Anonymous14z's opinion/analysis

An opinion piece/analysis about this game.

Foreword

Before anything else, I must begrudgingly admit, the game can be enjoyed as a simplistic, easy, and cheesy action game, indeed as many others have, truth-be-told, the rest of this "opinion piece/analysis" only comes about when someone critical over the game actually takes their time to think about all of the systems in the game and glitches, and realized just how flawed and broken it really is. However most people won't (nor shouldn't) ever go this deep into analyzing the game, indeed my opinion here is from a person who's compulsive, and "Over-informed" about the game, since one doesn't need to know anything about the game to really enjoy it -as so many others have-.

Below is is what you could say a rant -but also an analysis-, with hardly a concern for word-economy and if you have the stomach for this then you'll come into buying this game quite well informed about it -and maybe you'll learn a thing or 2 about game design-.
Admittedly most of my focus and ability is on the gameplay, while I might have sections for the story, UI, music, sexualizations, I'm not as strongly confident in my opinion about it.

It's reccomendend that you've read my previous "abridged" review first before you read further.

Long summary

Initial impressions of the game might show this to be a perfectly acceptable game, for indeed it is the "Core path" that everyone will play will work, the glitches and problems -for the most part- exist at the margins of the game or are hard to notice, but considering how only 20% of people even manage to muster the energy to even beat the game, many people will play it for a single playthrough mindlessly and find it works just fine, indeed many are rating them in some kind of non-relativistic (not considering other games of the same genre) way, and instead rate in porportion to the already low bar set by other neptunia games; So of course it's going to be rated well.

However, if someone actually commits any thought to the game, or heads into any of the "Non-core" directions: The multiplayer, accessory system, item system, Enemy design, consumable items, ETC the flaws become slowly apparent, indeed it's so bad that I've managed to find over 100 glitches in the game! And many of them are NOT TRIVIAL, and indeed upon inspection it seems like a game that wasn't designed by a game designer, instead appearing as a collection of animation assets and voice-lines.
I'd go so far as to claim that the very design of the game, was designed to HIDE just how mediocre it really is -instead of trying clumsily to try to fix it-, and it seem they got away with it.



But to enumerate what can be revealed by thought, I noticed:
1. Over 100 glitches (and 10 major/moderate ones, and won't be patched)
2. Non-existant Enemy design ("Damage Sponge" enemies)
3. Ineffectively used unique enemies (of which there are 2)
4. Nearly Non-existant dungeon design
5. Non-existant encounter design
6. Amost no minigames, or gameplay/objective variety
7. Boring -and trivial to apply- character abilities
8. Near-homogenous playstyles across the character choices.
9. Blacksmith, Gem, and Prayer systems are disintegrated from story.
10. Broken character abilities (Uni's backstep, and "dash forwards")
11. Trivial and dysfunctional dash and air-combat systems
12. Baffling multiplayer design (Die=kick, mission complete=disband)
13. Trivial and game-cheesingly strong healing.
14. Homogenous ultimate attacks
15. Overpowered consumable items
16. Dysfunctional Elemental Weakness System
17. Strange counterproductive game-design, (giving minimap in maze-dungeon)
18. Badly communicated design (Healer/Priest strikes for double in melee)
19. Uncreative, and overly-formulaic game design
20. Barely any "teamplay" mechanics with AI partners & multiplayer.
21. Disintegration between story and gameplay.
22. Overall lack of tactical challenge

-It's clear the game isn't finished.

When I ment that the game felt like a charade, designed to hide it's flaws, I ment in they hid many of these problems though subtle -and even accepted- mechanisms, like the game's innate difficulty/simplicity, how all character abilities are trivial to apply, and how overpowered healing is, how consumable items are overpowered, or the innate durability of the AI partners and their self-healing, or how all of the enemies are "damage sponges" with hardly any variety, or how the chaos of fighting hides the fact the partner AI in this game is terrible, or just how plain pretty the game looks, but is not only afflicted by bad design, there is a pervasive double-damage glitch, that only a few realized even existed (with maybe me solely realizing it's difficulty-wrecking presance), that further cements this game's mediocrity, indeed it seems the steam reviewer culture seems especially brainless, or rather, they just didn't care to analyze a game that set forth from it's onset -through the story- that it'll be a "stupid game".
I guess put plainly people won't complain -or even notice- if broken game-design or glitches comes to their benefit -or is inert- (like how only 2 reviewers I think, mentioned anything about "Destiny 2's" easy unchangable difficulty) but they'll sure as hell complain if it comes to their detriment, and causes an annoyance and ultimately this is the "deception" that this game employes. (admittedly, this game-design is better than if they had made the game glitchy and hard).

The story contributes to the culture of accepted mediocrity -as if it resembeld an "upvoted" reddit post-, funny, witty, and relatable, if ultimately trivial and petty, indeed it's part of the appeal -but also part of the deception-, since much like a comedy show (which this game is), the emotional range the charcaters express is limited, it's from funny, michevious, to loving eachother, with a tiny bit of the other emotions, but perhaps to give better examples, nowhere in the game are there any serious feelings of sadness, anger, fear, Nor are there any instances where the characters swear, or are in serious peril, the story is a joke. And personally, if you want a game with a joker comedy-show story, why not play a cheaper game "Goat Simulator" which is probably better at it, and at least much more honest about what it provides to you.

It's somewhat notable (if you think really hard about it) that many of the features in the game just don't work, -or appear to be relics of bad game design-, to give one example; Some "energy consuming" attacks suggest that they'd launch enemies into the air, to be combined with the air-combat system with you jumping in the air to continue the attacks, however enemies can't be launched in the first place, and a relic of this system (the one that causes enemies to be "blown away" by certain attacks) might be causing a glitch in the game!
Indeed it feels like Tamsoft may have had one idea how to make the game -with fancy air-attacks in it- while "Idea Factory" had another idea (and probably much more mediocre) of just putting out the game in a short time-frame. The game is clearly unfinished and having conlicted game-design decisions in it.

There are many trivial systems that one can safely ignore throughout the game (or maybe the game was designed to be trivial?), The blacksmith, the "gem merchant" and the "church priest" can be ignored as in-game mechanics possible through the entire single-player campaign! Or how in one maze-dungeon, they give you immediant access to the minimap! And it's not like the maze-dungeon is that hard to innately navigate in the first place. The touted "elemental system" I dare say, works in REVERSE from normal gaming convention, instead of becoming more important as the game goes on -like every other game- this feature actually becomes LESS IMPORTANT later on in the game!

The game desperately needs more tactical layers into it's core gameplay (the single-player story), but not by adding additional features, but rather by retooling the existing features, -and probably adding in some gamplay variety, and enemy design-, like de-trivializing the elemantal system, removing the minimap from the maze-dungeon, giving more enemies unique "elemental types" (so the loot system can work), and better intergrating, well, EVERYTHING!
All of this -including what I've stated below makes me feel that this game didn't have any play-testing, or difficulty tuning, (I mean how does die=kick in a multiplayer cooperative mode even get concieved of in the first place?) and I seriously think that this game might not even have had a game-designer on board to guide it's making!

Long Summary 2

However, this is not to say that the game is without merit, the cute sexualized anime waifus (Kiddos) are nice to look at -indeed top-tier character design-, the voice-acting is good, the UI is plesant to look it -If archaic in design- and the environments and weapon-swing affects are pretty as with the sound, and it's story is cheesy, relaxed, un-serious, (the big-bads you defeat even congratulate you) and even unique.
And whatever the problems that are in the game, -and my overemphansis on it- the "core" of the game still works, the attack->block->heal cycle works well, the "Guard system" is well implemented and is meaningful, the ultimate attacks work well with the "guard system" to give a sense of power when you use them against vulnerable enemies, there is appropriate enemy "stat increase" as the game goes on, and there is some -if very simplified- "exploration" mechanics with the chest/loot system. Indeed this game fulfills everything a Neptunia game needs to be -and a bit more-. Does it excuse all of it's problems? NO They still need to fix up the game's glitches at least (which they won't), and to make "fill in" the hollow husk of a game that this is, but there's something here in the game.

STORY/CHARACTERS

Goofy, trivial, un-serious, relaxed, dis-integrated, sexualized, light-hearted, comedy-show and a little unique are words I'd use to describe it, largely a show-peice designed to ferry you along the story, but also an excuse for the characters to go on a journey, indeed it's not anything in the story that's to be remembered, but rather the fun-times interactions between the characters or between the characters and the player.
This isn't to say that the characters are one-dimensional, -they've been around for years and have been slowly developing themselves in cheesy games- and each has a unique personality, grievances, preferances and sexual "techniques".

But all of this comes off with the intensity and themes of a mediocre children's show (Most episodes of "My little pony (G4)" have better writing) with some "Adult" content (or rather, "teenager" content) to go along with it by the characater designs -and I dare say it- sex-jokes and sexual situations, indeed everything in this game effectively is, a big joke. Where the cute sexualized characters do nearly all of the "Heavy lifting" in the story.
And what comes out of this mindset is a story that -for all intents and purposes- trivial.

Essentially the story boils down to:
Log in-> get introduced to big-bag->get introduced to kira/BCP->kira BCP get temped by big-bad-> fight cheetah-> Get angels-> cheetah goes rampant-> city gets "invaded"-> beat cheetah-> Beat up 2 generals-> Beat up jester.

And it might seem vulgar that there isn't much to talk about, since there isn't! there are no substantive plot-twists (since the story is trivial), and it's so absurd, that the very story-writers ask you to fully believe something like fighting hacker spawned enemies in-game is somehow viable! (that a "player" could do an admin's job) But also the story's own design is trivialized when clearly it had an opportunity to be non-trivial, I remember distinctly a "grmdark" event where one of the "Good guys" -The Minotaur- was mistaken for for a badguy after he spooked a "little girl", who then got the rest of his village to harass him and thus compelling him to sorrow and then manipulation by the jester, but this very scene was almost immediantly trivialized from meaning or complexity by a comment by the jester who summoned some "illusions" to do his dirty work!

I mean they had the perfect opportunity to create some depth or some ambiguity in the context the characters were working in, by making the villagers look like the bad-guy but the writers wanted to make the story -much like the gameplay- unchallenging and relaxing (but not "bad"), Maybe -and probably- this was done for the sake of the main characters who's integrity and sexuality they don't want to comprimise with moral ambiguity, indeed just look at the advertising of the game, what's plastered all over it? The characters.

Indeed the tone is set minutes into the game-introducing dialog, when the main character gives backstory when she speaks directly to the player and introduces -admittedly well- the other characters in the game, and gives some backstory about the world they're in, with the 4th wall being broken fairly often in the game (although in a very constrained way) with them referancing other parts of japanese gaming convention, with no playable character ever really feeling any strain or stress, and while it's certainly a refreshing change of tone with many other (non-neptunia) games with a grim or serious story, the problem in this game is that this tone -a cheery and relaxed one- is for the most part, consistant throughout the entirety of it, to the point that it trivializes much of the story.



So with the story out of the way -somewhat- what is one going to experiance when playing the game? Asides from it being trivialized and relaxed?
So far I've grouped most character interactions -asides from truely trivial ones- into 3 catagories (somewhat arbitrarily).

1. Goofy/Fun interactions
"Fun-fluff" that adds memorable events to the game, like the "password" incident, where the characters acquire the first "Goddess part" with made-up "passwords" of their choosing, or the "Teach me Vert" scenes were Vert (the adult character) educates goofily the player about tea, or the "frog-talking" scene were the young sisters can talk to a frog (and find it cool), or how the "polite girly" character says she "finally works up the bravery" to talk to one of the other characters.
This -and many permutations of this- are what you're going to see in this game, with give it a fairly trivialized vibe to it, and if you like this -as many fans do- you'll adore this game like them, I'd go so far to say that this kind of goofy/fun interaction is one of the main "hooks" of the game and is deeply part of it's own identity.

2. 4th wall breaks
Really a permutation of the "Goofy/fun" interaction but with the added feature of the characters referancing something about their game, or outside of their game (although they never mention how shoddy the gameplay is in their own game), like how the main character might expect something cool from the final boss, or how the game has "Asuka" and "Kirio" as spoofs of "Sword Art Online", or how the Black Knight character "Noire" finds her "Fake double" who's impersonating her in-game goofily, or -since it's noteworthy and endearing- how all of the characters congratulate you for beating the game (with some of the bad-guys ressurecting themselves to do so).

3. Sex Jokes / Sexual integration
Firstly, I do not refer to the "American" style of crude sex-jokes, the jokes in this game are more like funny scenarios dealing with the characters (to maintain the light-hearted trivial themes), like how the brest-envious "Kiddo" gets angry at the grown women character for her breasts, or the scene where the grown woman gets michevious and tricks the main characte into getting wet -thus making her skirt transparent and showing her colorful underwear- or another scene where both of the of the black haired girls (whom are sisters) are "KO'd" be a monsters spontainiously, but are put into a comprimising position with their bodies, whom look like they're about to kiss and engage in soft lesbianism (which is a re-occoring theme throughout the rest of the game).
However -to this game's benefit- all of this is done goofily much like the other jokes, and in a way that -somehow- appears in good taste.


Interestingly, it seems not only is the story trivial, but it's bad-guys also used as fodder to maintain the light-hearted themes of the story, as many of the main baddies from the previous games are turned into accidental commedians, with the antics they commit to, like how they casually talk to the main characters without any stress, or how they perform foolish things like forcing eggplants down a wishing well in hopes for a wish for our amusement, this even extends to the more "serious" bad-guys too and while refreshing there just isn't any expression of any more serious themes in the game -as if the writers wern't good enough to write it in without comprimising the relaxed story-.

Really, the only characters who're permitted to in any sense feel any non-trivial emotions are curiously, only some of the bad-guys, (since all of the good-guys are essentially on a joy-ride) of which I can only think 3; Black Cat Princess (the crude female (think female dog)), Kiria (Her "knight in shining armor" (who's incidentally also a girl character), and the main big-bad, the hacker mr.mine.

STORY/CHARACTERS 2

Black cat princess (BCP) is essentially a crude needy "princess" who needs "white knights" around her but this "triviality" was actually used to express some more "Deeper" emotions -rather than letting this feature being underutilized-, since once she's been out-done by the trivialized main-characters, she expresses a kind of frusterated "dark side" which is perhaps the most serious instance of non-trivial emotions, while the context that she exists in is trivial -being an upset character in an MMO- the way her voice-actor conveys her frusterations indeed is the only time you'll ever see in the entire game a character who's seriously upset. So when I saw her rant like a -Female dog- I was annoyed, but also a little captivated!

Kiria is essentially BCP's White knight co-narsissist, and experiances her lashing out at her, but that's what causes some interest, since she has to deal with BCP's lashing outs, her reaction to this drama causes some interest indeed maybe she's the character that actually has to endure some dillemas (which no other character has to); When confronted with an opportuniy to cheat/hack does she commit to her "love" BCP? or does she commit to her honor and not hack? Indeed this is one of the characters who helps improve the story a bit -by adding in an appropriate level of drama to it-. Indeed this character arguably has the most character development out of all of these 3 "bad guys" I cared to think about, since by the end, she's encouraged out of her co-narissism a bit (after the cheesy ban scene).

The Hacker MR.Mine also has serious -if reduced- non-trivial themes, of subterfuge and mischief (and of fear), but there is a more serious sub-theme of jealousy and loss -since she fails her attack on 4 goddessess online- and her game "World break online" fails, and by the end her MMO business falls apart although this too appopriately trivialized, since she's unusually good-mannered about it and doesn't tantrum about losing at any part of the game, instead she feels guilty about causing all of this havoc with her hacking skills and even apologizes which I must confess, is better than the one-dimensional villan.



---However, there is a serious problem with how the story has been communicated, that is almost solely though the cheesy Visual Novel (VN) sequences with only 3 3D cutscenes, and 4? 2D cutscenes to liven it up, and since these events take up roughly 33% of the gameplay, you'd expect them to be reasonably voiced (and especially considering how un-creative their gameplay is), but only 45% of it voiced!

You'd think that since the game features athropomorphized game cosoles (and hand-helds) as characters that the gameplay would be excellent -since we all believe that games should ideally provide gameplay first- and it would be used creatively to help express that story, however this never manifested. I made a comment about how the game seems to be a collection of animation assets and voice-lines and well, that seems to be the case.

There coulda been something done to help mitigate this sense of isolation like adding unique gameplay to each charater (only 1 character has semi-unique gameplay) where the samurai or ninja requires some dexterity or skill to use, -and having the characters comment about it- or some kind of unique encounter like herding the passive-slime-ball enemies into a pen (to let the kiddo's "Play"), or hell, if we want to be really creative, they could have implmented a rap battle (or a rap) between 2 characters as a "fight" (which is something I would have adored), to add in some creativity with the story telling, but the entire game is literally composed of a brainless combat system, then into VN sequences, over and over again!

It's to the point of comedy almost (and I'm suprised more reviewers haven't mentioned this defficiency), like an event where town that you go to gets invaded and all of the other "Players" are forced out of it, you can still buy things from the shops there! (when supposedly they'd be closed due to an invasion), or one instance where you fight the rogue AI cheetah by firstly -absurdly- fighting it as a player (when it is a "Virus") wielding an "Anti-virus" bomb that does nothing as a plot device; You just beat up the cheetah as you would any other boss, so why is the "Anti-virus" story gimmick there in the first place when they can't even back it up with gameplay? And such a theme is presant thoughout the game, and only in a few circumstances (like 2-4) does the story create unique gameplay.

