The Hyperdimension Neptunia series is a strange beast. Ever since the series debut on the PS3 back in late 2010 it has been met with mixed responses across the board. However that hasn’t stopped Compile Heart and Idea Factory from making new games and it seems that despite a rocky start the Neptunia games since Re;Birth 1 on the vita have been some pretty dang solid RPGs.
Although
lets be honest, if you’re playing these games you’re usually
playing them because you know about how the game is basically one
giant mish mash of retro gaming references mixed in with copious
amounts of fan service to make one truly interesting little series.
However
as with many gaming series there is going to be some spin off titles
and neptunia is no exception.
Most
of these titles have found their home on the vita with Hyperdimension
Neptunia Producing Perfection starting the spin off train off then
with Hyperdevotion Noire and Hyperdimension Neptunia U following
shortly after (although Noire and U have been released on steam as
well)
The
latest addition to this group of spinoffs is Megatagmension Blanc +
Neptune VS Zombies, a hack and slash spinoff from Tamsoft, creators
of the Senran Kagura series.
I
got a lot to say about this game so without future a due lets dive
right in.
Story:
The
Neptunia games have never been known for having intricate stories
instead preferring to play the story for laughs most of the time
(although there are a few exceptions. Looking at you MK2 and Victory
II). Megatagmension is no exception to this rule. The games plot is
very tongue and cheek and it knows it with many of the visual novel
scenes in between gameplay segments being the prime example of this.
What
little plot there is though revolves around the titular Blanc and her
friends working together to film a movie to save their school of
Gameacademi. Problem is the whole school is overrun with zombies.
Instead of giving up however Blanc instead opts to use the zombies as
props in the movie and film her friends fighting them off to use as
footage for the movie.
This
is just one example of the games goofy sense of humor. When
Megatagmension isn’t talking about zombies though it is either
making references to retro video games, breaking the fourth wall into
many tiny pieces or just simply goofing around.
This
is Megatagmensions real strength when it comes to the story. While
the plot itself is pretty simple and really not that interesting the
writing is excellent packed with many moments that can and will make
you laugh out loud especially if you are a retro gamer like myself.
The retro gaming references are spot on and pretty much always got a
laugh out of me.
As
for the characters I can best sum them up as being a trail mix team of
Anime stereotypes. You have the goofball, the tsundere, the quiet
girl, the one who has a giant rack and so on.
If
you were looking for a game with a deep story you certainly won’t
find that in Megatagmension but either way the excellent writing is
bound to get a laugh out of you.
Gameplay:
So
before I start I’m going to be splitting this section up into 2
parts. One talking about the single player and the other about the
multiplayer (yes this game does have multiplayer but I’ll come to
that). I’ll start with the single player.
The
single player campaign is mission based. You pick a scene (level) and
then pick a cut (quest) and off you go. There are a total of 12
scenes in the game with around about 5 or 6 quests each.
Quests
usually consist of having to kill a number of enemies. Megatagmension
is a hack and slash game similar to the likes of Senran Kagura and it
is no surprise considering that Tamsoft, the developers of Senran
Kagura also developed this game.
If
you’ve ever played a Senran Kagura game then you should be right at
home here. Each character has a light and heavy attack (light mapped
to the Square button and Heavy to the Triangle button) as well as a
dodge, jump and access to special moves. You can chain together
attacks to pull off combos as
you would expect. You also have the ability to hit enemies into the
air and “juggle” them in mid air, a feature also seen in the
Senran Kagura series. You can also lock on to enemies using the L
button and guard using the R button.
In
the way of special attacks you have 2 kinds. You have normal skills
and then you have SP
skills.
Normal
skills are activated by holding the R button and pressing one of the
face buttons. As expected these will deal a large chunk of damage to
enemies. The interesting thing about normal skills is that they don’t
use any of your EXE gauge (More on that in a moment) and instead just
have a cooldown time.
