Finally decided to attempt slogging through the backlog, and started by finishing the first Neptune game. My expectations were more or less zero since I heard it was a terrible game, but it really wasn’t that bad! I wouldn’t call it a good game but it was playable enough to finish it (probably due to the presence of Noire). I played the original PS3 version – some of my complaints may not exist anymore in the Vita remake. Got all of the trophies except for Nurse/Switch (too lazy to grind them) and completing the bestiary (missed some missable mobs and really don’t want to play through the game again to find them).

Good:

• Noire is an absolute goddess– er, I guess that’s true by default. Anyway she is unbelievably adorable! Every time she came on screen I was dying from the cuteness… that flurry of events after recruiting her was bad for my heart ;w;
• Tsunako’s art and character designs are so good (but I already knew that).
• I like the tachi-e animation style (also seen in games like Oreimo PSP, and taken to the next level in Witch’s Garden). The jiggle in the CGs was… amusing. w
• Scenarios are entertaining most of the time. Since I had Japanese voices on, I noticed the English translation actually made things even more risque at times. References seemed more obvious and there were a lot of jokes added to lines that were originally nothing special.
• Hnnngh I still can’t get over Noire.

Bad:

• Combat was… hit and miss. The combo system was okay but it takes a bit of time to understand what is going on and how you’re supposed to set up the combos. And I never used the switch function until near the end of the game if a goddess died and I needed to switch in someone who could rez. S-ranking some of the side dungeons was a matter of RNG. And accuracy was terrible sometimes…
• Speaking of combat, WHY!?!? do I have to spam L2 after every move!? I’m okay with manually skipping the transformation cutscene but having to mash L2 between every button to skip the (sometimes overly long) attack animations is just a pain. I heard the original JP release didn’t even have the skip option…..
• The goals in the game aren’t very interesting… search for a key fragment on each continent, search for a special weapon on each continent, …
• You can’t sell anything. I mean, I was never hurting for money, but swapping out gear is kind of annoying when there’s a hundred downgrades in the list.
• Not really a con, but what’s the point of only being able to travel to the “incoming” continent when you can just press a button to wait for the one you want to come closer? It’s instant anyway.
• It takes foreverrrrrr before you can recruit the other CPUs… Noire ;_; Don’t put them on the box cover if you’re going to make it so hard to recruit them!!!
• S-ranking the squid dungeon was near-impossible.

Character ranking:

Noire > [impassable wall] > IF > Gust = Histoire > 5pb. > Nisa > Vert > Neptune > Blanc > Compa