Mary Skelter Nightmares (Nathan Green)

2017 has been an interesting year for video games. We’ve had a number of excellent new releases this year, the PS4 and Xbox One have been churning on with another successful year and Nintendo rolled out the Switch, a console that many people are gushing over but I’m still 50/50 on.

Among all of this however the humble PlayStation Vita, now over 5 years old is still very much alive and kicking with new games still coming out for it.

While 2017 hasn’t been anywhere near as active in terms of vita games as 2016 had been we have still seen some very solid releases this year. Out of the 2017 line up however there has been one game that I have had my eye on since the announcement trailer. That game is Mary Skelter, a DRPG developed by Compile Heart and published by Idea Factory.

The first thing that caught my eye about the game was how much of a drastic departure it was from what Compile Heart usually does. The company is more known for it’s Neptunia series so when I saw that Mary Skelter was going to be a game with a much darker theme to it with a much heavier focus on plot I was rather surprised. Granted at the time I never thought it would actually get localized so imagine my surprise when an official localization was announced by Idea Factory.

I’ve been looking forward to playing and reviewing this game for quite a while so without any further fanfare lets begin exploring the jail.

Story:

Right off the bat Mary Skelter provides a very interesting setting and premise. The opening details that the world of Mary Skelter takes place in a sort of post apocalyptic unamed city in Japan that many years ago was taken over by a race known as Marchins while the land around them transformed in a living, breathing jail.

Our two main characters, Jack and Alice, are one of many people trapped in this living jail, forced to live their days undergoing various types of torture in order to appease the living jail they are trapped inside. Things change for the pair one day though when they are suddenly broken out of their cell by a girl who calls herself Red Riding Hood (yes, really).

They escape and join a group known as DAWN whose main goal is to escape this living jail that they’re inside. Naturally this involves Alice and Jack working with the other members of the DAWN to fight their way through various dungeons with a hope of escaping.

In terms of actual story, while not groundbreaking or anything Mary Skelter does manage to provide an interesting and rather unique premise with a decent amount of mystery and character interactions.

Overall while Mary Skelter doesn’t exactly sport a groundbreaking story what it has is certainly enjoyable and unique. It does feel like Compile Heart put a lot more effort into the premise, character interactions and the overall plot than they have in other titles which is really nice to see. It’s not going to win any awards any time soon but it’s certainly above average.

Gameplay:

Mary Skelter, as I mentioned earlier is a Dungeon Crawler RPG. DRPG’s have always been a bit of a mixed bag with me. Some of them I enjoy but some of them I just... don’t.

It doesn’t help that the last dungeon crawler title I actually reviewed was MeiQ Labyrinth of Death, a relatively mediocre DRPG also by Compile Heart. With that in mind the gameplay would really be what would make or break Mary Skelter and in this case I think Compile Heart hit the ball out of the park.

Mary Skelter plays like your traditional DRPG. Walk around dungeons in a first person perspective going between floors, solving the odd puzzle here and there and fighting enemies in turn based random encounter battles. The base DRPG formula remains relatively unchanged however that isn’t to say that Mary Skelter is just another bare bones DRPG, in fact it’s quite the opposite.

Where the gameplay in Mary Skelter starts to shine is in the smaller things that they have added or tweaked. The game adds a surprising number of unique mechanics which I haven’t seen before in other DRPG’s and they really work in the games favour.

The first and most often utilized of these mechanics is the Blood system. Alice and the various other characters you’ll run into throughout the game are known as Blood Maidens. Blood Maidens have the special power to wield what are called Blood Weapons as well as the ability to actually effectively fight the Marchins. Marchin blood also helps extend the powers of a Blood Maiden in battle allowing for higher damage output and other such goodies.

This is where the blood mechanic comes in. How this works is that each Blood Maiden has what is called a “Blood Splat Meter”. There are a few ways to fill up this meter. The first way is by exploiting enemy weak spots by using the correct elemental weakness. The second way is by performing what is called an Overkill which is usually triggered when a character deals a blow to an enemy that is more than enough to kill them (for example if I dealt 100 damage to an enemy with only 10 HP left).

