The first game in the Neptunia series, JRPGs featuring moe anthropomorphisms of the 7th generation consoles in a humorous take on the Console Wars.
The game starts off with a battle between the three goddesses - Vert, Noire and Blanc (the personifications of the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii respectively) - versus a fourth goddess, Neptune, the personification of the Sega Neptune that never came to be
. Following her loss, Neptune loses her memory and gets turned into a preteen girl. An unknown force then sends her out on a mission to stop the piracy monsters running rampant in the gaming world. To do that, she needs to find a book that holds the secrets of the world... and hopefully win the three other goddesses to her side for good.
Along the way, she gets to meet up with other various people who are the personifications of Gust, Nippon Ichi, Idea Factory, and Compile Heart. 5pb and Red are also available as DLC characters.
Sadly, the game was plagued by issues caused by the complete lack of a budget. Luckily, however, it sold well anyway, and kicked off a series of games that still runs to this very day.
There is also a manga that details the events following the normal ending.
Apparently, the faults of the game were seen by the developers, as three years later, a remake by the name of Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1 was released for the PS Vita, and later for the PC.
The original was localized by NISAmerica.
Visit the Japanese and English websites.
Hyperdimension Neptunia provides examples of:
- Absurdly High Level Cap: There's a total of four DLC updates that bump up the level cap in 200 and 300 level increments. Eventually, the level cap can be upped to 999!
- All Periods Are PMS: IF assumes Arfoire is menstruating the first time they fight.
- Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: During the events on Leanbox where the trio agrees to help the Parliament with the Basilicom, IF specifically states the party will not get involved in missions attacking other humans.
- Bittersweet Ending: After defeating the villain and destroying every monster in the world, the true ending has the four goddesses agree that if left alone, they'll only be back to fighting one another. They ultimately decide to give up their power and immortality so a new goddess can be made to rule in their place. The epilogue even states that the world sees a new era of peace, while they grow old and eventually die.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: For a small fee of real money, one can pay to get a few stat augmentations for various characters. These are large enough to make the game a breeze.
- Broad Strokes: At least some of the later games treat the events of this game with this; the general chain of events happened, albeit with details changed, particularly the true ending.
- The Cameo: Macaroon from Trinity Universe surprisingly appears as a boss to a couple of the sidequests.
- Calling Your Attacks: Darjeeling Rotation! Turbulence Candy!
- Captain Obvious: Now and then Compa will exclaim "I don't like getting hurt!" upon damage. It's cute and funny the first time you hear it, but it may wear down on your nerves after awhile.
- Character Blog: All three goddesses have one. They're mostly just Seinfeldian Conversation material, such as Black Heart going slightly cat-crazy and White Heart discussing how tangerines "kick ass."
- Cool Ship: In the opening sequence, we see a jet plane while Neptune is being shown. Fans would assume that since this is an RPG, this is what people are gonna be using as a mode of transportation even though you don't travel on the world map. However, later on in the game, Neptune as Purple Heart gets a second Limit Break where SHE transforms into that jet and fires off a Wave-Motion Gun. Sadly, no ramming attack even though the design really screams that the ship rams at opponents.
- Cut and Paste Environments: One of the letdowns of the game is that you see backgrounds from Record of Agarest War, Trinity Universe, and Ar tonelico. You also see monsters that were seen in Cross Edge and Trinity Universe.
- Death as Comedy:Jade: I'm a member of the Guild. I live on Leanbox, but I don't follow Lady Green Heart...Neptune: ...Why're you telling me now? What's up with this?*grack*IF: ...And that's that. You finished him off.Neptune: Oops. Well, that was for ruining the moment.
- Developer's Foresight: If you change Neptune's clothing and use her hammer skill in the field you can see that they took the time to change the color of her panties to match her stockings.
