Recent reviews by CipherZeroSixtyFour

Yet another trainwreck of a Neptunia spinoff that gets a very undeserved "Very Positive" rating. That's basically three in a row for Neptunia action spinoffs. I'm starting to think the fanbase doesn't really care for getting even a decent game, and would be happy enough just getting whatever has Neptune's gob plastered on the cover. IF/CH can sell this game for 60 bucks, and the general fanbase would be more than willing to pay 80 dollars for it.

Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online is an action-based Neptunia spinoff, although dissimilar to Action Unleashed and MegaTag, this game is not a musou/Warriors type game. This means that you're no longer fighting off hordes of brain-dead enemies. Instead, they have innovated by making you fight brain-dead enemies in groups of five. Seriously, the enemy AI hasn't improved from the previous two games, although it was kind of understandable in Action Unleashed and MegaTag because they were, you know, Warriors type games.

The story is... well, it's stupid. It's one of those stories that can only happen if everyone in it has no brain. To give you an idea of how stupid the story can get, there's a time where someone manages to hack the MMO (the story involves the characters beta testing the MMO) and spawn high level enemies in the starting area. The solution? Why, send all the high level players to clear out the enemies, of course! And then there's another time where the main characters are sent to hunt down a cheater... by killing their in-game avatar? Have Idea Factory/Compile Heart's writers ever actually played an online game in their life?

The combat hasn't really improved much, either, in fact, you only have one attack button now, and everything else is special attacks. While they have tried to make combat more involved by giving enemies various elemental weaknesses, you can just ignore them for the most part and just brute force your way through combat with the exception of bosses and Metal Dogoos, who require you to spam elemental skills to break their guard so that you can actually do some damage. The problem with this though, is that combat is extremely static, where you have a guard break phase that involves using whatever elemental attacks you have, then a damage phase where you can no longer use your heavy hitting special attacks because you wasted all your mana spamming elemental attacks. While it is possible to kill bosses without guard breaks, it will make the bossfights take much longer, and trust me, you don't want to be playing this game for any longer than you should.

Part of the problem with the combat is the characters themselves. You can play as the 4 CPUs, their Candidates, and the Angels, but for the most part, they're all very similar in general gameplay. Each one of them is capable of doing elemental damage, and each one of them has highly damaging special attacks. Every character is capable of blocking and parrying, regardless of what archetype they are, meaning that Uni, the Thief, can block and parry just as effectively as Neptune, the Paladin. Ranged characters are redundant because everyone can use ranged elemental attacks, and it's not like it's an advantage to fight from far anyway when the AI is so dumb and/or easily exploited that melee characters won't have a hard time. There is basically zero balancing between the characters. The only exceptions are Neptune and Blanc, who are the only ones who have healing spells.

Also, why is it that when your allies die, it's okay, but when you specifically die, you go back to the main city? I hate games that do this for no reason. At least Dragon's Dogma has a lore reason for why it's acceptable for your teammates to die, but not you. This game has no reason at all. If Blanc dies while I'm playing as her, it's an instant lose, but when the AI is playing as her, it's totally fine for her to die as many time as she pleases. That makes no sense.

And don't get me started on the friendly AI. It's so stupid. And it's not even an endearing kind of stupid like in Dragon's Dogma (and at least in DD, they have moments of brilliance, while 4GO has none). Anyone who says that Cyberpunk 2077 has the dumbest AI should play this game, because the stupidity of the friendly AI in this game will give Cyberpunk AI a run for its money. The friendly AI in this game is so stupid that they can't even jump. They just teleport to where you are when they encounter even the slightest ledge. Don't be surprised when you develop myopia (or if it worsens if you already have it) after playing this game, because whenever your allies teleport to you, they do so with the most obnoxiously bright special effect I've ever seen in my life. It beats out Holy-spamming White Mages in FFXIV.

The AI also regularly runs into enemy attacks, fails to block or dodge, and have no strategy in fights besides "charge and die". You can command them to do general things like saving their SP (so that you can switch to them for damage phases because they're stupid), hang back and play more defensively, or play as aggressively as possible. The commands work for the most part, but only a handful of them are actually useful.