Performing either of these actions fills the Blood Splat Meter which the player can then use to perform a few actions. Firstly if the meter fills up to the top then on their next turn the Blood Maiden will enter massacre mode which significantly boosts damage output as well as applying a minor HP and SP regen effect.

There is a downside though. As Blood Maidens are dealt more and more damage or get K.O’d the colour of the blood in the splat meter will start to grow darker. The darker the colour the higher the chance a Blood Maiden has of entering Blood Skelter mode.

Blood Skelter mode is something you REALLY want to avoid. Upon activation a maiden receives the buffs of massacre mode but will attack both enemies and party members without any rhyme or reason. It’s something you need to be constantly aware of while playing since if you end up overlooking it then it can come back to bite you fast.

Now there is a way to prevent and counteract blood skelter but I’ll touch on that later.

The second use of blood in the Splat Meter is through the act of Licking. Yes, you read that right, Licking.

The Lick option in the command menu lets you Lick the splattered blood off of a party member. Outside of being a bit weird this does actually have a use to it since the act of licking blood off a maiden actually applies a buff or boost to either one member or the whole party. This could be an HP regen effect, SP regen effect, stat boost etc.

The act of licking also empties the Blood Splat Meter so it can be a good way of buying yourself time if you have a maiden on the verge of entering blood skelter since it resets the meter.

Jack is also a member in the party but he plays a bit differently to the rest of the members. For starters he can’t attack, instead he has the ability to use items, guard a blood maiden to block them from damage and most importantly use his special weapon called a Mary Gun.

I say weapon but you use it more like a supporting item. The Mary Gun is the main way you prevent blood maidens from entering Blood Skelter.

In a nutshell, Jacks blood has the unique trait of being able to purge corruption from a blood maiden as well as completely reverse the effects of blood skelter. This does come at a cost though since you are literally using Jacks blood as ammunition. This means you can’t just go around spamming the thing willy nilly since you have to keep a close eye on your own blood supply.

The less blood you have remaining, the higher your chances of getting stunned and being unable to move after performing an action with the Mary Gun. You do have an option to generate blood when Jacks turn rolls around and most of the time if you play your cards right Jack’s blood supply will rarely drop below halfway (this is where strategic use of licking comes into play since it can buy you time to generate more blood to purge the corruption).

It’s a very well implemented system which adds a new layer of strategy to the gameplay while not coming off as a half assed addition they threw in at the last minute.

I’d like to also commend the games pacing in terms of how it introduces new gameplay elements. The Mary gun and the whole corruption gameplay element doesn’t even come into play until the second dungeon giving the player time to learn the ins and outs of licking and massacre mode.

It’s one of the few DRPG games I know of where gameplay mechanics are sensibly introduced at a good pace so they don’t overwhelm the player with a bunch of stuff they need to get their head around right from the first dungeon.

Outside of the battle system there are a few unique gameplay elements as well, the first of these being blood abilities.

Blood abilities basically function as ways that you can interact with the dungeon in various ways to open up new paths and solve puzzles. Each maiden has their own unique ability and they all get used pretty equally. It’s a simple system but it works.

By far the most useful ability though is Alice’s rabbit hole ability. This essentially lets you create a save point anywhere you want in a dungeon as well as being able to use this point to escape from the dungeon back to the town if you need to. You have no idea how much of a godsend this has been at times. It essentially lets you save anywhere and provides a convenient way to warp back to town in an emergency if you need to.

Another element is the jail bonus system. This is basically made up of three meters consisting of Hunger, Libido and Sleep.

Filling any of these meters up starts a roulette which will grant a bonus to the party. I found that hunger was usually the easiest one to fill up with the next being libido and finally sleep. Really outside of a bonus here and there it doesn’t do much else and it’s really the only system I consider to be half baked in terms of execution.

Finally we have Murder Hunts. This is basically a chase mechanic. How this works is that each dungeon has their own boss enemy called a Nightmare. During your exploring at random intervals the dungeon may begin to grow dark. This is the sign of a nightmare being nearby. If it stays dark long enough then the dungeons Nightmare will appear and trigger a Murder Hunt. 

When a Murder Hunt is triggered the minimap will disappear and some text will pop up showing how close/far you are from the nightmare. In order to complete the sequence you have to escape from said nightmare which is easier said than done especially when you’ve lost your minimap.

