2025-07-15
Megadimension Neptunia VII review
Not another Victory.
When I started playing through Megadimension Neptunia VII, I thought that this was Neptunia finally reaching a level of effort and polish never before seen in the franchise. Character sprites were improved, there were levels that weren’t just recycled from the previous games, enemies were voiced and so on. Unfortunately, despite the seeming jump in quality, I started noticing a problem: the game wasn’t fun to play.
You know how in RPG games the game decides to take away your party members for plot reasons, leaving your party understaffed and making those characters underleveled when they rejoin your party? And how that is annoying as all hell? Well, Compile Heart decided that this annoying mechanic was worth making into an entire game. It took like 17 hours for my party to be at full fighting capacity, and they don’t even stick around after that. You really don’t want to get attached to any single party member because the chances are that they’re going to be missing for most of the story.
It also feels like they’ve completely forgotten about basic game design that previous titles in the Neptunia franchise understood. Things like having save points before a boss fight. Oh, you thought to challenge the boss after only 25 minutes of grinding? Time to lose your 25 minutes worth of progression. There’s also a point where you can get your character’s health too low for a boss fight, with no possibility to heal. Hopefully you didn’t overwrite your previous save, since you’ll have to reload at that point too. Compile Heart really has no considerations towards the value of your time in this game.
The overworld traversal is also a great example of just wasting your time. Movement between dungeons, cities and other points of interest involve moving on a gameboard-like map where every single space has a chance to randomly pull you into combat. Trying to get from one overworld plot event to another might require you to fight three random groups of enemies. And as you progress through the game, your party level far outstrips the enemies, requiring you to just waste time beating small fries for no good reason. Even if you don’t have to fight a single mob, the gameboard-like movement is just slow to watch. There is a fast-forward button but what the game needs is a skip button. And to further add insult to injury, you’re also expected to spend credits to build the paths to dungeons and other cities. Could I just pay a bit extra and build a path that isn’t infested with low-level mobs?
I think Compile Heart even realises how awful many of these things are since they allow disabling a lot of them once you reach New Game+. Personally, I’d design my game in such a way that you don’t want to disable a dozen "features" after a single playthrough.
VII might also have the worst achievements in franchise history. Card Master is an awful waste of time that will give you carpal tunnel, headache and a disdain for life itself. Treasure Hunter, while not reaching similar peak awfulness, is also a giant time sink without really any fun aspects to it. If you decide to challenge these, hopefully you have a second monitor to watch YouTube videos on as you painfully grind through them all. Completionists beware.
While there’s some good and interesting changes to the combat, like having a combo system that discourages just spamming the same attack again and again, combat feels worse than for example in the Rebirth titles. The timing for symbol attacks, trying to align your attacks to hit multiple enemies, having to chase after enemies dispersing all over the place. Everything just feels that much worse. Then there’s things like boss fights where the boss is immune to damage until you hit him enough times to break his damage immunity item – a process that takes way too long to be remotely fun. It’s not even a hard fight since the boss only does chip damage, meaning that at no point are you actually in danger.
As for the story, it’s just okay. Definitely not as good as Victory’s but it’s a serviceable Neptunia story, at least towards the end. I’m not really a fan of how the game is split into three different parts. It doesn’t really even add much to the story since it’s all continuous anyway. The conditions to reach the true ending are also annoying to fulfil and probably better saved for the New Game+ when the game stops doing its most annoying features.
The technical side of VII is nothing short of a train wreck. The sound settings are awful, you can’t have controller and keyboard input working at the same time, the game is capped at 60 FPS and 1920×1080 resolution and the battle load times are bad considering I have an SSD and the game isn’t that graphically intensive. I also had issues with the controller button mapping with my DualSense but maybe that was the fault of Steam Input. Hasn’t happened in other games though. And to put a cherry on top of everything, using my KVM switch (which unplugs the keyboard and mouse to use them with another PC) makes the game crash.
Thankfully there is a mod that allows you to run the game at such arbitrary resolutions as 2560×1440, and mercifully above 60 FPS. While my PC is quite powerful, I saw no negative effects from running this mod and would recommend it to anyone playing on hardware more advanced than a Steam Deck. And since the mod works so wonderfully, it really makes me wonder why Compile Heart couldn’t implement these features themselves. Although I think I know the answer: Compile Heart is a two-bit kusoge developer that wants PC gamer money for the least possible effort.
What a shame that the sequel to the best Neptunia game, Victory, and the only mainline Neptunia game we’ve gotten in the last decade, is such an awful game. And this is by Neptunia standards, which have historically not been that high anyway. I don't know why they decided that VII stands for "Victory II" with a quality gap like this. Usually with these things you can at least recommend the game to fans of the series, but I don’t think you can really even recommend it to them. The game just isn’t fun to play and the story’s not interesting enough to justify it. If you insist on having to experience the game for yourself, at least do yourself a favour and grab the game on a sale. Maybe that way you’ll feel less bad about playing it.