SP
skills are activated by holding both L and R then pushing either
Square or Triangle. SP skills make use of your EXE gauge, basically
your SP meter which fills up overtime as you deal and take damage. To
pull off an SP skill your EXE gauge needs to be above 30% though so
you can’t just fill it up a little bit and spam SP skills.
You
can also Press X while holding L and R to activate your CPU mode, a
mode where your character transforms and deals more damage as well as
just receiving buffs all around. This slowly drains your EXE gauge
though so you can’t just go wild with it.
Finally
holding L and R and pressing Circle allows you to switch characters.
This doesn’t actually require anything from your EXE gauge however
because each character has their own separate EXE gauge swapping
characters will change how much you have available.
Whatever
character is swapped out will also slowly recover HP which is useful
if one of your characters is running a little low.
There
are also support characters which can be activated when charged by
pressing square and triangle or square and X at the same time.
Finally the select button opens up your item menu and lets you use
items.
The
combat system itself I found quite enjoyable. There’s just
something satisfying about mowing down a bunch of enemies by chaining
together combos and pulling off the odd special attack. Dashing is
also incredibly useful as well and is basically required if you want
to avoid getting hurt by a large enemy who is charging up an attack.
It probably also helps that Tamsoft are no stranger to hack and slash
games meaning that they have this gameplay style down to an art at
this point which leaves us with a fun and polished combat system.
It
also helps that the game has a pretty large character roster with
each character playing differently to others (with a few exceptions
however). This certainly helps add more variety to the gameplay as
each character has their own distinct fighting style. For example
Neptune uses swords which are excellent for close combat and are
pretty balanced all around while Uni instead opts for using guns
making her extremely useful for taking out larger enemies from a
distance although she can’t move while shooting or reloading.
The
fact that each character has a different fighting style is something
I quite like as it makes me want to go back and play around with each
of the characters so I can experiment with different styles. However,
this leads me onto the first problem I have with the single player
campaign. You see, all characters start at level 1, even new
characters that pop up halfway through the game, so if you want to
level up a character so they don’t get killed in the later levels
you have to go all the way back to the early quests and grind on them
to get the character up to speed.
Now
this wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for a few things. For one,
quests are short, like, REALLY short. At the time of this review I
have played halfway through the single player campaign and around 90%
of the missions I have been able to finish in less than 2 minutes.
The
other part of the problem is the number of quests... There isn’t
many and they are all relatively short with a few exceptions.
Now
you’re probably thinking “Why don’t you just go and play the
10% of the quests that are actually of a decent length to level your
characters?”. Well the problem here is that these quests only start
popping up in around scene 3 or 4 and taking a level 1 character into
a quest designed for a level 10 character is usually not going to end
well. This means that to get any new characters I want to use up to
speed I have to grind the same single player early missions over and
over and over again and it gets extremely repetitive.
I
mean, playing the same mission over and over is one thing, playing
the same mission that takes you less than 2 minutes to clear over and
over again is another thing entirely. It just gets drawn out and
boring and it’s a real shame because it really puts me off actually
wanting to experiment with the other characters because I know I’ll
have to grind them for a little bit in early missions to get them up
to speed.
Granted
you could always put said character in the second slot and play the
higher level missions with a higher level character but it’s still
annoying that I have to do stuff like that in the first place. It
isn’t a deal breaker but I do find it annoying.
The
other issue with the single player is the complete lack of
sidequests. In Neptunia U not only did you have sidequests that
popped up here and there but you had post game content as well.
Megatagmension has none of that and it honestly feels like step
backwards in terms of the single player. It’s still fun but there
just isn’t enough there.
As
for mechanics outside of the game you have a shop where you can go
and buy new weapons, accessories and other bits and pieces. You can
also fuse patches in the shop which are special little items which
you can equip to your weapon to add buffs, change its type and all
that.
