This was quite the upgrade compared to previous games, could have also become my favourite in the series so far if not for the increased bugs and an especially annoying character.

For starters, graphics and music are about the same nice quality as the other games, so that's good. Although the UI overhaul was definitely appreciated, they did well there, practically everything got changed. I think the biggest change was the menu and Stella's Dungeon, both of which are certainly a lot better. I very much liked that. Speaking of Stella's Dungeon, you can now access it from the menu anywhere, now THAT is an AWESOME change. Everything also feels a lot smoother. I wonder if it's because it has higher fps now or better animations or something. One other little thing that I found is the fact that shares aren't a requirement for anything (I don't think) anymore, which for getting the endings, you can imagine it'll be easier. The shop was also changed so that 'Equip' is where you go to compare stats, which is also great for checking costumes before buying, a great change.

For the story, there was a lot more going on, this was a much bigger game, with even a postgame being added, which was pretty cool. Honestly, it might almost beat the first ones; the only reason it wouldn't is because I'm partial to being able to save Arfoire in the first game. Heck, those little 3D animated cutscenes were a nice addition to the game, a change of pace from what to expect. I liked it.
As for characters, mostly great, seeing a small Histoire again, for example, was awesome, although there was one certainly extremely annoying character, Plutia, I mean, yikes, she's fine in human form, but in HDD form, she's so annoying. It's just constant. Nep, for example, isn't like cracking jokes 24/7; sometimes she does try to progress the plot and is sometimes not doing as many jokes if at all, but for Plutia, it is absolutely constant in HDD, with only, I think, 1 or 2 exceptions. Besides it being constant, it also then targets allies, and it's like, come on, I didn't know abusing our allies was now supposed to be funny. It gets worse in the 'Good Ending' route, tbh, on one scene that's just absolutely ridiculous, transforms just to ♥♥♥♥ with the party, and then TRANSFORMS BACK, doesn't even stay hdd.
If only her HDD had been different or not as annoying, like making it less common for her to act like that or something, sheesh.

The combat was fine, the animations seemed smoother, it was cool, it also got it's overhaul. The only thing I'd say about it is that the Total Damage and Hits being moved to the top left may have made it harder to read because it's not just there near the enemy at a glance, but it's a small thing. EX Gauge also got fused with the SP bar, which has its ups and downs, but I reckon it's mostly a fine change.

The map and enemy design, as always, was good. I saw familiar faces and locations along with new faces and cool locations, just nice overall.

Other cool new mechanics would be the 'Challenges', which the more you complete, the more stat bonuses it adds to the specific characters you do the challenges of, along with some plans, which are pretty nice, although locking EXE skills behind them isn't. Actually, that part is annoying. The hidden treasure being changed to the hidden block was unexpected. When I read about blocks, I thought I'd have to be looking for both, but no, blocks replaced treasures, a neat change, although it did make it annoying to try and get stuff from blocks that wasn't just a puny 100 credits.


For the bad, this has a lot more bugs, there's visual bugs, like for example in the DLC Swimsuit for Neptune (Don't know if it's the same for the rest) you get the toes are shifted up like quite a bit from the rest of the toes which looks a bit weird, there's also the trying to rotate characters in the equipment menu, first off you can't do it with a controller, only with middle mouse button, which is not good but on top of that, it's tied to the refresh rate of the monitor, the higher monitor the more it will spaz out, I found that 120 seems to be a hard limit which already spazzes a lot, heck at 144 you don't even need the plan to be able to rotate them a further 30 degrees or something (which itself should be just unlocking rotation HOWEVER you want, not just tiny bit), because the characters go absolutely wild, and if you keep moving them, they just dissapear. It only works normally at 60 Hz. There's inconsistent names of dungeons in the world vs. the plans, at least Castle Chambers in Lowee is Underground Cave in plans, don't know if there's more.
There's typos here and there, heck, I think I saw placeholder text at one point too.
The jump is sometimes buggy, stopping midway for no reason. Human character events are buggy, and you can only check 1 event from a human character before needing to leave the city menu and reopen it for the rest of the events to show up again. This happens throughout the WHOLE game.
In the other games, you automatically unlock backgrounds and such, in this game, it's only the CGs, with the rest unlocking after X ending, which I kinda get it, but can be confusing, probably not as big a deal as the rest of these bad things.

A huge gamebreaking bug is just in the visual novel part. After fighting the 2nd boss in a row in the lab, just as it's going to reveal who she is without HDD, it stops proceeding, it just stays there on a character, and you can't do anything, only open the menu and quit out to the title screen. THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. I mean, this can literally block you from continuing playing. Apparently, the only fixes are to patch the .exe file to use 4 GB+ of RAM or something, or using CFF Explorer and doing something with it, that's just bad. Another thing with this, though, is that this same I guess, bad .exe(?) makes some of the images in the album not load, it just loads a black screen. This is ridiculous.

Then there were some events in the postgame after the true endings that were just bad and didn't make any sense on what the characters were trying to reference, who knows.



Overall, a fun game, with a good story and mostly great characters(not all of them) that continues the 2nd game with an overhauled UI and nice combat. It's a Neptunia game, I think you might know what you're getting into.

I mean the gameplay is a lot like the other two rebirth games so if you like those then you should like this one too