Neptunia Game Maker R: Evolution Switch Review

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There is a pretty funny story behind why I’m reviewing this game. About 12 months ago when I started this channel, I was shown how to apply for keys through certain outlets and I saw Neptunia Game Maker and put it on a wishlist. Admittedly, I thought it was like RPG Maker, and I would be able to create my own games in a cool 3D engine. Now that I have the game to review, I was certainly wrong in my own silly assumptions about what the game was, as it’s about making video games in a sense, just in an absolutely bonkers way. What’s It Like? Rev up the motorbike, prepare to fight the bugs, and staff your dev team as we review Neptunia Game Maker R: Evolution on Nintendo Switch.

Neptunia Game Maker R: Evolution tells a wild story about you, Neptunia, and a team of peppy staff that form a party to battle it out with other game makers for sales and shipping domination. It’s largely nonsense, and I did find myself skipping a lot of the dialogue later on in the game as I just wanted to get through it. There are some humourous moments with 4th wall breaking which is sometimes funny and sometimes lacks self-awareness by criticising the very tropes and themes that feature heavily in the game. There are also some thinly veiled pop culture references like hiring Parappa the Rappa and Mario clones to help you develop your game which were a good little nod to iconic characters, but outside of this, the main characters are whiny and insecure and really don’t have much going for them.

Gameplay can really be split into 2 separate sections, the dungeons, and development.

You navigate to dungeons to open up shipping areas for your game. These areas help enhance your sales of games you develop. These are navigated in a 3rd person view with monsters roaming about that you can try to avoid or fight. Combat is well implemented, allowing you to move around a circular area, chaining attacks and using special abilities to gain XP and levels. It’s satisfying to link combat chains by doing a certain amount of hits before switching to your next character, subsequently piling on damage. You can also unlock ultimate mode which makes your characters have stronger attacks and resilience, but it also puts your characters in their underwear for no real reason? I haven’t played any other Neptunia games so I’m not sure if this is a reference to something else in the series, but I already found the gratuitous over-sexualization of characters that look like they belong in high school off-putting. The overall difficulty of combat swings wildly too, with some random mobs being more difficult to defeat than the rival game makers bosses you sometimes have to face.

You can also unlock the ability to navigate these dungeon sections on your motorbike, but it is clumsy and awkward and sometimes it was just easier to navigate on foot. There are puzzles as well which turn out to mainly be frustrating and not very enjoyable. Early on in the game, there’s a task to push a minecart back and forward filling it with different gems to open different gates that was uninteresting and made even more frustrating by constantly running into enemies thus dragging you into another unwanted grind of a fight.

The second part of gameplay is the Plaza and Game Development which needed a bit more time to cook in my opinion. You develop games initially in the plaza, which you can decorate with items to boost game stats and populate with developers you unlock as you progress by answering their emails. The issue is that game dev is meant to be the integral mechanic, and the most interesting aspect of the game, but it is executed in a way that makes it rather boring, and you have to grind repetitive dungeons to unlock new things. Development of games suddenly relegates development to an uninteresting menu option where you select some devs, pick a genre and style, and then wait the allocated real time for the game to be released, which then gives you more CP to rinse and repeat. Once a game is complete you also get an equitable disc that can be used to buff your team, offering different effects depending on the game quality and makeup. Since you can spam game dev, it loses the excitement rather quickly, and I really wished that they delved a little deeper into this mode.

Graphically, the game looks good with high-resolution character art and bright and colourful locales. The environment design is interesting enough, and the variations keep it interesting. There are a few performance issues, mainly the pause both loading into a fight and also finishing a fight means the game actually halts to a loading screen to enter combat. There are some performance hitches on launch, but nothing too bad to take away from the game mainly some stutter during the combat phase as well, but I’m sure these can be patched and fixed in a post-launch patch.

For my vision-impaired Anime Game Developers, there are no accessibility options, so further research may be required to see if Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution is for you. The majority of the game features higher contrasting and bright colours, but combat can have a lot going on at times. The asking price is also fairly steep, sitting at $75 AUD for the standard edition, and $100 for the digital deluxe version. If you’re a collector of Neptunia games or a fan of the series, this might not be an issue, but newcomers might be best to wait for a sale.

All in all, Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution is an okay package with a ridiculous premise and decent gameplay. Its biggest mistake is making the core theme of the game the weakest point, sidelining game development as a mini-game of chance, and focusing on largely uninteresting dungeon crawling and a repetitive grind. The dialogue can be cringeworthy at times, but also has moments of good humour and self-awareness, as well as pop culture references and nods to other game series. Fans of the series will most likely have a good time with Neptunia Game Maker, but newcomers might want to look elsewhere for a game-developing RPG adventure.

So, What’s it Like? Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution is like the Tales Series, crossed with Game Dev Story.

In the interest of full disclosure, a review copy was provided by the publisher, but this does not affect my score.

 

 

 

 

Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution

58% Score

Review Breakdown

  • Graphics and Visuals 0%
  • Polish and Performance 0%
  • Gameplay 0%
  • Content and Features 0%
  • Value 0%

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