Unlike the rest of this website, I'm gonna be out here writing a positive review on this game. I am no stranger to expressing my disappointment with the Neptunia series for the last 6 or so years. I don't keep it a secret that I think the Neptunia series has been on a massive downwards trend after 2017's 4GO.
With the series starting out great, with tons of momentum generated not just by the first 3 games on the PS3, but with the Re;Birth series on the Vita & the Vita-exclusive spinoffs, which were eventually brought to PC, culminating with the release of VII back in 2015 - what I consider to be this series' best game overall, Neptunia looked like it was in a good spot. Decent games, tons of momentum and lots of fanfare from the diehard people following it along, myself included.
But ever since 2017, this series has been stagnant. The only things releasing for Neptunia were cash-grabby spinoff games that served to do nothing more than just to pad out the time. Neptunia stopped being treated as a series meant to parody the gaming industry, and instead turned to a series about being "nep = funny". As a hardcore Neptunia fan, it was heartbreaking to witness this firsthand, especially when the "secret 10 year anniversary project" ended up being a remake of a remaster of a remake of the first game for the PS5. It was genuinely heartbreaking to watch.
Out of nowhere, this game was announced. I didn't know what to think of it when I saw it. Another spinoff in the style of 4GO? Sure seemed like it based on the initial trailer of the game. But then I see the original Gamindustri from mk2, Victory & VII...but it wasn't that surprising, considering Neptunia U used the dimension from Re;Birth1 as the basis for its plot. But, "okay", I was thinking, "maybe we're finally getting a spinoff in the main timeline of Neptunia for once". The game comes out in Japan, and I start hearing whispers that the game is decent. And that the game is good. But I didn't pay it any mind because the Neptunia community loves doing things like giving a game a positive review because "has nep, nep funny" (wish that was a joke). I kept my hopes low and was expecting the worst either way.
So now the game is out in the West. I have the physical Calendar Edition for it. And I just came out of my first playthrough for the game. My emotions are all over the place for this game, and the high rating attached to the game might change over time, but...holy shit, I'm so happy to finally see a step in the right direction for the series. This game properly positively surprised me. It does so many things right for the series. And honestly - I wouldn't call this a spinoff title. I'd just call this a proper follow-up after VII, just with a different gameplay model. But either way, let's get into it.
Story
At first it was really difficult for me to pinpoint where the story takes place in relation to VII. Is it a sequel? Is it a prequel? Is it neither? Fortunately, rather early on the game does indeed establish that this game takes place after VII, as Uzume does get mentioned within the story...once. Yeah, once. So it at least establishes that the other characters are aware of Uzume, placing it firmly after the events of VII.
The story itself though...well, I thought the story overall was good. I genuinely enjoyed the story start to finish, with it basically catching Gamindustri up to the current gaming landscape from VII. The 2 new maker characters, who I won't spoil, were a genuine treat to see, especially since one of them is a direct reference to the publisher of another rather niche Japanese series. If you know, you know.
However, I do have some qualms with it. Namely the pacing of the story. For as good as the story is overall, I think its pacing is...bad. Each chapter of the game goes by stupidly fast, to the point it makes me wonder why they didn't combine several of the chapters into a few larger chapters. This game has 13 chapters overall, starting with Chapter 0 and ending with Chapter 12, yet some of the chapters genuinely last no longer than 40 minutes, and it just felt awkward. You talk to Histoire, get your next assignment, do one dungeon run and you're onto the next chapter, which was just...huh?
There was also another disappointing aspect of this game's story, which might sound silly, being the lack of many CGs throughout the entire game for key moments. Towards the end this was remedied, but throughout most of the game - there were actually very few "special" CGs for scenes which I would deem important, yet this game doesn't, apparently. I won't spoil anything, but you'll see what I mean if you play this game.
But aside from that, I appreciate the fact that the game has brought back a darker tone to the story, making it fall more in-line with the main games of the series of mk2, Victory and VII. The stakes are high and the risk all of the characters have to face is genuine, especially when it's revealed at the end what exactly it is they are dealing with. In a way, a lot of it reminds me of mk2 and its...infamous non-canon ending, which according to this game - could actually be canon in some fashion, which is an interesting thought experiment to have for those who have been around long enough.