SEXUALIZATIONS

Perhaps the 4th deception in the game (the 1st being the story, the 2nd being the graphics, the 3rd being the easy gameplay), that tries to dissuade us from "rationally" scrutinizing the game on the basis of it's story, or gameplay.

However the word "sexualizations" might imply nipples and butts or crude remarks, but these techniques aren't used, (indeed would be impossible since kiddos are sexualized too) rather it's more subtle and possibly effective (if tasteful), with the character being vaguely treated like barbie dolls -seemingly perfect- despite that they have "character flaws" but to return to my old habits and to list the techniques.

Firstly, all of the characters have super-model hourglass bodies and have outfits that accentuate that wide (child-bearing) waists -most miniskirts flare out a bit at the bottom-. All characters have idea body/leg proportions -again, vaguely like a barbie-doll- with unusually narrow shoulders and effeminant bodies and arms, giving each character a strange "baby body" (essentially no "chunky, or muscley" girls). some characters have outfits that reveal their upper back -as if they were showing a "bra-strap"-.

All charaters -as you would expect, since this is an anime- have large girly eyes and well-done hairstyles, with no facial blemishes or scars or other assorted imperfections or ravages of time and every female has a "stapled on" blush at all times. All characters are presented in an usually youthful way, no voice sounds over "old" nor does anyone move slowly or oddly.

Many of the characters are distinct both in their outfits (each character seems to get a colorful theme) but also in their personality -like one lover-girl who's constantly being supressed, or one "girly" girl, or one energetic girl. This ensures that there is sufficient diversity in the girls that most people will be able to pick a favorite to "bond" with.

All characters are expressed youthfully and no character seems to be over 32 (or so) years old, nor do any of the characters seem unhealthly -as if all fertile women-, they're animated and drawn somewhat as if they were youthful super-models with their hands either forming "girly" fists, or bent backwards -as if they're trying to be sexy- (this also applies to the kiddos). All characters have their backs straight and breasts erect at almost all times.

The animations -which are excellent admittedly- help massively with this expression, where all animations playfully express each character's own "girly style" excellently, but usually bordering on the "magical girl" and "playful" side of expression, with how the wizard character youthfully jumps in the air as she fires her bolts, or how the paladin seemingly playfully swings her sword. If applicable, if a character has sizable breasts, they will most certainly have hand-made jiggle to it as the characters do their actions. No character takes on an unusually "masculine" or "serious" fighting style or animations.

There are almost no strange deviant characteristics to any of the characters -or anything that might subtract from their "sex appeal- like a character that picks her nose, or talk about how her "sex-drive" is miniscule, in fact there is often the opposite, characters impliticly want to look sexy, (and are into fashion or cosplay) with some characters being jealous of others for having a better-looking "curvy" body.

If a character is old enough (about 14+) they have some kind of cleavage going on, whether an outfit reveals their belly-button, or shows the upper part of their breasts (or both under and upper breast) or maybe will wear some underwear in place of a miniskirt.
Most/all skirts in the game are miniskirts, to tempt people to investigate the girl's underwhear, (an example of the underwear fetishism) which is suitably tasteful and colorful featuring stripes or small decorations -like a cat on the front of a girl's panties.

None of the charcaters are put into situations that might overy sexualy comprimise or degrade them or their sexual utility (thank god) but more meaningfully the game's entire story has been propped up to -seemingly- allow the character to express themselves -rather than it being a advertsity for them to overcome-. There is another thing it's likely that the game was designed that you'll be spending a lot of time looking at the cute anime waifus, long enough for you to begin "bonding" with them, such that you'll buy more neptunia games in the future. But also as a way of giving a peculiar "dignity" to them. This is also enhanced by the fact that none of the girls in the game are intimidating, or unapproachable -as if every character is an idea girlfriend-, and with a consipicious absence of any possible "boyfriends" to the main characters (they even go out of their way to make fun of one "boyfriend" in a prior game (Umio) and 80-95% of the characters are female.

SEXUALIZATIONS 2

It is possible to "Dress-up" the characters with the cosmetic system where you have a selection of fashionable outfits -and recolors of them- to pick from, all having the passive sexualization you'd assume. However you can also assign accessories, like a pair of glasses, or a cute bow onto your "cute anime waifus" to comply with any fetishes you might have, you even have the option of replacing many character's weapons with joke "candy weapons" (like a pocky-stick for the samurai).
(However, this system is glitched, and acessories won't show on the AI partners).

There is a "free roam camera" that allows you to detach the camera to view the characters as a group or to get certain "shots" of the characters as they stand (if you can tolerate the horrid hard-bound controls), and when placing acessories on your characaters, you can freely view them from any angle (to look up their skirt).

Parts of the story prop up a kind of "Playful lesbianism" where the adult character shoves her boobs into a younger (little sister) character to "bond" with her, or another where the kiddos are bathing together with them undressed down to their underwear, or another, where 2 characters are "KO'd" in such a way as to suggest they're about to kiss. All of this is done playfully and in good taste admittedly.


Now that that's done, it seems that this game -at it's core- is designed to distract you from the core of it -the gameplay and relaxing story- though this technique, this game has bizzarely sexualized kiddos to help the devs make rent, but it's strange that nobody seems to really question the problems with this, it is as if people go into this game strictly for this and will rate as such despite that it disrupts regular customers ability to dicern the real quality of the game.

But another thing, it seems that here -like elsewhere- girls can't just be "girls" (as in "Human"), their sexuality has to be upsold or overemphansized, like how the girls must have wierd straightened backs at all times, or exceptionally beautiful hourglass bodies, contrasting this from to the older modes, -where the girls wern't passively sexualized- like "Ripley" (From "Aliens") wasn't used as a character because her body would increase sales, but more to buck a trend, or to express a unique take on the human condition, or how "littlefoot" from the movie "A land before time" (a dinosaur) wasn't added into the dinosaur movie as a girl because she would boost sales, but to perhaps add additional "accomplishment" to the story -since it'd be harder for girls to accomplish what a guy would do-.

This is not to say they're brainless and one-dimensional doafs (although maybe they are), each has unique personalities, preferances, biases, ETC, it's just that it's all been "streamlined" or rather "purified" so that only "girly" characteristics remain rarely (if ever) doing things that would be ungirly, or unsexy, and each character is more a way of exploring a unique sexual preferance (and yes, even the kiddos are involved).

But to better explain how the sexualization as one of the "Deceptions" that this game has, here is a perfect example; There is a quote in the music industry that goes something like this "The appearance/beauty of the artist is a bigger determining factor for the sales of the music than the quality of the music", and I think this quote also applies to this game comfortably, in that the "appearance" of the game -the promotional materials, and the cute characters- is a bigger influencing factor over a game's success than the "Honest" methods: Making engaging gameplay, adding in player-agency in the upgrade system, cutting out unused parts of the game, making the story an interesting challenge for the characters to overcome. Since it's clear that -upon inspection- that this game falls well short of excellence falling between "ok" to mediocre.

This is not to say that it's a deception -else this game would get lampooned as you'd expect- but it's rather there is something about the "image/appearance" that goes into the customer's brain and somehow substitutes actual game quality, with it's own substance.

WORLDBUILDING

Much like the rest of the game, first impressions might suggest that there is enough to help sell the MMO format that the game tries to maintain, where you have a "City" you return to, with other 2D cutout "Players" for you to interact with, with some homages to that MMO setting in one of the 2D cutscenes showing the characters passwords and usernames.
However there are some serious deficiencies with this, since this game largely has no game mechanics associated with an MMO (or even encounter design), -mainly- player interaction which kinda stunts it's own story-telling effectiveness.
It seems like this game has the bare minimum needed to "kinda" sell it's theme, you have 13 boring souless dungeons to play around in that have almost no mechanics associated with MMOs attached to them, 12 "Character classes" to use -where many of them play near-identically to eachother-, a bare-bones item system, barely enough themed enemies, and just some character refances to being in an MMO (I think the character voice-lines is what allows the devs to be lazy about this) But I think more can be exposed by doing something that might be absurd; Comparing this game to "Goat Simulator".

While it may come off a bit of a joke that I dare to make the comparison, there is a stark (and meaningful) contrast between goat MMO simulator, and 4GO, that reveals something.
Goat simulator actually upsells it's "MMO" Theme from the get-go, with a goofy loading-screen that resembles an actual MMO login screen (with funny text to accompany it), -something which 4GO seems to have neglected to add-. You're welcomed to the game in a class selection menu, where you can pick from 6 classes; Warrior, Rogue, Hunter, Magician, "no class", and "microwave", while 4GO doesn't make any hint at "character creation" at all, (admittedly, all of the characters are automatically "created" by their in-house designer), "players" in Goatsim are actual interactable objects with obnoxious MMOish health bars above their heads (another thing from MMO convention), and I dare say it, while goat simulator has less environmental assets, it actually uses it better since there are at least SOME environmental obstacles to "pad out" the gameplay, and how some of the "quest" structure asks you to explore stuff in a semi-convoluted way. Unlike how in 4GO, where the chat-box to the lower right is strictly used for describing loot and combat, in Goat simulator, it actually self-populates with "fake" player dialog, and market-lingo, with players saying things like "WTB golden penny 4G"


Indeed I hope that after making this comparison that it's revealed that this game just doesn't sell it's "MMO" theme that well -or at all-. It's more like they took a boring Neptunia formula, and clumisly injected an MMO themed into it almost soullessly (since it seems Goat MMO Simulator outdoes it) and there just isn't any real adaptation to the environment, or gameplay to really sell the MMO theme. Perhaps it's more accurate to call the theme a "High Medieval fantasy" theme, instead of an MMO theme.

GRAPHICS/UI/MUSIC

Perhaps another one of the deceptions in the game that attempts to pull your focus away from how mediocre the game really is, since -for all intents and purposes- the game looks great, the UI is high-resolution and detailed, Weapon sounds are great and the particle systems when you swing your weapons are nice, and the character models are very good. The animations especially are top-notch and each character has expressive and customized animations -indeed maybe some of the best in the game industry- (though there is a consipcious abscence of good-quality animation systems). The dungeons and enviroments looks quite good (except for the hard-casted shadows) and indeed all seems correct -the game looks nice-.

But there -as with many things- flaws at the margins of the game, that occassionally leak out into the "core" of the game, while the character models look good upon inspection some of the textures on the clothing appears blurry -and this is a semi-sexual anime game, so this counts more than usual- the dungeons -while pretty- have a boring and predictable layout with no unique or interesting design features to them, and they seem to re-use several assets over and over again to make them, with the later dungeons with seemingly barren detailless ground -as if to reinforce the "show no play" dungeon design-. And while the animations look great, if you look closely, you'll notice that the characters don't have an animation system for transitions between animations -which some bosses nobably affected-.

-but to comment about the music-
While the music is nice, it -like much of the game- is vacious and filling, or rather -to be insightful- it's not that the music is vacious and unfulfilling, it's rather due to the abscence of any "Feeling" that the game may have had (though level design, boss design, story depth) that bring the music down; It's hard to make a fun musical track when nothing is happening in the game to back it up!

And while what's here is ultimately appreciated -and admittedly impoves the game regardless-, I suspect that the graphics are in large part an evasionaly technique used to distract people from the actual gameplay component of the game since if that was peeled away -in addition to the sexualizations, the cheesy story, and the easy difficulty- what would be seen is a fairly -and throughly- mediocre game.

GLITCHES

Perhaps another sign -admidst a mountain of evidence- to suggest that these guys are incompetant; This game has over 100 glithes, and while most of them are marginal and will probably never really have an impact, there are a few that are substantively more serious than the others, with the 1st being the double damagle glitch -with I think everyone underestimates- since it soo thoughly "infects" the gameplay component of the game (I mean a game is there for gameplay right?), since if you have doubled damage you're less encouraged to acually read the instructions for any of the abilities or items, you're less encouraged to actually upgrade your weapons or less compelled to even try understand anything, it seriously harms the "diffculty curve" of the game rendering the game as a brainless cake-walk.

There is also the matter that some of the "core features" of this game are seriously comprimised some of the glitches -or baffling game design choices- like how the accessory system -indeed something advertised on the steam store page- while working at it's core, doesn't show up on the AI partners (and there is even a screenshot showing it working), or how the multiplayer has done totally serverside with seemingly no latency compensation! The degree of deception that's in the game is well quite suprising, if 2 of the main "key features" of the game are busted I think this is quite serious but it seems nobody else thought so -or even cared to mention-

True there are some fun glitches in the game like the model viewer with no weapon glitch, but it seems that this company is in the business of removing the "fun" glitches, if I recall correctly, there was an infinite jump glitch that let you go "out of bounds" of the game world or another that let you -in a bizzare sense- swap the heads and bodies of the characters around resulting in a surreal sight.

But perhaps what's most signifigant is that none of these glitches were ever fixed in the game! Indeed it's been a year (and surely to be "forever") since the game was released, and still to this day, not a single patch has been released for it!
This would be acceptable if this was on the old-school consoles -since you can't really patch your game post-release-, but it's unacceptable here in this online world where patches can be done easily!
Indeed it seems that they are absurd; I've propped up a post on the forums about said glitches, but they haven't responded to any of it? Haven't fixed anything?

Difficulty

Simple and easy to a fault is how I'd describe this game, very little in this game compels you to go outside of your comfort zone, nor is there much grinding needed to accomplish anything. Indeed it feels from the ground up that this game was intendend to me simple, since there is seemingly only 2 "layers" that the game relies on: the guard system, and the attack->block cycle, and that's roughly 90% of it. To give some analogies it would be the equivalent of being restricted to tech 1 units in starcraft, being restricted to only pistols in a GTA game, Unreal tournament without the secondary fires on each weapon -boring and plain- with very few things to consider.

There are also 2 very strong mechanics that you're introduced to; The consumable items, and the character's healing abilities.
The problem with the consumable item system is that it's literally a totally free action that has a universally beneficial effect -and the effect is really strong, like 30% HP or "energy" restore-, which combos nicely with the healing system -which is unusually trivial and powerful compared by common gaming standards-, you essentially press the healing button to heal everyone by 30%, and if you use the energy restore items, you can essentially ignore all resource management when it comes to healing.

While most don't see a problem here, I do, since there is very little difficulty and complexity, the player isn't compelled to explore the mechanics of the game (which is why I rated the X2 damage glitche as the NO.1 glitch of the game), why bother visiting the blacksmith when you'll never need to? Why bother really empowering your characters when the bosses are total pushovers? Why learn any fancy technique in the game if it can't exist (and is discouraged) because the game is too simple?

The game's innate difficulty (and to an extent it's gameplay diversity) is even sabotaged by some suprisingly incompetant game-design, in one area you're in a maze-like dungeon, but you're given a minimap which trivializes it's design! Or another, where the "elemental system" -one of the foundational systems of the game-, works IN REVERSE in that you pay LESS attention to this mechanic as the game goes on!

Indeed even if difficulty were better implemented into the game -as was the case in the end-game multiplayer mode that you don't want to play, the devs seem to resort to a very bad way of doing it -by giving enemies more HP/attack/Guard or by adding in multiple bosses- rather than adding in cool new mechanics like luring a boss over a trap, or by adding some interesting gimmicks to an arena.

I'i even go about thinking that this game doesn't have (or has incompenant) game-designers, or maybe this is an outcome of conflicted communication between tamsoft (the real developers) and Idea Factory/Compile heart.

Begrudingly, maybe this was the intent of the game at the onset? Make the gameplay trivial so that the goofy fun-times characters can show through?
(this "game-design" seems a little deceptive to me, isn't a game played for it's gameplay?)

DIFFICULTY CURVE

Normally in games, you're given an increasing variety of tools to use in the game with increasing enemy diversity (among other things) to increase the challenge as you progress and to compel you to explore the game systems to get ahead, with essentially you being expected to understand more, multitask more, "DO" more, with the various enemies and mechanics; Like how you know to use a rocket launcher at longer ranges, or to use a flamethrower at short range. But This game just seems to fall back ever more so on it's few key mechanics; Healing, blocking, and the "defense bar" mechanic, (with items and leveling to give you the option to trivialize the game) Because literally those are the only meaningful mechanics in the game; There isn't any real enemy design, enviromental design, character gimmicks, character abilities, or spacial (or special) considerations the developers can use to add difficulty to the game. Literally as you go on in the game, you just block better, heal more often (often you're forced to include multiple healers, or spam healing yourself), or just plain out-level the content.

And everything you get later on in the game (goddesses, Ultimate attacks, new moves) just seem to fall back further on this "trifecta" of simplicity (healing, blocking, defese bar), no ability you get goes outside of "deal damage or "defense bar" damage, No support spell is more simple that "press button to heal or buff entire team", even ultimate attacks are homogenous, they're essentially all damage bursts with very little variety and very little was done with them, since they're used during a bosses that has it's defenses down much like nearly every other attack.

There just aren't any levers for the game developers to call upon to increase the difficulty of the game, nor did they even use what they already had in the game that well (like using certain enemies more creatively). This game really does seem half-baked and unfinished, and judging by the glitches I found, it probably is, and they got away with it due to the adoring fan-base and use of clever diversionary techniques.

COMBAT SYSTEM

Despite that you have a colorful cast of characters to choose from, from kid to adult, to reserved to expressive, from black to white, the actual gameplay mechanics that each character has to diffentiate the characters from eachother is -much like the enemy design- nearly non-existant, all of the melee characters -which amounts to 9 of the 12 characters- have virtually identical gameplay; They get into melee range, use melee attacks, block the (unusually) rythmic enemy attacks (and hopefully timing the block correctly to get a counteattack), and heal themselves (In a variety of ways) when low on HP.
The attack--->block--->attack cycle is really the majority of the combat system, LITERALLY, and if you can master that part (which is the hardest part) you're set to beat the rest of the game, and it's not like the Attack/Block cycle is even that well implemented into the game, -you can even block mid-attack-, no character has an attack pattern beyond "Mash the attack button", (almost) no spacing for proper distancing, no timing correctly to get a damage boost, no heavy/light attacks, no backstabing, NOTHING, just that cycle, for all of the characters, with their unusually rythmic and hemogenous attack pattern (heavy sword, and light-sword have the same attack pattern/speed).

