clickbliss — Superdimension Neptunia vs. SEGA Hard Girls Review

Superdimension Neptunia vs. SEGA Hard Girls Review

Superdimension Neptunia vs. SEGA Hard Girls
Developer- Compile Heart, Felistella
Publisher- Idea Factory International
PS Vita, PS TV

If there’s anything that the Neptunia series has become infamous for, it’s the incredible amount of repetition within the games. Art, enemies, and battles are continually reused not only within a single game, but throughout the series. What keeps people coming back, however, is a breezy script full of gags and fun interactions between the established characters, as well as the excellent localization that brings a sense of self awareness to what can often be an overindulgent mess. So it’d only follow that Neptunia would crossover with SEGA Hard Girls, a multimedia project from SEGA and Degenki magazine that uses a similar premise of making moe style girls out of game consoles, SEGA consoles specifically. Unfortunately, the series trend towards bloat takes over here, and the results are less than ideal.

The first problem can be see at the title itself. As the Vs. might imply, the game’s premise involves the two groups of anthropomorphized consoles set against each other in war. As it begins IF, the Idea Factory surrogate, races through a barren landscape toward a library of time, seeking to undo the damage that the war between the factions has created and stop the rapidly disappearing history within the library itself. On its own it’s not a bad premise, and even justifies to a degree the reuse of a lot of the locations within the game, while setting up a mystery that can unravel across time.

Instead, Neptunia vs. SEGA Hard Girls fails to take advantage of this premise at all. What follows instead is a meandering plot that perpetually stalls for time. The dialogue is lengthy and wasteful, piling conversation upon conversation that fails to advance the plot. What could have been communicated in a few sentences is given paragraphs, repeating dialogue and using constant misunderstandings to prevent any thread from being resolved. The new cast of IF and Segami (the SEGA company surrogate) fail to even provide good banter, with IF being near blank and Segami’s entire character switching between “mysterious amnesiac” and “the mean girl who calls everyone else a bitch”. At some point the dialogue became so tedious I ended up skipping all the it, then scrolling back in the chatlogs just to go through it faster.

All of this is underpinned by an incredibly repetitive mission structure that sees you continually returning to the same locations to grind out battles, or pick up enemy drops, with some tired excuse to justify it. The battle system is unique, allowing free movement and some tactical considerations, but the novelty wears off quick. Aside from bosses, you’ll rarely have to actually consider your approach, and there’s plenty about it that initially seems interesting, but instead proves to be awkward to fumble with later on.

The addition of the SEGA Hard Girls proves to be empty as well. While I never particularly enjoyed their designs, the accompanying anime (Hi-sCool! Seha Girls) got by the way it mashed up SEGA games and played with the memory of them. Seems SEGA was a bit reluctant to lend its properties here, so none of that returns. That leaves nothing but the character designs themselves to do the lifting, and they’re nowhere near interesting enough to stand on their own. Neptunia vs. SEGA pays lip service to SEGA games by including them in the game’s locations, but the locations themselves don’t reflect that at all. The entire crossover seems to have been given little thought. If you’re looking for an interesting use of SEGA games, or any at all, go play Sonic & SEGA All-Stars Racing, as there is absolutely nothing here for you.

To top it all off, the game has a bizarre set of technical problems. Despite the unimpressive appearance of the game, it frequently experiences slowdown. This can even happen in basic parts of the world, when nothing intensive is occurring. Simply moving the camera can be enough to trigger a performance drop.

Megadimension Neptunia vs. SEGA Hard Girls is, on every level, a letdown. Even for the hardcore Neptunia fans I can’t see it being anything more than a chore to play through. Any interesting aspects of the game are better represented elsewhere. Even those looking for an appealing side story are better off playing Neptunia U. It even fails to meaningful explore its crossover aspects, with even Dengenki Bunko: Fighting Climax providing a more interesting use of both the SEGA Hard Girls characters and SEGA games in general. Instead, Neptunia vs. SEGA Hard Girls retains the most tedious aspects of the series while failing to deliver on any of the humor that people return for.