Neptunia: Sisters VS Sisters
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Neptunia: Sisters VS Sisters Cover Image
I truly have a weak spot for Neptunia games. Sure they’re not the best games out there, far from it, but there’s something about the Neptunia games that keeps me coming back to them.
If you’re not familiar with the games: they’re about “goddesses” that are supposed to represent different gaming consoles from real life. The green-themed Vert is supposed to be Xbox, Noire is PlayStation, Blanc is Nintendo and so on. Neptune, the protagonist of the series, is based on an unreleased console by Sega. And so you play with them through mostly JRPG adventures with lengthy story scenes where they bounce off each other while referencing some real life aspects about the consoles or gaming in general. In short: you either love it or hate it. But I do love it.
After having played through the Re;Birth Trilogy I was kind of sad to learn that there are basically no direct sequels to the story apart from Megadimension Neptunia VII. The series always had a continuity problem in my opinion. Re;Birth 2 is technically a soft-reboot and continuing from there, it seems like no entry really continues the story from the previous game. And that’s not even including the countless spin-off games!
Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth Trilogy
Neptunia: Sisters VS Sisters is also a spin-off and not a direct sequel to any story but it is as close as you can get to a mainline entry these days.
I won’t go too much into the synopsis or the basic gist of the game, think of this as just some notes.
Story
This is one of the best stories of any Neptunia game.
oh no, what happened to gearsy!
Maho is a great character and I wish she would’ve been playable in-game. She is supposed to represent smartphones. The changes in the gaming landscape the smartphone had brought is the central part of the story. It is what I expect from a Neptunia game, in a good way. It has its own story to tell but also interweaves it with meta-narratives surrounding gaming history and the gaming industry as a whole.
Like the other games it features quite lengthy Visual Novel style story bits. These can be quite long too. Sometimes I even feel like it loses the balance between telling a story and being a game
one of the very rare choices you can make during the cutscenes
Gameplay
The spin-off games always were in various different genres, but this game is the first “big one” to not be a turn-based JRPG. Instead it features real-time combat centered around two combo-trees you can customize. It even features a Soulslike dodge roll!
Neptunia with real time combat
Some side-mechanics have been kept, like the EXE attacks and the HDD mode.
However, it feels a bit sluggish sometimes. There’s always a bit of a delay when executing your actions. When doing your actions, which sometimes take over five seconds, you cannot do anything else like dodging. So you’re somewhat incentivized to just spam your attacks. Doing attacks fills up a purple bar.
After it’s full, you can either unleash a somewhat powerful attack or use an item. Having your ability to use items tied to this mechanic was a bit strange in my opinion. Because of that I rarely used my dozens of consumable potions and powerups, it was almost always a better decision to use your purple bar for something else.
Difficulty
The difficulty can vary wildly between the Neptunia entries. Re;Birth 1 was a rather hard game for example. Sisters VS Sisters is not a hard game. By using all the games mechanics I was able to breeze through the game including all bosses. I haven’t seen many people complain about it though. It might just be that my knowledge of some mechanics and the tendency to grind levels from the previous games made me and my characters over-prepared for the challenges of Sisters VS Sisters.
Conclusion
Despite the flaws mentioned above I still really liked my time with Sisters VS Sisters. If you ever wanted to get into the series or the premise of it has interested you, then this entry is great place to get into it!