Megadimension Neptunia VII - analysis

During this holiday I finally had time to pick up a game from my backlog and this time it was Megadimension Neptunis VII. This is a JRPG that has quite a big following with 4 games in the main series and multiple spin-off games.

I have played 2 of those before (Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 1 & 2). As the names probably tell with the combination of being Japanese the games are pretty over the top. There is a lot of dialogue that has no choices but are well structured and the main story has both English and Japanese voices.

Here's a 1 minute video showcasing some of the battle effects available.

Overall Neptunia games are pretty generic JRPGs when it comes to mechanics: turn based combat, big numbers, bad tooltips with many different stats and big boss battles.

Of course that includes cute anime girls too.

The previous games had multiple endings based on the way you played. This one in the other hand only had 3 endings and those were based on how many dialogues you found. I had to play the game on New Game to reach the "True Ending" that required some grinding that I had skipped on my first playthough.

Since I already had played some JRPGs before (Kingdom Hearts, Dark Souls) and a ton of MMORPG games the grinding for me is nothing new. That is probably the first point that turns off a lot of people since Neptunia games tend to require quite a lot of optional monster hunting to progress.

However with Megadimension I felt like there was in fact less grinding than the previous games. There were maybe around 3 times during the story where I felt like getting ripped apart by enemies. Those were mostly due to the way the game separates the characters at certain point of the story so you might end up having to play someone who is multiple levels behind your main character.

What I found really interesting compared to the previous games was the New Game playthrough. This time there was a new Hidden Treasure feature added that gives the player incentives to return to old dungeons and complete secondary objectives to unlock extra rewards. That combined with the possibility of reaching True Ending made the second playthrough (with high level characters) really enjoyable. Also the fact that you don't lose any of them during the new playthrough is a huge plus to me.

62 hours well spent.