Overall - good story for Neptunia, but poorly paced and structured. I still enjoyed it as a whole, but I'll admit it could have been better. Quality-wise and enjoyment-wise I would put it above mk2 but below VII in terms of how much I personally liked this game's story (with Victory being the best still for me).
Gameplay
Neptunia Sisters vs Sisters does, admittedly, feel like a huge downgrade in gameplay from 4 Goddesses Online, the previous hack & slash combat game that I played in the series. It took me a rather long time to get used to how this game's mechanics work and to have a decent time with its combat system, though I will admit I still think 4GO was much, much better in terms of gameplay.
Sisters vs Sisters feels like it's trying to find a happy medium of the JRPG entries of old and the combat mechanics established by this series' spinoff titles, such as Neptunia U, MegaTag & 4GO, yet the attempt here feels rather undercooked. There are many nitpicks about the gameplay that I disliked, but let's break them down one-by-one.
The combat was, initially, horribly clunky for me and it took me a few in-game chapters to actually get used to how fighting in this game worked. You traverse the dungeons of the game much like you would in any of the old JRPG entries - you are placed into a level with an "Event" marker showing you where your destination is and there are enemies around that you can Symbol Attack or just run into regularly that you fight. That much hasn't changed, however the main difference is that battles are no longer turn-based, rather - both you and your enemies attack each other at the same time. But the way the game flows & explains its combat mechanics is...unorthodox.
As an example, I did not know until halfway through the game that you can actually put up a shield to block attacks, or that you can dash out of the way to dodge attacks, however - I never ended up using this feature. On top of its mechanics being rather clunky, I didn't find them useful since once you're in a combo and attacking your foe - you cannot break out of it to put up a shield or to quickly dash away. You can do this if you equip a specific disc that you can develop, sure, but without it - once you're attacking, you're attacking, and if your enemy isn't stunlocked from your hits - good luck dodging anything coming your way. The implementation of these two mechanics just felt half-baked and not very intuitive, serving more to break the flow of gameplay rather than to engage me further in the combat. My strategy instead was to make my characters as tanky as possible and brute-force my way through everything.
Another thing I didn't end up using whatsoever throughout the entire game was the EXE drive. Yeah, not even once. I didn't really understand how it's even meant to be used, or how you charge the EXE meter to let you use it. Do you need to be in HDD mode to perform an EXE move? I don't know, the game never tells you. They show you that they exist, and there is a tutorial card explaining the EXE drive, but I didn't get how it works and ended up completely skipping it. It's been a trend that ever since they released Re;Birth3, Compile Heart has been needlessly changing around the EXE drive system for whatever reason, reducing its use with each subsequent release. The system was decent enough the way it was in mk2, Victory, Re;Birth1 and Re;Birth2, but the implementation was perfected in VII. Yet after that point, they sought out to fix what wasn't even broken to begin with, and that trend continues here too, sadly.
Lastly for my endless rant - I don't like most of the dungeons in this game. What doesn't help is that there are tons of reused dungeons and aesthetics. You see it was soon as chapter 1 of the game - you get 2 identical forest dungeons with the exact same layout, just with different entry/exit positions, different "safe zones" locations and different enemies. Otherwise, they're the same dungeon. And this happens throughout the whole game. Do you like Virtua Forest? Good, here's 5 more Virtua Forests, with some of them being at night to spice things up. Admittedly the old games did it too, especially the likes of mk2 & Victory, but it's just a shame that this is still a recurring issue.
With that out of the way, the gameplay otherwise I felt was fine. Without the clunky dashing & blocking mechanics, and completely ignoring the EXE system like I did for my playthrough, I found Neptunia Sisters vs Sisters overall to be a very comfortable experience. The combat, while repetitive and formulaic once you get the hang of it, is fast, frantic and fun. Difficulty-wise I had absolutely 0 issue with the game in any capacity. Dare I say that I found this game way too easy? To the point that I didn't "game over" even once. The closest I got was almost dying to one boss in Chapter 8, since 2 of my 3 party members just blindly ran into the boss and died, and here I was chipping away at the boss with Rom, who the boss for some reason never managed to land a hit on, no matter what I did. But while the mechanics were difficult to grasp at first, once I got the hang of it - no battles posed any real threat, which I don't know if this means the game is way too easy, or if I'm just good at the game. Probably the former rather than the latter.
