The list of companies involved in Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 reads like a who’s who of Japanese RPG game companies. GUST Co, Nippon Ichi Software (and NIS America), Idea Factory, 5pb. and Compile Heart. My first thought is, did none of them venture to think outside the box?

Japanese RPGs have a certain subset of RPG elements and generally include many anime/manga elements that define what they can be and Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 does not do anything to jeopardize its position squarely in the deep confines of that genre. It has turn-based combat, scantily clad girls that seem to be in the pre-teen to late teen age range (in fact, I haven’t seen a major male character yet), constant mention of goddesses, extremely lengthy, and wordy cut scenes with no way to skip (well, they allow you to skip but really it is just fast forward), power up modes for characters that turn them into pseudo-mech-battle-suits and no automatic saving of your game, a feature which I detest altogether because it often results in a lot of lost gameplay time.

So let’s start with that feature because my review will go up from there. In the game, you have the ability to save whenever you please, from the system menu, unless you’re within the confines of an instanced dungeon where you have to find a save kiosk to do so. That’s all well and good. But the game is based on a world map, city interfaces and then these dungeons and you constantly travel between them. Wouldn’t it make perfect, logical sense for the game to save your progress each time you switch between the world and city or enter a dungeon? It does to me. Of course, this seems to be an idea far, far outside the game design specs of the JRPG, and so, much time is wasted in running up against a monster unexpectedly and then dying and having to restart, 30 minutes behind where you died. In fact, this caused me to simply turn off the game in utter disgust a handful of times because it makes play monotonous and repetitive.

Hyperdimension Neptunia Mk2 is indeed repetitive. There is a quest system where you pick up quests from the guild and then go solve the quests to get rewards. Every single quest is to defeat X number of a specific creature (or numerous creatures) or collect Y number of certain items (usually dropped by specific creatures). To move the story along there’s a series of events which trigger the next scene in the story. You are given the choice of when you take on those story-moving battles, because they’re all clearly labeled on the world map. Yes, they’re all battles, minor bosses, major bosses, the same enemy, over and over and over again. You would think that beating down an opponent three or four (dozen) times would keep them from attacking you again. Nope!

Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2 is the sequel to the RPG Hyperdimension Neptunia, in which you control personifications (humanoids) of videogame consoles whose objective is to protect the world of Gamindustri. In Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2, the four heroines are the younger sisters of the CPUs (Console Patron Units) from Hyperdimension Neptunia. Yeah, so they’ve even got a story hook as to why all the characters are scantily-clad girls of questionable age. You can imagine what some players will be doing when presented with the combined short skirts and free roam camera centered on the characters.