Hyper Dimension Neptunia

This is another one of those games I'm going to talk a little bit about despite the fact I haven't quite finished it yet.  I've been playing the fucking thing for almost a year and I've still not managed to polish it off and this is due to it being in Japanese so sometimes I'm just not in the mood to read that shit and just because it's generally not very fucking good.

So from what I understand, the game is set in a world that kind of representative of the games industry.  There are a number of islands with silly names like "Rui", "Leenbox" and "Raystation" and  each one of these has a goddess that presides over it (In Japanese referred to as "hards" as in hardware)  and one day they decide to gang up on one of their own and chuck her out of the goddess world or whatever.  On the way down, she loses all her memory, changes form into some small annoying girl and starts hearing voices from someone or something called Istoval (different in English?)  Istoval wants her to collect pieces of a key so she can free him/her/it from confinement otherwise something really terrible will happen to the world.  Thus begins the adventures of Neptune and her companions Compa and IF(?) on their journey for key that will save the world or some shit, I dunno.

The story surprisingly has a lot of charm to it and while it's not exactly the best written thing ever it's entertaining.  Where this game really falls down is in EVERY OTHER DEPARTMENT.

The combat is OK as there is a system in place where you can create your own combos with the skills that you acquire as you level up but after a while it all becomes very dull and unsatisfying and every encounter feels like a chore.  There is also this weird fucking thing where you can't use items by yourself, you have to put points into item skills which give them a percent chance to activate under certain conditions which can really fuck you over at some points.  Also combat difficulty will just be all over the damn place with some of the game being painfully easy and then suddenly a side quest or dungeon will be full of impossible shit that just doesn't want to die.

The game also features a ton of side quests which is cool and all but all the dungeons in this game are fucking IDENTICAL.  There are maybe 6 or 7 different types of dungeon and the only thing that changes is the layout.  You will always been running around the same looking cave, factory, castle, temple looking thing and the layouts are just standard crappy mazes with a couple of rooms with treasure in them if you're lucky.

Other problems include things like music that's so boring it'll put you to sleep, voice work that will cause heavy cringe if you're playing with anyone else in the room, slow animations in combat and many other things.  The only reason I'm still playing it is because if I don't finish it it'll forever remain unbeaten in my collection and I can't be having that.

Now, what I have heard is that the games that followed it, Mk2, V and a bunch of other stuff on PSP, Vita and other systems are way WAY better so once I finish this one I'm not going to give up on the series just yet, like I said there is a small amount of appeal to be had here.  I'll be interested to see how they stack up after I finish this shitty one in about 10 years.

Playing Games in Japanese

So recently I've been trying to wipe Hyper Dimension Neptunia off my backlog list and I thought I'd share what playing games in Japanese is like.

First of all some background to my ability.  I've been studying Japanese for a good while and I have a degree in the language.  After I graduated a 4 year course in the UK (which included 1 year in Japan) I came to Japan and started working and living with my wife where we speak Japanese pretty much constantly at home.  While I'm not studying the language formally anymore I'm surrounded by it on all sides so I get lots of chances to build my skills.  While my speaking and listening are pretty good, my ability to read Kanji could use some work and since I've not hand written anything in a long time my writing has probably gone to shit. 

The first game I ever attempted to play in Japanese was Catherine.

Catherine is a puzzle game and since the story is told mostly by dudes sat around a table in a bar then the vocabulary in the game isn't particularly difficult.  What made Catherine even easier is that it's almost all voice acted so any difficult words in the subtitles I could make up for my just listening closely to the actors.

Hyper Dimension Neptunia is a different beast though.  While the game is mostly voice acted, all the characters speak in that high pitched moe voice which makes it very easy to miss shit.  The game also uses a lot of vocabulary and ways of speaking that I'm just flat out not used to which makes the thing quite hard to understand at times.

Old games are even worse with insane kanji or fonts that are so hard to read it would make your head spin.  Visual novels are a real pain in the ass since I can't get through one of those without being firmly attached to my electronic dictionary.

That said, getting through a game entirely in Japanese is a rather satisfying experience and over time my reading of kanji and the like will get better and I imagine it'll be second nature at some point.  If you are studying Japanese and you want to play some Japanese games then make sure you pick your game carefully because its very easy to get lost in all the weird words and phrases that make up the dialogue.