Speaking of balance, I find it absolutely hilarious how some characters have been jacked up like crazy in terms of damage from the previous games. My party throughout 80% of the game consisted of Nepgear, Uni & Rom, mainly because I found these 3 to synergize perfectly with each other, as they all have combos that can directly lead into a follow-up attack from the other. But there's also one more thing - Rom. Rom is absolutely busted in this game. I don't know what kind of edibles Blanc fed her between VII and this game, but Rom is straight up the strongest character in this game, period, no questions asked. She used to be a dedicated support in the old games, with a limited health pool and limited offensive capability - they defined this as her role rather consistently in the older games. While she retains a few supportive abilities in SvS and her low health pool, her damage scaling has been jacked up to unbelievable degrees. Rom straight up shreds pretty much every single enemy in the game, there's nothing she wasn't able to handle. Remember when I mentioned 2 of my 3 characters dying in a boss battle during chapter 8? The one character that wasn't dead was Rom. Because I was able to effectively stunlock the boss as Rom and cheese my way to victory with her ridiculous magic attacks. Honestly I found this funny. By the endgame Nepgear can kinda rival Rom in terms of raw power, but Rom has the advantage of being a ranged character, whereas Nepgear is a melee-based character, meaning that Rom has a lower chance of getting stunlocked by the enemy.
Stepping away from the combat side of things, other parts of the game I think were handled well. Disc development is back in much of the same way as the older games, acting as a "choose your own stat buffs" thing, with you needing to develop discs in order to get what you're looking for. In this game, they sort of combined "Plans" and the scouting system into one universal system where you send out a Scout to develop a disc with a specific genre and bonus addon. I think the system here works fine enough and I did end up using it...until I realized all of my characters have everything they need, so once I got all the necessary discs for everyone - I kinda forgot about the disc system by the endgame.
The "Chirper" system replaces the Basilicom Quests system from the old games. And by "replaces", I mean it basically works the exact same way, just meant to look like it's a social media feed instead. And it's...fine? I never understood the point of the "Chirper" system when it comes to looking at a Twitter-esque feed of everything. I never understood the point of it - I thought it would have an effect on the in-game world, but no. It means...nothing, really. Otherwise, yeah, it's just how you do side-quests and how you earn characters for Disc Development.
Also, one more thing - getting to explore Planeptune for once was actually super duper neat. It gave a proper sense of scale as to how large a nation is. A few things that could've made it better though would've been a faster means of traveling around without using a menu to warp everywhere (such as maybe a bike? a scooter? a sprint button?), and being able to explore the other nations as well, since Planeptune is the only explorable nation in this game. Maybe in a future installment of the series we'll get to see Lastation, Leanbox and Lowee expanded upon in this way too, I hope.
Graphics, Sound & Optimization:
Yeah, well...this one was rough in these departments. On the PS4, graphically the game looks...rather mediocre. Lighting is pretty basic and baked-in (aka not real time) and aesthetically the game can look pretty ugly at times. Nowhere near as bad as how ugly VIIR can get at certain points, but the game certainly doesn't look very pretty a lot of the time. However, Neptunia wasn't ever really known for being "graphically impressive", so it didn't really bother me much how the game looked...rather bad in some places. Noticeable, yes, but never distracting.
Sound-wise...this game's sound design is a bit of a mess. Now, where it counts - it's good. Landing attacks feels satisfying and punchy, just how you want them to. Navigating menus - perfectly fine. Character voice acting? I played on the Japanese dub, but yeah - it's pretty good (except for Neptune, annoying as always). However in other areas - not so much. Some characters are notably quieter than others when they talk, some sound effects are stupidly loud to the point it could hurt your ears (I'm looking at you Rom), and the sound itself, at least for me, had its moments where it would just be very choppy.
