When you make a passionate waste of bluray like Hyperdimension Neptunia, you'd need some real cahones to show your face around the gaming industry afterwards. I guess enough people were baited by waifus though, because they clearly made enough money to try again about a year later. After about 30 hours of my life were siphoned away, I can safely say that this is actually a video game this time, at least.

The banter between characters is truly what keeps me going through all of this. They may be a gaggle of tropes loosely based off of game consoles/handhelds, but they're also adorable and bounce off each other really well. It helps that the cast is more than doubled, so they don't have to keep inventing one-off NPCs to keep moving the story along. They retconned and reworked a ton of the original Hyperdimension Neptunia's lore, but it still feels like it could take place in the same universe. Moreover, the story has a setup that makes sense like the "console war" setup in the prior game. A group known as ASIC is attempting to revive Arfoire by spreading her influence across Gamindustri. Their methods of choice are handing out illegal download links, emulators, Action Replay-esque cheating devices, and more. (It also just clicked with me as I was writing this that "Arfoire" sounds like "R4", y'know, the Nintendo DS flashcart brand? I feel old.) Basically, devs can't make money, and consumer trust is in freefall. But hey, free games, and you can do whatever you want with them. ASIC's main mooks are a group of villains called the "Criminals of the Free World", or "CFW" for short.

The game's town menus let you hear the voices of the citizens via Chirper, a spoof of Twitter that reminds me of the good old days, prior to the Mass Tumblr Migration of 2018, but I'm getting off-topic. I'm sure this will filter me in some people's eyes, but this game's referential humor taps into the exact era of games I grew up surrounded by: the Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360. It constantly references the kind of useless-yet-obscure gaming knowledge that's built up in my brain over the course of a decade. That kind of appeal is very shallow, I'm aware, but it manages to put a dumb smile on my face. It rarely feels outright intrusive in the dialogue, and more like the writers are into the same infodump of game history that I'm into. They're just like me, for real for real. A few examples:

-there's offhand Chirper dialogue about a game that keeps deleting your save right at the final boss (pirated copies of Earthbound) -monster hunting games have taken Lastation by storm
-Blanc imagines "calm, blue oceans" when she needs to chill out
-Nepgear is canonically a Shenmue fan. (This will make or break her waifu status for some people)

On the downright despicable side of things though, I hope the writer who thought that putting the minors into sexually explicit situations . It's not funny, it's extremely uncomfortable to behold. This is not what Nintendo meant when they said "touching is good". Every time CFW Trick was onscreen, I just skipped the dialogue. I feel genuinely bad for the voice actors and localizers who were exposed to this drivel.

Everything's got a much more unified and distinct art style. Tsunako's character designs are as adorable as ever, and enemy/area designs are comparatively colorful and creative. You'll still see a lot of asset reusal, but you'll also soon discover that this is just part of Compile Heart's "shtick". The cutscenes of the game have forgone using Live2D, and instead use 3D models, which I think was a wise change. They've got a much wider range of animations and movements to work with, and it makes the cutscenes a lot more fluid and expressive than staring at a couple of breathing jpegs. The game actually reverts to those jpegs a handful of times, but it only happens in completely optional side events. My compliments to the english voice actors, they sound like they were actually given some voice direction this time, and are enjoying hamming it up with their lines.

The combat system of the original HDN was thrown out and replaced, which was definitely for the better. Some remnants remain, such as the combo system, but were simplified into something more digestible. The defining factors in combat are your AP (action points) and SP (skill points). You get a full meter of AP at the beginning of each turn, and it costs AP to do pretty much anything: attacking, using a skill, or using an item. It's somewhat awkward early in the game, but as you level up and have more AP to go around, you'll be able to accomplish 2-3 different actions per turn if you so choose. Using skills requires a combination of AP and SP, the latter of which is built up faster by using multi-hit combos. Each attack in your combo uses AP, and certain button combos will automatically trigger an EX attack if enough AP is expended in total. The only other thing to mention is the HDD forms, which I didn't use once in this game (at least, never intentionally). It costs a whopping 100 SP to activate, and continues draining SP each turn it's active. That's a massive investment for very few benefits (SP caps at 300 for all characters), and I often just used my skills outright instead. Neptunia is still a grindy franchise at its core with gameplay that long overstays its welcome. This is definitely a podcast game (derogatory) if I've ever played one.

It's no exaggeration to say that Mk2 definitely surprised me. This franchise could've been dead in the water, but the team behind it probably knew they could do way better, and they didn't squander their second chance. This game's not gonna completely blow your mind, but it's a charming romp with fun characters and perfectly serviceable gameplay. This is probably my favorite Neptunia game I've played so far, which is a really sad statement when I put it like that. God, I hope this franchise improves from here.

Neptunia mk2 was a big improvement over the original game in a lot of ways. Better graphics, better gameplay, better everything. While the story was a downgrade compared to the original game, it retained the darker tone that was present with the previous game while trimming down on the unnecessary fat of it.

In a lot of ways, I feel like mk2 is a better game than its remake - Re;Birth2 - purely if we're looking on the progression side of things. Yes, both games are very similar in how you progress through them, but where they differ is in their difficulty. mk2 can be brutally difficult at times, to the point where you can easily spend several hours grinding just to progress. A lot of people will see that as a negative, I see it as a positive personally, having played Re;Birth2 and breezing by that game in about 7 hours.

The amount of endings this game has (8 in total) also make the game very replayable as you can try out several different routes through the game.