Can anyone who has played these two games compare them for me? I expect to eventually get around to playing them (and I noticed the Hyperdimension Neptunia series is on sale in a bundle) and am wondering how these two games compare to each other.

In particular, I am interested in things like the amount of cutscenes and how complex the battle mechanics and growth systems are.

You are considering trying Hyperdimension Neptunia?
Do you want your head to explode? XD

I've played all the Hyperdimensional Neptunia games and... I still don't know what the story is...

Trails in the Sky is much easier to follow (well - ANYTHING is easier to follow).

Neptunia does have a trans... er... crossdress... er...
It's a robot(maybe?) and someone of one gender maybe uploaded their conciousness (maybe?) to it and lives their life as a different gender but... I'm not sure which gender is which (male to female I guess)...

It's all very confusing and I just played through it without really understanding what was happening.

....

Nevermind, maybe it's perfect for dtgreene.

Perfect in the sense of giving her more material to complain about gender roles. ;)

That reminds me I should sometime finish Xenogears. I think the story was about mechs and Gods and something.

I especially remember the dialogue having lots of ",,," which I presume meaning someone not saying anything. Maybe they were dumbfounded too and didn't understand what was happening around them.

Anyone care to share about the battle mechanics, or the gameplay/story ratios, of these two games? (I prefer my games to focus more on gameplay than story.)

Trails in the Sky is much more story driven, and is generally more serious than Neptunia. On the other hand, Neptunia is rather grindy. I don't like the battle systems of either game, but I think that Trails is the weaker of the two series in that regard.

The girl voices in Neptunia really put me off. I had to play the gsme muted for a while because of the high pitched squealing and giggles.

Try gamefaqs.com. I'll share my impression, I guess, but I've only played 1.1 Trails and 0.5 Neptunia.

Both are turn-based battles on a field, with initial placement of your party adjustable. Trails uses a grid, and Neptunia allows "free-form" movement. A turn consists of movement and action. Individuals get turns based on initiative (adjustable by how you start your encounter with out-of-battle enemy avatar) followed by delays depending on the speed of your action. Neptunia uses "combos" for the regular attack, rather than a single attack button. The available commands for combos are adjustable, and part of your character configuration. Both have SP attacks. As far as I know, only Trails has "interrupts" available if your character has enough SP. I haven't played Neptunia enough to notice, but I don't think it has any magic equivalent, whereas Trails does. On the other hand, Neptunia has many other complications to battle (partners, transformation, EXE meter, etc).

Neptunia is much more focused on item gathering. Prepare to battle the same monsters repeatedly to gather all of their goods for crafting, dungeon enabling, and completing the quest hub's quests. Trails' drops are mostly just money and elements, which can be gathered from anyone, and items that are available in shops. Neptunia monsters do at least regenerate after a short time (and both games regenerate monsters when leaving/re-entering an area, except for specials of course).

You asked about character development: as far as I know, there is none (other than XP/level) in either game (although Neptunia has partner affinity, I guess). Characters are adjusted using items, and other skills are fixed for each character. If you want to change your Trails character from a fighter to a mage, just change the "Orbment" configuration (i.e., what items are installed, and where), but some characters' stats are more suited to one role or another.

As to cut scenes, Neptunia seems to have much more of them, but you can skip them more easily (Trials only seems to allow acceleration of in-engine cut scenes).

Overall, Neptunia feels much more like a lazy console port. So much so that I can't play the game with the keyboard and mouse, but have to use a gamepad instead (which limits my playtime). I can control Trails easily with keyboard and mouse. Also, in Neptunia's dungeons, you can only save at save points, whereas you can save nearly everywhere in Trails (unless you have multiple battles connected by cut scenes, such as the final Trails in the Sky 1 battles). Trails also auto-saves into 10 round-robin slots on area transitions, etc. In fact, Trails doesn't really have dungeons in the same sense: the entire world is just interconnected maps, some of which have monsters. Neptunia's world is an overview map, where you click dungeons to enter (and cause them to appear in the first place either by story or specific item gathering).

Edit: Not that you asked, but I should also mention that Trails' characters are almost all at least 16, and many even in their 20s, so more towards Western age guidelines (although, as typical, one character had a "mysterious past" and "advanced training" presumably when he was 5). In contrast, Neptunia goes full Japanese with most characters being 8-12-year-old girls, with some of them having an "adult" transformation appearing to be in their 20s, but given that it's Japanese, probably more like 17.

Another thing I forgot to mention regarding Neptunia's grinding is that you can use crafting to not just open new dungeons, but also make minor adjustments to dungeons, further increasing the amount of repetition required to "complete" the game.

