Quite possibility the most boring and tedious game I've ever played in my life

I want to love it but I honestly just can't.

Can't wait for Lords of the Fallen (2035) which also sucks

This game is just....bland. It's not offensively bad, but it's not good either. I'll probably forget everything about it within the next couple weeks except for the big plot twist and one particularly good quest.

Best way to sum it up is that Starfield is the world that Outer Worlds was parodying and warning against. And that is not a good thing.

I really just think this is a game of incredible highs and some incredible lows. Lack of RPG elements is what ultimately killed it for me, crafting is useless since everything is just a linear upgrade. You can barely customize Clive at all aside from switching out a couple moves here and there. The Eikon battles have been touted hugely and I kinda get why but ultimately even they feel repetitive despite being the games highlight overall.

I genuinely cannot bring myself to finish this game because I often just mind myself bored from walking down linear never-ending hallways which ocassionally branch off to like one potion or something. The game just loves to waste your time on nothing content. Story is overrated as hell, people just give it more respect than normal FF games because of the "realism" when its all the same Final Fantasy tropes at the end of the day.

Genuinely one of the worst SRPGs i've ever played. Could've genuinely been a Vita launch title (and that is NOT a compliment.)

If you have any lingering affection for Fairy Fencer and it's lovable cast like I do, please don't let them use that to sucker you out of money for one of the laziest and most boring sequels i've ever attempted to suffer through. You're not missing anything story-wise anyway since they just rebooted the timeline and characters AGAIN. So it's all effectively non-canon.

To quickly run through all the problems this game has though.

-Copy pasted enemies everywhere, you'll be seeing the same models over and over and OVER. especially Glace. Glace will be copy pasted into every single battle you do it feels like. And no, putting (shadow) next to the name and writing some one-off line about how she can make shadows of herself is not an excuse lol

-Basically 0 customization, most sub faries are useless, most gear you can buy in the shop will be worse than what party members started with several chapters ago.

-Difficulty curve is just a flat line. The game is never challenging, most enemies can barely scratch you while you just mow through them.

-The 3D models in battle, especially for the party members are just so ugly. I'm pretty sure the devs just aren't talented anything to pull this kinda thing off. All the way back in 2014 Hyperdevotion Noire looked BETTER on Vita, and thats because they didn't kid themselves by trying to do proper models, just some decently cute looking chibi ones instead.

-The singers aren't actually an interesting mechanic. As party members all they do is just sit there with a buffing aura around them when their songs are active. And when the songs aren't up, they're practically worthless (can't attack, very mediocre single-target buffs, no healing moves.)

World shaping, the most unique mechanic in the original game has been replaced by the most pathetically boring mini-game I've ever seen. Stabbing swords into squares on the world map and getting items you'll basically never need, wooo, so exciting!

Wo Long isn't bad, it's just incredibly disappointing. I'm not entirely sure why Team Ninja dropped the winning formula they had with Nioh 2 to make a pretty shallow combination of Sekiro and Nioh. But as a result it often struggles to match up to either game. This is what happens when you streamline mechanics so much they basically become non-existant.

Pros:
-Cool setting, especially if you're a fan of Dynasty Warriors or this period of history in general.
-Genuinely fun and engaging combat (for the most part)
-A handful of really awesome bosses, Lu Bu, Zhang Liao and the final boss come to mind as great examples i'd gladly fight over and over.

Cons:
-Tons of quality of life missing. (An example that annoyed me was if you want to do multiple side missions, you have to go back to the village or the current main battlefield inbetween. Why is this necessary?)
-No world map. Just a very empty bland and lifeless hub which characters who act/speak like robots.
-About 9 or so weapon types in theory. But in practice 3 of them are just slight variations on a sword. And a couple more are just slight variations on spears.
-Woefully lacking in gear and enemy variety. You'll be fighting the same enemies from the beginning all the way to the end. (Especially the tigers, fuck those things and their fast as hell combos)
-A ton of bosses just outright suck tbh. Xiahou Dun and Liu Bei being notable examples. They are emblematic of everything wrong with Team Ninja bosses. Flying all over the arena so fast they never sit still, throwing elemental damage all over the place which really adds nothing but frustration. Combos that feel just barely within the limit of human reaction times.

Not really worth rushing out to play until a year or so from now when they release a GOTY edition that will have the basegame and 3 entire DLC's worth of content plus probably hundreds of small QOL fixes that Nioh already had btw.

Pretty much the final nail in the coffin that Neptunia is never going to be good again. This game is EMBARRASSING.

I'm not even gonna bother writing a proper review and just list all the reasons why this game sucks

-Action RPG combat made by people who have never made an action game. Clunky combos where each move just happens one after the other, no real sense of combo or flow. Animations that can't be cancelled out of leading you to just getting hit (the dodge is pretty much worthless because of that) Genuinely the worst combat i've ever experienced in an action game.

- Series mainstays like IF and Compa have been downgraded from major playable characters to just extras who might as well not even be in the game

-New makers introduced (Higurashi and Touhou) that aren't even playable until NG+ (So whats even the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ point of them existing??)

-Entire dungeons copy pasted right next to each other. Most continents have reused dungeons (some dungeons even have maps copy pasted within them, sometimes the 2nd floor/part of a dungeon will have the SAME map as the first with some things moved around)

-Basically entire soundtrack copypasted from previous games.

