Do you like Neptunia? Do you like Vtubers? Well boy do I have a game for you… maybe. The Neptunia series is known for its referential humor based on anime and the game industry (sometimes even being a bit funny), I guess it was only a matter of time before it jumped on the Vtuber craze. That might be a recent thing here (I have been watching Vtubers for a while but it’s only last year that I really got into it), but they have been blowing up in japan long before, so it makes sense.

Not really much to say here. Let’s just talk about this game.

Developer: Idea Factory, Compile Heart
Publisher: Idea Factory
Release date: March 2nd 2021 on PS4, March 29th 2021 on PC
Platforms: PC, PS4 (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Third-person shooter/hack and slash

The four main Goddesses of Gamindustri are going to the Gamindustri Game Show, an E3-style show to play upcoming games. They all strap in for a VR game of sorts, but they’re suddenly transported to another world, a planet called Emote that is under attack by Antis who are taking over different parts of Emote. Emote has areas where different kind of “Content”. There’s a youtube area, a “restaurant food review” area, a twitter area, a game area and a library, each of which has a villain that’s messing things up for all the people in those areas. For example, the villain in the library is replacing every book with shitty isekai light novels, and the villain in the youtube area is trying to make video viewing into paid subscription models. The villains are coming from Planet Obsoletia, which may or may not be having its own issues. It’s a pretty basic story by the end. I will note there’s some really dumb deus ex machina near the end when you need to go to Obsoletia but your characters are like “but we need a fast spaceship… oh hey some random simp gave us one lol” (literally a simp you don’t even get to see gives them a spaceship)… you already had a character with a spaceship, why not just… upgrade his spaceship to make it faster or whatever?

The visuals are really just as you’d expect from Neptunia. Colorful, smooth, decently animated, you know the stuff. Lots of reused enemy and character designs here, a few new ones which do look pretty good. I really have little to say about this visually, if you’ve played any Neptunia game you know exactly how this looks. The one thing I thought was cool is for the “real life” Vtubers. Rather than making new models for them, they just got them to make small videos with their usual equipment (some with a bit more specialized equipment, as Hololive used their full 3D models for example) so you’re seeing their actual models they use on their streams (some Live2D, some have motion tracking 3D models. One of them literally just had a jpg (since then her channel does have a really nice Live2D model though). The funniest part of the game is how the character animation for talking works. I thought at first it was the lip-sync just being bad, but then I realized it’s like that because that’s kinda how it works out for actual Vtuber models, the mouth tracking is not always ideal. So that’s kinda funny.

The gameplay is action in this one. Not the first Neptunia game to be action, but like this I think it is. You have access to 6 characters at a time, switching between 2 groups. You have the Goddess group, and you can switch between them, and you can switch to the Vtuber group, which is a selection between Me and You (Mewtral), or Vice and Licht. The goddesses use guns and only one of them is active at a time but you can switch between them on the fly. A Vtuber group will have one melee and one ranged character, but they both appear in the battle at the same time so you basically have backup (and yes you can switch between them on the fly too). The playable Vtuber groups kinda suck though, more on their subpar gameplay later.

Each Goddess basically has a normal shot attack and a bunch of different specials. They can also glide along the ground and do a little dodge at the end of that, and jump. They’re very simple. I will say the crosshairs are garbage and the bullets go wherever the fuck they want a lot of the time. Enemies do have a stun meter that stuns them if you attack them enough, that stops mattering when you get so strong that they die long before filling up that meter. The Vtubers have a weak attack and a strong attack button, some air combos, as well as a dodge that slows time very mildly if you time it right, and a few special attacks each as well. If they kill with a special attack they can have a special kill animation which… I dunno what that does. Me and You have a weird problem though. Me has a down stab attack in the air, which both never hits and also never lands. Literally she’ll be floating pixels off the ground and will be unable to move unless you switch from Vtubers to Goddesses, or get hit. I’ve also had that attack make me fall through the floor, in which case switching to the Goddesses just left me in the void so I had to reset the game (make sure you save a lot!). You had the same issue, she has a divekick air attack that also doesn’t ever reach the ground. How is that same glitch on both characters? I dunno if Licht and Vice have this issue, I never tried them. I will say I know why this issue happens, it’s tied to framerate Idea Factory not testing their game. Needless to say, the Vtubers are unplayable, so you’ll have to play as the Goddesses the whole time… which is fine because they’re OP, more on that later.

You have a few ways to power up your characters. Some I didn’t even do so I won’t talk about. The main way is simple, just level up. Killing stuff gives you EXP for all your characters (even ones you’re not using). This makes you stronger. Yay. The other way is the costume system. Each character gets 3 slots to give them accessories so you can mildly change how they look (you can place those accessories wherever you want in them and scale their size and such), or you can equip them and hide the so you get the effects but not the visuals. Those get a skill or 2 or 3 that increases some stats and passive things. Finally, the main way you power up is through these Vtuber cube thingies. Each character gets 4 slots, each cube is based on a Vtuber and gives stats based on which Vtuber it is and sometimes based on what attribute that cube may or may not have (the Lewd Peanuts one is pretty good). Some of these stats are a bit different between the Vtubers and the Goddesses. Both groups get Attack, but only Vtubers get Life and Defense, while only Goddesses get HP and TKMK (whatever that is, I actually have no idea). Life for Vtubers is basically regular HP bars, you get damage based on the enemy’s attack and you defense. For Goddesses, they combine their HP stat and it goes up to 30 maximum. They lose 1 HP when they get hit, whatever hits them. So when you’re at the 30 HP max, you need to get hit 30 times to die… And if you’re finally close to dying, you can use items whenever… so you’re basically invincible. Also Vtuber cubes can be upgraded (up to +50).