If you happen to run into a random encounter during a Murder Hunt then you’ll trigger a Booked Battle. This is the same as a normal battle except the Nightmare will continue attempting to find you and if he does will start attacking you as well. Basically you want to get out of a booked battle as soon as possible. Winning a booked battle does have an advantage though as the resulting blood splatter on the walls of the dungeon will actually light up the surrounding area.

Now you might be thinking, “why can’t I just fight the nightmare?”. Simple answer. For the vast majority of the dungeon the nightmare is invincible. There is nothing you can do but run from him. 

This whole Murder Hunt system is pretty well implimented and actually adds a pretty effective element of horror to the game since these murder hunts happen at complete random so as you explore the dungeon you’re constantly aware that you could run into a Nightmare at any moment.

The darkening of the environment and complete removal of your minimap during a murder hunt only extenuates this fear since now you have no way of actually planning where you’re going to go, how you’re going to get there etc. You have to go off what you know about the dungeon layout and just leg it and it’s incredibly effective.

My only gripe is I can’t really find a pattern in what the game actually counts as “escaping” the nightmare. I assumed it would just be distance but no patterns were popping up there. Then again you could argue that this works in the games favour since it means you don’t actually know how far you’ll have to run or for how long until you actually escape the nightmare so your mileage may vary.

What is interesting is that Murder Hunts and nightmare appearances in general only start to happen from the second floor of a dungeon onwards which is a design choice I can totally get behind since it helps compensate for the lack of a mini map in the Murder Hunts by giving the player a decent amount of time to get to grips with the overall structure of the dungeon they are in so they can do a bit of planning ahead when escaping the nightmare since they know a bit about the types of designs seen in this particular dungeon. It’s a small thing but it works incredibly well.

Speaking of Dungeons...

Graphics and Sound:

The dungeons in Mary Skelter are very well designed and this statement extends to the rest of the presentation in general. Each dungeon has a surprising amount of graphical detail put into it with its presentation. The first dungeon has a very obvious Alice in Wonderland motif going on with spinning clocks and playing cards and framed pictures on the wall shaking about on their own.

In stark contrast the second dungeon, a graveyard, has a lot of coffin looking objects which have their lids fall off when you walk past (something which actually caught me off guard the first few times) along with garden gnome looking things sitting in the background which every now and then shake and pulsate as if they were still just a little bit alive.

Every now and then though the game likes to go a bit uncanny valley with its visuals by mixing in something like an eyeball inside a wall or a red intestine like thing which stands in stark contrast to the rest of the area but really pushes home the fact that this place you’re exploring is indeed alive.

It’s this kind of attention to detail which I really like and Mary Skelter is full of stuff like this. It’s clear a lot of work and effort went into the presentation and graphic design and that has really paid off. Mary Skelter is an incredibly unique looking game which sticks out in amongst the growing pool of Vita DRPG’s. It gives the game a lot of personality and charm which makes the world of the game memorable.

Character art is very nicely drawn and each character has their own unique look. Since the majority of the characters in the game are based off characters from fairy tales a lot of the respective fairy tales are reflected in the designs of the character.

Cutscenes also use that trademark sort of pseudo 3D type look that Compile Heart games commonly have in their cutscenes and like always it looks really nice.

Sound wise it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The game has a superb opening theme and some other tracks that really stick out but some of the tracks do sound a little generic at times. On the bright side I haven’t really had any music tracks which have got on my nerves so that’s a plus.

The game has dual voice track support. The English dub is a pretty standard Idea Factory affair, not bad but not outstanding either. The Japanese dub is pretty well done though.

Sound design in dungeons is also relatively standard although there are some sound cues and use of spacial sound and stuff like that here and there so there is that.

Overall sound wise the game is fine but not groundbreaking. The visuals on the other hand are very well designed and have a lot of detail put into them and they truly help make the game stand out.

Verdict:

After MeiQ Labyrinth Of Death last year I will admit I was worried that this was going to be more of the same. Thankfully I was very wrong. Mary Skelter provides the player with an interesting and unique DRPG with well fleshed out mechanics, an interesting story and some utterly gorgeous presentation.

