Game Over: Neptunia Virtual Stars

I’ve never been so glad to have finished a game, as I feel having rolled credits on Neptunia Virtual Stars. I suppose there’s a reason it scored poorly…

The game sees the goddesses Neptune, Noire, Blanc, and Vert being transported to Planet Emote, in another dimension where content reigns supreme. They are asked to team up with VTubers Me and You (collectively known as MEWTRAL) to stop the evil Antis and save social media!

It’s a third-person action RPG with two styles of combat. The goddesses use guns, each one with a different style of weapon from sniper rifle to submachine gun. The VTubers use more hack ‘n’ slash weapons, though that covers a wide array of things when you go looking into the 20+ character DLCs.

The enemies are both the best and worst part of Virtual Stars. The Neptunia series uses and reuses the same enemies in every single game, except for this one (barring the iconic Dogoos) which replaces the videogame-inspired foes with memes. But there are some which make irritating noises constantly, and those are usually the hardest to kill. No, I don’t mean the toughest; they’re smaller so long-range attacks aren’t as accurate, while their attacks are more difficult to dodge.

Speaking of irritation, scattered around every area are screens which show trapped VTubers. You can stop to look at them, and they will usually reward you with an item. However, they will speak even when you’re just racing past, and if you happen to enter a cutscene while one is talking, it will continue, but now without subtitles. There was one who talked about something rolling and said that word about 30 times in a row, which might be as hilarious as they appear to think it is, if you’re not trying to watch a cutscene while they’re saying it.

One of the main plots is that you’re trying to free the captured VTubers, which turns them into V-Cubes. There are over 50 V-Cubes, which can only be obtained from specific enemies, and you need more than a certain number of them to progress the story past a point. I would have quit the game if not for a real-life YouTuber who made a video about Cube Grinding, because I’ve been playing this on and off for four years, there was no way that I’d have remembered how to obtain V-Cubes other than as a random drop.

In the end, Virtual Stars took me 17 and a half hours to complete. It’s such a grind to level up, and while you’re supposed to swap between the goddesses and VTubers to tackle different enemies, I never found a use for the latter. Strafing and shooting will eventually defeat every enemy; why would I opt for hacking away at an enemy that keeps firing a bazooka in my face?

There are super attacks when you fill the gauge, that’s really only of any use against normal enemies. It sees the goddesses transform into their CPU forms, and you just mash the three buttons (for four goddesses?) until the enemies die. I never used it with the VTubers so don’t know what happens if you do; I assume something similar. However, the super attack in boss battles doesn’t transform the goddesses, no, they just all attack at once and do slightly above normal amounts of damage.

You also obtain items which summon VTubers to do something. It can heal you, damage the enemy, make you invincible or have infinite MP for a time, etc… There are tons of them, but absolutely no way of knowing which VTuber will do what, unless you manually keep track of it.

There is also an optional mini-game called BeatTik, which is supposedly a rhythm game. You just press one button over and over again, hoping that you timed it right, while a song plays. You can record these performances to re-watch at your leisure... for some reason. The only reason to play BeatTik is for the achievements and because you’re sometimes given gifts by viewers, I hadn’t actually touched the mode until the final quarter of the game, even though it was available much earlier.

I’ve played almost all of the games, but I had to force myself to play this. The story is fine, and while the writing is as enjoyable as always with funny interactions between the goddesses, I didn’t enjoy most of my time with it. I enjoyed Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heartwhich is a tactical RPG, a genre that I do not like. At least that one felt like it was a Neptunia game, and not something they decided to glue Neptune and company into late in development.

Speaking as a fan of the franchise, Neptunia Virtual Stars is really only for fans of the VTubers who appear. There are 42 pieces of DLC available, spread amongst costumes and DLC characters, so if you’re really into Japanese virtual content creators, there’s likely someone here you’d like to check out. I’m just glad that I’m finished and can move on to the next game.