To give a little bit of credit, the dungeons you go through are more interesting than the arenas of Action Unleashed and MegaTag, but to take away that little bit of credit, the dungeons are ultimately just corridors you run through to get to the boss at the end. While that might sound like any dungeon in an MMO, at least an MMO dungeon is interesting to fight through, with minibosses in between and some nice setpieces every now and then to break up the monotony. In 4GO, you just fight regular enemies all the way until the boss room. There's even one dungeon where the developers must have gotten lazy and just placed a bunch of default Unreal Engine assets in a blank hallway. They couldn't be less subtle about how much they don't give a ♥♥♥♥.

This game boasts an online feature, meaning you can torture some friends to play this rubbish with you on the world's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ netcode. I'm not kidding, the online function is complete arse candle. Think of the worst online experience you've ever had and multiply it by a hundred, and you pretty much get an idea of what it's like to play this game online. Even if you do get an online game going, the multiplayer just boils down to completing a single dungeon and that's your lot. If any of you die in battle, you are immediately removed from the game, unable to rejoin, and whoever remains is just left to continue on their own.

The PC port is a mess, too. I can't run this game at a smooth 60 FPS on medium settings. My PC isn't a beast, boasting only a GTX 1050, but that's way higher than the GTX 960 they're recommending for the "Recommended System Requirements".

This game truly disappointed me. I actually had some hopes for 4GO, but the game fell flat. This is the THIRD action game that the trifecta of Idea Factory, Compile Heart, and Tamsoft have made together. And this is the THIRD time that they made a mediocre action game. You'd think that by the THIRD game, they'd figure something out. I only expected a decent game, nothing too spectacular or game-changing, but I guess even that is too much to hope for.

Another Neptunia action game that 100% does not deserve its Very Positive rating. It doesn't even deserve anything higher than a Mixed rating.

This game is what you get when you don't expect anything better from the masterminds of not giving a rat's bum about making actually good games.

MegaTagmension Blanc + Neptune VS Zombies (which I will now shorten to ZombieNep because any game that tries to have "omg quirkyyyyy!!! long name!!! XDD" is just annoying at this point) is a lot like the previous Neptunia action game - completely not worth your time and money, ahem, I mean, it's a Warriors game with none of the fun of playing one.

I shall now copy and paste some parts of the review I made for Action Unleashed, to reflect how the developers copied and pasted some parts of Action Unleashed to make this game.



This game is a perfect description of me: mostly soulless, boring, and the things it does, others do way better for the same price. This is a game that got Very Positive solely because of the franchise it is so sloppily stapled to. If any other developer were to make something of this calibre, it would get laughed out the door. A tried and true example of "Why spend money to make a good game, when our horny fans will buy it anyway?"

The enemies lack any sort of intelligence, with their sole purpose seemingly to just merge their body with yours in the vain hopes of dealing damage. You'd have to play like a complete idiot to even give them a fighting chance. I get that this is a Warriors type game, but even other Warriors games don't have infantry that are this incompetent at doing their one, sole job. And for ♥♥♥♥♥ sake, sometimes the enemies can't even hit you while you're standing right next to them.

Combat is incredibly boring and repetitive - even more so than Dynasty Warriors 9 despite only being a mere fraction of the length. It's your standard Warriors affair with large, sweeping normal and heavy attacks, special attacks for quick area clearing, and EXE Drives for killing anyone in the same postal code. Yet, for some reason, despite having all the basic fundamentals of a Warriors game, it's nowhere near as fun as one should be. The balancing between the playable characters is completely non-existent, and you can steamroll the entire game in your sleep - the state in which the game most certainly would bore you into.

Stages never last longer than three minutes. And to all those that would inevitably say "It's a portable console game, the levels aren't supposed to be long". Two words: Monster Hunter. Hell, Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker was on the PSP, so any arguments that portable console games are supposed to have short levels are invalid.

You can tell they really just wanted to phone it in - an astounding lack of passion and effort that is honestly almost on par with the annual EA sports games.