I find the gameplay design particularly weak because of how simple it is to be overpowered. Basically you choose whichever Goddess that has the gun you prefer. Then you put all the Vtuber cubes you can on her that give the most attack boosts (even if they reduce HP), then put HP-increasing cubes on the other Goddesses that you’re not using anyways. Then you win the game for free without even having to try. Because of how HP works for the goddesses, it’s basically impossible to die, and you hit like a truck. No need to ever use the Vtuber groups, and no reason to. Not even any reason to experiment with some of the mechanics… There’s a few I didn’t talk about, like powering up your songs for resonance mode (heck, I didn’t even mention THAT) or the rhythm game or the video thing… because I didn’t do any of them and I was OP anyways. Strangely the only problem I had in the game was the final boss. I’m not sure what happened but Neptune couldn’t damage the final boss when you empty her HP and knock her down, I just had to switch to literally anyone else and that worked (a heart appears over the boss and you have to shoot it, but it didn’t work with Neptune, it worked with Vert no problem though). Weird (might be related to that TKMK stat, whatever it may be). Then I went to the post game secret boss which was level 96 and I was level 67 and I still wrecked it. Lol.

There’s several things I could mention that I just have no reason to. I mean, every level has 2 or 3 small areas to explore, with a mini-boss in each, and a big boss at the end. You roll them if you go with the “be OP and win for free” strategy. There’s a rhythm game. No idea what it does. There’s a video-making element. No idea how to use it.

I do want to take a moment to talk about the actual Vtubers. From the ones you play as, Mewtral (Me and You), Licht, Vice, Mauli and Kili (Mauli and Kili aren’t playable but they are “Vtubers”), only Mewtral seem to be actual Vtubers, as far as I can find. They have a pretty small youtube channel that hasn’t posted in 2 months now, and have a pretty small library of videos. They seem entertaining enough but they’re not very active.

This game does feature a bunch of other real Vtubers though. I think it’s a bit of a shame none of them except Ileheart play any role in the story, but they show up in many ways. They may have pop-up videos where they encourage you, there’s monitors in the level where they may talk to you or ask for help (if their cube thingy is kidnapped nearby), and they have side-quests that they ask you to do, each with their unique video. How they generally appear is in load screens, where they talk to you for a bit asking you to sub to their youtube channel. It’s a bit of a weird way to integrate all of these Vtubers into the game, just being advertisements for their channels.

It has Ileheart who seems to be a Vtuber affiliated with Compile Heart (one of the companies behind this game) who doesn’t really do streams, but more like regular short-form video content (which is how more classic Vtubers tend to operate). It has 9 Hololive members, which I obviously know. There’s 13 independant Vtubers here, actually 4 of which I previously knew about (Tamaki, Ponpoko, Peanuts and Heart-sama). Then there’s a pile of Vtuber groups here that I never heard about: Asano Sisters Project, WACTOR, Horror Academians, Aogiri High School, Game Club Project, Electronic Fairy Project and ReVdol… and there’s a few that were contest entrants or something? They’re over on Showroom (some japanese streaming site) but most of them have a youtube channel as well.

This is certainly a fun part of this game, seeing all these Vtubers you may not know about. Most of them are currently active (2 were already inactive when this came out in Japan, and one more stopped creating content in January this year which is unfortunate because she seemed pretty cool), and they vary between being live streamers or making normal video content of different types. There’s some good content in there. For a surprising one can’t say I was expecting, after seeing and HEARING them in this game, that 2 of the 3 featured Horror Academians were guys using female vtuber models, I was expecting the voice of a 12 year-old girl (which is what you hear in this game) but got the voice of a 30 year-old man in their streams. This is a pretty normal thing in japanese Vtubing (such as eromanga artist Ito Life’s vtuber model), I was just surprised because of how they were advertised. Definitely found a few interesting channels to follow here.

Overall

I spent a bit of time here talking about Vtubers, and frankly that’s because they’re the most interesting aspect of this game. Which is a shame considering how under-used they ultimately are.

This game itself was… okay at best. I found this to lack any kind of depth gameplay-wise and it’s so easy to be too strong that the whole game feels like I’m just walking through it without challenge. The story is fine but they could easily have removed half the dialogue (and the stupid deus ex machina at the end there) and nothing would’ve changed. I wish the real Vtubers had a bit more of a role.

I wouldn’t really recommend this one. It’s fun to see some of the vtubers, but you could just find them from the game’s official website and not have to play this game.