Mary Skelter is also commendable in that it provides a game that is accessible to players new to the DRPG genre while having more than enough in it to keep genre veterans happy. If you’ve never played a DRPG before and are looking for a good place to start then I highly recommend picking up Mary Skelter.

If you’ve played a load of DRPG’s before then I’d still recommend Mary Skelter to you. There’s a lot of unique stuff here which mixes up the DRPG formula which alone I feel makes it a worthwhile title to play.

Mary Skelter Nightmares gets a Highly Recommended

I know I haven’t been very active this year in terms of reviews. The vita might be starting to slow down release wise but there still are quality titles coming out for it and I’ll be sure to keep covering them. Until my next review this is BDVR Author Nathan Green signing off.

Mary Skelter Nightmares will be releasing September 19^th in North America and September 22^nd in Europe and Australia for PlayStation Vita.

Review Code Provided by Idea Factory International.

PEGI: 16

ESRB: M

CERO: D

OFLC: Er... Let’s just get onto that.

While Mary Skelter Nightmare will be seeing a release in Australia with an R-18 rating (mostly due to how the game has been released unmodified from its Japanese counterpart so it retains all the... awkward screen rubbing mini games which can thankfully be skipped after you’ve played them once) the game will NOT be getting a release in New Zealand due to the game not being submit to the NZ OFLC for classification.

It’s a pain in the rear end but I can’t do much about that so if you’re a kiwi like myself you’ll either need to make an overseas PSN account or import it.

If you want to support the site, check out our Patreon, or just check out our Amazon affiliate link.

Megadimension Neptunia VII (Nathan Green)

Yup, it’s time to take a look at another game from Idea Factory and Compile Heart's self-referential JRPG series which loves to poke fun at video games and the people who play them. Surprisingly Megadimension Neptunia was the first main series Neptunia game since Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory on the PS3 released in 2012. Anyway before I jump into this review I should state that I am actually looking at the recently released PC port of Megadimension and not the PS4 version that came out last year. With that out of the way lets dive right into Megadimension Neptunia VII.

Story:

When I jumped into Megadimension the first thing I noticed right off the bat was the major tonal shift in the story, especially when compared to the previous games. Megadimension's plot is quite a bit darker than previous entries and honestly in a series like Neptunia I found it a breath of fresh air. The dialogue is still very well written with the usual retro gaming references scattered around the place and the game doesn’t lose its personality despite the darker plot which I do like. It’s a good balance between silly and serious and it’s refreshing to see in a game from the Neptunia series.

Gameplay:

Now if there was one thing that the devs really tweaked and refined during the transition from Victory to Megadimension it was the gameplay. The battle system has been heavily tweaked in all the right ways and this makes me feel that gameplay wise Megadimension is the most solid of the Neptunia series.

For starters the Guard gauge which was present in Victory and all the Re;birth remakes has been dropped. In previous games enemies would have a guard gauge as well as a health gauge. When this gauge had a little bit of charge in it the amount of damage you could deal to enemies was heavily reduced meaning that in order to deal any substantial damage you had to drop the enemies guard gauge first which caused a guard break. However enemies with their guard broken would have their guard restored by around a third when they had their next turn.

This is made even worse when you take into account that you don't have access to a guard gauge so any damage you take gets lopped right off your life bar which can result in some enemies making mincemeat out of you if you aren’t careful. I could go on further about the problems this system had but basically all you need to know is that it was incredibly unbalanced so having the guard gauge removed in Megadimension is something that makes the game a whole lot more balanced.

A lot of the tweaks that were made to the battle system help to fix the balance issues that were present in previous games and almost all of these tweaks I find useful. Combo setting has been changed up a bit with a system that is far simpler than it was in previous games which also adds an element of strategy to the planning of attacks (meeting certain conditions allows for certain attacks to have extra bonuses thrown on like a 100% crit-rate or 100% accuracy).

Special attacks have been refined and you are now able to pull off special team attacks depending on where your team members are placed (i.e I might have to make a triangle formation around an enemy first before I can use a specific team attack)

Outside of battles dungeons have had a few tweaks as well. The treasure search feature present in victory has been removed (goodness knows why) and you are finally able to use healing skills outside of battles.

Meanwhile the over-world has seen a complete overhaul and now sports a Mario 3 esque design with points on a map that you move between. While moving around the map however you can run into enemies while moving over smaller points.