I won't even talk about the story because it's forgettable. I dunno, something happens at a school or something and it involves zombies, I guess, and everything that happens in between are a blurry haze. At the very least, most of the game is voice acted in English for all you dub fans, and the writing for the banter between characters is alright. But that's it, really, the only good things about this game don't even pertain to what's arguably the most important aspect of an action-oriented video game - the gameplay.



Now for the things that are different.

At the very least they made new maps... that they don't even use in their entirety, and are entirely flat, and uninteresting. Christ almighty, it's like for every step forward they take, they run back eight hundred miles.

You can block... In a game where most characters have evade dashes that allow them to span the entire Great Wall of China, so it's completely pointless... Unless you're abusing its ability to cancel the recovery animation of evade dashes, meaning the only reasonable purpose of the block is so you can dodge faster. So much for guarding.

There's a character progression system. It's basic, but it's there.

There's online multiplayer... with some of the worst idiot netcode I've seen in my life. Playing CS 1.6 with a 56k modem is a far smoother experience than ZombieNep's pitiful excuse for online multiplayer. Crashes can happen for any reason. Switch character in the lobby? Crash. Fight a boss in an empty arena with your best mate? Crash. Just launching the damn multiplayer? Crash. I'm all but certain that if your PC detects you coughing too loudly in multiplayer it would probably be grounds to cause the game to crash.



The optimisation is of questionable quality. The game seems to suffer from slowdown at time, especially during sections of heavy combat. It's not a frequent occurrence, but it happens enough for me to notice. My rig isn't the best, but you'd think a GTX 1050, 16 GB of RAM, and an i7 would be able to run a Vita port.


Look, if you wanted a good musou or Warriors game... Senran Kagura and the actual Warriors games exist. There's no need to waste your time and money on this one like I have. Don't even buy this game on sale. Don't reward mediocrity.

I've always felt like there were very few games that allowed you to smash a dragon's face in with a giant slab of bone whilst your friend cartwheels down its spine with twin blades while another friend rains down artillery from afar and an overlevelled random plays sick beats on a giant bagpipe.

Action Unleashed?

More like Mediocrity Unchained.

Hyperdimension Neptunia U: Action Unleashed is a game created by the same people who brought you Senran Kagura, but for some reason, this game lacks any of the polish of a Senran Kagura game.

This game is a perfect description of me: mostly soulless, boring, and the things it does, others do way better for the same price. This is a game that got Very Positive solely because of the franchise it is so sloppily stapled to. If any other developer were to make something of this calibre, it would get laughed out the door. A tried and true example of "Why spend money to make a good game, when our horny fans will buy it anyway?"

The enemies lack any sort of intelligence, with their sole purpose seemingly to just merge their body with yours in the vain hopes of dealing damage. You'd have to play like a complete idiot and force yourself down to Level 1 with an accessory to give them a fighting chance. I get that this is a Warriors type game, but even other Warriors games don't have infantry that are this incompetent at doing their one, sole job. The enemies in this game are so magnetised to the player character, that sometimes, they forget how to go around obstacles, it's like their pathfinding system was designed by someone who only knew how to draw a straight line.

And when the game does provide difficulty, it's so cheap. Get the enemies to 200 levels higher than the level cap? Check. Bloat enemy health to the point where it takes forever to kill them? Check. Have them deal lots of damage in one hit that you can't see coming because of the amount of enemies thrown at you at once? Check. These problems are prevalent and compunded in the stupid 1 dollar DLC they had the audacity to include. Even on sale, the DLC isn't worth it, and that's something I never thought I'd say about a DLC that costs the same as a can of soda. I beat the DLC quests, by the way, but do I feel fulfilled? Do I feel the same thing I feel when overcoming insurmountable odds in other, much better designed games? No.

They make this whole show of the clothes break mechanic, and how it's supposed to make you stronger whilst making you more vulnerable to damage, but it's really just a thinly veiled attempt to give this game depth, as if they suddenly started caring about the game.