Hell, this whole system is actually substantially WORSE than in the previous Neptunia action games, and in a way, far less "elegantly simple" since in at least that game, each basic attack had it's own unique AOEs, delays, and properties (like some would knock up enemies into the air, or have big AOE), with some -basic- enemy design that made it important to memorize and time each attack, while in this game, every basic attack essentially is the same as any other, (they're even timed nearly identically) and they all deal damage lifelessly with no enemy reaction, no special timing, or anything.

Additionally, there seem to be hidden block values between the differant characters, with Melee characters getting a superiour block to ranged characters, but nowhere is this mentioned in the game, you're only told that you had to block, and considering that most people just assume this game is kinda broken and simplistic, they'd assume that all blocks are equal, I guess this is another additional system that was in the game, that the rest of the staff forgot about, which might explain why it's not mentioned in any tutorial.

COMBAT SYSTEM > AIR ATTACKS

There are air attacks clumsily added into the game, but when I mean clumsy, I mean really clumsy, they suffer from the same attack/block loop, and literally there is no time in the entire game where you're compelled to use air attacks -so that's like 40% of the animation budget just plain wasted- since none of the enemy design (damage sponges) or environmental design encourages it, and while yes, you get X3 SP/ultimate gain each attack doing this, and air attacks have a bit more range (for melee characters) but all this is unsufficient, since firstly some of the smaller enemies are hard to air-attack in the game (and these are the beginning enemies) due to the high jumping causing your attacks to hit over their head, training you no not even bother with the mechanic, secondly, because when you air attack you're stationary means that some enemies that charge forwards when they attack or that move slightly, they'll be out of range, additionally ground attacks have the benefit of shoving your characters into the enemies/bosses -trivializing spacial considerations- while air-attacks are clumy with their static->movement nature, thirdly, -and by far the most important factor- is that when you block -as part of the attack/block loop- in the air, you rapidly plummet, which reduces the rather generous time-frame of 0.5 seconds for a perfect block to about 0.2, (I guess I'm terrible at blocking) however, there is also the matter of the glitchy landing animation which nearly disables your character, and it's only cancelable by pressing a movement key, but often you won't be using the movement keys when in the air -since movement is halted-. This suggests there wasn't good communication between the controls guys and the animation guy to make this specific landing cancelable by nearly every attack? The game is ostenibly designed to be easy right? (Too easy IMO), but why add in this useless busywork for the player to consider when it should be removed?

There are even some instantces of there being bosses in the game who's attacks are low and sweeping -suggesting that you should jump over it, to better integrate this system in the game-. However oftentimes when you attempt this, you'l be struck by the very projectile you're ment to jump over, or you'll be hit by a melee attack the boss uses when he fires out the projectiles.
It is as if they didn't have a proper game-designer, since if they did have one, for sure such attacks would be countered by air attacks, to reward clever out-of-the-box gameplay.

Although speaking begrudgingly, air attacks have SOME utilitiy, they add in a meaningful skill tier when used against bosses, since they don't move around that much, and you can attack at your maximal jump height so you have more time to block enemies attack as you fall, and the added SP/ultimate gain is nice, but seemingly only when you're comfortable fighting a boss, and can bear the risks of having clumsy gameplay with the attack/block cycle, and the risk/reward gameplay due to the awful landing animation and reduced block times.
However, ranged characters benefit from air-attacks much more than melee characters, and arguably the only types of characters that can include in into their playstyle, since when they do it, they essentially get a rate-of-fire boost and they are stationary in the air (ranged characters tend approach their enemy as they attack) and they don't need to worry about blocking because they're at a distance from the enemy (while other characters have to put up with that), so it's a clear benefit to them, but why not for the melee characters?

Why couldn't there had been a special "slowfall" attribute given to characters when they block so they don't have to put up with the landing animation, or why is there even a landing animation that can't me bypassed by everything, why wasn't that just implemented? Why isn't there a single boss or enemy or situtation in the game where air attacks are expressly encouraged? Why can't I dash or double-jump in the air? Gah, again it makes me think these guys don't have a game-designer on board.

Ultimately, it seems that air combat is a half-implemented mechanic that the developers decided to leave in beacuse it filled a "content gap" despite that this feature is very poorly integrated into the gameplay and is rarely (if ever) encouraged. Since if you ask yourself the question "How much would my gameplay change if they just removed air attacks?" many would reply "not at all".

COMBAT SYSTEM > DASHES

Much like air attacks, there exists another even more obsoleted tool in this game -probably a relic of more ambitious tamsoft developers and animators who made Senran Kagura-; ground dashes, now again if you asked the question "How much would my gameplay change if this didn't exist in the game" you'd probably answer "not at all" because this feature is for all intents and purposes, negligable; The distance that you travel when you use this ability is insignifigant (like 3M) and it dosen't any worthwhile protection from attacks, amounting to a block that requires even better timing to do, but unlike blocking (and subsequent counterattacks) you don't get any SP (energy) or ultimate from doing this, so why even bother? It's inferior to blocking (and counterattacking) in almost every way.

Yet interestingly, this feature oddly got more polished than you'd think; all characters have a 4 animations for dodging in all 4 directions (forwards, backwards, left, right) while locked onto enemies, and there is also a follow-up attack unique to each character if you press the attack button after a dodge, with each character having a unique dash animation for each direction (although it seems copy-pasted pretty bad) with some (mainly ranged characters) having unique out-of-dash attacks.

But being realistic, it's likely that you'd never notice that characters have an out-of-dash attack since well, nowhere is this mentioned in any tutorial, the only way you'd maybe notice it, is if you have UNI in your party, and maybe notice how she does unique attacks, but otherwise, this feature is just hidden from common player awareness.

Speculating, it's probable that dashes are again another relic of poor communication, or over-ambition in game-design, maybe the tamsoft animators were thinking that 4GO would involve big swarms of enemies -much like in NepU and Megatag- and these dashes would be quick ways out of being swarmed from all sides, -hence non-trivial enemy management as part of the gameplay- or as quick ways to move around your environment, also, maybe the fact that some of the melee physical attacks strike in a 360 radius around the player suggested that at one point, the game was to be a musuo game like NepU, but in a dis-organized change of management (or maybe just "Rogue" animators), they decided against it, but instead of scrapping their work -which I admit, is kinda nice- they just trivialized and ignored it and left it in, claiming it as "content". Kinda like how some SP moves will knock up enemy corpses, suggesting that at one point, that follow up air-attacks were supposed to be fuctional.

Another speculation it's likely that were going to be unblockable attacks in the game, that had strong lockon (and indeed there are remnants of these stonger attacks) and required a dash move to break the lock, so that you could dodge the attack, to help mix up the block-->attack cycle a little bit, or since the speculated musuo theme was scrapped they tried to go for a slower-paced more "tactical" gameplay, were in-combat movement was much more restricted than it is now, but that was a scrapped idea part-way into the game too, since when locked on, you move much more responsively, that mildly suggested there was sepposed to be a totally differant movement paradign when in combat, where these dash-moves would fit into it -maybe for getting behind enemies-. Except the enemy design and encounter design was just plain scrapped, thereby leaving again these broken systems for me/us to speculate on for our amusement.

CHARACTER ABILITIES

Repeating what what was said in the character analysis; While you have a bunch of characters to pick from, the diversity that they possess is for the most part abscent -much like the enemy design-, most of them play nearly identically to eachother with hardly any gameplay gimmicks to make them unique, which incidentally is quite the stark contrast between how the characters appear on the steam store page -Bright and colorful-. It seems that the devs were content with largely making each character unique in quite a lazy way -by giving them access to stock "abilities" of which there are 9 varieties:

1. Strong melee
2. Ranged magical
3. Damaging magical circles (only wizard)
4. AOE heals
5. AOE buffs
6. AOE elemental buffs
7. Self buffs (only samurai)
8. Strong forwards dash
9. Strong ranged (only pistoleer)

Now, this might feel like a lot of abilities, and while they're helpful in adding something to the diversity nearly every ability -except for the damaging circles- is applied as a damage boost to your regular gameplay, very rarely are you compelled to do anything outside of your regular gameplay of just wailing on the enemy with your abilities, 4 of the abilities are straight damage abilities, 3 are "set and forget" buffs that you might want to refresh before a bosses stunned state to help burst him down, and healing is trivial to apply, so thus, only one class of abilities -The Magic Circles- has any unique -gameplay diversifying- mechanics associated with it!

Curiously, it also seems that the devs did everything in almost as lazy a way as possible when getting new abilities; You unlock them as you level up with no/barely any announcement that they've available -and sometimes, the player won't even know they've earned a new ability-, why must everything that's done in this game be so lazy? There could have been a little bit more player agency/control here by at least letting the player unlock specific abilities from a menu by spending points -and by spending points to upgrade the moves- and thereby adding in a sense of satisfaction in buying that cool new ability! (although this again, would demand they overhaul their entire game)
Additionally abilities don't even tell you their damage stats when you look over them in the character menus; The only ability that has any output (like damage or healing) numbers are healing spells, so when you're using nearly any of the abilities, you wouldn't know which one is better than the other, or what any ability does exactly! It's like the devs know that the game was designed to be simple (and IMO mediocre) so they just hid away all of the systems and neutered any difficulty that might be present so people wouldn't notice. I guess I shoulda infered that considering items -arguably a broken game-cheesingly strong feature- is overtly and plainly implemented into the game as it is, that if used correctly (which is easy to do) can give you enough energy/SP to use your abilities without even having to worry about conservation! Thereby trivializing another element of the game.


However, going over each type of ability.


All physical attacks are done in melee range and just inflict damage plainly, there isn't much of a unique state your put in , nor are there any unique de-buffs are temporary enhancemenst that one is put into, you essentially get a sword slash as your starting physical ability, and you later unlock a 2 sword slash move that for all intents and purposes, is a more damaging move, little more. Some physical attacks will deal moderate "defense bar" damage, but nowhere is this mentioned -since the numbers are hidden-, but generally magical attacks are better for that.

Hower, speculating; If you pay attention to some of the physical attacks you might notice that some of them look like they knock up enemies upwards -to make use of the largely unused air attacks- however this feature was never implemented into the game -and thus further reinforcing the idea that the game is incomplete-. However there is another remnant of an air combat system in place -perhaps a feature they forgot to remove from the game-; If you kill an enemy with one of these "knock up" attacks (or some other melee attacks), they'll be launched in the air, in a way acting as a "unique death animation" but to speculate some more, maybe this half-baked feature they added in is in fact causing that "enemies continue their attack after they die" glitch, since maybe the "air launch system" is causing glitches with the regular death animation by somehow interupting it, since it seems to be the only bit of code that might interfere with a regular death animation. This also might explain why I don't recall bosses ever having this glitch benefitting them, since they don't have this "air launch system" added to them (because they're too big), or how enemies seem to consistantly die instantly when they're 1HKOd by one of these "knock up" attacks.


Magical attacks give a little bit more freedom, you have tier 1, which shoots out a projectile, Tier 2 shoots our more projectiles, Tier 3 creates a magical ring (only Wizard gets this) and tier 4 creates an explosion at the enemy.
Judging by this list, nearly all magical spells shoot out a projectile (that will rarely miss) and deal damage, (especially since the elemental status effects are trivial), The only "unique" spell mechanic in the game is the wizard's Magical circle; Which deals damage to an enemy as long as they are in that circle, and indeed is the only non-cookie-cutter (AKA interesting/fun) ability entire game (this is not an exaggeration), since you're compelled to pay attenion to where the enemies are, or might be going when you use this (if they move at all).

Now if only the magical circle ability was a baseline for abilities uniqueness and engaging gameplay -instead of being an exception- then the game might have some other mechanics it could fall back on, but sadly every other ability is much more simplified compared to this.

Healing and buffing abilities are in an even worse spot, essentially you press a button, your character channels the buff/heal, and everyone gets healing/buffed!, inial impressions find this a perfectly acceptable way of going about things, but taking a care to notice, that this system/method is utterly trivial! Typically in most other games, healing is in some way limited, and thereby you need to ration the amount of damage you take, or heal only specific teammates, in TF2 for example, Healing is rather constricted -you can only heal a single target at a time, in Killing floor you at least have to aim to heal your teammates with the medic dart-gun, in Overwatch, there were a variety of ways of healing; The typical healing stream to a single target, A drone that lingers around a player and heals, or an aimed "spraygun", all empansizing some kind of conservation of HP since healing is hard to come by or a certain technique to healing, but here the healing is so utterly trivial, by being cheap, spammable, nessesary, and powerful (even the weakest healing spell restores 30% of all HP) that you're only asked to press a single button to heal your entire team, that it takes away any technique, skill or conservation to heal your entire team! Unlike healing, buffing isn't mandatory later on in the game, nor even particularly encouraged -Why not out-level stuff or spam healing?- it's like they added in this system that with some tweaking coulda been meaningful in the game but just decided to not do a "balance-pass" on it, leaving another trivial mechanic in the game!

CHARACTER ABILITIES (part 2)

Speculating, both healing spells, and magical spells (and every ability in the game) were probably intended to be interuptable upon being hit by an attack, -considering the conspiciously long casting animation compared to physical abilities and how the tier 1 (low-difficulty) magic spells are instant- to add in a small layer of skill and to discourage using healing or magical abilities in melee range, however this sub-feature was removed likely because the AI healers (all of whom tend to charge into melee range) would constantly have their timely heals interupted -which may have attracted some complaints from whatever minimal testing base the game had- and since the AI programmers were too incompetant to give proper rounds of adequate custom AI testing to each character they just said "aww, ♥♥♥♥ it, lets nix the whole system" so they just made magical channeling animations uninteruptable, so that the bad AI partner's AI wouldn't be noticed for how terrible it really is.

Commenting further, it's possible that all generic spells, heals, and buffs were implemented before they had this game-design change, and elmental buffs were implemented later on in the game due to their more complex mechanics, -after they realized they wouldn't get the partner AI they wanted- since blanc cospiciously, has a generic buff that has a delayed casting animation unique to her, while Vert's elemental buffs (which do what blanc can do but more) lack these lengthy animations. It's also possible that the devs in a way wanted to fix up the animations -and hasten casting animation for melee casters- but they decided against throwing out perfectly good content that does what they wanted well enough, so they just accepted the current situation and moved on lazily, and hope nobody would notice -which was the case-.


There is a dashforwards move (not the trivial multi-directional one) that could have had a better spot in the game -as a combat maneuver when fighting enemies- but since there is no enemy design -that is all enemies just melee brawl you rythmically- there is no place for it! Under this circumstance, it's mostly used as a way to speed up transit times when going across dungeons, and even in the circumstances where you might want to use it in-combat -to avoid the team-wiping 1HKO moves- (not that it would be intuitive to even know this) when you use it against bosses to counter their 1HKO move, you'll rush TOWARDS the boss instead of AWAY from him, since you'd be locked on. Why couldn't they had made an exception with this one ability that it ignores any "aim-direction" from lockon and lets you move in any direction much like the dysfunctional dash move? It's stuff like that that makes me think that these Neptunia games aren't made with a game-designer in mind, and are rushed out for purchace by a seemingly brainless customer base who unduely adore the game.

Perhaps the most unque character among all is the pistoleer (uni) who has access to a unique class of abilities all to her own; The strong ranged abilities. Yet any gameplay implications that would be tied to this are squandered, these abilities -much like physical attacks- are mere extentions of regular physical damaging strikes! Her "Twin Barret" (her best move arguably) is essentially just her shooting out ALOT more projectiles same with elemental shot, and nearly same with every other ability she has, she has a backpedal move, but it's meaningless to use -she doesn't back up far enough- (which makes me further think that the game is a collection of animation assets, and/or that there was serious lack of communication between any game-design departments, and the animation department) and perhaps more bafflingly, the melee kick that she does in this "backup move" is hard to hit enemies with in melee range, since the doesn't kick immediantly upon doing the move much like certain characters (blanc, Nepgear) counterattack and instead does it about 0.7 seconds into move, as she's already out of melee range.


Really, all abilities seem to be crude attempts at adding in unique playstyles to each character, in a way adding a more meaningful layer of gameplay, but the current implementation is pretty bad, many characters have functionally identical moves, 11 of the 12 classes can afford to get locked into melee and do the attack->block cycle again and again, almost no character is so differant from the others that it nessitates a substantially differant playstyle (maybe except for Ranged characters if you felt like it), there isn't a character that could, -for example- fly, or a character that inflicts curses, or summons minions to help. There are effectively about 9 abilities in the entire game with about 8 of those abilities being very boring and trivial to apply, with only 1 of them being actually unique to a degree (the magical circle compels a unique playstyle).
Abilities are nothing like in Diablo 2 (where each ability is unique throughout) or Overwatch's abilities, Or hell, even like WoW or casual MMOs this game tries to crudely emulate, with each character having a collection of abilities that fundamentally changes how they play to their core, no, essentially abilities are a peripheral addons with very little legitimant ability design to the base abilities of each character, as opposed to working deeply with each character to define a unique playstyle. (not that the AI programmer could facilitate this for the AI partners, since it seems they never had good ones to start with).