With all that being said, why would anyone even want to play this?? It's got some love poured into it for Neptunia fans with tons of references and callbacks, but with gameplay this boring, slow and shallow; who cares anymore??

Neptunia is dead, and Compile Heart are dancing on the grave while we continue giving them money to produce absolute garbage. I'm done, Neptunia is dead to me now.

I don't even care if the game gets "better" later on. The first couple hours were an absolute slog to get through and I have no doubt the rest of the game will be the same.

This game is just...not good. I'm not sure exactly what I was expecting especially as a One Piece fan but I was incredibly disappointed.

To break the game into two halves, the OP stuff and the JRPG stuff it goes like this.

As a JRPG it woefully fails, the combat is just not engaging, I basically met nothing that could survive more than 2 turns at the very max, even bosses. It's not so much that the game is incredibly easy (which it is) but the fact it's dull. You spend most of your time slowly walking through empty fields and avoiding enemies because it's not worth the time investment and not fun enough to be worth doing. There IS arguably variety in character building but I just equipped accessories with attack on them only for the entire game and never even came close to a game over.

On the One Piece side of things we have frankly some embarrassing retellings. the supposed "what-if" scenarios mostly amount to "What if Alabasta but all the fun fights and memorable characters were gone.", "What if Water 7 but nothing mattered and most of CP9 were missing." So on and so forth. They have virtually nothing to offer to an existing fan but they aren't comprehensive or interesting enough for a non-fan to even get through. For some reason it seems like all their effort went into Dressrosa and Marineford exclusively because that's where most of the relevant characters and antagonists do all make appearances with some notable exceptions. On the other hand the original story is actually quite decent, Adio is okay and I really liked Lim. Lim is a charming addition and seeing her warm up to the Straw Hats and gradually get more interested in the plot as if she's becoming a One Piece fan herself was good. The original story is about on par with the original stories of most OP films, and I guess that's good enough.

Overall, it's just a bad game, for JRPG fans and One Piece fans.

Definitely overhated. Gets a ton of flack for things that don't even really matter or that other games have been doing for like a decade now. Loses most of it's points because of how shitty the grinding is and how the boss fights might be some of the worst in years.

This review contains spoilers

I genuinely don't think ANYONE was more excited for this game than me, it's been the wallpaper on my Chromebook for 4 entire years now as I wait for the release that I always hoped in my heart would come. So believe me when I say, this hurts me to say probably more than any game I've had a bad experience with. (And yes, I know the game was basically rebuilt from scratch halfway through and had like 0 budget)

This game just...isn't good. It's easy to point to the combat and say it's incredible vapid, boring and grindy, which are all true. But I actually think the visual novel portion is the bigger flaw of this game. It's incredibly weird to go through a choices matter VN where your choices don't matter at all. Raising affinity has no impact on the story since all the deaths in the first playthrough are scripted and forced to trigger. Your morality plays almost next to no role in the story, only determine maybe one death towards the end of the game (possibly 2) and that's about it.

Such beautiful presentation wasted on an incredibly empty and tedious experience that even after waiting 4 years for, I don't even really want to play again. I'm not gonna sit through unskippable dialogue, scenes and battles in a NG+ playthrough when 80% of it will play out the exact same as the playthrough I just did.

This literally breaks my heart to say, but I almost wish the game had just stayed in development hell and been cancelled after all.

It's insane to me that a game can have so many great QOL improvements and yet still be by far the worst entry in a franchise and it's not even close. The story is meh, you fight the same boss at the end of every single chapter and the final chapter just starts copy pasting it as a regular enemy, it's honestly a joke. Less classes than any other recent entry. Only about 4 new ones added. No weapon skills so about half of the skills have been completely gutted. This game just feels unfinished and rushed out the door, feels more like a spinoff than the follow-up to the excellent 5th entry in the franchise. Not a great game for veterans but newcomers might have some fun with it.

I wish I could say this game was better but it's basically a buggy low effort and unpolished game. Very edgy grimdark writing ruins pretty much most of the story and interactions. Gameplay is very shallow and far too easy. Faction relation system seems tacked on and sometimes the game will straight up force you to take actions that lose points with certain factions. Fast travelling in the final chapter permanently softlocks and ruins your save file on top of everything else. Just a really forgettable and skippable game overall.

It's a pretty terrible remake of a classic game that already hasn't aged well itself. The original has the charm of being a novelty combining sidescrolling with a town building sim. However by todays standards it's outdated, archaic and somehow the tower defense mechanic they added makes the game even worse than the original. It's pretty impressive when the worst part of a remake is the stuff you added...

An incredibly emotional yet overly ambitious low-budget game which tries to do way too much for it's own good. Probably some of the worst most repetitive action RPG gameplay you'll ever experience but with a great soundtrack, interesting (if sometimes slow and repetitive) tear-jerking story. An experience that's well worth it if you can slog through the repeated routes and make it to the true ending

Neptunia games have been on a sharp decline for years and years and this may be the final nail in the coffin. Boring forgettable story, barely functional gameplay. Littered with technical and performance issues. Two combat styles but you'll spend the whole game in one of them because the other is objectively worse in every way. Not a single reason to play this game, even fans should skip it.

Not just the worst Neptunia game I've played, but one of the worst games I've ever played, period.