Posted: 2025-03-30
I stopped following Neptunia after Super Neptunia RPG. I think a lot of people did. At the very least, that’s about when the Wikipedia page for Idea Factory stopped getting updated, and in my recollection that’s about where Neptunia fell off the radar for a few years. I’ve mostly been busy looking into MMOs and gacha games over the last seven years so I haven’t been as aware of the developments in console RPGs as I was in the 2010s. If I can actually finish one of these for once my next one’s probably going to be on Nippon Ichi’s storybook games, because I could really use a good excuse to get back to Liar Princess and Cruel King. They’re so charming and the coverage has been so thin and Nippon Ichi’s in some dire straits, and maybe I’ll also look at the Void Terrarium games to see what was even happening there.
Now, before I get to the point, I just want to talk briefly about who Idea Factory are, because the understanding there from what I’ve seen is pretty weak. Frankly, most of the discussion I see around Neptunia and Idea Factory have the sound of people regurgitating third-hand information. This will not be especially exhaustive or in-depth because I am much too mediocre to research properly. This will just be a cursory overview so that we understand where they came from.
I am not the person to give a history of Data East. They were an early arcade game developer whose heyday was before I was born, and who had already crashed and gone bankrupt by the time I was reading Magic Tree House. They released a lot of games between 1976 and 2003, though the only names that mean anything to me are Windjammers, Magical Drop, Burger Time, Jake Hunter, Bad Dudes, Shadowrun on the Super Nintendo, and the one that’s important for the story here: Joe and Mac, released in 1991. I haven’t played Joe & Mac so I can’t comment on how it is, though it did decently for itself and got a sequel. One of the planners on Joe & Mac was Shingo Kuwana, who went on to make a couple more games for Data East before striking out and going freelance, working as a contracted planner on Dragon Force on the Saturn before the company he was working for went bust. After that happened, he founded Idea Factory in 1994.
If you’ve never heard of the games I brought up there: that’s fine. In truth, I hadn’t really heard much of them either, outside of Game Center CX episodes or ROM listings, but it all paints a portrait of the sort of space the company occupied. Data East was a middle-of-the-road developer with a lot of output and some modest hits under their belt. This isn’t a story about towering, unparalleled artistic achievement. The story here is about what comes out of a small business that makes enough to keep the lights on. Idea Factory does not pay much. Checking their job postings it seems like they offer pretty low starting pay ranging from about $15000 a year to about $21000 a year, paid monthly, and most of the positions look to be contract work. As best I can tell those numbers work out to be somewhere around minimum wage, maybe a tiny bit higher. Like the companies that pay 12 bucks an hour in places where the minimum wage is still $7.50. I asked a friend in Japan about it and he said some of those numbers aren’t unheard of, but McDonald’s pays better, though it also seems pretty average for game development wages in Tokyo, if the GDC panel on the subject is anything to go by.
Now we have a sketch of Idea Factory as a company, and it looks to me like a pretty typical case of a medium-sized business still being run like a small business. They’ve been around for 30 years churning out a lot of the most notoriously mediocre RPGs in the business. I want to emphasize the notorious part there as rumor, since I haven’t actually sat down and played most of them myself, and I’m generally inclined to distrust a lot of the sorts of opinions that might be repeated by angry Youtubers. A lot of Idea Factory’s earlier games have genuinely interesting premises and great aesthetics and occasionally inspired moments, but they’re, reportedly, drowning in a sea of poor execution. I could imagine the poor execution tying back to some labor and scheduling problems I was seeing in Japanese employee reviews that I can’t get into if I ever want to finish this, but I do not have any hard confirmation so I would stress to take most of this paragraph as speculation and hearsay. I haven’t played enough of their early catalog recently enough to say how I feel about it.
