The History of Neptunia: Hyperdimension Neptunia

At the time of writing, the release of Neptunia: Sisters vs. Sisters is bearing down on us, but we’re not supposed to write anything about it until later this month. So in the meantime I thought we’d do the next best thing: kick off a retrospective look back at the rest of the series, including both some historical context and some personal anecdotes that help to explain why this franchise has remained so popular over the years. And we begin right back at the beginning with the first Hyperdimension Neptunia.

Hyperdimension Neptunia, developed by Idea Factory and Compile Heart, first released for PlayStation 3 in 2010 in Japan. It came west a year later, with NIS America handling the North American version and Koei Tecmo taking charge of the European release.

Compile Heart had been around for about four years by the time they produced Hyperdimension Neptunia. As the name suggests, they have their roots in the classic game developer Compile; the company was founded by Masamitsu “Moo” Niitani, creator of the Madou Monogatari and Puyo Puyo series. Prior to Neptunia, the company put out a variety of games, including ports of Astonishia Story and Vulcanus on PSP, the original RPG series Record of Agarest War, and the crossover RPG Cross Edge, which featured guest characters from a variety of franchises.

The PlayStation 3 era was often regarded as a bit of a black spot for Japanese RPGs due to the fact we were getting a lot less of them than we had done in previous console generations. The fact was, development of HD polygonal games was considerably more expensive and time-consuming than working on games for earlier platforms, and as such many developers and publishers seemed unwilling to take risks on such sprawling titles.

Compile Heart — and Idea Factory in general — latched on to an interesting idea, though. Rather than taking the big-budget blockbuster approach which many high-profile RPGs had taken throughout the PlayStation 1 era in particular, they instead chose to take a more anime-style approach, keeping the overall scope of the game relatively limited and deliberately taking aim for a specific audience rather than mainstream success.

As a result, something of a rift developed between mainstream opinion and those who found themselves resonating incredibly strongly with Compile Heart’s output — reviewers of the games press tended to absolutely hate almost anything they put out, while those who picked up their games on a whim often found themselves charmed by games that had a genuine feeling of passion and soul about them, even amid technical limitations and an overall sense of jankiness.

I speak from experience, because I was a member of that latter group. I was hanging out on Google+ one day — as one did in 2011 — and saw a post from a friend of mine who had picked up a bunch of new games for her PlayStation 3. Hyperdimension Neptunia particularly caught my eye, so I asked her about it and, being well aware that I’d just come off the back of an Ar Tonelico marathon, she suggested that it might be something I’d enjoy a fair bit.

So I nabbed myself a copy, unsure what to expect from a game that claimed to feature involvement not only from Compile Heart and Idea Factory, but also Ar Tonelico creators Gust, Nippon Ichi Software and even Sega. And not long after booting the game up, I was absolutely smitten — while also being well aware why some people bounced off this game hard.

In Hyperdimension Neptunia, you take on the role of Neptune, a goddess who was knocked down to earth during an allegorical representation of the “console wars” in the celestial realm. Banging her head hard enough to lose her memory in true RPG tradition, Neptune makes some new friends named IF and Compa, and sets off on a journey around the world to try and get her memory back, figure out what’s going on with all the monsters that have started appearing around the world, and perhaps put an end to the Console War once and for all.

The game eschews the standard “field screen” of earlier RPGs in favour of a menu-based system where you can choose from various events and missions to participate in. The former unfold as visual novel-style storytelling sequences, featuring one of the earliest in-game uses of Live2D for animated character sprites, while the latter task you with travelling to one of the region’s dungeons and completing a particular objective.

It was the event sequences of Hyperdimension Neptunia that first charmed me. I was very taken with the larger-than-life characters, the energetic Japanese voice acting and the fact that the game’s script was genuinely satirical; it did a great job of lampooning some of the more absurd aspects of gaming culture at the time without ever getting mean-spirited or overly silly about it.

We take a lot of Neptunia’s characterisation for granted today as these characters are so well-established, but back when Hyperdimension Neptunia first came out, it was a genuine delight to relate the various main characters’ personality traits to the companies and platforms they were supposed to be representing.

For example, Noire’s stubbornness and arrogance was a perfect allegory for the Sony of the PS3 era, who continually seemed to think they could do no wrong after their success in the previous console generation; naturally, Noire often found herself being taken down a peg or two, much like Sony themselves were when they found themselves utterly dominated by Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

Meanwhile, Xbox (sorry, “Leanbox”) representative Vert is a textbook anime-style depiction of a “foreigner” — blonde-haired, blue-eyed, huge breasts. But she was more than just her appearance; her gaming tastes, for example, erred towards western trends such as online multiplayer titles, and her overall princess-like sense of refinement can be interpreted as the way in which certain parts of the western games industry seemed to think they were somehow “better” than their counterparts in the east.