ULTIMATE ATTACKS

Perhaps the name "ultimate attacks" in of itself -upon inpsection and thought- suggests there is a serious lack of developer creativity, because "ultimate abilities" (not attacks) typically in other genres (and even the same genre as this game) tend to be a character/build/faction's signature gimmick/specialization expressed strongly through the game mechanics, like how the "Demon hunter's" ultimate in "Warcraft 3" shows him succumbing to his corruption and turning into a powerful demon temporarily, or how "Bronya's" Ultimate in "Honkai Impact 3rd" is a black-hole attractor move that deals very little damage, expressing that she's a support character, or how the sub-superweapons in "Command and Conquer: Red alert 2" express each faction's theme; The Soviet's "Iron Curtain" sub-superweapon exemplifies their brute-force approach, making their tanks invulnerable, while the Allies ultimate the "Chronosphere" teleports your tanks to any point in the map, exemplifying their sneakier tactics.

However in this game, there just isn't any expression of character themes in the game -not that each character's "class" was ever developed that well in the first place-; The Priest's ultimate is mechanicanally near-identical to the Paladin's, The dark-knight, samurai, ninja, all have identical ultimate attacks -when the game expresses that each character is unique because they have a "class"-. This is quite the wasted opportunity, why couldn't the priest -for example- produce a powerful healing circle as her ultimate? Why couldn't the wizard temorarily enhance all elemental weaknesses enemies had (and made some on a boss) for her ultimate, it's such a break from each character's own theme even, it really feels like the characters are cookie-cutter mechanically with not much to differentiate them, and us -the customer and the fan-base- is supposed to be deluded by the funny, unique, and well-animated characters into "feeling" that there is character diversity.

Speculating again (which is one of the reoccuring themes of this writing), The Wizard's (nepgear) ultimate was probably going to be a 2-part ultimate, since there is a cospicious cut between the first scene, and the 2nd scene in her attack, suggesting that at one point you were at one point demanded -by the game-designers- to 1. Summon the circle, with it maybe offset a bit to encourage you to lure a boss over it, then 2. Activate the ultimate for a lot of damage.

Returning to what ultimate attacks are in this game; They're essentially just things that encourge certain types of gameplay (like using green-heart's air attacks) and by rewarding counterattacking, since those things give ultimate "fuel"; Which is then accumulated and used against a boss (preferably) when his defenses are down, it enables some tactical gameplay -encouraging resource management and buff management- and it does it's job well with it being flashy and powerful, but it's applications seem so specific -it's only used against bosses- that it doesn't feel like much of a power-increase, partly beacuse the game didn't have enough challenge in the first place to create a sense of progression to feel satisfied from, but also because ultimate attacks are hard to accumulate "Fuel" for, so you wanna use them against bosses near-exclusively.

There is the matter of the ultimate buff which while helpful, just feels like a punishment for not pressing the ultimate attack button fast enough once you reach the 3rd level of ultimate buff, (since you'll trigger the buff on the 1st press, and the 2nd press attacks and might run out of ultimate fuel to do an attack), but curiously it seems the progression on getting an ultimate attack works in reverse, -to most people- the ultimate attack is probably easier to utilize than the buff due to it's intuitiveness, but you unlock the attack later on in the game -for theatrical effect- rather than in the beginning. I continue to think that the low difficulty sooths over this game-design weakness. Not that it matters that much.

Character Analysis (Melee/Healer)

Repeating what I said earlier at the beginning oy the "ultimate attacks" , "Character abilities" and "Combat System"; None of the characters are fleshed out, it's like they added in a samurai because "daww how cute" and didnt' care to implement any "samurai-like" mechanics to her, they added in a "Enchantress" because they thought it would be neat and elegant for the grown woman character, they added in a wizard because it would be a new fit for the girly-girl character. Indeed it's likely that they were picked to be these classes not because of the unique character gimmick that they could use to "accessorize" this class mechanically, but rather to put the characters -as in the story- into new situations. The whole game is character-focused in a bad way; Not by giving each character a unique playstyle, but by making the characters appear unique for the purposes of the story, petty jokes, and playful atmosphere in the game, reinforcing the feeling that this game is well, quite hollow.

Although -at the end of the day- each character does indeed have a somewhat-unique playstyle, -if minimally- and welp, I felt obliged to talk about them each in turn. Although just talking about the mild differances in gameplay won't let me get off scott free from what I obliged myself -a much more detailed "Review" of this game-.


-----MELEE/HEALER
This class of 3 characters are needed to progress throgh the game, and indeed any team that includes more than 2 of these is allowed to be unusually reckless, since these characters are unusually powerful due to the healing and only the starter characters have this -perhaps to further make the tutorial nearly unlosable, (since they'll automatically heal), and indeed these nessesary characters are the very first you play in the game.
These characters just don't have enough downsides to justify NOT including into your party; They're around as durable as any other charcter, they attack about the same as any other, they all have elemental spells,but -much more impontantly- they have the overpowered healing spells.


Neptune (Paladin)
A melee character that is durable and has the strongest block in the game, and with healing spells, tier 1 magic spells, and a selection of melee attacks to pick from. Indeed for most purposes, this character can do it all (and to a degree complys with the "paladin archetype", and -if you want an easy time- use this character (and people go around saying this game has better "character balance").

But being speculative, It's likely Neptune was one of the first characters to make it in the game, and she was used as a test-bed for the first mechanics, and her 3D model was probably the first to make it into the game -especially since her default standing animation is recycled from older games-, and she's a "Paladin Archetype" and thus would have some fancy spells attached to her (probably too much, giving an impression overpoweredness). There are 2 unique attributes in 2 of her abilities that set her apart, -that give unique insight into the game's development- and that is:

1. She can cancel her heal with a block.
It just makes sense for a tanky healer (Paladin) to be able to tank, but also to heal, to it thematically makes sense for her to be able to cancel her heal to block, and indeed it was possible that each character may have initially had the option to cancel their casting animations to block especially since -judging by the conspicious casting animations- they were intended to be interupted by enemy attacks, -thus not sparing healing out of the attack->block cycle and adding in some technique to healing- but after they noticed the partner AI was terrible at healing sensibly -and they weren't willing to fix it- they just decided to axe the interupt system as a whole, but failed to remove Neptune's gimmick heal->blocking feature. I think this is a hidden relic that shows just how much the game changed from it's more ambitious design to a more "gutted out" game with broken features and trivial gameplay. (which I assume to be a result of poor communication between tamsoft/Idea Factory). But as with these hidden relics, they're incomplete, and this gimmick won't refund the "energy" cost of the heal, not that it matters anyway, the healing will more than compensate for any recieved damage. But to the 2nd hidden gimmick.


2. Her "Ray Split" ability allows her to move as she uses it.
This relic suggests some degree of conflicted game-design between the 2 devs, Tamsoft was thinking they were making a musou (swarmlike) game initially -or this was an compulsion of of the animation or game designer- since spinning-like-a-top moves tend to permit movement so they added in this feature to this character, that was until there was a change in game-design, somewhat early -but still late enough for relics to remain- but it's rare that they'll just straight cut out features of their game, -even if some of those features cause glitches in the game -like the abandoned "knock up" system- so they left in this gimmick and abandoned it by failing to create the rest of the "sub-struture" needed to make this feature work; Like how some of the monsters -the slimeball, cat, tulip- enemies are small and could concievably fulfill a "swarmer" enemy that you fight en-mass and can clump together so AOE is important -and where movement-controlled spinning- would be valuable, but none of the enemy design or encounter design supports it.

Really, I have a feeling why I'm getting so much conflicted game-design vibes from this game is because Tamsoft was thinking "Senran Kagura" or maybe "Neptunia U" animations and gameplay design, while Idea factory's employees were playing "Sword Art: Hollow Realization" and felt they should try to mix up the Neptunia series with a sub-genre transition, but what came out has so many broken features, half-implemented features, wasted man-power and just conflicted game design that maybe the devs shoulda just picked a route and went with it, but since this company has such money and time constraints, the game was released in a broken-mess state and -shockingly- never fixed.

Character Analysis (melee/healer) Part 2

--Vert (Enchantress)
Arguable the best character in the game, able to use 6 of the 9 types of abilities, only lacking somewhat in the durability department -although compensated by her own self-buffs but the sheer flexibility of her makes her probably -until you get items- the best class to have in any team.

However she curiously has one class of semi-trivial ability unique to her: She can enchant weapons to exploit combat vulnerabilities, however if you've read my topic on trivial elemental vulnerabilities, -specifically how meaningfully tough bosses don't have weaknesses to exploit- and have read the top-most important glitch in the game -the double damage glitch-, the CENTRAL functionality of this abilities is nullified, leaving it's residue -the attack/damage buffs- remaining. (although it's probable that elemental vulnerabilities are glitched too, I'm just too lazy to investigate).

It seems -perhaps fittingly- to give the only "Player" adult female the "enchantress" class, complying with the passive and subtle sexualizations in the game, but what resulted is something kinda broken, since the devs only had 9 types of abilities in the game to use (all of them being boring) they may have wanted to give her something specialized and unique, but they just gave her nearly every ability in the game instead to make her feel "magical" like the rest of the melee-healers.


--Blanc (Priest)

Now, why is a priest in this catagory? In almost every game, the priest sticks back at range and supports the team with heals (or buffs), and this character does this. But there is an odd reason why you'd want to get into melee range as the priest -your attacks hit double in close range- (for added ultimate/energy gain) and this is further backed up by how she'll APPROACH the enemy as she attacks, and how she bizzarely has melee "Energy abilities". It seems that IF/Tamsoft wanted to make the gameplay somewhat engaging, -by subjecting her to the attack->Block cycle, but to accomplish this, they just broke the thematics of a priest (sitting back at range and supporting) by adding in a pain-in-the-ass mechanic of approaching the enemy as you attack, that most people wouldn't assume was -in a way- designed to help you, that in no way is communicated to the player at any point in the game. I mean why couldn't the make her starter staff look like a mace? (Or make it a mace) or change the animations a bit to make it appear that she's swinging the staff/mace more forcibly? (which would also perfectly suit her hot-headed nature perfectly) To help communicate -and not in a pain-in-the-ass way that she's supposed to get into melee?

I mean most players are not going to realize this feature, and are going to stick with their gut-instinct and sit at range and bombard the enemy with magical projectiles, and just assume they have to put up with the enemy approaching nature of the attack as an annoyance (or as a risk/reward component) requiring them to stop attacking, and then run away, so they can attack some more, the game clearly communicates this through the projectile that she shoots out, why is there this conflict of communication?

There is also conflict in her counterattacks as well, since when she does a counterattack she will leap backwards and fire out 2 projectiles, (communicating she's ranged) however -and baffling- she does a melee attack (which inflicts the bulk of the Ultimate and "Energy" gain), in this counterattack, but only AFTER she's Lept bacwards -out of melee range-, I mean this fact is perhaps the best example of conflicted -and outright broken- game design in this game; It's a move that you're forced use to get out of range -where you're strongest- which includes a broken mechanic in it that suggest you should be in melee, but you're forced out of it! (this again makes me think this game is a collection of animation assets)

It's also likely that this approach mechanic might have contributed to why healing spells in the game were uninteruptable, since the AI programmer didn't really give her effectual AI to commit to the ostensible ranged gameplay that you'd think she'd do, and with her healing also in melee -as well as all healers are melee-inclined- they probably nudged the developers towards axing that entire -although speculated- system.

But what's also kinda absurd is that the healer isn't even that good at healing or even buffing, since her buffs are just as good as Vert's (who outclasses her), though she does have a 50% heal -as opposed to a 30% heal- but almost nowhere in the game are you compelled to commit to that -the enemies just don't hit hard enough-, to you have a healer, who's heals aren't even worth it.
And perhaps baffling enough, she has an ability "ressurection" that doesn't ressurect teammates! It instead it restores the entire team's HP to 100%, It's as if Tamsoft or Idea Factory tried to give her a gimmick but failed to program it in the game, so they instead recycled the ability instead, resulting in this mockery of broken game-design in it. Alternatively (if you want to be more optimistic) they tested the ability, but then they realized it broke the game -not like it's broken enough already- so they just decided to change it, but they weren't even hard-working enough to rename the ability!

However being pragmatic, She does kinda fulfill the ranged combat charater, (even more so if you use the air attacks) since her Strength is kinda low, (even though she has 3 strength based abilities) and she's kinda delicate and has a larger energy reserve, but she's just second rate -since her buffs are too weak, and the enemies don't hit hard enough to justify her-.

Character Analysis (Brawlers)

This is arguably the most specialized class of characters, though in a way the weakest class of characters, since essentially all they do is melee physical damage -AKA get locked into melee and swing their weapons-, and that's what they do for the most part, just doing the attack->block cycle and maybe using their abilities if they have energy (SP) to use, and have nearly no team synergy, there just isn't that much to talk about.

---Noire (Dark Knight)
Arguable one of the worst-off character in the entire game, she just plainly strikes the enemies and uses her energy abilities when the situation allows, there just isnt' anything to talk about, other than how ordinary, underdeveloped, and plain she is, there isn't any conflicted design, or bugs with her, she's just there.

--Rom (Samurai)
This character (outside of having my favorite costume and character design) is about as boring as Noire is gameplay wise, all of her attacks are plain, nearly every ability she has is just a melee attack, she has a useless dash move, and while she has a self-buff (that's exclusive to her) it just does nothing to redeem this charcater out of mediocrity, she just does the attack->block cycle over and over again exactly like Noire, and also like here, there just isn't any conflicted game-design to talk about.


--Ram (Ninja)
Think just like Noire and Ram in boring to play, except her basic attacks can project her boomerang/disc thing to hover a few feet in front of her that can hit the enemy multiple times, her abilities have a TINY bit more AOE in them -She throws her boomerang-discs around her sometimes- but there's just no encounter design to facilitate that uniqueness. She has a slightly better air-combat than most characters however, since every attack in the air is a boomerang throw, which multi-hits and gains you more SP (energy) and ultimate fuel but really, she's slightly better than Rom and Noire in that she has magical abilities -to better harm the guard/defense meters of bosses- but she's much like the rest of the brawlers, boring and one-dimensional.

-Angels
Now, I've clumped all of the angels together because, well, nearly all of them are mechanically identical since they have the same pool of attacks and abilities, they all have strong dash-forwards ability, a magical explosion ability (which helps with breaking enemy guard), and various melee abilities, there are some moderate/mild differances, like how Greenheart is better for noobs because she attacks more (thus more SP/ultimate), or how Blackheart/Whiteheart has an unusually good melee ability, or how Purple-heart is the best charcater in the game if you exploit a glitch, but these differances don't really encourage a change in playstyle.

Character Analysis (ranged)

Arguably the 2 classes with the most unique playstyle out of all, with their ranged attacks -in a way- being thematically sensible, the wizard stands still when she attacks, and the pistoleer -to offset her power- annoyingly approaches the target as she attacks, these characaters have SOME kind of gameplay gimmick that makes them mildly engaging to play as, unlike the the rest of the classes in the game who rely overly on just having one of the 9 cookie-cutter easy-to-apply abilities. However like the rest of the more ambitios charcaters, there seems to be some bizzare problems in the execution.

On the ranged characters the air-combat systems is a little bit more meaningful, (like with the priest) such as increasing their fire-rate while in the air, and preventing them from moving (which is hugely helpful). Now if only it was good an the melee centric characters.


---Nepgear (Wizard)
The first ranged character, and one who -ostensibly- just sticks at range to use standard attacks and casts spells at range! (if only the other ranged characters were as thematically consistant) However, there is an oddity much like with the priest, attacking in melee will hit doubly, but this is without the obnoxious mixed messages of the priest APPROACHING the target as you attack, so the gameplay design is better.
Her abilities are very plain and wizard-centric and very good at breaking guard, she has access to essentially all tiers of spells, however she has one unique gimmick ability, -The magic circles- that just by this existing add in more gimmickiness and gameplay diversity than any other simple decision, since without this, she's just an exceptionally boring charcater to play as due to how straight-forwards she is. I sometime wonder, why didn't they give the ninja, paladin, samurai neat character gimmick like this.


---Uni (Pistoleer)

Arguably the most unique character and ambitiously designed out of the bunch (which is appreciated), while she has the conflicted "get into melee" game design that the priest has with her standard attacks, there is FAR less mixed messaging , making the gameplay through this "get into melee attack annoying feature" a little bit more engaging -and I dare say it fun- and it's thematically consistant too, with your attacks dealing 0 damage in melee range (instead of hitting doubly).
She has the most unique (although useless) dash moves, and dash out-of-dash attacks, and it was clear that this "Get-into-melee" attacks were sepposed to be reversed by the dash moves (which have unusually intricate animations) and indeed it looks like the animatiors had ideas that Uni would dodge enemy attacks with these dodges, but as usual, this system has is effectively useless, partly due to the non-existant enemy design, and due to blocking being straight better than dodging, and as for "retreating" after using standard attacks; Why not just Run away? It's faster.

She is strongly encouraged to use her air attacks much like the rest of the "pseudoranged" charcaters because it makes her stationary, (as opposed to approaching the enemy) and gives her a faster shooting speed, although this too suggests some more conflicted game design, they added in the standard ground attack, but put in air attacks that straight up obsoleted it?

Among the set of expected energy (SP) abilities she has, -shooting out a lot of bullets-, she has a conspiciously ineffective one; The ones where she's supposed to back up while doing the SP move, since ostensibly these moves are supposed to get you out of melee, but the amount that they move you backwards (or sometimes forwards, which is a bad thing) is trivial compared to just running backwards and using another ability, it's as if they wanted to make her fancy with these abilities -including the intricate dash moves- but they never got around to fixing or balance-testing any of it, (the ability includes a kick, suggesting it'll knock back the enemy, which it doesn't) again as if they had the animations and programming put it, but they didn't want to scrap it.


