Kill (?) Three: November 17th, 2020
It has been 40 hours and I am tired. This game has been, dare I say, a Stockholm syndrome-esque experience. I don't really play RPGs (last time I touched one must have been when I played NosTale back in the day, and I can assure you, I sucked at it), so I've been looking forward to seeing where "baby's first JRPG" gets me… except baby picked what is possibly the worst JRPG baby could have tried. I will openly admit, I own nearly all of the Neptunia games because the girls look cute and there were multiple cheap bundles in the past. Now, I'm reminded of what my cousin once said when discussing buying habits - "I'd just buy the first installment and see if I like it or not". I can now say that this is where I messed up. But let's get to the point.
Hyperdimension Neptunia is, without a doubt, CGDCT… in an RPG setting, for some reason. The plot is supposed to be poking fun at the real life game industry, but it ends up being more of a metaphor for… religions. I don't hate CGDCT and I know I'm not the target audience for this game, but the banter between the characters was so utterly annoying I just wished I could go back to bashing stuff. And as far as bashing stuff goes, I think the difficulty curve was good… but that thought is easily overshadowed by the samey-looking dungeons pretty much anywhere you go and the unsatisfying quest system (most of the quests being repeatable, because the game wants you to be strategic about them). Seeing the multiple ways this game pushes you to play more (achievements linked to unlocking the CPU candidates, two different endings, item making and money saving), I decided it's about time I quit. As expected from a blind (or at least semi-blind) playthrough, it wasn't done very strategically - I managed to unlock one CPU candidate, set my Shares up for the True Ending [after a session of grinding] and max out the levels on all characters. I attempted to take on the final boss three times… and then realized how done I actually am with this game. My life is a mess (for reasons completely unrelated) and forcing myself to play this game further isn't worth it. I'll mark it as "beaten" for now (because I have to say, at this point I don't even care about seeing it through to the end) and maybe one day, after I've mostly forgotten that I ever played this game, I'll be able to get back into it just to grind.
For now though, it's goodbye.
Next up: This has been long overdue!
samey-looking dungeons
This statement is misleading. The dungeons aren’t merely “samey”; they’re literally copy-pasted duplicates of each other! Yeah, I didn’t like this game, either. Honestly, I didn’t even think the difficulty curve was that great: it probably only works if you do all the side-quests at least once, but I wouldn’t know since it’s possible to miss certain side-quests if you don’t do their prerequisite quests early enough. In other words, when I made it to the final boss, no amount of strategy helped me prevent it from slowly healing back all the damage I did to it while also keeping my own party from dying.
Seems like even when I’m trying to be negative, it doesn’t come through as much as I want it to, huh :D
The boss actually sucked ass, pardon my French. I looked at a guide that said something to the effect of “remember to keep your party spread out; this boss has an attack that will effectively one-shot kill everyone if they’re not spread out”… but guess what, even if I kept it as spread out as could be, the boss would just dish out three of those attacks to eliminate each party member one by one. And what’s the deal with not having the backup party members come in upon the first party members’ deaths, anyway?
I got NepNep 1 on Vita first and then on PC with some DLC. Eventually got the trilogy because a deal was too good to pass up. but I have yet to start playing either version. SAD.
I wouldn’t hesitate to buy it for the PS if I liked it enough… but now I’m just sad about having spent on most of the series (through bundles, but still) :(
I feel this… Thankfully I don’t buy bundles that much, but I did the same mistake with 2 games - Distraint and Tropico. I had Distraint 1 on GOG, and then bought D 2 because it was in a cheap bundle. And similarly, I own both Tropico 4 and 5, and I didn’t enjoy what I played of T 4…
Hey, I have both DISTRAINT games too! The first one wasn’t anything amazing, but I’ll get to the sequel eventually. Tropico, though, I can’t say anything about…
Second one has some mechanics that make the game much easier, but I can’t say it’s a huge improvement.
I really hope there’s no more mazes…