I still remember the mass confusion that originated when Compile Heart announced the Galapagos RPG project to create games “for Japanese players” as though their prior projects weren’t already influenced primarily by otaku culture. Over time it’s come to represent their more experimental titles that are funded by the Neptunia cashcow, but the original project in this brand was anything but. There’s definitely a desire present to be taken more seriously, as evidenced by marketing playing up Yoshitaka Amano and Nobuo Uematsu’s relatively minor contributions to the game to claim their Final Fantasy pedigree, but it’s really just a different form of pop art from Neptunia, one spares the self-referential edge and invests heavily in stock fantasy tropes.

I probably made it sound a bit worse than it is, because it’s literally just… okay. Fine. Mediocre. My main criticism narratively is that protagonist Fang is a narcissistic, envious ass whose traits are vindicated instead of developed from, but otherwise the story’s functional, and the midgame twist didn’t blow my mind but it did enough to shake things up and keep me mildly engaged. I’m also incredibly sympathetic to Neptunia combat from having been exposed to it for so long, so the usage of a modified version of that battle system appealed to me, and the minor innovations to it lead to finding new fun ways to break the game. Still, despite there being far worse JRPGs, I really can’t recommend this at all because there’s just nothing that’s really that special or appealing you can’t get elsewhere at a higher quality.