Overall Megadimension's gameplay is all about the tweaks and refinements. The base JRPG gameplay is still incredibly solid however with battles based on positioning and chaining together combos to deal the most pain. All in all though Megadimension in my opinion is the strongest of the series gameplay wise thanks to the multitude of tweaks and refinements made to systems throughout the game.

Presentation and performance:

Ohboy, now this is going to get interesting.

Presentation wise Megadimension does look pretty good. Environments are incredibly detailed, models extremely well done and environments are far more varied and diverse than they were in previous titles. However there is one gigantic issue present in the PC port that just ruins the whole experience for me and it is the same issue that has plagued basically all idea factory PC ports.

In a nutshell, the performance is completely and utterly abysmal and I mean abysmal. In gameplay I was barely managing 20 frames per second and that was with all the graphical effects turned on low and the resolution dropped as far as it could go.

Now if this was only a problem with my PC then I could understand that as it isn’t really built for gaming. However owners of high end PCs have also reported utterly abysmal performance with the port as well.

Things don’t get any better when I found out that the Hyperresolution Neptunia mod, a mod that let you change the texture rendering resolution in the PC ports of the re;birth games, didn’t work with Megadimension. On top of that there seem to be some graphical settings that the game simply does not let you turn off. They aren’t in the options menu and they aren’t in the config file either so graphical effects such as bloom and reflections are stuck in an enabled state. Not being able to turn off stuff like reflections is especially annoying because you’re stuck in a state where these graphical resource hogs are forcefully turned on and it really kills the experience.

So not only is the game playing like a slideshow for me but I am basically unable to watch any cutscenes because the enormous amounts of lag actually cause cutscenes (and only cutscenes) to encounter audio stutter. Yes, really.

This is my main problem with Megadimension on PC. The game is optimised so, so badly that it makes it hard for me to recommend. Heck even if your PC meets the requirements that is no 100% guarantee that you won’t run into performance issue.

Also speaking of system requirements, LOOK AT THESE THINGS.

To compare, here are the system requirements for Dark Souls 3

Yeah, I dunno about you but those seem like some pretty ridiculous system requirements.

Terrible performance aside the game does sport an excellent soundtrack as well (in my opinion it’s the best in the whole series) which is one of those few video game soundtracks that I actually went out of my way to listen to while I wasn’t playing the game so extra points for that.

Verdict:

Megadimension Neptunia VII on the PC is most certainly entertaining. If you’re a fan of the series then you’ll be right at home with this entry. I also think that for newcomers Megadimension is probably the best title to start on. However the one think that stops me from recommending the PC version of Megadimension is its gigantic performance problems. The game is so terribly optimized for PC that it almost makes buying it on pc not even worth it due to how much of a glass cannon the game is with performance. Granted the game is a turn based RPG so it doesn’t kill the experience as much as it would if these performance issues were present with say, a fps but the 20 or less fps I was getting in game coupled with the audio stutter present in almost all cutscenes makes Megadimension on PC a difficult recommendation to people who only just meet the minimum requirements and honestly it’s a damn shame.

If you want my advice then if you have a PS4 and are interested in this game, go buy it on PS4. If you already have it on PS4 there is really no reason to rebuy it on PC and if you don’t own a PS4 and want to get it on pc then proceed with caution especially if your system only just meets the system requirements (and if it doesn’t meet the requirements then don’t even bother to be honest).

In its current state Megadimension Neptunia VII on PC gets a Proceed with Caution

If these performance issues get patched out in the future then I would have no issues with upgrading Megadimension to a highly recommended but at the moment it’s just too much of a glass cannon for me to recommend confidently.

Now I know this review was shorter than my usual ones and that it’s well… a little late. To cut a long story short my sound card died while I was in the process of playing the game and I had to wait until I got a new one before I could get back to playing the game for this review.

ESRB: T

PEGI: 16

CERO: C

OFLC: M (Unrestricted)

If you liked this review, please consider supporting us on Patreon.

Game provided for review by IFI. Logo and game screenshots provided by IFI. System requirement screenshots taken by Nathan Green.

Megatagmension Blanc + Neptune VS Zombies Review

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 4^th 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 10^th in North America and May 13^th 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