I’m so very, very torn on Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution, the latest entry in the long-running Neptunia series from Compile Heart.

On the one hand, I feel duty-bound to give the game a fair shake, because it’s a series that, on the whole, gets fairly short shrift to an unfair degree from the mainstream games press. And it’s clearly built up enough of a fanbase over the years — a fanbase that I count myself among — to suggest that those negative reviews are missing something.

On the other, there’s something just not quite right about this latest one. And I hope by splurging some thoughts onto paper about my feelings over the first 18 hours or so of play (evidently not too bad, because I’ve played for 18 hours) will help me nail down what I really think of it. So let’s get a-pondering after the jump!

Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution is a follow-up of sorts to the excellent Megadimension Neptunia V-II, a game that many fans still regard as the high point of the series, and which even ardent Neptunia haters had to begrudgingly admit was sort of all right.

The new game follows the adventures of Older Neptune, a character that was introduced in Megadimension Neptunia VII as a dimension-hopping bug hunter who, unlike her counterparts from the other dimensions the series has explored to date, is a relatively normal human being rather than a goddess. The narrative setup sees her teaming up with Jagaa, Reedio and Pippih, three “Failure Goddesses” who, in series tradition, represent failed video game consoles — in this instance the Atari Jaguar, the 3DO (“NEW EXPERIENCE!”) and the Apple Pippin.

Ostensibly, your goal in Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution is to help Older Neptune and the Failure Goddesses build a successful video game company by producing game discs. In practice, the game unfolds pretty much as every other mainline Neptunia RPG has gone: there’s a linear narrative with dungeons to explore along the way, plus some optional bits and pieces to engage with if you feel like. Even the disc development side of things has been seen before; the only difference here is that conceptually, greater importance is placed on it, and there are slightly deeper mechanics involved. And I mean slightly.

So let’s look at those two main components, beginning with the disc development. Marketing for Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution feels like it was trying to position this part of the game as a full-on management sim, but in practice it’s more of an idle game that runs in the background while you engage with the story. This sort of thing has been seen quite frequently throughout the series with systems such as the Scouts system from Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory and the Stella’s Dungeon mechanic from the Re;Birth games.

In order to develop a game disc, you have to choose a genre and a style. New genres are unlocked by purchasing and upgrading various buildings for Neptune and company’s headquarters, while styles are just available from the outset.

After choosing the genre and style, you then assign one or more creators to the project. Each creator has base statistics determining how quickly they work, the base level of quality they will apply to the finished product and preferred genres and styles they like to work in. The higher level the headquarters building is, the more creators can be assigned to a project, thereby allowing the finished products to be higher quality.

Finally, an optional step in the process is to add “Ideas” to the project. This increases the chance that the finished disc will have various attributes attached to it, but can have a negative impact on quality. Since discs are equippable accessories, they can be used to unlock various mechanics in combat such as animation cancelling, double-dashing and suchlike, so it can be worth plopping in some ideas to produce an optimal disc.

After that, you start the development, and it takes about 3-5 minutes of real time depending on various factors for the disc to be completed, at which point it will be reviewed. You’ll find out the final quality and the attributes that are attached to the disc, and it’s added to your inventory. You’ll also receive “Company Points” or “CP” — a currency used specifically for developing the company — commensurate with how well the game has sold.

That’s about it for how it works. It’s very simple, kind of to a fault. There are a couple of additional mechanics, such as the ability to advertise in an area (which increases the CP income from that area when the disc is completed) and influence the trends in an area (which, again, will increase the income in an area if its trends match the genre and/or style you’re making), but these don’t have a particularly major impact on anything. You can also release DLC for your discs, which allows you to add up to two additional attributes to a disc that has already been released.

New creators are unlocked by receiving emails from them, which occurs as the story progresses, and unlocking them in the various genre buildings’ development trees. Creators travel around the world, and they’re cheaper to hire if they’re at your headquarters rather than elsewhere in the world, so you can pay a flat fee to “summon” them to your headquarters. You can also invest in a project to speed up its development, and add decorative items to the company to add bonuses to development speed and base quality.

Finally, you will sometimes get “Entrusted Development” requests via email. These request you to make a specific genre-style combination at a particular minimum level of quality, and sometimes come with a specific creator attached. Successfully completing these rewards you with helpful items; failure has no real consequences, as you can just try again.

This might all sound quite good. And on paper, it is. The trouble is, it just doesn’t really matter. Outside of an instance early in the story where I had to produce four discs to exhibit at a game show, the system has remained completely irrelevant to the rest of the game. Worse, the level of CP you start the game with is enough to buy pretty much everything you need almost from the outset, and the income from just a few discs will allow you to stay on top of upgrades very easily. There’s no point where I’ve ever felt like I’ve had to “manage” the company beyond just telling people to do a job every so often, and no real feeling that I need to be strategic about it.