Music-wise, it's alright. There are plenty of songs reused from the older games, but the game does include its fair share of original tracks as well. The brand new original tracks are properly good - they are very pleasant to listen to and don't actually get ear-grating or boring after a while, which is decent. The reused songs, however...hit & miss as with every other game. The one song that gets reused from VII is "The Code ~Noisy and Calm~" by Kenji Kaneko, and it's still a fantastic piece of music, but others are...well, I didn't like them in their original games they're from and I still don't like them now.
Optimization on the PS4 wasn't that good. I've noticed plenty of times when the game started to lag and chug. Both during gameplay and outside of gameplay. I already mentioned the choppy audio at random bits part, but particularly when smoke appears during a cutscene - I can hear the Unity Engine just screaming & begging for its life for some reason. It's inconsistent and it's a shame that this too remains a problem that wasn't ever properly addressed from the mainline games. But not entirely unexpected for Neptunia, I suppose. The game ran perfectly fine and smoothly about 70% of the time though, I didn't experience any hard-crashes or save corruptions, or anything like the sort, so that's a bonus. Sure beats Re;Birth3 which would randomly softlock you at certain points on PC.
Verdict:
Well, they've done it. They finally released a Neptunia game I finally enjoyed playing, despite its flaws.
Sisters vs SIsters is far from perfect. I think I made that clear with how much I was able to complain about every aspect of the game, from story to gameplay to misc. things. And to be honest, to the average player - I do not recommend this game. Unless you are willing to deal with the negatives I presented about the game, I recommend skipping this game and look for something else. Hell, even from the Neptunia series I'd direct you to VII or something like 4GO if you don't like JRPGs.
But for Neptunia fans like me - this game is such a breath of fresh air. Such a good step in the right direction. And such a massive win for the whole fandom after 8 years of mediocrity and ambiguity for the future of the series.
Sisters vs Sisters feels like an apology for those 8 years of stagnant, useless releases. It feels like an apology for the disappointment of the 10th anniversary of the series. And for that - I am so happy this game came out.
If you're a Neptunia fan like me - burned by the series' mediocre cash-grabby run for the last 8 years - give Sisters vs Sisters a shot. It's worth it.
With the series starting out great, with tons of momentum generated not just by the first 3 games on the PS3, but with the Re;Birth series on the Vita & the Vita-exclusive spinoffs, which were eventually brought to PC, culminating with the release of VII back in 2015 - what I consider to be this series' best game overall, Neptunia looked like it was in a good spot. Decent games, tons of momentum and lots of fanfare from the diehard people following it along, myself included.
But ever since 2017, this series has been stagnant. The only things releasing for Neptunia were cash-grabby spinoff games that served to do nothing more than just to pad out the time. Neptunia stopped being treated as a series meant to parody the gaming industry, and instead turned to a series about being "nep = funny". As a hardcore Neptunia fan, it was heartbreaking to witness this firsthand, especially when the "secret 10 year anniversary project" ended up being a remake of a remaster of a remake of the first game for the PS5. It was genuinely heartbreaking to watch.
Out of nowhere, this game was announced. I didn't know what to think of it when I saw it. Another spinoff in the style of 4GO? Sure seemed like it based on the initial trailer of the game. But then I see the original Gamindustri from mk2, Victory & VII...but it wasn't that surprising, considering Neptunia U used the dimension from Re;Birth1 as the basis for its plot. But, "okay", I was thinking, "maybe we're finally getting a spinoff in the main timeline of Neptunia for once". The game comes out in Japan, and I start hearing whispers that the game is decent. And that the game is good. But I didn't pay it any mind because the Neptunia community loves doing things like giving a game a positive review because "has nep, nep funny" (wish that was a joke). I kept my hopes low and was expecting the worst either way.
So now the game is out in the West. I have the physical Calendar Edition for it. And I just came out of my first playthrough for the game. My emotions are all over the place for this game, and the high rating attached to the game might change over time, but...holy shit, I'm so happy to finally see a step in the right direction for the series. This game properly positively surprised me. It does so many things right for the series. And honestly - I wouldn't call this a spinoff title. I'd just call this a proper follow-up after VII, just with a different gameplay model. But either way, let's get into it.
