Neptunia Virtual Stars

Upon launch, Neptunia Virtual Stars recieved a lot of negative attention from fans. While some of the critiques and complaints were absolutely valid, it having such a bad reception pushed me away from playing it for a good while assuming it was a miss in a franchise I loved. I am glad to say that Virtual Stars is anything but that and I wished I had tried it sooner. The game's plot revolves around saving a planet in the digital world from certain destruction; along the way rescuing Virtual YouTubers from the ever-popular Hololive's talent to a good number of channels I've never heard of as someone who's been interested in the scene for nearly four years. It's far from subtle and is nothing really that special, but it is fun and it acts as an excellent set up for where the game really shines: Combat. In Virtual Stars, the game fully expects you to make full use of your toolbox, swaping between third person shooter gameplay as the franchise's four main goddesses - each having a different gun with different best use cases - and a duo of new original characters that play like Tamsoft's hack n' slash entrees in the franchise. This makes combat frantic and often very tough, but once you learn the dance Virtual Stars wants to teach you, it shines in all the best ways. Couple this with composer Ian Shibasaki's excellent soundtrack (coming from someone who is typically very indifferent towards Neptunia BGM) and an absurdly wide net of vtuber representation and you have a recipe for a game I've grown to be very impressed with during my time with it. Only warnings are if you've never played a Neptunia game before the characters are VERY loud and there's an unfortunate lack of alternative voice lines from a majority of the cast so you'll hear a lot of the same over and over. But, if you can look past that or are like me and have come to embrace Neptunia's weird quirks, you'll find something to love here.

Unfortunately, there's not really any other way to describe this game, so let's get into it... => VTubers Starting with the elephant in the room, the game features 2 kinds of VTubers - fictional ones which are playable and part of the main cast, and real-life (Japanese only) VTubers, which appear in a rather minor supporting role. The fictional ones have VTubing as part of their lore, but this doesn't have any substantial impact for most of the story, since they just fight against the Antis like everyone else. While the real-life VTubers have 2-3 main roles: -Short videos during loading screens, where most of them will just introduce themselves and ask you to subscribe to their channel (in other words, you're watching an ad), though there are a few of them who did something more creative with their time. -VCubes, equipable items which increase your stats, can be obtained by defeating certain Antis, and the lore behind them is that they contain trapped VTubers, which will call out for your help in certain sections of a level, play a short thank you video upon being freed, and afterwards have short clips playing occasionally where they cheer you on in fights. (These latter clips repeat very frequently and soon become annoying.) -If you upgrade the communication building to level 2, you can watch some more short clips by accepting fetch quests for the VTubers. With that being the full extent of it, the developers somehow managed to make VTubers feel like an afterthought in a game that is about them... => Slop I'm approaching the character limit, so I have to keep this brief. Obvious bugs like Noire's hair glitching out, accessories glitching into people, or being floaty, etc were never fixed, audio volume is inconsistent, the story's pacing is all over the place, the antagonist does the most evil things, but is treated as if she was just misunderstood, and the game performing poorly are just some of the criticisms I have... (2 stars for being DRM-free.)

It has Minato Aqua 10/10