Neptunia: Sisters vs Sisters (Chōjigen Neptune Sisters vs Sisters) is the thirteenth spin-off game in the Neptunia franchise, developed by Idea Factory and Compile Heart, and releasing on April 22, 2022 in Japan for the Playstation 4 and Playstation 5 and on January 24, 2023 in the West for the aforementioned consoles, as well as Steam. A Nintendo Switch port was released in Japan on August 10, 2023 alongside Neptunia Game Maker R:Evolution and in the West on January 23, 2024. It will also be released on the Xbox Series and Xbox One on May 21, 2024.
Some time after the events of Megadimension Neptunia VII, the CPUs receive a request for help from the PC Continent. The Candidates stay behind and find a hidden research facility. They encounter a mysterious gray CPU sealed in a capsule, who upon waking up, suddenly chucks them into the capsule and puts them to sleep.
The Candidates wake up to find that two years have passed. Gameindustri is now ravaged by "Trendi Outbreaks" which periodically spawns hordes of monsters, and everyone now occupies themselves with an "rPhone", which is taking shares away from the CPUs and has cut off access to the Ultradimension. Furthermore, Planeptune has fallen, and Neptune never returned from the PC Continent...
Now it's up to Nepgear to save the world as "Planeptune's final CPU".
Tropes in Neptunia: Sisters vs Sisters:
- All Up to You: Right after salvaging Nepgear from her cold sleep, Histoire tells her to save the world as "Planeptune's final CPU".
- Art Evolution: Character portraits are much more animated, and their in-game models have been completely rebuilt.
- Bad Future: Grey Sister (Maho) and Ziri originally came from a timeline where Nepgear and Maho are the only remaining CPUs, struggling to keep people alive as Arfoire has grown too powerful to defeat. After getting fatally injured, Nepgear uses the last of her strength to have Ziri perform Time Travel with Maho to try and fix things.
- Bittersweet Ending: The Normal End. The friendly and nihilistic Mahos destroy themselves in a paradox in an attempt to drag Arfoire down with them. She escapes by travelling back two years, only to be ambushed and slain by the time-travelling Grey Sister who had been sent back 12,000 years and awoke from the sealing device in the prologue, who will become the friendly Amnesiac God Maho once the brain damage from her cold sleep sets in. After the paradox, Gameindustri has been saved from Arfoire... but Maho is dead, her continent is still gone, and the Trendi Phenomenon has still left massive casualties in its wake.
- Boss Rush: Neptune expects this to happen as the group enters Gamindustri Graveyard. They do end up fighting F2P, now piloted by a mechanical soldier instead of Anri.
- Breaking Old Trends:
- Unlike most other games in the series, especially mainline games, this game does not have a lot of playable characters, instead only having ten (the four main CPUs, the Candidates, Higurashi, and Shanghai Alice), with other returning previously playable characters such as Compa, IF, and Histoire being Demoted to Extra. Just as a comparison, Re;Birth3 has almost three times that many with 28 playable characters (29 if counting the Steam version exclusive Uzume).
- Generally, Spin-Off titles in the franchise are set in their own, self-contained universe with their story, characters, and world building; some don't even take place in Gamindustri at all. note Sisters, meanwhile, is a Gaiden Game that is connected to the main Hyperdimension that previous mainline titles (sans the first one) take place in, confirmed via an Opening Monologue addressing that Kurome was one of the three major threats they've fought.
- While Grey Sister AKA Maho isn't the first goddess to start off as an antagonist first before joining the main party mid-way through the game, she is the first to be affiliated with a nation outside of Planeptune (the PC Continent in her case), the first non-major goddess to not come from another dimension (Plutia and Peashy came from the Ultradimension, Uzume in the Zerodimension), the first non-major goddess to be a Goddess Candidate, and the first non-major goddess to not be based around a specific video game console or handheld (in her case, smartphones).
- Chaos Architecture: Virtua Forest looks nothing like it has in previous games, going from a forest fused with technology with a river running through it to a completely normal lakeside forest with a few small caves.
- Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: The only indications that this takes place after VII are the opening narration alluding to Kurome as one of the threats Gameindustri has overcome, and IF comparing the current Arfoire to the ones met in V and VII. Despite this, the NEXT Forms go completely unused, and none of the characters from VII show up in any real capacity aside from an extremely downsized Dark Purple as an Optional Boss and the Gold Third appearing in the Chipper events.
- Cold Sleep, Cold Future: Grey Sister throws the Candidates into the sealing device they found her in, putting them to sleep until Histoire finds them two years later, by which point the world has gone to hell from Arfoire's revival and the Trendi Phenomenon.
- Darker and Edgier:
- This is by far the darkest entry in the series, what with having one of the main characters openly seeking revenge for the death of her family, Arfoire once again being a legitimate threat and an absolute No-Nonsense Nemesis, a variation of the infamous Conquest Ending is confirmed to have happened in one of the many time loops Grey Sister has gone through, a functionally similar ending occurs in the Bad End, and even the True End is an extremely bittersweet one. None of the more whimsical locations have returned, even the likes of Virtua Forest have been made very normal looking, and finally there are no fanservice CGs this time around.
- It's also the darkest spin-off entry in the series, a sub-genre of games in the series that are generally light-hearted in nature. Between the moral ambiguity of some of it's lead characters, the increased amount of stakes and drama and the few-and-far between moments of comedy, Sisters is generally more in line with mk2 and VII in terms of it's plot and tone. To put it in perspective, the very first spin-off title is an idol simulator where you train each of the four goddesses into becoming high-rank Idol Singers, with the only stakes being that you have to gain their respect in 180 days while also having to beat the rival idol group in Shares.
- Ditching the Dub Names:
- "CPU" has been abandoned in favor of the original term "Goddess".
- The Candidates address their older sisters as "Sis", which roughly corresponds to "onee-chan" from the Japanese version, instead of addressing them by name like in previous dubs.
- Dub Name Change: The MagiPhone and Buzzoer Phenomenon are referred to as rPhone and Trendi Outbreaks respectively in the English version.
- Evil Weapon: Gehaburn makes a return from mk2's infamous Conquest Ending. After Nepgear used it in one Bad Future, Grey Sister smashed it to pieces, but kept a shard to power Ziri’s Time Travel. Arfoire later seeks it out to kill off the PC Continent’s CPU that she’s possessing so she can switch to Maho.
- Genre Shift: Compared to the previous main series titles, this game shifts much more into an Action RPG; the party leader is controlled in real-time alongside two AI-controlled allies.
- The Glomp: The final scene in the True End is Nepgear tearfully doing this to Maho after preventing the events that would lead to her Heroic Sacrifice.
- Gosh Dang It to Heck!: A post-release example for the English version. A recent patch for the game toned down several lines of dialogue
to remove even mild instances of profanity (the most egregious instance of this being renaming the item "Bastard Sword" to "Brute Sword") in order to "comply with the T ESRB rating.", despite games of a similar rating getting away with similar amounts of language, even in the same series. This is likely due to IFI somehow not properly disclosing the amount of profanity present in the game to the ESRB and thinking it would be easier and cheaper for them to tone down the dialogue post-release to match the rating descriptors (which, in fact, do not include "Language" among them unlike previous entries in the series) than it would've been to simply have the game recalled to have the rating descriptors revised to properly reflect the game's content. - Human Popsicle: A variation of the Trendi Phenomenon freezes a good chunk of Lowee’s citizens, and begins affecting other nations later on. And in the Normal End, they stay like this.
- Hikikomori: Most citizens have simply shut themselves in and occupied themselves with the rPhone after monsters from the Trendi Phenomenon made it dangerous to go outside.