It seems the devs wanted to give both UNI (pistoleer) and Blanc (priest) more engaging gameplay, but sadly, they chose methods that broke the thematics of each -doing stuff at range-, instead of implimenting better systems, like maybe a gun-magazine capacity for the pistoleer (that requires reloads) or some kind of alternate Mana system for the priest. And well, I'm suprised nobody else seems to have really noticed this (or even thought about it).

AI Partners & Teamplay

Normally, -in other games- whenever teammates are presant throughout it as a continious feature of the game, the AI partners are controllable, and who's control is meaningful and required to succeed in the game, in "Swat 3" you are forced to include commands to your AI policement to make then breach a new area, throw a flashbang, guard an entranceway, In "Army of 2" you can can command your AI partner to be agressive, or defensive, -and you'll need to pay attention to the flow of combat to determine when to change the AI-, in "Pikmin" the AI partners you control act as if they're an extention of the player's will. In all of these games, the AI partners are a non-trivial element in the game that requires you to command them around tactically in order to progress though the game, and indeed they'll require some input on your part to let you beat the game.

However route the developers took to implementing the AI partners into this game is arguably one of the LAZIEST ways to go about it; The AI parters are essentially 3 mindless drones who'll help you beat down the damage-sponge enemies, and that's mostly it! There's no team synergies (like using Ram/Rom sisters together) or unique abilities outside of the 9 mindless ones listed prior, there's no in-combat team-commands that you can issue personally to the AI; like ordering them to heal or attack at certain times, hell, the only team-commands that exist in the game are 2 layers deep in the main menu! and they act more like a "setting" by picking their agression and abilities (not that even picking their abilities is even mentioned in the tutorial), it's as if they built the game from the ground up to be this trivial, that one of it's core features -the AI buddies- is literally not a gameplay-altering element in the game!

While they can use group healing and buffing spells, that's literally the beginning and end of any inter-team mechanics in the game (outside of the lazy team-revival item) and even then they don't do a good job of that later on in the game, when they're programmed to only start healing once a member's HP is below 50% (or so), but even then group healing is utterly trivial and easy to use -just press a button and heal/buff your entire team!- Really, with all of this lack of any "teamwork" in the game, I dare say that each character was made in near-complete isolation from eachother mechanically and animation wise, since there just isn't any special inter-team synergies!

Even examining their AI, it's clear that they do a bad job, many of the AI settings (which again are set in the main menu, not a hot-key) have your AI partners pausing without reason in the middle of battle, or sometimes you'll see the pistoleer attack in melee range, the priest recasting the same buff even when it's already applied, or healers just not keeping everyone at 100% HP! Heck, the AI even cheats and will sporatically heal themselves in-combat (not that this is ever mentioned in any tutorial) I mean if you were to really examine the AI an it's own (If you managed to peer past the battlefield chaos) you'd realize it's utterly mediocre and clearly unfinished!


Really, I speculate that the AI is at the root of many of this game's problems, from the non-existant enemy design, to the non-existant encounter design, from the revival system to the ability design, to the very fact that the AI cheats with healing itself, and to trivial healing in the game, to the broken air-combat in the game, to even to the very foundation of the game -the difficulty- being so easy.

The AI sabotages whatever enemy design was in it because they couldn't add in good AI or team-commands that could help the player counter that, lets say for example you wanted to fight an enemy that would heal other enemies, but the AI wouldn't know how to cope with that, they'd just continue to strike at the tanky target beaing healed, so thus they just ditched the enemy design so people would'nt feel frusterated.
The AI sabotages the encounter design because again they couldn't implement neat AI into the gameplay, so the devs might have wanted to add in that tight-rope section, or that room full of traps, or a jumping section but you'd just see the AI repeatedly hurt themselves or fall. (incidentally there was a VN (visual novel) event mentioning a trap, but the encounter was axed.
The AI ruins nuance in the ability design -or even any unique abilities- because the AI isn't smart enough to combo abilities or unique gimmicks to any sensible advantage, even exististing nuace that MIGHT have been in the game -like being interupted while casting spells or abilities- was axed because the AI couldn't cope with that, since it appears they used the same copy-pasted AI that the melee characters have for all of the characters (or badly modified it for each character).
The revival system was probably trivialized -and disintegrated from gameplay- because if they ever did properly integrate them, they'd die over and over to the same late-game boss and hence be exposed to derision -when merely failing once and completely wouldn't bring such scrutiny-
The AI hurts the speculated air-combat in the game because the AI was never programmed to even be able to take advantage of it, essentially compelling the devs to scrap the system. (and leaving a couple of bugs in there for good measure).
The AI cheats by healing itself sporatically because having them die is generally a bad idea (even if it's the result of your own incompetance) so they made them heal themselves -seemingly out of nowhere- so this never happens, but also to mitigate the terrible healer AI as well, since often they'll attempt to heal much too late, which would result in character deaths occasionally.
Hell, It might be possible that the entire game was designed not to include the AI partners, but to hide just how terrible the AI partners really are, and yet still have them in the game, from how the AI partners will heal themselves automatically, to how trivial healing is to apply in this game -not even being interuptable-, the abscence of AI commands, to how the enemies give out measured and predictable damage to each character and how they aren't designed to compel any unique gameplay, to how the fighting they do is chaotic, and helps to hide their terrible AI, and to how the AI is never expected to do anything other than brawl the enemy.

Speculating further, it's likely that they trivialized the teammate design and enemy design in the game (outside of needing at least 1 healer later in the game) because they wanted to give everyone the freedom to pick their own group of characters, so that you wouldn't need to switch to the pistoleer because of a certain encounter or enemy, or that you won't need to use ice spells against a fire golem, so that you could have all of the cute characters you want, so that everyone will be happy

Or maybe the devs just produce these mediocre Neptunia games with very little innovation and ambition and with highly-conflicted game-design hope that the fan-base they've nurtured will eat it up? (Yeah, probably)

Trivial Elemental Choices

The only enemies that have elemental weaknesses to exploit are trivial enemies who'll die too quickly to you anyways to be worth the extra effort, (which is exasperated by the X2 glitch) and many of the bosses (where most of the difficulty spikes) don't have any elemental weaknesses to exploit. In fact, the difficulty curve for elements WORKS IN REVERSE. Normally in games you'll have to better exploit the mechanics that arise in the game; Like you need to pay more attention whether to block or counterattack, or whether you should bring radiation resistance or bullet resistance.
But in this game, the further along you get in in, the LESS YOU PAY ATTENTION TO THIS MECHANIC. (Do these guys even have a dedicated game designer?)
Why isn't there an enemy that requires a certain element to defeat? Why don't any bosses have elemental weaknesses?

Exploiting elemenatal weaknesses is really a matter of picking a differant spell from a list, since each elemental type is a re-skinned version of the same spell, none of this compels you to change your playstyle, it's nothing like in Diablo 2, where a fire-meteor is funtionally differant than a frozen orb. And even then, huge swaths of the spells in the game are nearly identical anyways, you have magic missiles, more magic missiles, and a magic explosion (the enemies don't move around fast enough to possibly avoid projectiles, nor do they come in big enough groups).

Status effects are trivial; The fire status just deals some small amount of damage, the ice and wind status effects just give the enemy a free hit, but the electrical status effect periotically staggers your character, and is interestingly the most potent status effect, but often it just means you'll take additional hits for attacking (so sometimes it's better to block over it's duration).
However Status effects you inflict on enemies are essentially non-existant, fire just deals a negligable amount of damage, frost/wind status is meaningless because the status effect are STILL is removed in a single hit, with you and your teammates will collectively be beating down on the enemy, and electrical status probably does'nt work (I didn't test, although I suspect enemies are immune to this status effect), and to further empansize how meaningless this feature is, bosses are immune to status effects!
This suggests that these dev's don't have a game designer on board, there doesn't seem to be any way to control when a status effect is inflicted on an enemy, it just randomly happens.

Really, Status effects could have been used add another layer of gameplay to the game, like you wanted to prevent a bosses 1HKO move that wipes your team (which is actually in the game) by ice/wind statusing him with an on-command teamplay ability, or reducing a tough boss's damage output by keepng a paralyse status on him, or speeding through a boss with a fire status effect.
But even then, there is so little gameplay variety in the game, and a near-complete lack of enemy design that to even implement this into the game they'd need to overhaul at a minimum, nearly all of the enemies, Perhaps it goes to show just how half-baked the game really is.

Guard System

The guard system it inself -as a core mechanic of the game- is well implemented, it's clear that this feature was to be throughly imtegrated into the gameplay and it shows, you're encouraged on longer boss battles to tactically accumulate (or use items) SP (energy) and ultimate "fuel" to use against them when they're weakened, with this mechanic becoming increasingly important against bosses up to the final boss -whose guard is so effective that you're required to break it to deal damage-.

However -despite that this mechanic is will implemented- many weaker enemies also have guard meters, and even guard break animations (if carefully attack them to leave them alive) which is quite the oddity; Why did they even give these trivial fodder enemies guard meters in the first place if for most intents and purposes, it's never going to be seen? This suggests a conflict between management and the game-designers, the former demanded plainly that all enemies are to have this feature, but the game-designers maybe mildly protesting, that many of the weaker enemies would die without the guard mechanic ever being felt.

There is also another mild thing, since the enemy design is so barren, the only way you'll ever really interact with the guard bar (which is to say how you'll reduce it) is by repeatedly attacking normally -or if you want to do it faster- with magical, or certain physical attacks, and little else, -and most of these things are things you'll be doing anyways- instead of being a more dynamically interactive mechanic, like trying to attack enemies from behind to break the guard faster. So essentially, for bosses you 1. Fight the boss normally, and then 2. you burst-damage the boss as his guard is down, and there coulda been a little bit more done to make the gameplay more engaging. Because in it's current implimentation, it sometimes just prolongs the fights needlessly.


However there is a far more serious problem with the enemies below.

Nearly non-existant Enemy Design

Looking at a fraction of the enemies in the game, (a horse, a slime-ball, a goblin) you might come to think that each enemy has differant techniques for defeating them, the slime enemy might require freezing, and then a shatter to defeat, the horse might charge around and be tough to hit, so might require ranged attacks or a well timed melee attack to interupt it's charge, a goblin is a fodder enemy, that's sepposed to be easy to beat and just requires ordinary attacks.
The above sample of enemy design (vaguely like serious sam) is what someone might come to think if they were asked to speculated on the screenshots on the game's enemies.
However what we got is quite a diverse set of enemies indeed (about 16 standard enemies and 10? bosses) however there is a problem, Vast swatch of them are mechanically similar! They all just get into melee range and very rythimcally (in fact, unusually rythimcaly, as if they didn't even put a randomizer on their attack timing). The horse walks into melee (incidetnally it moves slower than your characters despite being a horse) and rythimically attacks, the goblin and slime do the same too. Heck, there is no enemy that goes beyond just conventionally attacking to defeat, you're only rarely compelled to switch tactics for any enemy!
There just isn't anything in the enemy design, (might explain why there is a crummy difficulty curve).
Indeed it feels that the game is essentially a collection of animation assets tied clumsily to arbitrarily designed enemies given a health bar and defense bar and let loose on their game!

1HKO moves / Revivial system

I must confess, there is one category of enemy moves that bucks this trend -the team-wiping 1HKO moves- and while the diversity is appreciated, I ask myself "What the Heck?!" this move is only ever shows up on 3 enemies (on the 3rd one due to a glitch); The Cheetah, The Jester, and the Minotaur, but what's more suprising is that there is no warm-up moves of similar potency like a move that freezes our entire team from a standard enemy, that must be countered in an interesting way, -thereby training the player naturally the techniques to avoid this-. This ability literally comes out of left-field and suprises the player with no intuitive counter!
And perhaps the very design of this ability is even more baffling, -It's designed to wipe your team out- in a game where you're sepposed to always have your team as a core mechanic of the game, but we have here a clumisly introduced mechanic that just nullifies that? That breaks the game's own design? All facilitated by the brain-dead AI that can't avoid these attacks?

But to further speculate, it's clear that these special 1HKO moves were designed to introduce some tension into the game, since these moves are used by end-game climactic bosses -one of the few instances of a clumsy marraige of game-design and story- by forcing the player to (potentially) solo the boss without help but much about this is just plain awful; Why can't I retract the AI partners when you see these moves being telegraphed by the boss? Why don't I have better control over my AI partners to command them to not die? These moves suggest that at one point in the game, there were sepposed to be advanced AI readily-usable commands in the game, like disengage, retreat, use healing, go pure offense since these AI commands would wonderfully and intuitively counter the 1HKO moves that the bosses dish out.
You can even say that the current "AI tactics" menu is in fact a shell of this ambition, since it kinda works (a little), it's just they lacked the game-design talent, and development time to correctly develop the system into something good.


Since I'm on the subject of 1HKO moves, teammate revival is arguably the worst here than I've ever seen it in any other game, since like healing it is trivial; You essentially use a -unusually expensive- item and presto, you get your entire team returned to you, and again -like healing- this initially seems to be a perfectly acceptable way to do things until you think about the cost of the item -the potion- which is so high, and so rare that you literally get only 1-3 times to ever use this item, but even if the potion was cheaper and required less grinding to get, there is something lost that's more substantial; tension when down a few teammates, being perceptive, most other teammate oriented games require you to do something outside of your regular gameplay fighting to revive your teammates -like doing an revive animation around them and imperiling yourself in the process- and consuming a rather cheap ressurection item in the process, or SOMETHING that changes what you should do to create a sese of tension -and in a natural way-, like some desperate calls of your player character to revive an AI partner with a fleshed-out animation.
Yet, at the same time, I speculate (again) that the whole reason the revival system was implemented in this way -in a all or nothing way with a expensive but powerful item- is because again of the bad AI, since they knew the AI would die to often to these 1HKO moves and if you were to revive your teammates, they'd surely die again to the 1HKO move you'd get annoyed and complain about their stupidity since well -it's being rubbed in your face-, and the devs desperately didn't want to annoy the players, since well -every single reviewer never mentioned any difficulty in the game, or in the dumb AI- so maybe that's why they just trivialized their revive system.

2 Unique enemies (commentary)

However, despite all of this, the word "nearly" is accurate when describing the enemy types in the game, because there are 2 genuinely unique enemies that are distinctly differant from the regular enemies, however the implementation of these 2 unique enemies is seriously flawed, some being part-way implimented (as with the plant) or having faulty enemy design (the ranged guy), it's like they had some ambition to spice up the gameplay, but they just decided to trivialize their whole game instead. (prehaps at the risk of someone claiming this game is too hard -which it isn't, it's too easy-.

Plant Suicide Bomber Enemy

First impressions of this time-bomb enemy compel players to believe "Huh another enemy let's beat it down" (maybe after it exploded on you the first time) but if you look a more deeply, there are some serious flaw with this guys implimentation -reflecting many of the other flaws in the game's design-. For example, he appears as a tuft of leaves when he's buried and "hidden", suggesting that at one point there were ambitions to use him to create some "stealth" gameplay, asking you to more carefully examine your envinoment, however they never "Camoflauged" this enemy in with the background foliage, since they never really added enough foliage varitey to make this work, nor did they ever make the grass tall enough, hell even the barren -and clearly unfinished- floors of the "Chrono wasteland" dungeon you can see this enemy clearly and without any suprise. Essentially nullifying a CRUCIAL element of this guy's design.


Add into this that since there is no encounter/environmental design (which makes this game repetative) even when this enemy BADLY needs encounter design to work, and without it; this enemy loses a HUGE amount of it's gameplay enriching potential. Since otherwise he's fought much like any other enemy in the game. It's like literally Tamsoft (or whoever) made this totally unique enemy with unique gameplay implications, and required careful consideration for the game designers to make it work, but the game-designer just said "♥♥♥♥ it" and added this enemy in along with the rest of the fodder enemies mindlessly, without really thinking about what he was doing. (and this game somehow gets an 97% positive rating; I swear the "Voting base" here has lost their minds)


However, there is SOME remnant of encounter design with this guy, he at least requires you to prioritize him, and he's often placed around other fodder enemies, so that you'll need to personally attack him since your AI partners will be busy attacking the distraction enemies (if they don't automatically attack the bomber) however even that is is somewhat sabotaged by a very pervasive glitch; The double-damage glitch, that results in a mild tension from this guy being reduced to 1-shotting him effortlessly -when "time-to-kills" are especially important on this time-bomb enemy-. There's alse a hidden feature -that I'll choose to speculate from-; He'll harm nearby monsters when he explodes on his timer, however it's nearly impossible to actually use this feature to enrich the gameplay, by the time he's "set" to explode there is very little you can do -like escape the blast radius- outside of outrunning him (he moves slower than the players) and already being outside of the blast radius, but really, any teammate gameplay is ruined anyways, since the AI that only knows how to mindlessly charge the enemies and who'll surely die to the explosion or kill the bomber.


Even with the current setup with all of these flaws, they still had an opportunity to create a unique boss encounter with this guy; A scenario where you have a lot of plant enemies hidden around in bushes, who'll you'll need to provoke to bring to a near-invincible boss that'll absorb the explosions and die/become vulnerable.
It's like they didn't even try.