The levels are ripped straight out of the PS3 and Re;Birth games with no real effort to tailor them to an action-oriented game, aside from putting some stupid barrier that prevents you from getting out of the immediate area you spawn in. They quite literally lock you into a box to fight some boring enemies, and then once the game decides you've killed enough, they mercifully let you into another box where you do the same thing again. And sometimes, they don't even do that. Sometimes you just stay in that one specific part of the larger dungeon and have you do the entire mission there. You can tell they really just wanted to phone it in - an astounding lack of passion and effort that is honestly almost on par with the annual EA sports games.

I won't even talk about the story because it's about as forgettable a piece of blank paper I put back into a drawer some time ago, and even then I can still remember the vaguely phallic shaped creases on that paper. At the very least, the entire game is voice acted in English, and the writing for the banter between characters is alright. But that's it, really, the only good things about this game don't even pertain to what's arguably the most important aspect of a video game - the gameplay.



All in all, there's almost nothing positive to say about this game. It sells on its name alone. It is reviewed well solely because of its name. If anyone else made something like this, it would get ripped apart. It's a shame, really. Because now Compile Heart and Idea Factory don't have any reason to try anymore. They can just keep releasing mediocre games and they'll still profit. In fact, the very next action game in the Neptunia series is an example of that very fact. MegaTagmension Blanc + Neptune VS Zombies is pretty much the same level of boring as this game is, and that game sold and reviewed well too.

Don't even buy this game on a sale. Just get some poor schmuck to buy it for you. Your money is better spent on good indie games that actually deserve it.

I randomly walked into a room as a Space Invader and got to listen to a dude talking about the history of Denmark.

I now have a PhD in Danish history.

10/10 would learn about history in an overglorified (in a good way) chat room again.

If you're a God Eater fan, you've probably already bought this game, or are thinking of buying it.

First things first, let me just say the multiplayer in this game is absolute ass candle. Don't even try. Get the game on PSVITA or PS4 if you want to play multiplayer.

I personally have not heard of God Eater prior to my purchase of this game (and by extension, God Eater Resurrection), but the game has somewhat sucked me in, enough for me to amass a grand total of 360+ hours across both games.

Now, I say "somewhat" because these are games I never really play for more than a few hours at a time, but I always seem to come back for more, sort of like an incredibly indecisive drug addict looking at his stash and is unable to decide whether or not to love or hate what he's doing. But there has to be something that makes him keep coming back, otherwise he still wouldn't be hoarding his stash to begin with.

And that's how I feel about this game. Indecisive. I don't know whether I like it or hate it. And because Steam has no "meh" button, I'm recommending it, because I still do play it. Sometimes. Maybe. If I can be arsed.

The story for both games is your usual post-apocalyptic affair, you've heard it before, Humans on the brink of extinction from monsters, Humans fight back, turns out the monsters are part of an apocalypse to wipe Humans out, Humanity prevails because of course they do. It's your standard post-apocalyptic story, only in this case, it's done with waifus and husbandos, and enough filler to compete with most shounen anime.

But story is story, right? We play games mainly for gameplay, and how does God Eater stack up? This game does make you feel like you are fighting massive monsters. Not quite Monster Hunter, Dark Souls or Dragon's Dogma kind of monster feels, but it's there. You never really fight more than five at a time, but each one of them is quite the endurance test, with some taking upwards to ten minutes to kill. The combat, while having all the klunkiness of Monster Hunter weighed down by a sack of bricks, is also fast-paced, particularly in Resurrection. It also has elements of Dark Souls, if you can can believe it, because enemies have exploitative attack patterns where they go ham on you for a few seconds, and then take a second to recover, which is your time to strike. It should be noted that you have no i-frames while dodging, which I have still not gotten used to.

Some monsters are harder to deal with than others, and I swear some of the monsters are more suited to a Devil May Cry game with how fast they move around. It can feel like you and the monsters aren't playing on even terms - where you play at the speed of Monster Hunter, and they play at the speed of Bayonetta - and just because they're huge doesn't mean they'll move slow. Coupled with the fact that 90% of all attacks send you flying, it can feel more frustrating than being given homework for the weekend.