Idea Factory spent about 16 years making various middling RPGs since the initial team was drawn largely from people who worked on Dragon Force, before branching out into otome and other games through their subsidiaries in 2006. I haven’t played most of their early PS1 and PS2 output so I can’t comment on how, say, their PS1 Pokemon knockoff, Monster Complete World, turned out. It’s probably some absolutely primo kusoge though. Along the way, in an attempt to bolster sales even a little bit, they turned to doing what a lot of smaller schlock publishers do in a lot of industries when they need to get people in the door: softcore CGs of their characters. Idea Factory stands out for doing this in the game industry in the mid-2000s and early 2010s, but it’s not like it’s unprecedented. B movies would do the same thing, as did pulp magazines. It’s skeezy but it’s a strategy a lot of smaller publishers will try to get their foot in the door, and to an extent it did work for them. I know I didn’t hear much about them until around when they started doing that, though it’s hard to say if that’s just because that’s when they started getting their games localized or not, or just because I wasn’t on gaming forums or reading EGM when I was 9 years old.
The other developer on Neptunia is Compile Heart, a subsidiary division of Idea Factory that was managed until 2012 by the creator of the Madou Monogatari series that spun off into the much more popular Puyo Puyo. This is incidentally why Compile Heart/Idea Factory are the publishers on the new Madou Monogatari -- They got the rights to it back when the creator of the series was running the company. There is at least some continuity there.
Neptunia is the product of these two groups of underpaid industry veterans complaining about their jobs and writing about the state of the industry with the thinnest veneer over it. The formula they’ve settled into is a kind of kabuki theater, loose and lighthearted with a cast of stock characters who aren’t really there to develop emotionally as much as they are to set the tone.
I won’t be covering the plots of the games in much detail. They largely follow the same beats as the average gacha game event and the point is more to just hang out with the cast than anything else. Additionally, even if I wanted to analyze the plots more, I am deeply stupid and don’t really get what the basic forms look like in text or how they get rendered out, and that would probably be an entire other research project if I were trying to do more than just regurgitate exactly what I’m seeing, and I’ve got enough on my plate as it is.
Now, since I last checked in on Neptunia, there have been about nine new games in the series. Two of them were remakes of Neptunia 1, one of them was a shmup DLC, one of them was a Space Harrier clone, two of them were collaboration titles, two of them were action RPGs somewhat in the vein of Tales, and the last was some kind of racing action game. I’ll be covering most of these, but I’ll be skipping over the Senran Kagura crossover because I just don’t want to play it. I just don’t think I’m going to have anything to say about it that’s any meaningfully different from the other crossover games, and 8 titles, most of which are 20-40 hour RPGs, is already a lot on my plate. I’ll also be skipping over Neptunia Shooter and Top Nep because I played them and I just don’t have anything to say beyond “yep, that’s a shmup” and “yep, that’s Space Harrier”, respectively. Of the two of them Neptunia Shooter has a bit more going on mechanically with different shot types you need to cycle between to hit different parts of the screen more easily.
Neptunia Re*Verse is a port of Neptunia Re;birth 1 that has some mechanical QOL and which adds in a fishing minigame. You can start the game with every character unlocked, though even if you do that their gear gets staggered out to encourage you to switch up the party.
I prefer to play Neptunia games with the developer gijinka characters instead of the main cast. In particular I like to have IF and MAGES. and the Falcoms in the party, though with how slim the SP pools were in this port the incentives pushed me towards having a party with more of the goddesses, since all their stats get doubled in HDD form and all their SP costs get cut in half. There’s some decent reasons to use the non-HDD characters – IF and Compa get status-affecting normals pretty early on and being able to inflict paralysis frees up a ton of turns, and the developer gijinkas have some pretty respectable numbers at various times, though they tend to fall off a bit.
The fishing minigame’s pretty good. It lets you get one tier better gear than you can get out of the shop and there’s some decent depth to it. I was having trouble catching fish at the third pond until I realized that my HP was only going down if I was pushing R2 past a threshold that caused the controller to rumble. Once I dialed in that nuance I had a better time of it. It was a nice break from the rest of the game.