P.S.
Actually this guy is better implemented than I previously thought, most of these complaints apply to the end-game environments (which appear like moonscape) where he clearly fails his stealth game-design purposes. But in the grassier places, he -for the most part- succeeds in the "ambush" component of his gameplay especially since there are more enemies that create enough chaos to hide him, (although that's sabotaged by the X2 damage glitch).
Still, the damage this enemy does is not enough to seriously jostle a player experience, especially in the only part of the game where his game-design works -the early game- due to the grassier dungeons, and since he cannot jostle (and the only way he even could is by killing your teammates, since the healing is too prevelant and trivializes any damage he could do), he really isn't accomplishing much of an alternate gameplay exeriance; He can -to a good degree- be ignored, which is further harmed by the AI partners simplistically targeting him and 1-shotting him during the parts of the game where his stealth-gameplay works (the beginning). However there is a solution that the devs could have implemented -making his explosion inflict a ton of status effects- so that way his mechanics are boosted to be non-trivial, and yet it's not so annoying/devastating that it forces the player to interact with the revive system (which is awful). However -as we know- this isn't the case, and this enemy is rendered somewhat ineffectual. (and it also de-trivializes the elemental system a bit)
This all makes me feel that the 3 "moonscape" dungeons weren't finished around the game's release.

Ranged Elementalist Enemy

Now, in fighting games such as this, whenever ranged characters are implemented into the game, there is usually some kind of telegraphing that he's going to do as he attacks (not that it'd matter due to the abscence of AI commands) so you can react to it, you saw this in "Neptunia U" with the ranged enemies there who'll make a certain sound and/or have a long wind-up animation to give the player an opportunity to counter the ranged attack or in other games there will be a "artillery hit" marker. However the game-designers in this game seemingly choose to ignore this bit of wisdom and just made this enemy fire out projectiles who aren't telegraphed at all, and who'll fire these projectiles out at you at quite considerable distances across even the gaps between clusters of enemies, effectively forcing you to take these periotic bits of damage as you fought another enemy, whose damage you seemingly cannot counter (and who's damage tends to get doubled due to a glitch).
It's as if this very enemy counteracts the game's own design directly, since the foundation of the game (or perhaps the only thing) is the attack/block cycle, here comes an enemy that says "Oh, I'm just going to throw this near-random hits at you and there is little you can do". And while it's nice they at least got that bit of enemy placement down -to emphansize this enemy's unique gimmick that he'll attack you from quite a distance away- It's just amazing how they even made this guy in the first place.

Adding onto that that this guy is the only place where you'll really encounter elemenatal status effects -one of only 2 places where it's somewhat meaningful-, all of whom tend to be annoying rather and largely uncounterable -often resulting in a free hit for the enemy- means this enemy is essentially produces -as a gameplay effect- a source of near-uncounterable damage that afflicts something annoying onto you! (although I guess the game's difficulty is sufficiently low that most people won't mind).

And interestingly, unlike the plant bomber enemy described above, this enemy -where you should prioritize the bomber- this enemy is the opposite, He's durable, but his melee attacks aren't that damaging, compelling you to attack the surrounding enemies. I guess this was implimented because he's designed to keep you busy atttacking him while one of his other buddies hammers you with these nearly uncounterable ranged attacks. Although there is another nice gimmick they added in with this guy, the projectiles he shoots out are only effective -for the most part- if you're about 80M away from him, -while fighting other enemies- since they're starting location is oddly located -like a V, or a upsidedown V shape- making many of the porjectiles miss you since the "homing potency" of the projectiles is quite low.

But really, this guy just serves to annoy you really, he'll interevene annoyingly as you fight other enemies with his nearly uncounterable projectiles, and -if you choose to run past him-, He'll shoot projectives at you as you try to pass by him (and maybe he'll KO an AI partner).

Environmental Design

With 13 dungeons to run around in, you'd think that from this amount, that there'd be a variety of situations and gimmicks to each dungeon, like an Life-draining aura in the wastelands, lava hazards in the lava land, or fall hazards in the mountainous region, -as any sensible game-designer would think-, However sadly in this game no such gimmicks exist for each themed dungeon (aside from somewhat propely themed enemies), most environments exist as set-pieces that have trivial difficulty or mechanics associated with them, -if any at all- (like jumping from one unfailable platform to another). Essentially each dungeon is layed bare for you to explore with almost no impediments to you going from point A to B, there just aren't any locked doors, clever platforming (which could concievably be done) or anything to really make you feel like you've accomplished anything or are going anywhere. You exist as a "Tourist" in their environments rather than a "Traveler" since there is no difficulty, here or in the rest of the game.

However this is not to say that the dungeons are ENTIRELY devoid of gimmicks, there is are somewhat-hidden chests and items in each dungeon with there being locked chests that require one-time use keys to open up, somewhat integrating money/item management with exploration. But arguably that's the most in-depth there is to meaningful mechanics in a dungeon. There are 3 types of dungeons I've determined below that in some way "theme" each, but the word "theme" implies somewhat meaningful gimmicks to each, when they are either 1. Trivial, or 2. Trivialized (through bad game-design)

1. Plains dungeons
These dungeons are as you'd expect from the name well plain, you go from point A, to point B (B being a boss) without much in the way of difficulty or challenge, there are some branching paths in these dungeons -to compel a little bit of exploration and to spare them the derisive comment of "linear"- but those are fairly short and trivial, taking about 1 minute to explore with maybe a cluster of enemies in it.

Interestingly, there is some -incidental- (these guys don't really care about enemy/environmental interactions) encounter design in some of these dungeons, -mainly the forests- where some of the paths can be obstructed by bushes or be very narrow (to deter using the ranged characters) but that's minor -especially due to the trivial difficulty pervading the entire game-. Also, there is one instance (Yes, only 1) where you have to commit to some platforming in the game, where you must jump on a sequence of pillars to access a chest, but I ask, why is there only 1 instance of this in the entire game was it really this hard for them?

However, there is a much more damning realization that one can come to -if you're perceptive-, one of the dungeons of this type has a "beta test" theme to it, and indeed they've re-used unreal 4 assets to make it, and while it's nice to have a change of theme, there is a question that could be begged by going through it; "Why wasn't more done with this theme?". The theme of "beta-test" gives incredible freedom to the game-makers to be especially bold in the design of the dungeon, to add unusual platforming, enviromental fight gimmicks, unusually dark areas here where you have to fight monsters via their bio-illuminence, and another spot where you're constantly blinded by light, or hell, an area where you'll lose health gradually! But no, no creative liberties were taken from this clearly workable and probably fun to do opportunity they had.
Really this says something about the devs, and how by-the-books and boring they are, and further reinforces the notion that these guys don't have any creativity, willpower, imagination to actually create a fun game!

2. Jumping Dungeons
The phrase "Jumping" might make you think of something like the platforming in "Mario" or -maybe at the worst- the "Xen" levels for the game "half-Life" however this comparison to better games gives this game too much service; All of the Jumping/Platforming in this game is nearly utterly trivial! So what I really mean by "Jumping Dungeons" really just means "Elevation" dungeons, where you have to jump from one unfailable jump to another and that's it! I mean if you were to remove the jumping from these dungeons maybe you'd have a "Plains" dungeon as described above, but with the enemy clusters unusually close (which would be a good thing IMO, the game needs more difficulty). Really It's just you having to press the jump button to progress through it, not timing the jumping, or carefully jumping, just merely jumping.

However, speculating again, there is one dungeon that suggested they might have had a meaningful element to it -The "Horor Garden"- (Yes, It's literally called "Horor") Where there are these circles whos design suggest that at one point they were more spaced apart -hence requiring jumping to get from one to another- however, maybe upon realizing that they just didn't care about making their game fun (and realizing the characters will sell the game for them) they just decided to dismiss this entire design! So now the circles are so close together that they overlap, and they added in a bunch of invisible walls throughout the game to reinforce that you -the player- won't dare to explore anywhere or fail any jump. (this might have something to do with the suprisingly unresponsive player controls, who require a good 2-3Meters to do a 180 degree turn)

3. Maze dungeons
Typically when dungeons of this type are included in JRPGs, they're paired with a puzzle-solving element to put the player into "investigative mode" where you -at the least- should try to memorize landmarks and pay attention to details in the map. However -and as you might have guessed it- this design is completely abscent from the game! and perhaps more baffling, YOU'RE GIVEN ACCESS TO YOUR MINIMAP. So they crafted these "OK-ish" enviroments that clearly had some gameplay implications, however for some absurd reason, they just decided to sabotage it's own design by giving you the minimap and thus ruining the experiance! And it's not even like the mazes are that hard to understand -the landmarks are sufficient and workable- it's just the developers didn't care to "De-trivialize" their own dungeon design!


But speaking about the aesthetic parts of the environments, they have a "copy-pasted" theme to each one, (just look at the laterns in "Tetyu Temple" or the trees in "Logi Mountain"), and really, I'm suprised everyone is giving this game a 10/10 mindlessly.
But perhaps what's more suprising is just how formulaic these dungeons are, why couldn't there be any trees directly in the path of the player as he's running through the dungeon? Why didn't they take that massive floating this in the City Ruins dungeon and make it part of a walkway that you have to cross? Why couldn't they make you tight-rope across a narrow platform?

Encounter design/Gameplay Variety

Out of the 13 dungeons, there were plenty of opportunities to have created some unique enemy/environmental interactions in the game, and while some are indeed there in the game (like with the constrained narrow paths in the forest detering ranged characters) they are either trivial, or barely implimented, and there exists one enemy (the plant bomber) who sorely needs encounter design to work to create an interesting experiance for players.
Hell, even without altering their own dungeon designs one bit, the developers would have made the dungeons much more engaging like clustering groups of enemies closer to eachother to compel careful enemy management by "pulling" one group away to fight, but while this somewhat non-trivial design exists in the game (so kudos to you game-designers for trying the bare minimum) it's only encountered in about 2 dungeons total! and even then, only about 2 times in each dungeon!


Essentially you're just going from one cluster of enemies to another cluster of enemies very predictably and comfortably with no change in objective varity, like defending an objective, or capturing a flag, or defeating enemies in a clever sequence, the game even practically taunts you on 3 occasions, one where your characters claim they've been surrounded -but upon leaving the VN sequence you aren't- and another, against the cheetah, where explicitly you're told to merely wait out the cheetah and wait for a timer to count-down, however you just beat him down normally, and another, where a VN sequence tells that a boss has been weakened by a prior battle, but the boss isn't weakened at all!


However The game does have a set of -barely enriching- gameplay encounter design that's in it's dungeons however, do note that many of these gimmicks -like the rest of the game- are trivial, or very rare.

1. One of the bridges in the "Hestie Crater" is -unbeknowst to the player- can be "falled off of" pitting you against an unexpected cluster of enemies. This helps with the design, but why the sudden transition from "safe" bridge to "unsafe" without any warning? Why wern't bridges filled with some kind of intuitive stress, to compell some interesting emotion?

2. You can access the "Tetyu Temple" (A higher level dungeon) early, and the enemies in it are quite dangerous which -if you choose not to cheese it with healing spells- can compel a small fright as you try to avoid the enemies. I mean it's nice -and indeed this is the best instance of encounter design in the game- but it just goes to show that the only level design they could do -even if badly- is one that is only incidentally easy to do, never any deliberate design with special mechanics.

3. There is one battle in one of the forests where you're compelled to run past a certain set of bosses because they're quite tough, and don't give you any rewards, and again, here is another example of a simple encounter design merely by monster placement, I just ask, "Why can't I see this design more throughout the game?", I mean I'd like to see more "natural" encounter design in your dungeons, rather than these bare gimmicks rarely throughout the game.

4. -And perhaps the most clever- there is one item in the "Chrono wasteland" that if collected and you carelessly continue to run past it, you'll fall down and be forced to trek a long path back to where you used to be -next to the boss portal- it's nice, but it hardly enriches the otherwise barren design.


Aside from these rare gimmicks that are in the game, the game is bland and repetative, but really, I suspect a lot of the reason why there is hardly any encounter design is partly due to the bad AI, the designers (even though we could probably infer they're lazy) axed nearly all encounter design from the game because they could not make one of the core features -the AI- workable with these encounters, so they -instead of taking more time to develop the game- just decided to remove any ambitions they had.

Perhaps There is a better metaphor I could use, this game is essentially if you were playing every mission in "Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2" But every scenario -except for about 2 missions- is you playing against skirmish AI, or if you were playing "Halo" and the only enemies you fought were the easy-to-kill grunts. This is the level this game is at! There just isn't enough encounter design/gameplay variety to make this good!

ITEM/EQUIPMENT/MONEY SYSTEM (commentary)

The game more deeply includes money-management as part of it's "difficulty" curve with you sometimes having to -if you choose to- sometimes ask whether if you want to spend money on equipment upgrades, or consumables. While most of this system exists ostensibly in simplicity and balance with armor/weapons, gems, and prayers (I guess to promote exploration) and indeed does add a somewhat meaningful lever of difficulty to the game (reduced since you can power through the difficulty without items) there is one system in the game that is massively stronger compared to the rest of the rest of the item/equipment/money system; The consumable item system.

Consumable items

Consumable items in this game are used instantly at any time in combat -even when recoiling from being hit- as a totally free action on a 6 (or so) second "cooldown" with even the weakest -and most cost-efficient- healing item restoring 30% of your HP or energy (SP), and with you being able to store 15 of these items in your inventory.

Just thinking a bit about these facts will show multiple departers from -IMO- Good game design, for one, the very fact that you can use these items at ANY TIME in combat almost seems obscene, usually in JRPG (or RPG games in general) consumable items are strong, but usually there is some downside to using them, like merely doing a small "consume item" animation to offset the benefits -and to add a small layer of difficulty to the game- and being struck in that animation will forfeit the item's benefits, but in this game, there is no such downside or tactical consideration!
There is also the matter of the quantity and potency of these items, You can have 15 of both energy (SP) and Health items for use, with each restoring -at a minimum- 30% of either, with this being only the "tip of the iceberg" since there are also many other items that restore 20-100% of energy or health each having a capacity of 15!
There just isn't enough money-cost to not justify using these items to effectively cheese through the game, they essentially trivialize all in-combat resource management in the entire game! With the only offset being that they don't help your AI partners. (but even then, just play the healer and start using the energy (SP) restoring items to heal without a care for conservation!)

Perhaps items were ment for use in the multiplayer mode, since there you encounter enemies tough enough to start challenging you and fights last long enough to deplete your resources, and due to the "optionalness" of having a healer in the multiplayer mode is, however this fact sabotages the idea of "team compisition" or "teamwork" that could have been present in the multiplayer mode; You don't need a healer, you don't need a buffer, or a tank, you just need these overly strong items as your support!

This trivializing game-design likely intended, in the earliest footage of the game that I recall, the user-inferface of the game puts items near to the fore, and their potency was probably just as potent as it was back then (considering they were nerfed post-release to have a re-use delay if I remember correctly) so yeah, this makes me futher suspect that the developers just do not care about designing a good game! (maybe because they never read about complaints about how easy the game was)).

Equipment (commentary)

To risk sounding repetative, the equipment system in other games normally would try compel some kind of decision making whether a certain piece of equipment is worthwhile to bring by it's effect on the gameplay, like do I want to bring a bullet resistance item? or a radiation resistance item for this mission?. Perhaps the best Item system I could possibly think of is the gear system in "Mechwarrior 4", where each piece of equipment demands intrinsically your consideration for the mission at hand requiring a different use of said weapons, and compelling much differant playstyles; you don't want to bring longer ranged weapons to a close-quarter city fight, nor do you want to bring too many energy weapons due to the overheating mechanic, and bringing guided missiles demands a differant gameplay than if you were to bring lasers. Maybe if one of your teammates is bad, so you can equip him with a bunch of long ranged rockets and keep him out of harm, and indeed this game has a fully integrated "builds" system in the game, where you can -just by changing equipment- change how any "Mech" (the robots you pilot) feels and plays.
Though the comparison is a bit unfair, the 2 games are vastly differant, and it's a bit ridiculous for me to impose this expectation upon 4GO, -clearly a low-effort cash-grab style of game-, since it this game, most of the equipment exists as simple upgrades from one item to another (to make it simple what to do) but there is one system in the game that kinda went against this; The Gem system. But bafflingly the implementation of this system is so trivial, and mis-handled that it's existance can be seem much like the air-attack system -in that it can be safely removed-.

Weapons/Armor

Here I can't complain that much, weapons in this game are fairly simplistically implemented into the game as "stat-sticks" that don't compel any change in gameplay, but rather it seems the most meaningful "enrichment" to the game this adds is as an incentive to explore the dungeons that you were in, or -to a lesser extent- as a mechanism that compels you to resource manage your money a bit so you can buy some moderate upgrades if a character is "behind" in the equipment upgrades.


While this system is nice, it's much like many other systems in the game -trivial-, (although much better implemented across the story) and partly because the innate difficulty of the game is so low that you aren't ever really compelled to go out to equipment-hunt for anything (The dungeon and quest design doesn't help enough) especially since there is a pervasive double-damage glitch that permits you to steamroll everything. All this denys you a sense of satisfaction over getting a new fancy piece of equipment, upgrade or ability or anything in the entire game -maybe with the sole exception of getting a new piece of armor for one of your characters-, really there just isn't any difficulty road-block in the game that you'll really need to compel you to slow down and make you think "Wait, I've been failing at this boss, maybe I should adjust my character builds or read the ability descriptions some more before I try again".

Even the exploration elements that I suggested earlier is somewhat sabotaged, by giving the player access to a minimap -and other ways of "discovering"- chests to just turn the environment into a non-interactive set-piece, -why even care to explore when everything is laid out for you?-.
Though confessing, a good deal of the character progression in the game is determined by having up-to-date items for your use especially later on in the game, so there is SOME sense of improvement over getting one, but even then there are a couple ways of by passing this difficulty easily, probably by just plain grinding, or by using items, or by playing the healer.

