December 2025 Progress Report

This is easily one of the worst Hyperdimension Neptunia games ever made, and as someone who 100% Hyperdimension 1, 2, 3, and Cyberdimension 4, I can’t stress enough that this game should be skipped. While it is mercifully less grindy than earlier entries, Super Neptunia RPG is made with pure Spaghetti Code and it genuinely left me with the impression that even the developers didn’t want to work on this. To top that off, the story is distressingly bland, the entire 20-30+ hour plot is basically ‘2D games are better than 3D’ with you convincing the villains to change their mind to accept 3D games. It’s shallow and pointless, and only devoted Neptunia fans will pretend there is something of substance here, as there is barely any humor other than references to previous titles.

Gameplay wise, there is a interesting positioning mechanic where characters change their ability depending on where they are located in a formation, which you are meant to rotate to defend or attack against a variety of enemies. It’s a solid idea I really liked, except the mess of code turns this into an incredibly frustrating experience due to how broken the game is. An example, I needed Vert to learn the fire skill ‘Ignisa’ to deal with forest enemies who are weak to fire, she mastered the skill but was unable to use it because there were only three party members, instead of the max of four. When I did have a full party, the skill would sometimes vanish entirely regardless of where she was in the formation. To make things worse, the game constantly shifts your party members around, removing and adding them multiple times per chapter, which has the FUN broken mechanic of resetting everyone’s skills back to the basic attack skill – so instead of building cool defense strategies and elemental setups, I spent more time than I ever wanted to shuffling characters around, reapplying skills and passives with every literal party change the game threw at me, and trying to remember who has what skill, since abilities would vanish and reappear at different positions, with no pattern I could find.

The artstyle only makes this game worse. I would have called it AI slop if the game hadn’t come out in 2019. Instead, it looks like the jumbled, chaotic mess early AI would have spewed out if you prompted it to generate a sprawling fantasy city; Roads lead to nowhere, paths splitting in odd and awkward directions with random gaps you can see the sky through, windows of various sizes, shapes, and at weird spots on a wall may have a bridge jutting out from them, and structures warped together with clashing building styles using a confetti of different materials. The most normal city is Lowee, and it’s barely qualified to be called one as it has four entire structures, one of which is a bridge that’s stacked at four different heights. Rather than feeling like it’s a unique style, it left me confused on how any of this was approved, or why it was created in the first place.

I say this with all my heart; play something else. Games demand time, attention, and patience, and Super Neptunia RPG does nothing to earn any of it. If you care at all about your personal time, your enjoyment, your positive experiences, walk away and play something that at the very least, the developers loved making and will let you be happy.

20-80+ hours to complete, Paleo Pines is an adorable dinosaur ranching and farming sim where you and your dinosaur companion, Lucky, move to the beautiful and vibrant island of Paleo Pines famed for its large dinosaur population and more importantly, its herd of Parasaurolophus. Upon arrival, you unfortunately learn from the townsfolk that the Parasaurolophus haven’t been seen in a very long time; but with a new large home to settle into and a sprawling property to work, take up farming, ranching, and befriending the local dinosaurs and search for the missing herd so that Lucky can join a family of their own.

I honestly didn’t expect to give Paleo Pines a negative review, but about ten-ish hours in I realized roughly 85% of the development effort went into the explorable island and the dinosaurs, and everything else was rushed and left unfinished. You are given a house you can’t enter, furniture you can only place outside, and a cooking system that somehow didn’t quite make it to the finish line. You grow a ton of various produce and ingredients, and there are about eighty recipes in the game with their own drawn icons so I was expecting to be able to own a proper kitchen at some point – but your primary cooking set up for the entire game is a communal stone bowl filled with water, sitting on some wood, by a pond. It took me thirty in-game hours to find and purchase my own primitive cooking tool and I genuinely don’t understand as to why it’s locked before you reach the late game area, as this is something you should have been able to purchase, or make, at the start of the game. But this is just the start of how unfinished the game feels.

The quests are easily the worst part of the entire game. Every townsperson has a questline, but they are poorly written and seem to exist only as meaningless busywork to extend your playtime by about sixty hours. They are so long and drawn out I completed the entire main storyline before finishing a single NPC’s questline, or even before getting halfway to maxing out anyone’s friendship. The side quests available from the community board exists to give you friendship points by completing a npcs request, but they are so minimal they are barely worth doing. Nearly all of them are repetitive tasks like “bring me fiber/stone/wood” or “find/deliver a hat/lucky trinket/notebook.” Even worse, the “find” quests where you locate a missing item are broken or poorly designed, as the item is completely INVISIBLE and can only be found by standing directly on top of it and searching for the “pick up” prompt. While Paleo Pines is seriously adorable and petting dinosaurs is all good and fun, beyond that surface level appeal, it genuinely doesn’t have anything going for it.