Somewhere around the midgame I decided to use the plan system to adjust some of the core gameplay a bit. The random encounters started feeling like they were taking too long, so I turned down the enemy HP values, and then I broke the game open once I found the plan to uncap the damage from a max of 9999 per hit.
Reverse is alright enough, though some of the decisions it made with the narrative aren’t really coherent with the rest of the series. I’d probably need to go back to the original PS3 version of Neptunia to see what they were doing there at some point, but I don’t want to find a mini-USB cable to charge the DS3 right now.
Neptunia VVVtuber is a third-person shooter littered with advertisements for Vtubers. The zones are a series of combat rooms and if your mind ever starts to wander you can go and stare at one of the Vtubers yapping away in a box at the corner of the screen. The experience is hypnotic, like a TikTok video you can play, but without any of the satire that usually comes with those.
My friends who watch Vtubers tell me that Neptunia VVVTuber is mostly notable as one of the first instances of a game doing a collaboration with them. Before they were as ubiquitous as they are today, Vtuber promotions were mostly limited to stuff like Azur Lane and this.
I think what Idea Factory were doing was seeing how well-received their collaboration with Sega Hard Girls turned out and decided to repeat that a couple of times with this and the Senran Kagura crossover. I’d argue that the reason the Sega Hard Girls game was received as well as it was is because the Sega console gijinka are just the same thing as Neptunia, so they can slot into a Neptunia storyline seamlessly. Vtubers fit into a similar ecological niche as Neptunia, sure, but they aren’t really doing anything with the concept. This game is a thousand billboards telling you to subscribe to their Youtube channel and ring the bell for notifications, and in a few cases telling you to stop playing the game and go watch their videos. The experience reminds me a bit of one of those industrial-grade ad-serving machines you can find on the App Store that has the thinnest idea of gameplay functioning as spackle to fill in the gaps between ads. It’s kind of grotesque.
But speaking of grotesque advertisements: It’s time for our sponsor segment. Most of the people I used to follow and work with have either burned out, gotten stuck in the grind of adult life, or turned to streaming or podcasting because that provides a more stable revenue stream for way less work than scripting and editing a video. I’m terrible at performing live and I hate sifting through video footage, so this is my only real outlet right now. It’s so much easier to make things when you’re doing it with and for other people, but I fell out of contact with most of my old network when the Skype -> Discord switchover happened, and I floated around aimlessly for a few years there. I’ve been trying pretty hard to find a decent community to hang out in, and I’ve found a few places now but, man, so many places these days are oriented around franchise fandom or a cult of personality and that really rubs me the wrong way. It’s always been a little bit like this, I guess, but it felt like there was a bit more autonomy and drive to make things in the 2010s and earlier. I’m thinking of the way that most of the sorts of people who used to make gamer webcomics or fan animations or parodies have just been funneled into streaming and podcasts now. Oh right also there isn’t a sponsor, I just wanted to use that as a segue to ruminate on the state of online video and how it’s changed from the perspective of having been posting in various mediums online on various forums and platforms since at least like 2008, maybe earlier.
Sisters Vs. Sisters is a more standard Neptunia spinoff. The story reminds me of the structure I see in gacha game events, specifically Fate/Grand Order. But like, the more middling events like the Galatea event, not the stuff like the Odysseus event where there’s a real point being explored. It’s a lot of melodrama and evil clones of the new rate-up character and the like.
The main new side systems are a game development minigame and a Twitter knockoff for accepting quests. The combat’s continuing along the action-oriented trajectory of the last few, though this one’s more of a return to a dedicated action-RPG combat mode over the sorts of combat rooms of VVVtuber. Every action costs some amount of AP and you have a finite pool of AP that regenerates over the course of the fight. Once you deplete your pool of AP, you’re encouraged to switch to a different character to keep the combo going. It’s a bit weak to start off, though it fills out into something pretty decent as the range of effects you can get out of game discs and the combo maker increase.
It’s a pretty standard Neptunia title so the only other thing that stands out to me about this one in particular is that they went and modeled a pretty sizable chunk of downtown Planeptune, and it’s the only part of the game that I really want to harp on about, so I will.
