Definitely not a great game. But a fun one, mostly for the sense of humor.

Basic premise is pretty simple. The main characters are anthropomorphized game consoles (with the protagonist being Neptune, named after Sega's codename for the never-developed Dreamcast successor.) The heroes spend a lot of time running from dungeon to dungeon on various fetch quests, interspersed with 2D character dialogue and the occasional blog post.

The appeal is the video game humor - some of the "encounters" are just "ha ha, that person is making a Street Fighter joke" or "ha ha, NISA's really flat". (The various companies who worked on the game were all written in as supporting characters - Compa's adorable-ditz act goes well with IF's tsukkomi and Neptune's hyper dialogue streams.)

The actual game isn't terribly great, if I'm going to be honest. The dungeons are pretty small, the healing system is bizarre and baroque (and awful inconvenient at the beginning of the game - if a character is at 1 HP and has no skills that heal them except when they take damage, you will have a rough time finishing the dungeon.) There's a complicated combo system where you can set up 256 different combo attacks per character, but honestly you're going to stick with a fairly small number of them, and you'll generally be doing the same moves over and over for a while. The difficulty ranges from "Neptune killed every enemy in the dungeon in one hit" to "the boss one-shotted Compa, who is my only person with a revive ability... again", and it's hard to tell when you're pushing your luck on a given dungeon until the game smacks you.

It works because the game's pretty cute, generous with the fan service (more like, takes every opportunity to bounce Green Heart or Black Heart's assets), and the dungeons are short - you can play one in fifteen or twenty minutes without rushing too much. It's not a tremendously long game either - I'm already two-thirds of the way through it and I just bought it Thursday.

Definitely only for people with a good bit of game nostalgia, though. Most of the humor is bounced off that, and if it falls flat for you, the rest of the game won't carry it.

NISA shipped it with the Japanese track included, though the text is matching the dub. It's interesting to notice some of the dialogue changes they made... sentences missing, sentences added, including quite a few game references that just weren't in the original at all. Could have been terrible, but it ended up fitting the tone, so eh, why complain.



Huge like Xbox, indeed!

Posted by: Avatar_exADV at 03:25 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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