Hyperdimension Neptunia for PlayStation 3 Reviews by Gamers

The game plays like something from a PS2. That would actually be high praise if it were not for its poorly conceived game play elements. Even with the PS2 graphics, the frame rate seems to chug in some places, noticeably trying to navigate the dungeon maps. One of the settings allows you to increase the camera panning speed. But even in the highest setting, it is painfully slow.

Then there is the combat system. Ugh... it is like watching paint dry. The pacing is slow and tedious. The camera is pulled way back and everything is spaced far apart, except when someone runs all the way up to do some strike, and then they fall all the way back. There is tons of tedious dialog that seems to be written for an entirely different audience. That combined with the frequent panty shots and other compromising positions, seems that this game was written primarily for the stereo-typical manga crowd and less as an actual game.

The whole experience is just tired and sophomoric. Serious gamers should stay far away. I am surprised that the average rating of this is so high. I could not stand more than a couple hours, which is saying a lot since about 90% of that time is spent forwarding through countless bubblegum dialog.

The battle system and inventory system is not clear at all. With a rental, not having the game manual handy makes a good tutorial very helpful. I have played plenty of JRPGs and this is by far the least intuitive. Most you can pick up and get the hang of rather quickly. Not this game. It was thoroughly confusing.

I might have enjoyed this game when I was younger. The story is completely off the wall and full of gaming industry references (one of the few aspects I enjoyed in the short time I spent with the game) and the static art is of typical quality for a Japanese visual novel type game (which means it's great, but not altogether standout either), but everything else is why I chose to send this game before I finished it. The framerate in dungeons and battles is capped at 15 or something similar so everything looks like it's in slow motion (and you can't change the speed the game renders at). The combo system is also really confusing. Basically, instead of normal attacks the game uses a combo system similar to the old PS1 game Legend of Legaia. Every button press adds to a combo. Different combos produce different attacks which you learn as you level up. This is a great system - except for the fact that there's no way to see a combo list in battle and since there's like 60 or 70 possible combos, it gets confusing really quicly. You also can't heal manually. Instead, your characters have to learn healing skills which will only acitivate a certain percentage of the time based on certain criteria. This ends up getting really frustrating after awhile because characters will end up not healing when you really need them to, even if you have their skill equiped and the percentage high. Exploration gameplay in this game is non-existent. Movement around the world outside of dungeons is entirely menu drive. You select a short blurb from one menu, which might play a scene, then you select a dungeon from another menu. There's also a menu for shopping. Needless to say, this game can get kind of boring.