There’s an element of this in the “RPG” side of the game, too. Supposedly, clearing optional dungeons unlocks new sales routes for your games, but it doesn’t really seem to matter. Quite early in the game, the “infinite dungeon” Neptral Tower unlocks, but you’re given no indication as to why you might want to go there, let alone clear at least 100 floors (and then do it twice more later in the game) other than to get a trophy. A battle arena unlocks about halfway through the game, but again, there’s no real reason to engage with this beyond just doing it for the sake of it (and a trophy).

On top of that, the combat is not great. Building on the actually quite good action-style combat from Neptunia Sisters vs. Sisters, something seems to have gone a bit wrong somewhere, as combat in Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution feels floaty, lacking in impact and button-mashy. The removal of the “AP” feature limiting how often characters can use their combo skills hurts the system a great deal, leaving most encounters — including boss fights — feeling like exercises in mashing the square button and occasionally pushing a D-Pad direction to switch characters for a chain bonus.

On the plus side, the dungeon design is mostly good, building on the larger dungeons seen in Sisters vs. Sisters but providing much more variety in scenery. Some actual decent puzzles are used in some dungeons, too, making them more than a simple run to the finish line punctuated by enemy encounters.

For the most part, then, the main attraction for Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution is the story and characters, not the gameplay. Some might argue that this has always been the case for Neptunia, but there are instances of the gameplay in the series being a lot stronger than this in the past. Thankfully, the story is enjoyable and fun, and the new characters are a delight. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard “Do The Math!” yelled by a Japanese woman.

The reason I’m not super-mad at Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution is that I feel like on some level, it might be having a bit of a joke at the player’s expense, and if that is the case, I think it’s being a lot more clever than the above might lead one to give it credit for. The series has always been satirical, after all, and it wouldn’t be wildly out of character for a Neptunia game to use its very mechanics and structure to poke fun at something — in this case, the perpetual demand from modern gamers for “more content” and never-ending update cycles, lest a game be forever branded “abandoned”.

Everything I’ve just described above tracks with this. The meaningless-feeling management aspect is a jab at the inherent pointlessness of idle games and their inexplicable popularity. Neptral Tower is there to mock people who deliberately engage with annoying, boring things just for the sake of a platinum PlayStation trophy. The optional dungeons having seemingly no relevance to anything pokes fun at DLC and updates which just provide “more game” without really improving the experience. The same can be said for the combat, which can be interpreted as commentary on “update for update’s sake” — just a straight transplant of Sisters vs. Sister’s combat would have worked fine, but you know some gamers would have kicked off about it, so it was updated, because updates are expected.

But it goes on, too. Many dungeons have optional motorcycle races, both in the form of “Time Attack” challenges, which task you with driving a motorbike around level geometry that isn’t really built for a vehicle, and “Race” missions, which are impossible to lose owing to your opponent having a “Stamina” bar which expires well before the race finishes, allowing you pretty much an unopposed win after a particular point. The former mocks the shoehorning of disparate game elements into a system that doesn’t support them (perhaps through an “update roadmap”), while the latter is having a good old laugh at that particular breed of gamer who can’t deal with being told they have to practice something in order to succeed.

I think my favourite example so far is the dungeon that reuses the exact same “Lights Out” puzzle three times over its entire duration, with the last instance of it leading to a complete dead end that doesn’t even have a treasure chest to reward you for your thoroughness. That has to be deliberate, borderline malicious trolling. It just has to be.

The trouble is, while the more I think about it, the more Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution feels like an elaborate and clever troll, it’s also easy for someone to just look at it at face value and think it’s a “bad game”. In terms of how it actually plays, I can’t deny that it’s simply not a great Neptunia game in comparison to the genuinely excellent titles in the series such as Megadimension Neptunia V-II and Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online. To play the “management sim” angle straight, Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution would have been much better off taking a similar approach to the oft-forgotten (and Vita-exclusive) Hyperdimension Neptunia PP: Producing Perfection.

In terms of satire, however, it’s biting, and not just through its dialogue. It’s a ballsy move to be satirical through design, structure and gameplay mechanics, and I will freely admit that without being able to speak to the people who put this all together, it’s just my interpretation of the myriad bizarre choices that this game makes.

Thing is, though, I’ve been engaged with this series long enough for that interpretation to make a lot of sense. The Neptunia series as a whole is a lot more clever than a lot of people give it credit for, so I would absolutely not be surprised if everything I’ve described above is completely intentional. One might argue it seems like commercial suicide, but given that Compile Heart — more specifically, its parent company Idea Factory — is by no means dependent on Neptunia as its sole breadwinner these days, they can afford to take a risk like this and return to “business as usual” for the next game if no-one gets the joke. Or indeed if everyone gets the joke.

Or it could just be a bad Neptunia game. I don’t really know for sure. I think my interpretation is a lot more interesting, though.

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