- Disc-One Nuke: Neptune's Neptune Break can be obtained at level 20, making you bulldoze the game for a long time. It's also your main damage dealer as well. Oh and you can spam it too.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: You may have goddesses on your side, but several party members are just regular humans and only two of them have any serious combat experience. The game's backstory reveals that humans beating up an evil goddess has happened at least once before and the road to Celestia was sealed off to keep bad humans from attempting it.
- Don't Try This at Home: Said by Gust in a scene where she mixes a bunch of different energy drinks together.
- Duel Boss:
- Neptune vs. Arfoire later in the game.
- When you are trying to rally a goddess under your banner, they will join you only if you beat them in a one-on-one. Green Heart, despite her passiveness during her arc, packs a bloody punch and can kill you in two shots.
- Early-Installment Weirdness: The combat system was much different, enemy encounters occurred randomly, a very specific attack combo had to executed to activate Hard Drive Divinity, the other CPUs besides Neptune could be renamed upon joining the party (the names Noire, Vert, and Blanc being the default names that were later made canon) and many of the characters, especially the CPUs, were rather unlikeable, making Gamindustri look like a World of Jerkass.
- Emoticon: Histoire seems to really like using this in her fairy mode.
- Empty Levels: Anything past Lv. 99 can feel like this, as you get only one point per stat and no increases to HP or AP. The exception is Item Skill points, which increase by two and can help up the activation percentage rates.
- Engrish: The initial names and descriptions for the trophies in the Japanese version had started out in English, but none of them seemed to have been proofread, so you get garbage like "deAtearmine" coming up. For reference, here's the trophy list for the Japanese version, and the list for the English version. Now, the English version's trophy list has superseded the Japanese one; anyone playing either version will see the English version's proper trophy list rather than the Japanese version's garbage one.
- Forced Tutorial: The first dungeon.
- Genre Savvy: What does Neptune say when she discovers Jade dying?Neptune: Oh, yep. Death flag triggered. I kinda guessed he was one of those gonna-die-NPCs when I met him. Is he okay?
IF: H-How can you act like that when someone is dying? Compa, can't you do something?
Compa: I wish I could, but I can't do anything about a triggered flag or a bad ending route he chose... - The Glomp: Neptune does this to Noire in one scene. She does it to Compa many times, too.
- Gondor Calls for Aid: Neptune wants the other goddesses to help, but they don't want to. She has to beat the crap out of them again to make them help.
- The Gods Must Be Lazy: The goddesses spend more time on their personal affairs and bonking heads than actually running their lands. Vert averts this later in the game by going out and actively fighting monsters.
- Guide Dang It!: It's an Idea Factory game, which means an incredibly obscure undocumented system must be used to reach the Golden Ending. The game fails to mention that Neptune dying in battle has a hidden penalty and that if she dies too many times it can permanently lock you out of events — including the events to reach said ending!
- Have You Seen My God?: Planeptune's Basilicom is understandably upset when Purple Heart doesn't show up when the goddesses start arriving. And in the Golden Ending, all four goddesses call it quits and leave Histoire to create a new goddess to rule in their place.
- Hello, [Insert Name Here]: When you recruit the other CPUs, you are given the chance to name them. Their default names are set as "Noire", "Blanc", and "Vert", respectively, names that have been canonized by every other piece of media and merchandise in the franchise.
- Hopeless Boss Fight: The first boss fight with White Heart, Black Heart, and Green Heart cannot be beaten for two reasons. Not only are you fighting 3 very high level opponents who blast you each once with their best specials, but Purple Heart is controlled by the AI in this fight, guaranteeing you lose. In the remake the developers elected to skip this in favor of a cutscene showing Neptune holding her own for a while before getting overwhelmed.
- In-Series Nickname:
- Compa, and later Vert, call Neptune as Nep-Nep.
- Vert calls IF Iffy (Ai-chan in Japan), which flusters IF to no end.
- Thunder Tits for Green Heart, as coined by White Heart.
- Ganache is called "Solicitor" by IF or "Mr." Solicitor by Compa.