Planeptune in Sisters Vs. Sisters comprises around 12 or so pretty large maps. This is surprising by the standards of Neptunia because that’s about as many maps as the typical game sees in total. It’s pretty richly detailed for a Neptunia game, though the areas are a bit barren and devoid of life. Wandering around them and soaking in the sights is pretty neat though, like wandering around the remains of a long-dormant MMO like FF11 or Second Life or something. There’s a lot of heart put into all of it, like seeing the banquet hall with all the chairs and tables put away at the back of Planeptower, or looking at all the little gaming setups and seeing that they took care to show where all the cables plug in, or wandering around downtown and seeing the monorails running overhead. It’s a lot more detail than I’ve come to expect out of Neptunia, and the most shocking part of it is that I haven’t seen them reuse the area in the other games yet. That’s pretty crazy. Idea Factory reuses area maps constantly, but somehow the map for one of the most major locations hasn’t come back? That’s wild to me.
This is especially shocking to me because this sort of city environment plays to Idea Factory’s strengths more than just about anything else I’ve seen them do. Idea Factory reuses locations like very few others, and the function that reuse creates is a familiarity with the locations you’re running through. When it comes to dungeons, the conventions of RPGs have conditioned players to expect novelty and the reuse in that context creates some frustration. However, just from a creative standpoint, a city serves the opposite function. Nobody complains about running through Kamurocho again, because a city is a place where familiarity creates more of a fondness for it. You’re heading to a lot of the same places in the city, but it also lets you really get to know the cast of characters that inhabit it. If I’m thinking about what I’d want to see out of a new Neptunia game with these city maps in mind, I think it would be neat to have a title more on the scope of Lost Judgement where you play as IF going around the city doing her work for the Guild, getting to learn about the inhabitants of the city and solving their problems. At least, I think that would really play to Idea Factory’s strengths while also situating them a little bit better creatively for the sort of asset reuse they’re known for, and I think paying homage to Sega in the Sega-themed city would go over pretty well with the playerbase. This is all wishcasting though. I like the supporting cast of developer gijinkas more than the main cast of console gijinkas and I want to see less of the goddesses and more of IF and Falcom, and I’m deluding myself into going “yo it’d be sick if they made Like A Neptunia: Lost Judgement in Planeptune” because I’m pretty sick of seeing the same incongruous generic fantasy plains and caves and exploring Planeptune was a huge breath of fresh air.
Game Maker R:Evolution is an iterative step over Sisters Vs. Sisters. The AP system is gone and it’s been replaced with a scaling damage bonus that increases the longer the combos go on, which makes fights a bit more frenetic. The party size has been increased from 3 to 4 and the party change buttons have been moved from the shoulder buttons to the D-pad. Super attacks have been moved from hitting L2 and R2 at the same time to pressing R2 and triangle. The overworld has added some extra movement options in the form of a run button and a motorcycle, I guess because the maps were starting to get a bit too big and traversing them was starting to take longer than they’d like. The Twitter menu has been removed and quests have been moved to NPCs you talk to on the map. The game making minigame has added notifications telling you when a disc has been finished, and the creators you use in it now have a level and stats associated with them that increase over time. The menu for selecting an item to go with the game has been removed, I assume because the way it worked wasn’t especially clear.
The focus on making games here is a bit more fertile creative ground for Idea Factory, as they’re more familiar with that than being console manufacturers. All the little changes that have added up over time make it a pretty smooth experience to engage with, outside of some of the maps feeling a bit spare, and the game-making minigame has a lot of thoughts on the game industry built into it. It’s saying a lot of things like: Your early games will be bad. No matter how skilled you are, you’re not making a good game by yourself. You need to work with others. A team will improve if they’re given time to iterate and it will turn out better if they’re making what they want to make. You need to trust in your artists and give them room to develop to their fullest potential.
