the beginning of the game, IF and Compa head to the Graveyard to save the CPUs, but only manage to free Nepgear before having to do a strategic retreat.

The game follows Nepgear as she tries to find ways to save the CPUs and defeat ASIC, who are planning to revive an evil deity named Arfoire. While all of the Neptunia games have some sort of anti-piracy message, the second game’s is the most prominent in the story and ends up being very preachy about piracy being bad. Understandable, but everyone and their mothers have heard the argument somewhere on the internet. Plus, as of right now, it’s not possible to pirate Vita games, so there’s some kind of disconnect there. Some of the console references no longer apply now that we’ve moved onto the 8th-gen of gaming (the Playstation console representative brags about not needing to pay to play online, unlike Microsoft…), but they’re fun regardless.

The story is straightforward and follows the gather info—>gather allies—>fight enemy formula to the template. It’s the exact same storyline as mk2 on the PS3, but with changes to the company mascots that show up in the game. Gust and NISA are gone (the latter might have to do with a certain scandal earlier on where a bunch of NIS employees left for Compile Heart), but Red and Broccoli are added to take their place. Cave and Falcom, who were previously DLC characters in mk2, are also in Re;Birth 2 as party members for free of charge. New to Re;Birth 2 are Tekken-chan (design inspiration is obvious), CyberConnect2 (.hack series), and MarvelousAQL (Senran Kagura), who don’t play much of a role in the main story but are recruitable. Also recruitable into the party are the oracles of each nation, who were previously storyline NPCs only. This is nice fanservice, but also creates a gameplay-and-story segregation scenario where a character is supposed to be kidnapped, yet she’s right there in your party!

There are also little references like this…

The battle system to revamped to play like Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory, and it’s likely that future games will be based off this system. That means you have normal HP and SP bars, and the turn delay is calculated in the background instead of giving you AP to work with. The battles are basically more like normal RPGs. During battle, CPUs and CPU Candidates can transform into their HDD form at the cost of some SP for a huge boost in stats. In the original game, it drained SP per turn, making the stat boost hardly worth it. They changed it here so it only uses up SP during activation, making it much more useful.

The dungeons are unchanged, as well as the enemies. The Share system is changed to be much simpler and straightforward. You manipulate the Shares of each nation through doing quests and Coliseum battles, which will raise one nation’s shares and decrease another’s by the same value. In the original game, there were capital Shares and global Shares to mess with, which was more annoying to work with. Now you only really have global Shares to bother with.

You need to move Shares around for ending flags, and this game has the most endings of all the Neptunia games. To balance things out, it also has the shortest linear clear time, and you can end the first playthrough in 20 hours or so (my clock reads 40 as of the point where I’ve seen all endings). They re-balanced the game a bit so that some of the bosses aren’t complete pushovers like they were in mk2, and that one boss in Chapter 4 that can wipe out your party in one swoop on the first turn is nerfed so it plays out like a normal boss fight (i.e. you repeatedly hitting a regenerating brick wall). The one infamous bad ending is still here, but there’s also a new ending that branches from it and it’s basically a shortcut to the True ending. By shortcut I really mean “scaling up the cliff from the steep side rather than walking up the path made for humans on a tropical vacation”, because it makes you go through the six True ending boss fights consecutively instead of giving you new dungeons to grind in and time to save between the bosses. Of course, it really is a short cut if you’re on New Game+, but you don’t get access to any of the True ending exclusive dungeons. It also gives you the exact same outcome and scenes as the True ending, which feels kind of lazy. Not enough awesome to cancel out the bad ending, IMO. At least it gives you the best sword in the game.

The major difference between this game and its PS3 counterpart is the Remake system. Throughout the game, you get ‘plans’ that unlock features and shop items if you provide the correct ingredients. It’s like item synthesis, except you also synthesize options to change dungeons/items in the dungeons, add touch foes, break the damage limit, increase EXP/money gain, and a bunch of other stuff. You kind of need a wiki open to figure out how to get some of the more obscure materials (unless you love trial-and-error), but it’s less tedious than HDN Victory where you had to manually walk in the dungeon to raise or break item-change/enemy-change flags.

There is a plan that let you automatically win battles by slashing the enemy on the field (including the tough foes), and also one that lets you gain the EXP/money/items just like if you fought them properly. That means you can turn the game into literally “Press X to win”! It makes getting items and leveling to lvl 99 reaaal fast.

To take advantage of the game being on a handheld, there’s a mini-game sort of thing called Stella’s Dungeon, where you send Stella to dungeons and she will traverse them in real time, bringing back items for you and equipment for herself. It’s also the part that takes the longest to clear because Stella resets her level for each trip and if she dies, you lose everything she gathered during that trip as well as her equipped items. On the bright side, the game runs on the Vita’s clock so you don’t need to actively participate and can abuse multiple save files.

The music and battle graphics are the same as the PS3 game. Cutscenes have changed back to using the slightly animated 2D portraits that most of the series likes to use, instead of the worse-looking 3D portraits that the PS3 game experimented with. Despite being on the Vita, the game doesn’t look any worse since it wasn’t exactly making good use of the PS3’s graphical power anyway. It runs at a smooth framerate and is much smoother than any of Compile Heart’s PS3 games that use the same system, because the Vita port is outsourced to a third party named Felistella. For anyone who’s curious, they’re a new-ish company made up of some ex-Flight-Plan staff (developers of the Summon Night series). After Fairy Fencer F, which had a terribly choppy framerate, this smoothness is very welcome.

If you haven’t played Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, then by all means pick up Re;Birth 2 instead. It’s a huge improvement over the original in terms of gameplay. If you have, then you might want to ask yourself if you’re enough of a hardcore Neptunia fan to pick up a game you’ve already experienced the story for. The gameplay is more enjoyable than the original, but if you’re the kind of user who plays this kind of game for just the characters and story, then do note that 90% of the game will be the exact same scenes you’ve seen in the PS3 game. The localized script is surprisingly unchanged, which means half the lines have extraneous “wacky” jokes stuck in there thanks to NISA’s localization team, and despite HDD form no longer draining SP per turn, there are accessory abilities that still reference that concept.

There are loads of costumes for the new company mascots, and the paid DLC outfits for the CPU Candidates are now free in-game. It’s a shame some characters don’t get alternate costumes (like Neptune, the previous and next game’s main character!).