Story
At first it was really difficult for me to pinpoint where the story takes place in relation to VII. Is it a sequel? Is it a prequel? Is it neither? Fortunately, rather early on the game does indeed establish that this game takes place after VII, as Uzume does get mentioned within the story...once. Yeah, once. So it at least establishes that the other characters are aware of Uzume, placing it firmly after the events of VII.
The story itself though...well, I thought the story overall was good. I genuinely enjoyed the story start to finish, with it basically catching Gamindustri up to the current gaming landscape from VII. The 2 new maker characters, who I won't spoil, were a genuine treat to see, especially since one of them is a direct reference to the publisher of another rather niche Japanese series. If you know, you know.
However, I do have some qualms with it. Namely the pacing of the story. For as good as the story is overall, I think its pacing is...bad. Each chapter of the game goes by stupidly fast, to the point it makes me wonder why they didn't combine several of the chapters into a few larger chapters. This game has 13 chapters overall, starting with Chapter 0 and ending with Chapter 12, yet some of the chapters genuinely last no longer than 40 minutes, and it just felt awkward. You talk to Histoire, get your next assignment, do one dungeon run and you're onto the next chapter, which was just...huh?
There was also another disappointing aspect of this game's story, which might sound silly, being the lack of many CGs throughout the entire game for key moments. Towards the end this was remedied, but throughout most of the game - there were actually very few "special" CGs for scenes which I would deem important, yet this game doesn't, apparently. I won't spoil anything, but you'll see what I mean if you play this game.
But aside from that, I appreciate the fact that the game has brought back a darker tone to the story, making it fall more in-line with the main games of the series of mk2, Victory and VII. The stakes are high and the risk all of the characters have to face is genuine, especially when it's revealed at the end what exactly it is they are dealing with. In a way, a lot of it reminds me of mk2 and its...infamous non-canon ending, which according to this game - could actually be canon in some fashion, which is an interesting thought experiment to have for those who have been around long enough.
Overall - good story for Neptunia, but poorly paced and structured. I still enjoyed it as a whole, but I'll admit it could have been better. Quality-wise and enjoyment-wise I would put it above mk2 but below VII in terms of how much I personally liked this game's story (with Victory being the best still for me).
Gameplay
Neptunia Sisters vs Sisters does, admittedly, feel like a huge downgrade in gameplay from 4 Goddesses Online, the previous hack & slash combat game that I played in the series. It took me a rather long time to get used to how this game's mechanics work and to have a decent time with its combat system, though I will admit I still think 4GO was much, much better in terms of gameplay.
Sisters vs Sisters feels like it's trying to find a happy medium of the JRPG entries of old and the combat mechanics established by this series' spinoff titles, such as Neptunia U, MegaTag & 4GO, yet the attempt here feels rather undercooked. There are many nitpicks about the gameplay that I disliked, but let's break them down one-by-one.
The combat was, initially, horribly clunky for me and it took me a few in-game chapters to actually get used to how fighting in this game worked. You traverse the dungeons of the game much like you would in any of the old JRPG entries - you are placed into a level with an "Event" marker showing you where your destination is and there are enemies around that you can Symbol Attack or just run into regularly that you fight. That much hasn't changed, however the main difference is that battles are no longer turn-based, rather - both you and your enemies attack each other at the same time. But the way the game flows & explains its combat mechanics is...unorthodox.
As an example, I did not know until halfway through the game that you can actually put up a shield to block attacks, or that you can dash out of the way to dodge attacks, however - I never ended up using this feature. On top of its mechanics being rather clunky, I didn't find them useful since once you're in a combo and attacking your foe - you cannot break out of it to put up a shield or to quickly dash away. You can do this if you equip a specific disc that you can develop, sure, but without it - once you're attacking, you're attacking, and if your enemy isn't stunlocked from your hits - good luck dodging anything coming your way. The implementation of these two mechanics just felt half-baked and not very intuitive, serving more to break the flow of gameplay rather than to engage me further in the combat. My strategy instead was to make my characters as tanky as possible and brute-force my way through everything.