Crafting system/upgrades

While the crafting system is introduced early in the game, often using it is a waste since often the weapons and armor you'll be finding in chests later on will be upgrades to whatever you have, this annoyance is further compounded by weapons and armor being sold at the general store (although it's hidden one layer deep into it's menus). This is another example of the half-baked features that made it into the game; Why is this feature not meaningful integrated into normal playthroughs of the game? Perhaps this was implemented to shoe-horn in "tamsoft" as one of the shop-keepers?

However, the crafting system (or rather, weapon upgrade system since that's all what you do here) was probably aimed at end-game content, especially with all of the grinding that you need to commit to to upgrade some of the weapons, like having to defeat a cheetah 5 or so times for his "fur" to upgrade your metal sword and to a degree diversifies the grind. However, there is a pretty serious problem with the end-game, which I'll talk about later.

Gem System

Gems in this game function as the most unique set of equipment in the game, having features like one gem having +damage -defense, or +wind elemental resistance, or +elemental damage type or X2 ultimate "fuel" gain, and indeed through this system, you have much more control to be able to customize your playstyle, with somewhat meaningful build options for each character in your group; I'll make the wizard have an offensive-focus, and I'll give the paladin a defensive-focus, and indeed this is the only way you can "customize" each character's stats in the game. However -like many other systems in the game-, there are many problems with the implementation.

Perhaps most damaging of these is the double damage glitch in the game which essentially gives many players total freedom to ignore many of the game's mechanics because you aren't compelled to explore any of your "build options" to optimize your performance -especially with consumable items being as overpowered as they are-, You aren't compelled to slow down and think when the game is a breeze! Another problem is just how rare these gems are -and also how weak their effects are- I mean by the time you've gotten to maybe the cheetah boss (which is mid-way through the game) you'll have gotten like 3 of these gems or so (about enough to fully equip a single character) but even then, the effects that you'll have recieved from these gems is very weak; Those 3 gems might just be a -15% defense with a +15% attack, and the downsides might seem too steep to be worth it. Or maybe the stats you'll find a gem will be irrelevant to your build -or even the flow of the game- by offering a 25% wind damage resistance, however there is no enemy that deals a meaningful amount of wind damage in the game to justify it's use! (an example of the broken/unfinished enemy design hindering other parts of the game)

There are some strange gems in the game -like the double EXP and Money- gems, or -most potent in most cases- the X2 "Ultimate fuel" gem, but these gems don't compel builds or techinques, they're just straight upgrades, so in this sense, the uniqueness that's presant in gems begins to fold in on itself, and resemble the equipment system as above, without asking the player to make any decisions on what to do (other than which cute waifu gets the upgrade), there just isn't that much "tactical" use of equipment in this current system.

Perhaps there is one type of gem that I found most interesting; The gem that gives you more attack damage the higher your combo counter, I was saying to myself "FINALLY, Some meaningful piece of "active" equipment that requires me to adapt my playstyle". However, there was a shocking realization, you only got this gem NEAR THE END OF THE GAME! I mean this gem's inclusion is prehaps the best metaphor for how well integrated many systems are in this game, "Oh we'll implement it, but won't care to tailor the single-player story or even care to implement this early in the story to make it meaningful"! This really makes me feel that maybe they made this system without the help of game designer!
Indeed ask yourself, "How would I change my playstyle if this whole system was removed from the game?" I think the answer would be "not at all".

Perhaps I shoulda expected this half-baked implementation in this game at the onset, since there is a similar feature to this "Gem" system in previous hyperdimension games called the "Disc Dev system", where you could equip your characters with things like +10% damage to birds, or +10% resistance to fire damage, but suffers from very similar implementation problems where the game is never difficult enough to justify using them, or the effect is too weak, or you're don't have access to enough of them through your standard playthrough to make a meaningful impact on your gameplay.

Prayer System

This is an odd system, you essentially go to the church and buy a rather expensive a one-time upgrade that will last for a single mission, with buffs like 20% more attack damage, or 20% more defense or 50% more XP for -50% item drops, while this system has potential to enrich the gameplay by enabling some builds to work in conjuction with it (like achieving a 99% fire damage resistance) it suffers from many of the same problems that afflict the gems system, in that the effects are too weak to justify their use, and secondly; These upgrades are unusually expensive -like worth 10 of those 30% heal items- for a -quite marginal- benefit compared to just using items, and thirdly; This system is hardly integrated into the single-player story-mode, hence if you were to ask yourself "How would my playstyle change if this system was removed from the game", many would say "Not at all", especally since of that double damage glitch.

However, considering this, it's pretty clear to me that this system -much like the gem system- really only begins to mean anything for the end-game content -which less than 20% of people even get to- since only by then will you have enough income to afford these one-time prayers or the fancy "gems" that you can equip onto your characters, and personally, this seems like insane game-design, why are these 2 systems nearly totally committed to a feature that even less than 20% of the players will even reach, or even bear to grind?

Money/Difficulty balance

Now, after thinking about it, it seems obvious that the money/difficulty balance in the game for the single-player part is busted, you're rarely compelled to acquire that much money until you reach about the very end of the game, but weapon or armor upgrades tend to be given out freely in easy-to-find chests, and healing in this game is far too pontent to compel equipment-hunting, and perhaps the only meaningful bought upgrades will be buying the armors for your characters near the end of the game.
It might even be possible to -with only moderate difficulty- complete the game on only starter gear!

However, it's much more likely that much of the real money-difficulty tuning was ment for the end-game, since that is where you are actually begin assembling the gems for creating builds, or where you're compelled to grind bosses for their drops to upgrade your weapons and armor, this is where you'll end up with an excess of gold that you won't know how to spent -since you'll probably have bought all of the upgrades- so there is a "prayer" system to spend any of your excess money, and personally -and I'm repeating myself- it's quite baffling that the blacksmith, gem, and prayer systems were ment to play a part here, and not naturally through the story-mode.

MULTIPLAYER

Now, since the game has the word "Online" in the title of it you'd naturally conclude that that there must be a fairly robust and functional multiplayer mode, and indeed such a mode is in this game -and readily accessable- however the current reality of the game gives off a vibe of "False Advertising".

There are some pretty stark limitations with it; You're essestially (and repeatedly since the multiplayer is where the end-game is) going through short dungeons to beat up a boss, and that phrase alone describes 80% of the multiplayer mode's functionality (incidentally this describes the single-player too), but I ask, "Why was the multiplayer mode even implemented so simplistically?". It's clearly repetative and vacuous, you can't even buy or change equipment in the multiplayer room -or even chat with your friends- and there just isn't any variety to the experiance since at least in the main-game your gameplay was mixed-up with the story dialog. In fact, I'd dare to say that the multiplayer mode feels MORE LONELY than the singleplayer mode! Since the multiplayer mode is "dead" and at least the dumb AI partners feel like faux friends in the single-player.


Really, why wasn't the single-player story made into a cooperative multiplayer mode? I could imagine there being a lot of fun with this, since it at least offers a sense of progression to the multiplayer experiance, and gives people the mixed-up gameplay of watching the VN sequences. But it's probable that the developers were too incompetant or lazy to include -IMO- this wonderful feature.


But There are some MUCH more serious problems with the multiplayer mode in-of-itself indeed there are I think 4 major problems with the game mode that run unusually counter to the spirit of a fun-times multiplayer mode.

1. Die = Kick from group
This alone strongly suggests that these guys might not even have a game designer, indeed it seems that in almost every other cooperative game whenever you get KO'd there is some kind of recovery mechanism, like expending a resource to revive a teammate, or -at the very worst- forcing the player into a spectator mode and no game that I know dares to just make the game LESS FUN and HARDER to ENJOY, but this game dares to go this far.
Indeed I remember having a casual conversation with my brother, where I told him about this fact, and then I challenged him to come up with another game -from his memory and mine too- that was worse, and our imaginations ran dry! This is literally the PITS when it comes to online cooperative modes! In almost every other game they might at worst, just force you to stay dead for the rest of the mission, but no game is bold enough to straight up kick players! And indeed I'm suprised this game isn't being flamed day in, day out for this horrible game design!
This is including the fact that there is a self-revival item (read no teammate help or teamwork) that revives you automaticcaly to provide a safety net!

This game design even flys counter to the very appeal of the game in the first place! Being an easy and casual experiance! Why must the punishments be in this form? Especially since this glitch is synergistic with the 4th glitch? GAH


2. Totally serverside connection with nothing clientside or latency compensation.
I mean Wow, how could they be this incompetant? Just playing the game as a non-host for a moment will reveal just what this error means, and asides from the obvious (horrible rubberbanding) even time-sensitive things -like blocking and jumping- are afflicted by this glitch too, which essentially makes air attacks (admittedly already kinda useless) even more useless, and makes blocking much harder to perform! It's obvious that this game is incomplete.

3. Mission complete = Group disband
Again this game-design choice that baffles, and again goes against the vibe that this game was designed to give off; Being a casual experiance with fun-times characters in a magical land, -with admittedly too low difficulty- but here we go, making up more systems that people have to put up with that'll separate friend or random people from playing with eachother! And again I can't (nor my brother) come up with anything that might even begin to approach this terrible game design, in every other cooperative online game, you stay together after you complete missions -to perserve a sense of "union"- but this game just doesn't care!

4. ALL dealt, Recieved, and energy costs are doubled
Now there is already an omni-presant and unavoidable double damage glitch -that wrecks havoc on the game's difficulty-, but here it actually impacts us in a way we'd naturally care about -making the game harder- (since nearly all people won't complain about a game being too easy) however -and bafflingly- this fact was hardly even noticed at all too despite the havoc it wrecks over the game!
This double recieve damage glitch is especially synergistic with the kick on death game design above, since you'll be taking double damage, it's more likely you'll die and be forced to endure being kicked from your team!
The doubled energy costs is another baffling thing, wouldn't people notice that their spells cost unusually more? That they suddenly need to use more items, while it kinda has the least implications -just spam more items- it's still quite a shocking glitch that wasn't caught (not even by the reviewers).

----Comparisons to Prior work

Additionally, there just seem to be a bunch of regressions in the multiplayer mode from their prior work: Megatagmension: Blanc + Neptune VS Zombies, because at least in that game, none of the 4 above glitches or problems weren't presant, (which already puts it a league above their later work) and -and this is important- The lobby system where players stuck around was FAR more funtional than Cyberdimension's, and you could do so much more in it.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1631359842

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1631358933


You could Change your equipment while you were with your teammates.
You could "talk" to eachother useing the pre-recorded voicelines.
You could buy equipment from the shops.
You could view your progress to completing certain "chests".
You chould show off your personalizations to eachother since the lobby enforces a "close-up" of your characters.
Indeed it could be that the very lobby system in this game helps to "mix up" the gameplay, by convieniantly allowing players -while in a group- to change out gear and look at items (which aren't as overpowered) so they don't get burnt out repeatedly doing the same mission over and over again! And overall, it was just a far better lobby system -and indeed a multiplayer system- compared to cyberdimension.

Additionally, there is another problem with 4GO's multiplayer mode; there aren't enough multiplayer missions, so if you wanted to say progress through the multiplayer mode -although this would leave your characters overleveled for the singleplayer- with a friend, you'd be doing repeatedly the same mission over and over again, without a sense of progression because literally for 10 levels, you'd be doing the same mission over and over again with hardly a sense of natural progression, while megatagmension at least had enough -if fairly blad- missions to offer that gave sense of progression and gameplay diversity! (however minimal it could muster)

Perhaps another thing to mention, you'd think that since the multiplayer mode is far more accessable on the computer version than it would be an the PS4 (due to needing to pay for multiplayer on consoles), you'd think that more people would complain that this advertized "key feature" is broken, however -and bafflingly- so few of the actually reviewers mentioned how broken the multiplayer mode was, I guess many of these reviewers have to be "incompetant" and rush through the game? to capitalize on the transitory "focus" that this game will recieve?

Multiplayer Encounter design

Quite bafflingly, it's only here at the very end of the game that you encounter any semblence of encounter design, where everyone has quit or beaten the game, -perhaps the developers finally felt liberated from the dumb AI and "casual" players- since here you'll actually find a challenge! With each requiring a unique method of beating. (and worthy of grinding over and over again).
However the encounter design in the game is rather simple -Perhaps exposing just how limited the devs understanding of the UE4 tools-, it's just the placement of multiple bosses in an area and it asks you to "try to beat it" with everything being of unusually high level; Examples include a mass of these "reaper" bosses with a main-boss reaper in it, or one instance where you have to fight a cheetah and a jester (or an energyman and a jester) where you're compelled to strategically position yourself within a radius around the jester so he'll just do his firebal loop endlessly, without them actually hitting you indeed it displayes an awareness of the boss gimmicks that the devs knew about, Or maybe they intended you to "peel" each boss off of eachother to be individually killed?

But to continue on the AI think, it's very likely that the whole reason why there is some minimal encounter design in the multiplayer mode is because the devs don't need to dumb-down the game for the terrible partner AI, as speculated in the AI partners section, I legitemantly susect the whole reason why there's no enemy design or encounter design is because the partner AI won't be able to handle it since they only know how to melee brawl "could you imagine the AI maintaining the ability to stay within a certain distance from a boss while also attacking another?) .

TEAMPLAY and ITEMS

-As stated earlier- The teamplay that exists in this game is fairly non-existant (maybe even worse than megatagmension), indeed when I said heals and buffs were one of the few Teamplay interactions in the game, I ment it, -maybe outside of coordinating ultimate attacks-, so literally it feels like 3 players just beating down on an enemy mindlessly, however -and again somewhat baffling- they even trivialize this teamplay interaction by allowing items -as powerful as they are- to be used in the multiplayer mode, essentially, makeing the need for healers or buffers meaningless, Why not use items as your "support character?"
But, to throw the devs a bit of a bone, maybe this game has guttered teamplay mechanics in it (and by extension, enhancing solo play) is because they knew that the multiplayer mode would be barren especially considering just how buggy it is, so they actually included this as an improvement to give non-teamplayers these tools?

However talking more about the teamplay options in the game, they're quite shockingly easy to do, if you play cast a healing spell, the AOE that's emitted from your character is so large that it can literally cover nearly the entire map (about 100M range), and I say this because normally -in other games- healing requires you to do something to recieve it -like aiming a heal-dart, or maintaining a heal-stream- but this game has no such finnese -this applies equally to buffing as well-, and heck -perhaps as an subtle hint as to how busted the game is- the priest character who is arguably one of the weakest characters in the game has an ability called "ressurection" that DOESN'T RESSURECT TEAMMATES! and the only way to ressurect teammates is to use an item! (And often you'll be unlucky, and the ressurected teammate will be KICKED ANYWAYS). Why must everything be so hostile to teamplay?

Additionally, there is no unique teamplay encounters, like standing on a platform, or any puzzle-solving, or "friendship doors", and whatever teamplay there is in the game is strictly optional or uneeded! Literally the whole reason of the multiplayer isn't for there to be unique teamplay encounters barely any unique playstyles for each player, but rather 4 characters from the single-player incidentally put together and asked to comunually beat down on an enemy!

MONEY-ITEM/End-game System

Here is the part where you begin to assemble and prepare the equipment to progress, and indeed it's the only place in the game where you can "build" your characters to have specialties with the "gem" system, with one player potentially being the "tank" and the other players being the "DPS" (although this is strictly optional) indeed this is the only place where equipment -as a thing you want- actually begins to function, specifically the broken blacksmith that you can safely ignore for the entirety of the single-player mode (which is an amazing neglect of a game feature). Here you actually want to grind for some materials for upgrading your high-end weapons and armor -though this seems to be the focus of the end-game-.


Indeed it's only here -at the very end of the game- where the money system actually kinda begins to function as a non-trivial game element, where you're compelled to actually make some kind of effort to grind materials and actively seeking them out or conserving money. Though this is still quite the show of developer incompetance, since these systems aren't better integrated into the single-player mode.

The conusmable item system I mentioned earlier? How I mentioned how overpowered it is? It's finally here when that system actually becomes properly integrated into the gameplay -instead of being overpowered- and indeed you'll need to prepare items beforehand and juggle item use as you fight the tough bosses,(especially with the doubled damage glitches) with you actually having to conserve your money to progress through the end-game smoothly, -something that's notably abscent from the single-player-, however it also brings up a vulgar prospect.
It suggests that money matters more than player-skill, since using consumable items is so important, it suggests that just having the items is nearly a requirement towards actually completing a multiplayer mission.

Another system that finally begins to work at the end-game -or rather becomes of value since it's very grind-oriented- are the 1-time use conumable items who give small permenant stat upgrades, to the character you use it on, but this item was never petentiously pushed-in-your-face throughout the game, and it's clear in it's very design that it's just an item you grind for to empower your character in the late-game by doing missions over and over, indeed it's a nice feature that just accomplishes what it's set out to do -to encourage grinding in the game-.

Of course most of this incentivization for grinding these items is done in perhaps one of the most vulgar way possible, the enemies in the multiplayer have outragious stats, with sometimes you fighting multiple of them at once (admittdly SOME kind of encounter design). But rather, it's just how repetative the quests are; You just repeatedly redo the same mission over and over again to gain what you want with no "grind diversity" encouraged (like adding a timer to how long a mission is active)!

Mysteriously, there seem to exist "money sinks" in the end-game, mainly taking the form of the "prayer" system and items from the "high-end" shop, to ensure there is some way to make some use of your money indeed it seems that these systems -especially the "prayer" system- were specifically made with the intent that super-rich players will always have something to spend their money on, -even if they are a trivial 0.1% of the playerbase-.
However, there is one rather shocking thing who's cost is high that it begins appear as if it were designed to be here; The teammate revival item.