These ideas stand in stark contrast to the current realities of the game industry, where the suits up top look at all of this and decide it’s not worth it because an increasing level of skill commands an increasing price tag, and they’d rather churn through low-cost talent and use all the company’s money to manipulate stock prices instead of keeping around the institutional knowledge of how to produce a game in a reasonable amount of time.
As I’m writing this, GDC 2025 is happening, and the CWA has announced an industry-wide, direct-join union. This isn’t the first time this has been tried, though this attempt is a bit more refined than last time. At GDC in 2018, this same thing was tried, and spearheaded by the same person, Emma Kinema. Game Workers Unite was, if I’m being blunt, a mess. There were no dues and the organization, while it served as a useful hub and launching-off point for connecting people to start unionizing efforts, was mostly just a Discord server. I know this because I was in it, and I attended an organizer training session before the place fell apart from infighting and operational security concerns. Afterwards, the lead organizer there got hired on by the CWA and I assume she’s been the one behind the slate of organizing victories in the game industry in the years since.
I think the direct-join model they’re trying here is a good idea. I’ve been helping organize my own workplace with AFSCME in the years since, and the process there has been slow, grinding, and extremely demoralizing. For instance, right when we were formally recognized and just about to start negotiating the state legislature passed a bill barring us, specifically, from collective bargaining. The process of negotiating through the channels allowed by the NLRB is a pain and it’s subject to the whims of whichever administration is in charge. Most of the time you’re fighting multiple fronts of hostile management and paperwork to try even getting to the starting line. The only people in your corner are your coworkers, and not even necessarily all of them, because a lot of people are extremely beaten down and skeptical of anyone offering any help. It’s brutal, it sucks, and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for thinking there has to be a better way than trying to deal with an NLRB election, because the state of things there is dire.
Hopefully the direct join model there can help serve as a bulwark against losing more institutional knowledge, and hopefully they’ve addressed the opsec problems that killed the first attempt.
Riders Vs. Dogoos takes the bike-riding minigame from Game Maker R:Evolution and expands it out into a more full game. It’s a racing combat game sort of in the vein of Twisted Metal. It’s a video game-ass video game and it’s not trying to be anything more than that. There’s five levels divided into three stages each. My playtime when I hit the credits was 1 hour, 59 minutes, and 32 seconds, going by my OBS recording. It’s alright enough for what it is. I don’t have a whole lot more to say about it, though it feels like the sorts of budget video games that were more common on the PS1 that have largely gone the way of the dodo. As with a lot of things around Neptunia, it feels like a relic of a bygone age – the way things used to be and could be again. Though, speaking of that, let’s talk about:
While I’ve been looking into all of the Neptunia games I missed I found one dead free-to-play mobile game that was seemingly only released on the Vita, and one phone app that’s still up called Neptunia & Friends. The English version is seemingly only on iOS and hasn’t been updated in so long that the news page just doesn’t load anymore, and one of the people in chat quipped that I’m probably the only person who’s opened it in years while I was liveposting about it. Somehow this isn’t a gacha game. It’s an alarm clock app primarily and you can pay a couple bucks here and there for more skins or characters.
I was having an issue where the Japanese version of the app would lock up or crash whenever I’d try to open the character select menu, but for some reason selecting a character voice line from the settings menu ran through some other part of the system, downloaded the voice lines, changed the character on the main menu, and it worked after that. There’s a blind card guessing game that you can play with the characters that increases their affection meter and once it gets high enough you can give them headpats, but otherwise it’s mainly just clicking on the character and having them talk while being animated with Live2D.
I think this style of app was a bit more common back in the early 2010s. Ciel Nosurge riffed on it as a concept back in 2012, and I remember downloading a Fate/Extra CCC tie-in alarm clock app back in high school that doesn’t work anymore, which would have probably been somewhere around 2013 or 2014. The Neptunia alarm clock here says it’s on its 7th anniversary, released in May of 2017. 2017 would have been a few years into gacha games really taking off so this feels like an anachronism loading it up now, where you just outright buy the characters and skins instead of gambling for them.
