Neptunia Virtual Stars Review

More is less…

Neptunia Virtual Stars is available now on PlayStation 4 and PC, its an Anime special and features a host of busty babes to play as.

Neptunia Virtual Stars off the bat is a 3rd person hack and slash style of game, it offers a bunch of playable characters and sees you trawling throughout a virtual world in order to save humanity.

Fundamentally the game plays as you would expect, with enemies to cap around every corner. The enemy variety and difficulty is solid along with well crafted characters that each offer their own flavour of combat. As to not spoil the story or plot I won’t mention too much here, all that you need to know is that it is average for these types of games and offers nothing too different.

Where the game shines most is in fact its gameplay loop, the game has a mostly linear path with various zones to explore. There are collectibles and there are points to save as autosave doesn’t truly exist. The combat is handled really well as each character has their own style of play from swords to guns and from running normally to sliding along the ground without roller skates. Luckily if one character from the duo dies, you can bring them back to life whilst using the other. You aren’t wiped out right away and as such have the chance to recover from a messy battle. Weaknesses and strengths are key here and various enemies do seem to be hurt more or less depending on the character used. Areas of a zone are indeed locked until all enemies are dealt with and it’s rinse and repeat from there.

It is fun and at times you do feel like a badass collecting dropped loot. Leveling up is surprisingly fun too, you enter a mini-game where you take out an enemy, or a few if you’ve saved up levels and play a sort of slots type thing to get some extra goodies. I thought this was a really nice touch and made leveling have more depth.

Sound wise the game’s voice acting was great, I much prefer games of this genre not to be dubbed as is the case here. I also thought the soundtrack was really well done. It went hand in hand with the colourful asthetic.

Visually the game is highly polished on the PlayStation 4 and the zones look superb with their neon flair and animated LCDs. Hell, the loading screens even play videos. Sweet!

I also encountered no bugs or framerate issues, everything ran really well. Loading screens were lengthy at times though.

Sadly that really is all the good stuff out of the way, as is typical for some of these games, the walls and walls of text you have to plow through are infuriating. The characters outside of the ones you play as are generic and mundane. The lack of any intuitive tutorials is also frustrating, sure there are readable tutorials but these are hugely lengthy and take you out of the action for too long. Saves are manual except after important moments which wouldn’t be an issue if save zones were particularly easy to find. After the first couple of levels, they are hard to find and while you can use gates to go back to the main hub, that means traveling just to save. An autosave feature would have been much more appreciated.

As expected I skipped a bunch of these and ended up playing through the game thinking some extra nods would be here and there, alas there were none at all. The combat while feeling great for all characters, was slightly skewed towards firing at everything with the character bearing arms. She was quick, could shoot projectiles fast, and evade enemies much more easily than the others. Character switching was also not explained. It seems to me that if you die as one character you then play as the other. These duos of sorts were different depending on the zones. The UI while eye-catching felt overly complex, this complexity carried over to the menus as well. The zones while being linear and large were eerily similar throughout this game’s lengthy campaign.

Verdict

Neptunia Virtual Stars could have been a good, no even great game but has fallen short due to many nuances of the genre that often get repeated. The over the top cringe storyline along with the overly complex menus and UI make this game feel clunky. The uninspired cast outside of the main characters hinders the plot and the lack of any intuitive tutorials is striking, especially in an age where other games of the genre have got this right. Overall I am disappointed in what could have been an awesome title if some thought had been put in these areas.