This item bafflingly has a cost of 15,000 credits! (when the self revival item costs 2,000 credits and cheap recovery items cost 100) and arguably this is the most meaningful teamplay item in the game! So again why is teamplay so discouraged throughout the entire game?
Cynically, I suspect that the teammate revival item -judging by it's cost- wasn't sepposed to be a standard feature of teamplay, but instead a LUXURY, Yep, the convieniance of reviving your teammates in the multiplayer is a LUXURY and not a standard feature! Ment for those with too much money to spare as a money-sink! Whoever was the game designer should be compelled to go back and redesign the game since this amazingly bad.

The other money sink in the game -The prayer system- is where you spend credits (unusually large amount of them) to recieve 1-mission buffs and like the blacksmith system, and the gem system, it's horribly disintegrated with the main single-player experiance (asides from getting an achievement), since often the cost for some of the better buffs is so high that you probably won't even bother, and their affect is so low that you won't ever notice it (this is in combination with the X2 damage glitch), truely this system is for those who've reached the very end of the game, solely so that credits won't be stuck at 99999 (because for some reason, the devs thought this was a more important problem than fixing up the rest of the game).

FANBASE OPINION/RANT

I'm furious at these people, at the seeming brainlessness they've fallen victim too, at their seeming near-total societal apathy, to the poor eddiquete they've fallen victim to, to their dysfunctional relationship with information, and to the recklessness and brainlessness things they do.
This fanbase (which is quite indicative to others) I'd argue is much worse than many others, and indeed if you're looking for a near text-book example of a mediocre one, look no further. Indeed I feel the situation here is as if this company can sell the equivelant of "Aliens: Colonial Marines" to a eager fanbase who'll eat it up! Since it's somewhat decietful like Aliens Colonial marines (with 2 of it's "Key features" busted) and with shallow and repetative gameplay and a mediocre story to boot! Indeed I'd say Colonial marines has better gameplay -even though it's busted- since at least that game can be played as a brainless shooter -with a tad more nuance- while 4GO provides the exact same experiance without such nuance!

Indeed I feel the graphics, the story, the character, the gameplay, helps prop up a culture of mediocrity that helps sell the game! Since you'd be much more forgiving of a game if it had a goofy story, and you'd be much more forgiving if the graphics were good, or if the easy difficulty hid just how broken the story is, or if the cute sexualized characters helped to sell the game. Indeed I feel I was perhaps one of a few (like 2-5) people who realizes why the gameplay is so bad (as opposed to "feeling") and it seems only 20% of people even know the gameplay is highly problematic in the first place -as if they all play very passively and brainlessly-. And indeed we can see this behavior reflected in the brainless and un-serious review eddiquette.

It's clear that this game is a highly flawed experiance, indeed from all of the glitches I found in this game we can derrive something; It could be argued that every glitch could be seen -in a small way- as a small white lie told be the developers to the playerbase, and if a sufficient amount of said glitches are in the game, we could say that this game can either be honest or dishonest.
And it seems to me that this game is being dishonest.
However it seems that this fanbase is so brainless, as to not even factor in "Key features" into their review assessments -as if they don't care to challenge lies-.

Now, I'm sure some of those reviews are manipulated by -at the most extreme- being bought, but -and perhaps more insidiously- by just riding momentum and marketing forces, like by giving out free games to the reviewers and hoping for a positive review, or by releasing the game on a discount which helps give the impression of "generosity" to the company. Indeed I suspect there are a dozen techniques to improving this score, and this company knows the tricks (AKA subtle deceptions) to make it go up.

However there is something a wrong with this outlook -it's innately deceptive-. Ideally we'd rate the game based on it's gameplay, like it's difficulty curve, it's equipment system, the quality of the story -and how it's communicated- how interesting the characters look or act. But this game seems to have a way of side-stepping the "legitimant" way of producing game, by using it's characters as it's lynchpin around this demand (which makes me feel that this game wasn't made with a game-designer). Because on inspection, the gameplay, story, characters, game-design, ETC is vacious!

I mean I spose maybe this game deserves such a rating, (it indeed has it's merits) but only AFTER the bugs are fixed -and maybe a gameplay re-design- but it seems the fanbase is brainless and irresponsive with their powers. I'd go so far to say these people have been implicated into the deception and marketing of this game; This game needs brainless fans to prop up it's game, -and indeed "lie" on their behalf-. Now, the word "lie" might sound a bit strong, however I think that's the effect. What would you infer from a game that has an 83-87% positive review score?
That the game has decent gameplay, with an interesting story with suprisingly few bugs in it -or at least no major bugs or problems-, with a development company who'll listen to customer feedback and fix their game. But it's clear this isn't the case at all -especially if you cared to read the rest of what I had to say-.


This whole situation reminds me of an experiance I had when I was browsing amazon for some music, initially I was looking at mozart's (or was it beethoven's?) music, finding which song sounded best from it's demos -and being careful with my money- but to the side of my eye I saw an ad (I think) for 50Cent's music -whom I was naturally judgemental against, due to biases against gangster rap- but as I looked at the rating, I saw that 50Cent's music mysteriously and bafflingly had a higher rating than mozart, MOZART, a classic! A guy who's music has a elegant and thoughtful (if strange) charm to it, who's music will stand the test of time! Outdone by a vulgarity such as 50cent? I feel here we can see brainless fanbases in action, and a collective irresponsibility ruining the "information system".
And I feel this game "4GO" is the proverbial 50Cent album to the Mozart's of the gaming world "Metal Gear rising: revengance".



(but to return to my thoughts)
Initially, I remember I was more hopeful about this fanbase, Indeed I thought them a bit more "responsible" with what they were going to do, I had some anger against them -since they seemed so brainless- but I held out a sliver of hope. However it seems my concerns were well justified, and now I have -as you can tell- a fury against them; And in my fury -and my obligations- were unusually well justified, it seems NOBODY else rose up to investigating this game, indeed I am the SOLE FINDER of the ONLY bug-list that this game has! Indeed I feel as if I am the only person admidst a crowd of 40,000 to actually care about the quality of information I put out; One of the few people who care about a "Public" -as in customers of the game- to help them to become more informed about the nature of the product they're buying.

Interestingly, -and to propose something- you'd think that if the fan-base of the game is not up to the task of investigating the game, then you'd think that the professional reviewers would surely have caught these problems dead in their tracks (since well, they're "professional"), but I scrutinized their works, by reading every metacritic review and literally only about 1/3rd of them even cared to investigate the major key feature (The multiplayer) with the rest not even bothering to investigate! So they too are contributing to this deception that the game is better than it really is and it's quite shocking that this is even the case. But this is quite depressing to me. I would have hoped that many of the fans or customers of the game would naturally see through this deception and realize that this game is a buggy mess and doesn't deserve such a rating, and you'd see them make aggressive attempts to reveal and urge the reviewers to mention these flaws about the game. However this never happened, NOBODY -save for an excruciating few- even know -or care- about the "Truth" and well, it's kinda depressing that the "information system" is this dysfunctional.

Really -and to return a bit to a prior tangent- It seems that the fans of the game aren't just propping up a mediocre thing, but they're also performing a kind of interesting DDOS (distributed denial of service) to the information system, by clogging it up with so much garbage, that it makes it hard to find out the real diamonds of information out there, indeed most of us are technophiles to a degree, we like to think optismistically, that the information system will only improve; But it seems that it hasn't. But in a curious way.

FANBASE OPINION/RANT 2

Perhaps in my fury, I don't think it's that the information system doesn't work -it's still a huge asset if you're willing to work with it-, it's rather that cyberspace as it currently stands seems to train people passively -like another culture- to make you think some way, or behave in some way; Mainly for stupidity, apathy, and entertainment. It seems that cyberspace in it's sheer flexability to facilitate nearly all forms of communication/information -from a scientific article, to a radio show, to a video- has I think from this, degraded itself as an "information source" simply by also being able to host the proverbial "candy bars" of online discourse.
I gratifying video about something is easier to watch than a challenging scientific article, pressing a button is easier than commenting, making frivilous one-liners is easier than spending a minute thinking about what you're going to type, and it seems that the sheer freedom -and non-judgementalness- of the internet has ensured that these more brainless forces of human personality pervail indeed as I think has happened with this fanbase (and since the game is in near perfect compliance with these forces, maybe it's "in sync" with the medium and the culture).

People don't want to eat the fruits of cyberspace, for that requires time and effort to digest, people just want to eat the immediantly gratifying and effortless candy bars of online discourse.

Indeed as Americans, we're compelled to believe that "freedom and liberty" are the things that we'd hope each of us to commit to -since we're all optimistic democratic people-, and we'd all like to think that we'd work collectively and helpfully for eachother to provide the information they'd need to function, not only in the political sphere, but in the social, menial, or commercial spheres as well, that we'd strive for information, and try to produce good-quality information ourselves to help develop our "society", towards the "public good", that any new or expanded "freedom" that we recieve can only be a good thing and help us act more towards these ideals.

However it seems that in truth the freedoms offered seem to be pushing us in an opposite direction; We somehow seem collectively reduced, away from any ideal and towards our ownr gratification and amusements, we certainly have freedom, but how are we using it? Indeed the freedom is taking on an attribute found only in outer space: Zero gravity, since it seems to me that we're not enjoying any substantive freedom -like access to information- but rather enjoying a much less substantive freedom -from casual resonsibility-.

But to better explain the "Zero gravity" metaphor; When astronaughts go into outer space, they're subject to an unusal atrophying force (or rather lack of force) known as "zero-gravity" which weakens the astronaught's muscles and bones -and if they stay there long enough- they may incur permenant reductions to their abilities since the muscles aren't being continually "demanded" to fight it. Indeed it's safe to say that humans -and most other creatures of the earth- have co-evolved with gravity and thus are dependant on it's constant affect to develop or funtion properly in our world, this constraint that we all have to put up with is unavoidable, unchangable, only "endured" and "adapted to".

But I suspect that cyberspaces as a similar kind of atrophying attribute that zero-gravity also has, in that it frees us from a constant demand or constraint, since it seems to me, that in "real life" there is a near-constant constraint being imposed upon you by it, if you wanted to eat at a fast-food place you at least have to drive there, if you want to eat a cake, you have to bake it, if you want to enjoy an early-morning's sunrise, you better wake up early, indeed this is the very stuff of "reality" that seems to impose upon you some kind of constraint, or some demand on your patience or willpower to achieve anything (much like how you need to use your muscles continually to resist the impositions of gravity).
But the affect seems to be notable in another way; It seems that in other communication mediums, you are constained there as well; if you wanted to watch your favorite TV show or radio show (before netflix) you had to wait for it and be constrained by it's scheduling, if you were reading a book, you're compelled to stick with it else you'd lose your train of thought about what's being stated in the book, or if you were talking to someone face-to-face you'd feel constrained by social eddiquette not to become distracted at what the other person has to say. But it seems cyberspace doesn't have any of these constraints.

This is not to say that cyberspace "directly" attacks human intelligence -maybe it does the opposite- but it definantly attacks the peripheral human abilities; Patience, willpower, focus, self-control, almost to the point that the affect seems to resemble -in a way- the atrophying nature of zero-gravity!

It's not to say that this affect is totally undetectable, many of us -through studies or comments by our elders- feel a hunch that there is something deeply wrong here, something deeply screwed up about it, but I spose the mechanism of "addiction" keeps us here, to the point that this medium can "train" us for these personality flaws.

FANBASE OPINION/RANT 3

Returning to the "intellegence" topic, it seems that as our casual powers -however weakening- increase, it seems our responsibilities to a public -to a degree- increase as well, -although begrudgingly- many of the people who make the idiotic reviews on steam probably are smarter than they seem, indeed I remember having a rather strange "arguement" with someone's review -which was upvoted by the brainless masses- and how he could reply with startling clarity to my complaints -indeed maybe he was smarter than me-, however it seems that he was using his intelligence to perform a stupid action -defend a clearly unhelpful review-. Indeed I feel it's not actually that people are being made stupid, but rather we have a kind of strange culture that side-steps what common sense would dictate a "smart" or "reasonable" person would do with their intelligence, rather than him propping up helpful information with his intelligence, he uses it -like many others- to help gratify his own compulsions. I think there is a word for this "Apathy" or "laziness" (or zombie), indeed it's one of the main mechanisms that I feel disrupt "intelligent discourse" in the online world.


As a convergence of many of the forces described above (and below), we could naturally assume a kind of erosion of social eddiquette as well; Indeed why should anyone restrain themselves to be polite to anyone challenging? I remember quite well how I was recieved on reddit (not so much steam) when I tried to compel the fans of this game to (potentially foolishly) lampoon this game for it's deceptions; I was lampooned in return, with almost always some vulgarity "upvoted" to the top to mock me, indeed there was almost no acknowledgement of the fan-base over the issues I was concern about at all! (as if the reading comprehension of these guys has been shot too), only what is simplistic and gratifying made it to their minds. Admittedly, this is better than if this were to happen in real life -with that kind of harassment- however, why must it happen in the first place?

But why should I have expected anything else? Essentialy vast swatch of cyberspace lives is some kind of candyland culture, and when you live in a candyland culture, why should you ever feel compelled to do anything you don't want?

-at the risk of sounding irrelevant and repetative-
There are 2 definitions of the word "idiot", the modern definition -for the most part- means someone who's intellectually reduced (or lazy, or indoctrinated), and another archaic term from ancient greece, that ment a "private" person, now I don't think this ment a person who values their individuality, but rather someone who doesn't care to participate in public affairs, -like voting for a senator, or compiling a news article-; a person who just lives his life alone, away from others. Perhaps to better express myself, I feel many of the fans or -I dare say it- customers of this game are "idiots" in this vain. They don't have any concern about a "public's" understanding about this game, they just proceed mindlessly to state an opinion -no matter how un-informed- into the steam review section, contributing to the dis-information culture that's presant there.
Indeed if these people were public they'd coordinate and communicate with eachother to naturally try to bring out the truth of the game, however this never happened, many live as "idiots" in their own private world.

---

I sometimes wonder "Why am I doing this?" essentially, I'm helping to prevent some tweens and teenagers from making a bad spending decision, but is sparing these people worth the effort? How can I help those people who don't want to be helped? It's clear this world has a school open at all times, call "The School of Hard Knocks" that provides an excellent educational ciricullum -one that you'll remember- and it's lessons are well internalized, so in sparing them from this "ciriculum" been worth it to me in the end?

Not really; No.

But I spose some "little hero" has to expose this information/truth, since it seems nobody else was willing.

[Hilarion]

I'm not really sure what to say. I appreciate game analysis as much as the next guy, but this is a bit much.

Is the Neptunia fandom overall complacent and easy to please? Pretty much. Does this justify telling people they aren't allowed to have fun? I don't personally think so.

I understand that this took time and effort to write, it is a whole essay after all, but it does sadly feel wasted. We will keep seeing low-effort neptunia (or what-have-you) games, and people will keep enjoying them for what they are.

Hopefully, you are still able to enjoy yourself in whatever games you still play today. :)

[Splinx]

ngl felt personally attacked when I got called out on buying this game simply because it was a neptunia game. nonetheless even with how bland and shit it is, i don't really regret my purchase and i still had somewhat of a good time with this game. though i do agree it's scummy that they're capitalizing on this complacency the neptunia fanbase has.

[Lightning-Fast Neidhardt]

Upon closer examination, it seems you have some form of mental disability and vastly overestimate your intelligence. Move on, manchild. No one likes your creepy rant about not having "pole-dancing" in a video game.

[Lightning-Fast Neidhardt]

Was this written by a sixth-grader? Why the hell is this in the "Guides" section?

[mechnoob]

This review is very accurate and this rare to see someone being that analytical about a game. but think that not a lot of people will read. your review going is the type of review that going unto (deep analyse) category.

[samcan244(73 61 6d)]

heh theres also really bad preformance in this game or well power draw on my GPU while playing this regardless of what i do, kinda simmalar to the seemingly CPU usage leak the re birth games have

[anonymous14z]

@Flairiz
Being appreciative
There is a joy in the kind of reply you have given; It is rare for one to dare read this -or heck, even enjoy it-. Thank you for your reply and for your praise.

But to reply to your comment a bit
I shoulda realized that this community was as bad as it was, I was out of the loop with me playing other games for a couple of years to distract me with the "progress" (or perhaps regression) of social media and it's impact on our collective conduct which -as you could expect- has compromised the habits of this fanbase, of which this opinion piece could be seen as a "rant" against.

I don't feel that Neptunia needs to get better (this is me being heretical here), it's just that I insist they stay honest with what they make because -as you know- the game is quite deceitful with all of it's glitches. I still am baffled at the fanbase for not being offended by what could be interpreted as a lie I spose they're the kind to just passively accept everything brainlessly?

[Flariz]

Honestly I loved reading this, very well put.
Its true, I always had a feeling the Neptunia fanbase was a bit... Too easily comformed....
Overall I kind of enjoy the series but I am not going to pretend they are anything more than simple, basic, often broken, braindead games at their core. And its a shame, because they could be so much more- but then again, if your fanbase is happy with any halfway fuctional thing you make, why bother improving?

[anonymous14z]

@Bruvaesh Devata
Replying way to late, and simplistically
Thank you for you positive reinforcement, it's appreciated more than you think.

[John Soriana]

Finally someone who had the patience to analize this in a rational way.
I love this review since I've playing this series of games for so long and seems that almost nobody made a honest analisis of any of them.
You have my gratitude