![]() While she argues a lot with Vert, they are shown to get along, albeit rarely. This is intentionally triggered by some people, such as Vert, whom Blanc is incredibly jealous of due to her bigger breasts, or just about anyone who mentions her lack of breasts, intentional or unintentional. Underneath her calm exterior is an angry, raged filled girl ready to yell at or murder the first person who pisses her off. As well as showing her softer side to others. While she cares deeply for her little sisters, they anger her (perhaps not as much as others) and most of her stress comes from not knowing how to act around them. However, unbeknownst to herself, she isn't very good at it and everyone struggles to be honest with her. She enjoys simple hobbies such as reading during her spare time and writing, something she is overly passionate about and dreams of one day mastering as an author. Peel back the mess of a narrative and the RPG underneath is feeble and undernourished, far less robust than the studio's previous effort, Trinity Universe.A quiet and introverted girl, Blanc may seem to be lifeless and apathetic in comparison to others(with Neptune once comparing her to a doll). Not because its innuendo - we love a bit of innuendo, especially in your mum's pretty mouth - but because it's dull and stupid and essentially based around girls made to look and sound like schoolchildren.Īlmost as unforgiveable are the game mechanics beneath the story. It's playing on conventions of plain old ugly Japanese sexism, and while the Carry On tone ensures the game stops short of titillation, the innuendo leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Some will claim the game is playing on established anime conventions. In one of the earliest acts of the game, your character arrives at a busty barely-legal nurse's home only to have her scratched, suddenly-naked body bandaged to a soundtrack of squeals of delight. The camera lingers longingly over stills of each girl's crotch (and, as the cast of Hyperdimension Neptunia is exclusively female, that's a lot of crotch), while characters make lewd comments with all the awkwardness of a children's TV presenter telling a dirty joke. The wearying effect of the witless writing is exacerbated by the plain sexism on show in almost every one of the garrulous cut-scenes. Neptune takes her name from the unreleased SEGA Neptune, a system which planned to combine the SEGA Genesis/Mega Drive and SEGA 32X into one unit, originally scheduled for release in 1994. Moreover, the game adheres to a strict and orthodox JRPG template, both in terms of the narrative and game structure, a decision born not of irony but of a plain lack of imagination, one entirely at odds with the developer's boastful name. It's hardly Nippon Ichi's fault - the publisher's English translation is generally robust - but joke after joke falls flat, the dialogue inane and childish, the Japanese writers missing every available opportunity to say something witty or insightful about the industry whose terminology they plunder with such gleeful abandon. The writers grin idiotically as they rely upon our familiarity with their reference points to make the game funny and interesting, inviting us to join in gags that lack bite and, more often than not, a punch line. Rather, ideas and conventions from videogames are invoked with no rhyme or reason (from Princess Pear, a character who is running from castle to castle in order to evade her rescuer, to a Nintendo DS-style piracy device). Despite lines of dialogue that poke fun at JRPG conventions ("I'm apparently an amnesiac, so I need you to explain stuff to me in a manner convenient for the players to understand," says your character, Neptune) it's never quite clear who or what is the primary subject of the satire. It's a ripe premise, but almost immediately whatever metaphor the developer was aiming for falls apart. Instead Idea Factory's idiosyncratic role-playing game offers, ostensibly at least, an abstract, metaphorical take on the videogame business, featuring game consoles personified as warring goddesses that vie for dominance over the land of Gameindustri. Unlike iPhone app-du-jour Game Dev Story or SEGA's eccentric Segagaga, however, you are not charged with steering the fortunes of a virtual games company. Hyperdimension Neptunia is the latest member of a small family of releases to choose the videogame industry for a theme.
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