Neptunia: Sisters vs. Sisters Review (cy)
I played through the entire PS4 version of this game (hence why it says I only have 0.2 hours, I assure you I've played through this fully before writing this review).
The Good:
- Planeptune is now a fully explorable area giving this game a great big hub area with lots of lovingly crafted details. Honestly, this and what they did with dungeons makes the game feel a lot less disconnected from the story. It's really amazing to finally see some solid world building in a Neptunia game!
- This game's story is on a whole new level and excites me for the future of this series! It's really hard to undersell just how good this story is honestly, the story alone made my negative experiences with this game worth pushing through!
- New dungeon elements include puzzle solving (albeit they are extremely basic). It is obvious that they were experimenting in this area and I hope to see them do more great things in the future with what they've developed here!
- No mods required: I am able to run this game on my PC at 1440p with an uncapped framerate and everything looks amazing! This is a huge step in the right direction for the PC releases of Neptunia games!
- New quest types that are more interesting, fun, and straight forward than ever before!
- The 3 endings for this game are based on something WAY more intuitive and accessible than previous entries. The odds are actually in your favor for once to get the best ending on your first play-through!
- Great side content! Funny dialogue, and outstanding interactions/relationships between all the characters!
- All dungeons in this game are original and don't use content or level geometry from previous games (as far as I can tell. If they do, it isn't obvious at all). With that said, the styles of some dungeons is reused and some of this new level geometry is reused which is a bit annoying.
- Party members still level up regardless of whether they're in battle with you or not and you're able to see them level up on the right side of the screen at the end of battles along with whatever items you pick up. This streamlines the process of ending a battle making for a much more seamless experience.
- Battles no longer have loading times and take place in the same area you found the enemy in making for a much more seamless and immersive experience.
- Character animations have a lot of love and care put into them. Idea Factory is no stranger to making nicely animated 2d characters. In Sisters VS Sisters they somehow put even more into these animations and even made some nice animation transitions. They've done an outstanding job selling the idea that these are living breathing characters - not just some characters from a silly anime video game.
The Bad:
The Combat:
- I have very mixed feelings about the combat in this game. It can be very frustrating when your characters get themselves killed because they're too low level and you're not in control of them. I don't like that you're now forced to either level characters up more, or spend an eternity on a single boss fight (instead of coming up with a crazy strategy and winning by the skin of your teeth for a truly epic experience). The deep thoughtful JRPG strategizing you'd be doing is sadly gone now and replaced not by skill, but grinding (or having to fight the boss 1 on 1 while your dead party members just lay there).
Blocking attacks is very annoying and almost impossible since your attack animations take forever to execute. I regularly found my attacks missing the enemy in dumb and or unavoidable ways. This combat in this game doesn't know if it wants to be a souls-like experience or an RPG and usually leaves a lot to be desired. This isn't to say it wasn't fun when you could narrowly squeeze in successful combos, it just usually gets frustrating and difficult for all the wrong reasons. Most of the time I just let myself die rather than fight the boss battles out 1 on 1 because I didn't want it to take an hour to get through the fight. This left me to grind my problems away which is never fun. All in all, I give the combat a 4 out of 10.
- The censorship: Unfortunately, they went about censoring this game in the laziest way possible, they straight up removed many voice lines that were perfectly innocent along with others that were less innocent. In other words, they effectively threw the baby out with the bath water and it makes the game feel a lot less lively. I'm fine with censorship, I'm just not fine with the laziness.
- Some dungeons overstay their welcome.
- The PC version is oddly buggy. You tend to get stuck when you attempt to climb ladders, this can easily be fixed by alt-tabbing out of the game, but it is rather annoying. Also, characters that are supposed to follow you in this version of the game only ever seem to teleport to you, this is built in to prevent your party members from getting too far from you, since party members never seem to move with you in this version of the game, you only ever see them teleporting to you which is really awkward and results in you missing some playful banter from them.