Hyper Dimension Neptunia is a more actual style of JRPG full of fan service and "breaking the four wall" is more about having fun with dialogs while playing. The combat and the mechanic is interesting.. have some points in common with Trails in the sky: both are turn based and have some range movement in combat (and you must consider the movement like classics game such Grandia 2) but I consider this games as JRPG but not tactical jrpg.

Trails in the sky goes in other way. You can smell Falcom style everywhere. The game feels very comfortable in the interfase, learning curve and story.

I can't put in words every detail because I have an awful english and I've played both games just a bit (don't have enough time) My personal favourite? Trials in the Sky. But hey! Hyperdimension is a also a great game. If you like HyperDimension looks but don't like things like the "breaking the fourht wall" or less fan service, perhaps you would be interesting in Fairy Fencer Advent Dark Force. Whislisted in gog Why this version instad just Fairy Fencer? because this one is the same game but a remastered with more content.

I haven't played Neptunia, but here's a basic rundown on Trails in the Sky:

- Cutscenes: Quite a few. The big draws of the Trails series are their world-building, lore, characters and story. The games love their exposition or just characters bantering with each other. They can be quite long. Fortunately you can save anywhere and the game auto-saves at each screen-transition. Gameplay's okay, but nothing earth-shattering.

- Battle mechanics: Turn-based grid. There's a turn bar similar to Final Fantasy 10 showing the turn order of all combattants and the turn bar also has turn bonusses like heal 10% of your HP on that turn or get a 50% boost to your attack power on that turn that both enemies and allies can take advantage of. You can prevent enemies from getting certain turn bonusses by doing stuff that affects their position in the order bar by doing stuff like killing another enemy whose turn comes earlier, cast a spell with a short casting time, use a special delay-inducing attack on an enemy or use up all your special points (which you get by taking and dealing damage during battle) to jump the queue with a super-attack. Position on the grid matters for both damaging your enemies and buffing/healing allies. You get very few full-screen options and if a monster/character is too far away to attack or use an item, they're forced to waste a turn to approach.

Your options during battle are attacking (if an enemy is in your attack range), charging a spell (which takes some time to go off and can be impeded by certain attacks), using one of your special skills (specific to individual characters), using an item or moving without doing anything else.

Special skills (called "crafts") are unique to each character, but spells (called "orbal arts") aren't. Each character has a device with several slots on them and you insert a FF7-like materia (called "quartz") into those slots in order to get spells. Spells aren't directly tied to quartz, but each quartz gives you certain elemental points (like 2 water points and 1 wind point or 3 water points), so if you want to use a spell that requires 5 water points and 1 wind points, you must equip both the aforementioned quartz in order to do so. It's a bit tricky to get the hang of at first, but it's easy once you get the general gist. Most characters have some limitations on which combinations of quartz they can equip, since some of their slots are restricted to a certain elements or the layout of their slots won't allow combinations of more than 2 or 3 quartz. Some characters are "balanced", but brawler characters generally can't use higher-level spells and caster-characters lack the stats or special skills to be a physical threat to enemies, so you get some customization but most characters still have certain roles in battle they're good at.

There are no random encounters. Enemies are visible on the field and you can get a preemtive strike if you engage them from behind. (the same is true for them) The run button works 100% of the time as long as it's not greyed out. Experience scales, so fighting a monster 2 levels above your own gives you lots of experience, but once you catch up, they barely give you anything. Because of this, grinding is generally not necessary. You can get a bit of money by selling the "crystals" monsters drop (which you also use to craft quartz or open new slots), but your main income is through sidequests. (which can time out if you move too far ahead in the story) Later games allow you to play around a lot with your team makeup and equipment options, but in the first game only the final dungeon allows you to pick your own team and new equipment is simply the old equipment with better stats.

Growth: You get new special skills by gaining levels. More advanced quartz (and thus more advanced spells) becomes available as you visit new towns. Pretty standard.

Like mentioned before, the Trails games' main draws of the Trails series are their world-building, lore, characters and story as well as the fact that all games are pretty heavily connected and stuff that gets introduced in one game may remain low-key until it suddenly becomes relevant 5 games later. :P The gameplay's okay, but if you hate the story and the characters, the gameplay's unlikely to keep you hooked.

How does the game handle cases where your characters' levels differ? Will the lower level character get more XP than the higher level one, or does the game do something stupid like use your average or highest character level for the scaling?

I haven't played either game series myself either, so thanks to all for the detailed comparison. I'll be giving Trails in the Sky a go.

Characters with lower levels simply gain more experience. (the tally screen at the end of battle has an experience tally for each individual character rather than a party total) If their level is much lower than the monster, they get a multiplier to their experience which causes them to catch up sooner. If their level is much higher than the monster, they only get a single exp point per monster.