Thing
is, I have never found a use for fusing patches because patches drop
all the time from normal enemies in gameplay. I already have more
patches than I know what to do with so I don’t really feel the need
to fuse more. It just feels a little tacked on.
Weapons
wise each character has 4 weapons each one being more powerful than
the last. Weapons are character specific so each character will have
a maximum of 4 weapons, no more and no less.
Really
once you have the 4th weapon for a character there is no
reason to use anything else. Sure you have less room to apply patches
but it doesn’t really matter much anyway.
Then we have accessories. These are purely cosmetic and can be applied to
characters to change how they look during play. Each character can
have a maximum of 5 accessories equipped and there is quite a lot of
them to choose from. Probably the coolest thing with accessories is
the amount of control you have over where you can place them. You
have preset positions but you can also manually change the position,
rotation and size of an accessory to your liking which is pretty darn
neat. The level of customization in the game is quite impressive and
when playing online you’re bound to see customized Neps made by
other players.
Finally
we have the treasure menu. During the game you’ll be able to pick
up pieces of special game consoles and once you have all 5 pieces you
can go to the treasure room and construct the console to get a new
costume for characters. Again this is pretty cool and while the
costumes are usually nothing too special there is just something
satisfying about getting a new one.
Overall,
the single player, while fun, is a little bit lacking to really be
something worth coming back to and it’s a real shame. What is there
is fun but the main problem is there isn’t enough of it. Let’s
just cross our fingers and hope some new stuff gets patched in later
on.
Really
I’d consider Megatagmensions single player akin to icing on a cake.
It tastes nice but it isn’t really that substantial and leaves you
wanting more.
Multiplayer:
However
if the single player is Megatagmensions icing on the cake then the
multiplayer is most definetly the cake itself.
Megatagmension
is the first Neptunia game to feature multiplayer and really the
multiplayer is where Megatagmension really shines.
Multiplayer
plays pretty much the same as single player although there are a few
differences which I will go over now.
Firstly
in multiplayer you can only take one character with you instead of
having a second one on standby. Considering you’re playing with
other people though this makes sense.
Multiplayer
also removes the ability to go into HDD mode. Weirdly enough a
characters HDD mode and their normal mode are considered as separate
characters on the character select so you can pick either normal or
HDD instead of having the ability to swap between them. Personally I
find this a little weird but it isn’t like it breaks anything.
Lastly
you can’t use assist characters, again a weird removal but I never
really used them in single player anyway so it doesn’t matter much.
Multiplayer
comes in 2 flavours, ad-hoc and Online. I only tested online mode as
I had no one to Ad-Hoc with. There is also rankings which will rank
you on leaderboards depending on how good your online performance is.
Up
to 4 players are able to play at once during online play and when you
do have 4 people playing it makes for some hectic and insane fun.
Creating
a lobby is a simple affair, once in a lobby you can change your
character, change their equipment, access the shop and treasure area
and access the settings. Now while Megatagmension does not support
voice chat it does have around 100 preset phrases which you can use
to communicate with other players both in the lobby and during the
game and ALL of these phrases are fully voiced no matter if you are
playing in English or Japanese. The preset phrases are very useful
and they have phrases for basically any situation including one for
telling people you have a bad connection (which I had to use a lot).
Quest
wise the multiplayer does something interesting and has a completely
different set of quests to the single player. Not only that but these
quests are of decent length and most actually take at least 5 minutes
to complete. To add to that the game has 3 daily quests. 1 easy, 1
medium and 1 hard and these change every day. Quest wise the
multiplayer gives you A LOT more to do than the single player does
especially with the daily quests.
Gameplay
in multiplayer itself is basically unchanged from how it was in
single player however characters who run out of HP will be hit with a
30 second respawn time. However these characters can also be revived
by other players provided they have enough in their EXE gauge. Items
can also be used like in single player to recover HP or boost stats
for a short period of time.