I can’t imagine what kind of person would buy all those skins and voice packs for the characters, but it’s nice that it’s there for them, whoever they are.
…
Now since I’m obviously the target audience here I have been making a sincere attempt to use this app as intended. Every morning at 7:30 IF starts yelling at me to wake up and then the phone prompts me to open the app to tell me to say good morning. Before work the app goes off to wish me a good day, and at night it goes off at 9 PM to remind me to get to sleep and then says good night. It’s a decent structure for helping to maintain a more consistent schedule and I can imagine it being helpful for people who live alone and have even less of a social life than I do. It’s not the same as having people to talk to, but it’s nice to hear someone else’s voice.
The only real issue in the app’s assumptions is that the sort of people who would need and benefit from it the most don’t understand why going to sleep and waking up at the same time every day would help, because it’s something that only really intuitively makes sense after you’ve been doing it for a while, and the sorts of managing practices you see in a lot of industries with inconsistent and slapdash scheduling exacerbate the issue by making regular sleep patterns impossible.
In the years since this app was released the mobile market has coalesced around gacha games encouraging people to spend hundreds of dollars gambling on rolling the character they want. It’s pretty obvious why – there’s 650 million dollars or so floating around the mobile gacha game market by one estimation every month and even a middling success will earn more in a month than most retail games make over their lifetime. But also, like, this state of affairs sucks. After spending the last few years and a lot of money playing gacha games, this alarm clock app feels quaint and charming by comparison. Wow, it only costs 40 bucks to get my favorite character and every single microtransaction, and I don’t have to feel the void that gacha creates as I spend another 70 dollars to get nothing. God, how much nicer this is. Like, yeah, sure, it’s probably emotionally manipulative in some way but man it’s so much less insidious than gacha games or those AI chatbots.
I don’t know that I have any singular takeaway after playing all of these. I think Neptunia’s improving as a series on the whole, though I can’t tell if that’s just because they’re getting a little bit better at making games while the rest of the industry’s cratering, but I am interested to see what direction Idea Factory wants to take with the next mainline installment, since it’s coming up on nearly a decade since VII and when that came out the Switch was still on the horizon.
Earlier I talked about Neptunia being a thin veneer the devs put over their complaints about the industry, and I think that’s kind of what I ended up doing here too. Neptunia is a series that’s defiant of industry trends and is useful as a point of contrast to look at how things have changed by looking at how they were. I’ll lay my cards on the table here and talk about the state of the console market as I’m seeing it right now.
Right now things are shaking up a ton. The industry’s in turmoil. The western side of the industry is cratering, with the biggest publishers all struggling. EA’s sports game sales are down since they lost the FIFA license. Ubisoft is on the verge of collapse. Xbox is looking like they’re going to exit the console market and make it just a layer over Windows. The handheld PC market is being explored, with Valve making huge strides by the standards of Linux, but modest strides by the standards of consoles, but the Steam Deck is in a pretty interesting position. Sony’s in a pretty good position with the PS5 staying on pace with PS4 sales, but that’s masking some precarity that they’re going to need to address with game releases that they just don’t have the infrastructure for right now since they were betting big on live service and that was reevaluated after Concord. Rumors say Sony’s working on the PS6 right now and I feel like that’s probably a bad move with half of their players still being on PS4 and there only really being one game on PS5 in Astro Bot. I can’t imagine consumer confidence will be that strong in the PS6 when there have been several generations from Sony right now where there wasn’t really any reason to get the console for the first few years, and the PS5 runs most things I’d want to play fine as it is. Nintendo’s in a really strong position right now, with the Switch 2 making a pretty compelling case for a machine that will run Switch games better, and also have new games. The digital lending scheme they’ve got going there seems pretty decent, and they seem to be positioning themselves well.
There’s a lot of good tension in the console space for a new mainline Neptunia to explore right now, and it should be interesting to see what they do in the next mainline entry, since from the reports they’ve been really taking their time with it.