- Never the Selves Shall Meet: Maho and Grey Sister, who is actually a younger version of this Maho, create a time-space rift when they both try to grab the IS Crystal. Another Maho, the one from the current timeline, ends up causing a few more time-space rifts coming into contact with the other two on separate occasions. Grey Sister theorizes that direct contact will cause the Mahos to either fuse together or destroy themselves. In the True End, Nepgear goes back in time with a second IS Crystal so she can mutually destroy the first before it's ever used to revive Arfoire, preventing all the consequent issues in the game from ever happening.
- Post-Final Boss: The conflict with Arfoire concludes in a reconstructed Gamindustri Graveyard, pitting the CPUs against a fake, then the current Maho serving as her host, and finally her forcibly transformed into Grey Sister from the unlimited IS Crystal. The story in the Normal and Bad End pretty much ends with the two Mahos creating a paradox to eradicate Arfoire. In the True End, Nepgear goes back to when she first created the IS Crystal, getting into one last skirmish with Maho when she assumes Nepgear is trying to stop her from saving her sister.
- Powered by a Forsaken Child:
- It's revealed that CPUs can give up their own Share Energy as a last resort to power their nation's failing infrastructure. Noire ends up collapsing from this, and Maho is strangely horrified when she hears about this. Her own older sister, the CPU of the PC Continent, did this to the point that she's just barely alive.
- Ziri’s Time Travel requires a CPU’s life worth of Share Energy. Grey Sister uses Gehaburn, which had already consumed several of their lives in a Bad Future.
- Promoted to Playable: In the Nintendo Switch port, you can recruit Maho, Anri, and Grey Sister — who were originally the only members in Nepgear's party to not be playable and whose combat models were only used in their boss fights — into battle and have them partake in the Heartfelt Photo Mode.
- Puppet King: The CPU of the PC Continent and her little sister Maho are restricted to their own Basilicom, forbidden from appearing in front of their own people because they might tarnish their intended image of a mere symbol of faith.
- Retcon: VII establishes that the PC Continent isn't ruled by any CPU, instead being monitored by the people who inhabit it, according to Vert. This game reveals that there is a CPU in the PC Continent, but is in a deep slumber after giving up her Share energy, thus rendering Vert's point mute.
- Revisiting the Roots: After previous spin-off games put the "parody/commentary on video game history" that made the series popular to begin with on the sideline in favor of their experimental ideas, Sisters goes back to the former formula with the inclusion of PC and mobile gaming and it's effects on the current-day industry — a topic that has largely been glossed over or ignored outright in prior games.
- Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: In the True End, despite Nepgear and Maho mutually destroying their IS Crystals in the past to prevent all the consequences of its use, they both still remember befriending each other in the new timeline.
- Set Right What Once Went Wrong: Grey Sister came from a Bad Future where Arfoire had become unstoppable and every other CPU died, repeatedly jumping into the past to find some way of stopping the Deity of Sin for good. In the True End, Ziri prepares the calculations for one last trip to when Maho first created the IS Crystal so Nepgear can mutually destroy it with a second, fixing all the issues left hanging in the Normal End.
- Small Role, Big Impact: A nondescript remnant of ASIC captured early on by IF tricked Maho into creating the Infinite Share (IS) Crystal to save her sister, allowing the Deity of Sin to revive once more. Said sister also counts for this, as she's not only Maho's original motivation, but the actual CPU of the PC Continent who winds up as Arfoire's vessel, but is never named nor shown as more than a silhouette during Grey Sister's exposition on her past.
- Tamer and Chaster: This is the first game in the series to not include any fanservice CGs, nor does it have any jokes about the characters bust size (namely Vert and Blanc), and though Higurashi and Grey Sister sport a Cleavage Window, it's never used for titillation.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Liking red texted Chirper posts causes friendly characters to respond in disbelief and gradually lowers your Shares. This is almost absolutely required to hit the 50/50 balance for the True End. If you end up waiting until the final chapter to make this adjustment, the only one of this type of post is a thinly veiled suicide note. What the hell indeed.
- Who Writes This Crap?!: In one scene, Neptune complains about the story taking itself too seriously, and she warns the writers that they're going to hear about this.