Now
the most important part of any online game is how well it performs
and well... Megatagmension performs excellent online. In fact in
online play it was one of the most smooth and lag free experiences I
had ever played on my PS Vita when it comes to online and that is
saying a lot. I experienced very few issues and minimal lag when
playing online although when playing with 4 players the game did noticeably slow down a little bit but it wasn’t enough to effect the
experience. The lack of voice chat wasn’t much of a problem either
and the preset phrases proved more than ample during play.
Really
upon playing the multiplayer I could see that it was really what they
were wanting to push with this title. The multiplayer is leaps and
bounds ahead of the single player in terms of the level of content
and the amount of work that seems to have gone into the multiplayer
in general. To add to that all characters are unlocked from the start
in multiplayer mode allowing for players to jump right in without
even touching the single player campaign. Personally I’m glad they
made it like that because having to trawl through the single player
just to get all the characters in the multiplayer would suck so it’s
nice to have them all available right off the bat in multiplayer.
Overall
I will have to say that the multiplayer component is certainly the
more enjoyable part of the game and is what you will be spending most
of your time on. It is kind of annoying that they just sort of tacked
on a single player campaign but the amount of fun you can have in
multiplayer does make up for most of that.
Graphics
and Sound:
Graphically
the game looks pretty darn good. Character models are well made and
are animated smoothly and all equippable items and accessories will
make cosmetic changes to the characters. It’s nice to see games go
the extra mile to make it so that changing items and weapons actually
changes how your character looks.
The
visual novel sections are graphically pleasing and feature the same
live2D style that was present in Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth
onwards. Characters will blink, breathe and all of that in these
visual novel sections and it really does make them look that little
bit more lifelike rather than just static drawings on a screen.
Performance
wise the game performs at a rock solid 30 fps which makes for quite a
nice experience while playing.
Sound
wise the game is also pretty good although the soundtrack is not
completely original. Some tracks from previous Neptunia games get
reused in Megatagmension although the tracks that are original are
pretty good.
I’d
also like to mention the voice acting, Megatagmension has 2 voice
tracks you can choose from, English and Japanese. Both of these voice
tracks are pretty good but the English one is downright excellent.
The Neptunia games have always had a reputation for high quality
English dubs and Megatagmension is no exception with outstanding
performances across the board. Plus the game is fully voice acted,
every single visual novel scene has full voice acting in both vocal
tracks which is a very nice addition.
Verdict:
Megatagmension
is an interesting one. On one hand the single player is very lacking
and feels tacked on but on the other hand the multiplayer is
extremely fun and makes up for most of the shortcomings of the single
player.
The
amount of mileage you are going to get out of this game is really
going to depend on how much you like the Neptunia series. If you’re
like me and enjoy the series then most likely you will really enjoy
Megatagmension but if you’re completely new to the series and are
wanting to get into it then this really isn’t the best game to
start on.
If
you are still on the fence about this game then I’d recommend to
wait for a price drop. For how good the multiplayer is the rather
lacking single player is a little bit of a stretch for a full price
game. Neptunia fans will probably pick this up on the day of release
and really this is a Neptunia game for Neptunia fans. However if you
are looking for a hack and slash with solid multiplayer then give
Megatagmension a look, just wait for a price drop first.
For
fans of the series Megatagmension gets a Highly Recommended
For
people not familiar with the series Megatagmension gets a Wait for a
sale.
2016
is looking like it is going to be a really good year for the Vita in
terms of games so if you liked this review then keep your eyes on the
blog for any future Vita reviews from myself!
BDVR
Guest Author Nathan Green signing off
MegaTagmension
Blanc + Neptune VS Zombies releases on May 10th in North
America and May 13th in Europe
PEGI:
12
ESRB:
T
CERO:
D
OFLC:
M (Unrestricted, Estimated Rating)
Special
thanks to a friend who owned a copy of Neptunia U for providing me
with some information on the differences between the two games.
Review copy provided by Idea Factory International. Screenshots from Idea Factory International ideafintl.com
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