izigame.me

For a while, I had mixed feeling about if I thought this game was a good game or a bad game, there were some highlights and a lot of mistakes, bad decision and creative choices, but I was willing to give it the benefit of doubt as some kind of intermediate game between the old main games and the new main games.
This doesn't apply anymore, since now the game has received an utterly unnecessary censorship patch that has depleted my good will for this game. (Seriously, a bastard sword is a real sword and you change the name because what, it may offend someone that is not the target audience of the game?
So, let's start this journey on why this game has destroyed the faith of many long standing fans of the franchise.
Story
SvS canonicity has been a topic of discussion since the announcement of the game.
Story-wise it feels like a sequel to MK2/Re;Birth2, with a brief brush off of Victory/Re;Birth3 stating that UD is no longer available and directly ignoring anything regarding VII.
Without entering in detail, the game follows Nepgear as the main character, as she works to become a proper successor of Neptune while trying to reconcile with the years she has missed while sleeping.
The game, as usual, works a mix of real-life commentary through memes and references (like any post-2020 game with self-awareness relies heavily on commenting about the lockdowns) and a story that starts serviceable and even interesting at times but devolves into a mess.
Characters
In terms of our main cast, it mainly follows the guidelines that spin-offs tend to use, where the characters are no more than caricatures of their former selves, mainly repeating the same old joke that stuck with the fans to a tiresome degree (I really, really miss Re;birth 1 Noire and her proper character arc).
The new cast is not that good either, we have two new "makers" although in this case they stand for franchises and two platforms, Anri and Maho that both represent phone gaming.
Higurashi, Alice and Anri honestly surprise me how much they appear in the story and how little impact they can have in the player. None of their interactions really contribute in an organic way and they feel forced in there.
Maho, the other character, is the key character in the story, the source of the mystery and the driving force as Nepgear still feels passive in most of it just like in the second entry.
But for me, her biggest accomplishment is destroying the sister’s dynamic. And destruction feels like the right term since there's no bigger loser in the character's department that Uni.
Most of the story, character arcs, etc rely exclusively on how Maho and Nepgear are the best friends in the world with nothing to compare in terms of relationship. So where does this leave Uni? In a pretty bad position given that the only way to make Maho/Nepgear overperform her friendship is basically neglecting her in most of the story, reducing her to the lowest supporting role possible and turning her character in one that doesn't resemble her and acts cold and distant in situations it shouldn't just to give all the room for Maho to shine.
Gameplay
CH and IF jump into the Square train of moving their franchises from turn-based systems to action-based one, and just like Square, they fail miserably on making a middle ground, pleasing neither side and making it barely enjoyable.
I'll come clear, I like turn-based combat systems, I prefer them over action ones since action RPGs tend to lack the strategy turn based ones have and the combat is not as engaging nor fun as a character action game/hack & slash.
SvS combat takes an approach of 3 characters in combat, 2 used by the AI and one by the player, with the option to change between them at any given moment. Your actions consume AP and once you deplete it, it needs to recharge at a slow rate, which is a way to force you to switch, BUT this doesn't work well, and despite looking like there's fluid action, the game still runs on invisible turns:

If your character is executing an action, you are bound to it until it finishes, not real jumping between characters outside of specific prompts
Parrying an enemy attack gets your character stuck in defense position the exact same amount of time it takes the enemy to recover, so there's no benefit to it
You can give orders to the AI to switch patterns or use skills via a tactical pause menu or a quick action menu, both UNAVAILABLE if you are in the middle of an action, defending or basically anything else that is not moving slightly or standing still
If one character gets stunned, frozen, etc you can't jump to another until it recovers, and it feels like ages
Skills always targets your character, so activating heal with Rom will heal her, if you want to heal another person you need to use the tactical pause

Is even funnier to think about this because if they really really don't want to come back to a turn based system, despite working well in other of their franchises, they had Cyberdimension's combat system to take and improve, instead of going backwards with this.
Scouts
As is tradition at this point, SvS manages to, once again, make scouts even more annoying, time consuming and useless than before.
Scouts no longer visit Neptral Tower in real time like Re;birth 2 and 3, neither they explore dungeons with a comically large in-game time like in VII, they are now part of the disc development system, one that didn't need a rework and even less one like this.
Disc development and scouts now take an in-game amount of time based on the scout, the item used and the genre. The result is 100% RNG outside the scout's skill that is always added, so there's no real incentive to experiment combinations, just pick a scout with critical correction, another with exp+, another with combo loop and you are broken for the rest of the game. AAA also doesn't really add that much.
A big hub area and map design
There's something I really liked and is Planeptune.
In this game, Planeptune becomes a set of 3 large areas you can visit as a sort of central hub to take a stroll, visit the store, arena and even visit each floor of planeptower, including the CPUs bedrooms, etc
Funnily enough, despite Neptunia not being particularly renowned as a franchise for having detailed graphics, expansive maps, etc the city feels more alive than some AAA of the last years, which I really liked the first time I visited it.
Dungeons are, as usual, a rehash with slight changes of some of the ones we know (not even all), but more centered around opening areas to continue interacting with buttons, etc.
Each game tends to introduce some new dungeons along the old ones, in this case there's only one but I guess they spent the resources on Planeptune.
Stairs, stairs, stairs
In 2011 Battlefield 3 launch, and people poke fun at DICE for the ugly and "dated" water they put in the game. This pushed DICE to work really, really hard into water, and in 2013 Battlefield 4 heavily featured water in a kind of "see how cool it looks" way across all the game.
In this Neptunia the devs added a clean and detailed animation when the characters climb a ladder, and seems they took a note of DICE devs considering the time you'll spend climbing ladders is no joke.
L2D and character design
Usually I pay no attention to graphics on a game unless they use it as a big part of their marketing, but I want to commend here the massive improvement that the VN part of the game got. After the change of engines we lost the L2D due to UE limitations, now with Unity we have real L2D back and is really fluid, a big win in a otherwise lackluster game.
I'm running short on text lenght so I'm cutting corners, just let me finish this point asking for the old costume system to return, the new accessory based one doesn't fit each character.