The star of the Neptunia series returns as the protagonist of another game. Or at least, a version of her does. Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution has the dimension-hopping, bug-hunting ‘Older Neptune’ take the role of company president of a failing game developer.
Meeting the Failure Goddesses
In a world where goddesses earn faith by releasing games, where fun games are valued above anything else, several factions have developed, and strict rules are in place. Each faction has more influence in certain areas of the world, and agreements between them need to be made to even release your game anywhere you don’t control. It’s a tough world for a game development company, and not everyone succeeds.
By chance, Older Neptune finds a terrible game and enjoys it for how bad it is. This allows three ‘Failure Goddesses’ to reappear after a long absence.
The airheaded Reedio, the abbreviation-loving Jagaa, and the overconfident Pippih convince Neptune to help them reestablish their game company. But there’s more going on in the background. Word of an issue caused by the Failure Goddesses in the past, the leaders of other nations acting strangely, and attacks from a member of another faction all hint at something going on. On top of this, Arfoire and her band of video game pirates are causing trouble too.
Neptunia as a series often offers commentary through humor and Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution is no exception. The challenges faced by indie game developers, problems with piracy, reliance on influencers, and even the different tactics by different companies are all mentioned. While the overarching plot was not particularly memorable, moments like these stood out. Those parts, great comedic interactions, funny characters, nonsensical conversations, and moments of fourth-wall-breaking certainly allowed me to enjoy my time with the story scenes. That said, I preferred the humor and references in Neptunia Sisters VS Sisters and the Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth series. The jokes sometimes felt less relatable here, and Older Neptune isn’t quite as silly as the regular Neptune, who still appears but not as the main character.
While you can play Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution without any knowledge of the series, it’s worth noting that very little introduction is given to the setting or characters outside of the core cast. Series fans can expect appearances from all the usual characters.
Dungeons Diving
Most of the time in Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution is spent clearing dungeons to either progress the story, complete side quests, or make your company name known far and wide. It’s a standard case of making your way through dungeons, occasionally finding switches to unlock gates, exploring optional paths to find bonuses, and defeating enemies along the way.
Unfortunately, the dungeon gameplay isn’t particularly good. Some levels feel fairly long and repetitive, and at least a few are seemingly exact copies from previous games in the series, right down to the placement of ladders and switches. Backtracking is somewhat frequent, and NPCs that give side quests (almost always kill x monster type quests) are often placed so that repeatedly the area to spawn the appropriate enemies again is needed (Revise). The game’s slow walking speed doesn’t help here either.
On the note of repeated levels, Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution includes a feature to ride a motorbike through many of the levels. Driving it is extremely awkward, and the fact that many of the levels weren’t designed to accommodate the motorbike is noticeable. This is made clear by the presence of spots where I had to get off, jump, and then get on again to progress, as well as turns that require a near-complete stop. It’s not just the motorbike that has issues fitting with the level design though; enemies just try to walk into walls often, and some gaps that characters should be able to walk through are impassable.
Clunky Combat
For those familiar with Neptunia, this won’t be a surprise, but the combat action isn’t exactly excellent either.
After you either run into an enemy in a dungeon or give them a thwack with your weapon to gain initiative, a battle starts. During combat, you can move freely within a circle, switch between four characters, and attack. While you can set your skills in the menu beforehand, it essentially comes down to hitting one of the buttons repeatedly to cycle through them as a combo and occasionally using a timed skill. At certain points, you’re prompted to switch characters to build up a damage modifier. Most of my battles barely involved thinking while I slowly spammed the combo, cycled through characters on the prompt, and occasionally healed when prompted. Being hit by an enemy easily breaks your combos, but so do blocking or dodging (which are also quite slow to activate), so they weren’t worth doing those most of the time.
One thing I did appreciate was that switching helped to build up ‘link level’, which persists through battles and allows for a powerful skill. This let me spend time building it up for the boss at the end of a section. These bosses always have difficulty spikes, so using this was needed to wear them down quickly.
Building Victory
As Neptune is a game company president this time, Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution has included some simulator gameplay themed around developing and shipping games. That said, it is fairly basic.
By developing games, you can earn points. In terms of story progression, you need to spend points to unlock new areas to ship your games in and visit. Without buying any influence over these areas, it’s not even possible to visit new places when the story says you’re invited.
Beyond that, it lets you unlock ‘genres’ with their own skill trees. Skill trees contain perks like increasing sales, reducing dev time, or unlocking subgenres for any given genre. These can require items and story progression to go down. As time goes on, you can unlock higher building levels too, which allows you to assign more developers to work on your games and increase their quality.
There are several extra features here, such as spending points to influence trends in areas, run commercials, create DLC, and so on. After getting started, earning points was easy enough without feeling these were particularly necessary.
Much like some game developer simulator games, it occasionally threw up random events when creating a game. Spending points was enough to deal with these, and points came easily, so it wasn’t too interesting.
While this gameplay element isn’t amazing and is missing that addictive quality of sim games it tries to invoke, it is a useful way to create equipable discs to add passive skills to characters.
Master of None
Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution tries to do quite a lot. We’ve looked at dungeons, action combat, and business management. None of them feel like they were done particularly well. There are other little things like motorcycle races which feel just as half-baked and have issues like explained pickups, very minor clips causing an extreme slowdown, and being incredibly easy after memorizing where boosters are placed. There’s a battle tower too, but it carries the same issues as dungeons.
Some of these issues feel similar to but worse than previous Neptunia titles here. Others such as the company management and motorbike implementation are somewhat of a letdown.
It feels like this game has a focus on quantity of features over quality. This isn’t helped by additional little issues popping up like characters calling out nearby treasure when it’s in another room.
Scenery of Gamindustri
While wandering around dungeons, it felt like there was some slight stutter. Textures loaded in slowly at times, and I also noticed screen tearing, especially when driving through levels on the motorbike. This was on PlayStation 5. It wasn’t too bad and I got used to it after a few hours, but it was certainly noticeable.
As always for this series, the sprites are designed by Tsunako and look amazing. Live2D is used to help convey just how emotive they are. Certain characters also have notable jiggle-physics for the players who enjoy that. The 3D models looked great too and the occasional CGs were a treat for the eyes.
The main story is voice acted with Japanese and English options, both of high quality. Optional content typically isn’t voice-acted.
Verdict
Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution’s character interactions and comedy make it worth playing. However, it’s let down by its gameplay, which is occasionally good, often mediocre, and sometimes actively bad. I say this as a long-time fan of Neptunia, which might be the only group that this title appeals to.
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If you are looking for another JRPG, check out our review of The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel III.
Many thanks go to Reef Entertainment and Idea Factory for a Playstation 5 review code for Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