- Jerkass: Ganache, natch. He assigns the task of finding a rare ore to the party, and confines them in an abandoned building set to explode. Afterwards it turns out that was only a diversion, as stated by IF when Chian's factory is being sieged by Avenir robots.
- Limit Break: Neptune's "Neptune Break" as well as Nisa's "ZHP Legend!!"
- Marathon Level: The "99 Knights" quest, which tasks you to take down 99 Turquoise Cadets. Assuming you get very lucky and get 3 Cadets every encounter, that's still 33 battles. And given that the battles only start after a fixed amount of walking around the map, walking around can easily take up a significant amount of time alone.
- Mirror Match: Any of the CPUs versus their doppelgangers in the "Versus Fake * Heart" Quests.
- Mood Whiplash: Jade's final moments are filled with this.Neptune: What's up? A favor? Ask me anything! Oh, but no touching. Got it? No touching!Jade: Don't treat me like a pervert when I'm about to die.
- Never Trust a Trailer: The game advertises that you get to play as the goddesses in the middle part (or at the very least, early-middle part) of the game. You only get to play with them in the final dungeon and possibly post-game.
- Nobody Poops: Averted in one instance where Nep-Nep nearly misses out on Nisa's introduction by spending most of the preceding battle on the toilet.
- Averted in another cutscene where Neppermint admits to being a little too excited about a visitor.
- Face a foe who's a significant number of levels above you and Nep-Nep might start the fight by requesting a change of underwear.
- One-Time Dungeon: All dungeons that are part of a story scenario.
- Palette Swap: Many of the monsters use this.
- Permanently Missable Content: Anything that only appears in a story dungeon, including monsters for your Monster Compendium. Thank the goddesses for New Game Plus.
- Plot Tunnel: On the few occasions where Neptune leaves the party, you cannot leave that landmass until she returns. Justified in that she's the one who registered for permission to travel to begin with, and you'd need her for cutscenes in other landmasses anyway.
- Rank Inflation: Most of the dungeons have timers on them. The faster you finish the dungeon via beating the boss, finding the secret treasure, or getting lucky with item drops from random encounters, the better your rank will be. This always often leads to a Bragging Rights Reward when you beat the record times of other players.
- Restored My Faith in Humanity: Nisa spends one series of events chasing down a pair of bandit brothers. When she saves them from a monster, the duo realize it's not such a Crapsack World out there, pull a Heel–Face Turn and decide to help others for a change.
- Scripted Battle: The first "battle" in the game is Purple Heart vs. the three other CPUs.
- Shout-Out: This series has its own page.
- Skinship Grope: It's implied Neptune does this to Compa during one of the events when she invites her for some Bathtub Bonding, but nothing is shown except IF describing it.
- Strongly Worded Letter: Played straight when Neptune and her friends send a series of threatening letters as a tactic to lure out Arfoire, Overlord Momus' messenger and separate her from a group of extremists she's leading. The plan actually works, but for a reason none of them expected - because Neptune misspelled Momus' name as "Overlord Moron".
- Sword and Gun: All the CPUs carry a pistol of some sort alongside their melee weapons, and is their only means of performing elemental attacks via the use of 1 of 3 elemental munitions.
- The Syndicate: The Guild. Divided into two groups; Moderatists, who are criminal only in that they don't worship the goddess of their world but are otherwise completely normal people, and Extremists who are willing to resort to violence over pretty much anything.
- Thanking the Viewer: In both endings, the main trio directly thanks you for getting them through the game.
- Theme-and-Variations Soundtrack: Each landmass's theme is remixed for the landmass's dungeons as well as the battles within said dungeons. The title theme has also been remixed and used in various cutscenes.
- Transformation Sequence: The four goddesses every time you have them transform in the middle of a battle. Fortunately, you can always skip it by pressing L2.
- Transforming Mecha: Later in the game, Neptune transforms into the jet plane seen in the opening credits as one of her Limit Breaks.
- True Final Boss: Arfoire becomes significantly stronger if you face her after recruiting all the goddesses.