Blanc, representative of Nintendo stand-in Lowee, is a particularly interesting character. Presented as a much smaller, skinnier, young-looking character than the others, her overall appearance represents Nintendo’s family-friendly nature, regarded by some as “childish”. And yet her fierce temper channels the attitude of the ruthless former president of Nintendo Hiroshi Yamauchi, known by some as “the iron fist in the velvet glove” thanks to his powerful, uncompromising business acumen taking Nintendo from being an unremarkable card manufacturer to a worldwide phenomenon between the years of 1949 and 2002.

And Neptune herself is a satirical figure; named after a Sega console that never made it to market — the Sega Neptune would have been a combination Mega Drive and 32X unit — she represents the chaotic behaviour that ultimately led to Sega’s downfall in the hardware market following the Saturn and Dreamcast eras. She never quite seems to know what she’s doing and sort of stumbles from situation to situation, sometimes causing even more trouble than she was attempting to resolve.

As well as being fun, well-written characters, the main cast of Hyperdimension Neptunia also had a wonderfully distinctive sense of style about them. Designed and illustrated by Japanese artist Tsunako, the iconic look and feel of the series established in this first game persists to this day, and remains a core part of its overall appeal. Blending both cute and sexy aspects — and focusing entirely on the female cast to such a degree that the few minor male characters in the game are represented exclusively as silhouettes — Tsunako’s art is a core appeal element of the Neptunia series as a whole, and it has been right from the start.

A more divisive aspect of the first Hyperdimension Neptunia game is its actual gameplay. Outside of the visual novel storytelling sequences, the game unfolds as a third-person dungeon crawler with random enemy encounters and specific objectives to complete on each dungeon dive. There’s also a “time trial” feature that allows you to rechallenge previous quests and see how quickly you can beat them.

The various party members Neptune recruits in her adventures have different abilities that can be used in dungeons. Compa, for example, can ring a bell to summon monsters to her current location — great for quests where you need to defeat a particular number of enemies quickly — while IF can seek out hidden treasures. None of the dungeons are especially complicated to navigate — and, in a tradition that would persist for much of the series, many supposedly different dungeons make use of the same scenery and even map in some cases — but the different character actions added a bit of interest.

Where things really got interesting was the combat system. Unfolding as a turn-based affair, Hyperdimension Neptunia’s combat features a strong emphasis on breaking enemies’ guards before dealing direct damage to them. But there’s a considerable amount of added complexity atop that basic formula.

On a character’s turn, they can make use of action points to perform various moves, each of which are assigned to the face buttons on the PlayStation 3 controller. Some of these moves allow the character to swap places with a back-row partner, thereby extending their combo further with another pool of action points, while others have special, more powerful effects. A core part of fighting effectively in Hyperdimension Neptunia is setting up these combos beforehand — since you can define what each and every button press does at every possible step in a combo.

This actually gives combat preparations an almost puzzle-like feel as you attempt to figure out which moves will chain naturally into one another, when is a good time to swap with your partner (who, of course, has their own combo strings for you to define) and when is the best time to conclude a combo with a powerful attack. It’s actually possible — and arguably essential — to spend a lot of time in the menus setting up these combo strings, because just hitting the “attack” button absolutely does not cut it in Hyperdimension Neptunia.

A rather peculiar part of the combat system is the way items are used. Rather than being able to trigger them manually on a character’s turn, they instead make use of a conditional and probability-based system. Outside of combat, you can set up the circumstances under which an item will be used — such as a character’s HP dropping below a particular threshold — but then you also have to assign a limited number of “item skill points” to the condition to determine how likely it is to happen.

So what you end up with is a condition along the lines of “If a character’s HP drops below 50%, there is a 75% chance that they will use a healing item”. As you level up, you gain more points to divide across all your item use conditional statements — and there’s nothing stopping you making something 100% likely to happen — so it’s easy to see what the intent was here, but it’s a strange system that most people were rather glad to see abandoned after this first installment!

That aforementioned time trial feature has a strange quirk also — you can obtain faster times by skipping combat animations. Yes, the timer keeps on counting while animations are proceeding, and a squeeze of the L2 trigger will skip those animations. This means that if you’re going for quick times — or grinding levels — you’ll actually end up skipping most of the game’s fancier animations. Although the fact there even is a skip function at all will be welcome news to some people — particularly those who grew up with PS1 Final Fantasy games’ unskippable summons.

Oh, and you could customise various attacks and even the characters’ outfits by importing your own image files onto your PS3 via a USB stick. We don’t see that on console games these days!

All in all, Hyperdimension Neptunia is a bit of a tough sell to people today due to its many peculiar idiosyncracies, but if you enjoy the series it is still worth exploring to see where everything stemmed from. In some respects it’s kind of remarkable that a game this odd managed to spawn such a formidable franchise, but I guess it’s testament to the lovely art, the solid writing and the imaginative, satirical setting that people still found things to enjoy here, even if they didn’t necessarily get along with the gameplay.

Me, I genuinely, unironically enjoyed it when I first played it — but I appreciate that not everyone will feel the same way about it, particularly more than 10 years later! But at this point, it’s a game of historical significance for the Japanese gaming sector, and as such it will always deserve some love.

Neptunia: Sisters vs Sisters is out at the end of January 2023. Find out more and preorder here.

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