Another thing I didn't end up using whatsoever throughout the entire game was the EXE drive. Yeah, not even once. I didn't really understand how it's even meant to be used, or how you charge the EXE meter to let you use it. Do you need to be in HDD mode to perform an EXE move? I don't know, the game never tells you. They show you that they exist, and there is a tutorial card explaining the EXE drive, but I didn't get how it works and ended up completely skipping it. It's been a trend that ever since they released Re;Birth3, Compile Heart has been needlessly changing around the EXE drive system for whatever reason, reducing its use with each subsequent release. The system was decent enough the way it was in mk2, Victory, Re;Birth1 and Re;Birth2, but the implementation was perfected in VII. Yet after that point, they sought out to fix what wasn't even broken to begin with, and that trend continues here too, sadly.
Lastly for my endless rant - I don't like most of the dungeons in this game. What doesn't help is that there are tons of reused dungeons and aesthetics. You see it was soon as chapter 1 of the game - you get 2 identical forest dungeons with the exact same layout, just with different entry/exit positions, different "safe zones" locations and different enemies. Otherwise, they're the same dungeon. And this happens throughout the whole game. Do you like Virtua Forest? Good, here's 5 more Virtua Forests, with some of them being at night to spice things up. Admittedly the old games did it too, especially the likes of mk2 & Victory, but it's just a shame that this is still a recurring issue.
With that out of the way, the gameplay otherwise I felt was fine. Without the clunky dashing & blocking mechanics, and completely ignoring the EXE system like I did for my playthrough, I found Neptunia Sisters vs Sisters overall to be a very comfortable experience. The combat, while repetitive and formulaic once you get the hang of it, is fast, frantic and fun. Difficulty-wise I had absolutely 0 issue with the game in any capacity. Dare I say that I found this game way too easy? To the point that I didn't "game over" even once. The closest I got was almost dying to one boss in Chapter 8, since 2 of my 3 party members just blindly ran into the boss and died, and here I was chipping away at the boss with Rom, who the boss for some reason never managed to land a hit on, no matter what I did. But while the mechanics were difficult to grasp at first, once I got the hang of it - no battles posed any real threat, which I don't know if this means the game is way too easy, or if I'm just good at the game. Probably the former rather than the latter.
Speaking of balance, I find it absolutely hilarious how some characters have been jacked up like crazy in terms of damage from the previous games. My party throughout 80% of the game consisted of Nepgear, Uni & Rom, mainly because I found these 3 to synergize perfectly with each other, as they all have combos that can directly lead into a follow-up attack from the other. But there's also one more thing - Rom. Rom is absolutely busted in this game. I don't know what kind of edibles Blanc fed her between VII and this game, but Rom is straight up the strongest character in this game, period, no questions asked. She used to be a dedicated support in the old games, with a limited health pool and limited offensive capability - they defined this as her role rather consistently in the older games. While she retains a few supportive abilities in SvS and her low health pool, her damage scaling has been jacked up to unbelievable degrees. Rom straight up shreds pretty much every single enemy in the game, there's nothing she wasn't able to handle. Remember when I mentioned 2 of my 3 characters dying in a boss battle during chapter 8? The one character that wasn't dead was Rom. Because I was able to effectively stunlock the boss as Rom and cheese my way to victory with her ridiculous magic attacks. Honestly I found this funny. By the endgame Nepgear can kinda rival Rom in terms of raw power, but Rom has the advantage of being a ranged character, whereas Nepgear is a melee-based character, meaning that Rom has a lower chance of getting stunlocked by the enemy.
Stepping away from the combat side of things, other parts of the game I think were handled well. Disc development is back in much of the same way as the older games, acting as a "choose your own stat buffs" thing, with you needing to develop discs in order to get what you're looking for. In this game, they sort of combined "Plans" and the scouting system into one universal system where you send out a Scout to develop a disc with a specific genre and bonus addon. I think the system here works fine enough and I did end up using it...until I realized all of my characters have everything they need, so once I got all the necessary discs for everyone - I kinda forgot about the disc system by the endgame.