During missions you can bring in AI teammates, and their helpfulness varies. Sometimes they're halfway decent, and other times their usefulness is limited to being distractions for the enemy while you engrave your name into the monster's buttocks. A bit of advice: Always bring at least one gunner-only temmate with you with "Heal Bullet" skill. They can immediately heal you if you're low on health. However, your teammates seem oblivious to their other teammates. They assist YOU and YOU only. They won't assist other teammates no matter how badly they're getting their asses kicked, they will stubbornly refuse to help anyone but YOU.

You can craft various weapons using materials you get from breaking Aragami bonds, and to survive in this game, you have to regularly upgrade your weapons, craft new ones to suit the type of Aragami you'll be slaying, and install various perks and skills into those weapons to increase your efficiency with slaying monsters. If you spend time optimising your weapons, installing perks and choosing the right Preator Styles (Resurrection only) / Blood Arts (Rage Burst only), the game will be alright to play through, discounting the few ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ missions the game forces you to complete.

The gameplay, for the most part is alright. Fun, even. The one thing, the one very major thing that makes it all crash down: the repetition.

The games are undeniably repetitive. And both games are guilty of very slow starts and lots of filler missions in between the missions that actually advance the story. Not to mention that there aren't many locations in God Eater, so you'll end up visiting the same ten locations over and over and over again. The places you fight in aren't even that visually interesting. You have dystopian ruin, dystopian ruin, dystopian ruin, and, my favourite, dystopian ruin. Sure, Rage Burst has some new locations, but it's not much to alleviate the number of times you'll be revisiting them.

The games are really long, too, which further worsens the repetition. Resurrection took me around 40-50 hours to beat, and Rage Burst took me about 60-70 hours, bearing in mind that I chased after some optional missions to get more materials, and that in Rage Burst, there is more side stuff to do. Just keep in mind that these are not games you can just play for six hours and beat them. The games certainly have a lot of content, but most it is just more monster-killing missions.

Surprisingly enough, both games have endgame missions (which is more than can be said of Destiny 2), and the first thing I thought to myself when playing these was "Where the hell were these missions thirty hours ago?"

Endgame missions are actually a breath of fresh air. Sure, most of the missions touch the borderline on ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ County, but they are the missions I wish the game could have given you more often. Some endgame missions have you kill a set number of small monsters while ignoring the big ones while under a stricter time limit, some of them give monsters various attribute boosts at certain times during the mission (encouraging more aggressive play to kill monsters faster), and my favourite is one where monsters take massive amounts of damage if you hit them without them spotting you. These missions are great, I wonder why the developers didn't put these types of missions in the main storyline to help alleviate some of the tedium.

God Eater would have been much better if they had fixed the repetiton issue and gave you more, and bigger places to explore like Monster Hunter does. If they had done away with most of the stupid filler missions, it would feel less tedious to play through.

The soundtrack is pretty good, with some memorable songs and battle themes. It's not on the levels of Halo, Elder Scrolls or Dark Souls, but it's not bad at all.

The graphics are... meh. Looks like a high-end PS2 game, which baffles me that the console versions run this game at 30fps. PC master race, I guess, but then again PC has worse AI teammates and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ multiplayer, so there's that.



Overall, this game is alright. If you're a God Eater fan and haven't bought this game, go get it. It's the best the series has to offer as of this review.

If you're a Monster Hunter fan, just stick with Monster Hunter. Buy this on sale if you're genuinely curious or just watch videos on YouTube.

If you're a fan of neither, follow the second half of the advice I gave for Monster Hunter fans.

If you hate anime and your narrow-minded thinking causes you to label all anime fans as weaboos, why are you even reading this review?

Abandonware Filmmaker

I got this game two hours ago and now I have to type this review with one hand.

The story takes place on an island. Islands are bodies of land surrounded by water.

7.8/10 - Too much water. - IGN

Play too good, get called a hacker, play too terribly, get called a noob.

420/69 will play average again.