The "Chirper" system replaces the Basilicom Quests system from the old games. And by "replaces", I mean it basically works the exact same way, just meant to look like it's a social media feed instead. And it's...fine? I never understood the point of the "Chirper" system when it comes to looking at a Twitter-esque feed of everything. I never understood the point of it - I thought it would have an effect on the in-game world, but no. It means...nothing, really. Otherwise, yeah, it's just how you do side-quests and how you earn characters for Disc Development.
Also, one more thing - getting to explore Planeptune for once was actually super duper neat. It gave a proper sense of scale as to how large a nation is. A few things that could've made it better though would've been a faster means of traveling around without using a menu to warp everywhere (such as maybe a bike? a scooter? a sprint button?), and being able to explore the other nations as well, since Planeptune is the only explorable nation in this game. Maybe in a future installment of the series we'll get to see Lastation, Leanbox and Lowee expanded upon in this way too, I hope.
Graphics, Sound & Optimization:
Yeah, well...this one was rough in these departments. On the PS4, graphically the game looks...rather mediocre. Lighting is pretty basic and baked-in (aka not real time) and aesthetically the game can look pretty ugly at times. Nowhere near as bad as how ugly VIIR can get at certain points, but the game certainly doesn't look very pretty a lot of the time. However, Neptunia wasn't ever really known for being "graphically impressive", so it didn't really bother me much how the game looked...rather bad in some places. Noticeable, yes, but never distracting.
Sound-wise...this game's sound design is a bit of a mess. Now, where it counts - it's good. Landing attacks feels satisfying and punchy, just how you want them to. Navigating menus - perfectly fine. Character voice acting? I played on the Japanese dub, but yeah - it's pretty good (except for Neptune, annoying as always). However in other areas - not so much. Some characters are notably quieter than others when they talk, some sound effects are stupidly loud to the point it could hurt your ears (I'm looking at you Rom), and the sound itself, at least for me, had its moments where it would just be very choppy.
Music-wise, it's alright. There are plenty of songs reused from the older games, but the game does include its fair share of original tracks as well. The brand new original tracks are properly good - they are very pleasant to listen to and don't actually get ear-grating or boring after a while, which is decent. The reused songs, however...hit & miss as with every other game. The one song that gets reused from VII is "The Code ~Noisy and Calm~" by Kenji Kaneko, and it's still a fantastic piece of music, but others are...well, I didn't like them in their original games they're from and I still don't like them now.
Optimization on the PS4 wasn't that good. I've noticed plenty of times when the game started to lag and chug. Both during gameplay and outside of gameplay. I already mentioned the choppy audio at random bits part, but particularly when smoke appears during a cutscene - I can hear the Unity Engine just screaming & begging for its life for some reason. It's inconsistent and it's a shame that this too remains a problem that wasn't ever properly addressed from the mainline games. But not entirely unexpected for Neptunia, I suppose. The game ran perfectly fine and smoothly about 70% of the time though, I didn't experience any hard-crashes or save corruptions, or anything like the sort, so that's a bonus. Sure beats Re;Birth3 which would randomly softlock you at certain points on PC.
Verdict:
Well, they've done it. They finally released a Neptunia game I finally enjoyed playing, despite its flaws.
Sisters vs SIsters is far from perfect. I think I made that clear with how much I was able to complain about every aspect of the game, from story to gameplay to misc. things. And to be honest, to the average player - I do not recommend this game. Unless you are willing to deal with the negatives I presented about the game, I recommend skipping this game and look for something else. Hell, even from the Neptunia series I'd direct you to VII or something like 4GO if you don't like JRPGs.
But for Neptunia fans like me - this game is such a breath of fresh air. Such a good step in the right direction. And such a massive win for the whole fandom after 8 years of mediocrity and ambiguity for the future of the series.
Sisters vs Sisters feels like an apology for those 8 years of stagnant, useless releases. It feels like an apology for the disappointment of the 10th anniversary of the series. And for that - I am so happy this game came out.
If you're a Neptunia fan like me - burned by the series' mediocre cash-grabby run for the last 8 years - give Sisters vs Sisters a shot. It's worth it.