Choujigen Game Neptune The Animation

After years of fruitless war between the four realms of Gamindustri (Planeptune, Lastation, Lowee and Leanbox) over Share energy, the source of their strength based on how much their people have faith in their goddesses, the four CPUs that rule over them have finally signed a friendship treaty. The treaty bans any attempt at claiming Share energy through military force, in hopes of bringing peace and prosperity to their worlds. Yet, a month after the treaty, Neptune, the CPU Goddess of Planeptune, spends her time goofing off and playing games rather than doing her job, leaving her land's Shares plummeting.

Choujigen Game Neptune The Animation follows Neptune and her friends' attempts at raising Shares, while dealing with an external threat that could spell the end of both the Goddesses and Gamindustri itself...

Neptune Main

Tanaka, Rie Japanese

Noire Main

Imai, Asami Japanese

Blanc Main

Asumi, Kana Japanese

Vert Main

Satou, Rina Japanese

Pururut Supporting

Hanazawa, Kana Japanese

Nepgear Supporting

Horie, Yui Japanese

Uni Supporting

Kitamura, Eri Japanese

IF Supporting

Ueda, Kana Japanese

Compa Supporting

Sakai, Kanako Japanese

Rom Supporting

Ogura, Yui Japanese

Cook, Justin Producer

Tanaka, Shinsaku Producer

Miyajima, Kouhei Producer

Yoshitake, Shintarou Producer

Reviews

Jun 2, 2015

Kasumi_Mamiko

Recommended

I am a HUGE overzealous fan of the Hyperdimension Neptunia games, and have even garnered myself a bit of a reptutation on DeviantART by creating "Custom Canvas Textures for use within the second and third games in the console series. (mk-2 & Victory)

I LOVE this anime, i think they did a great job mixing the plots of the games together to create a comprehensive story line for an anime that i believe is probably only ever going to have this one season. The art is beautiful and vibrant, and the character designs are as close to the game as possible without Tsunako doing the ... animation alone. The sound quality is great and it's very funny and entertaining.

As for the drawbacks, there are only 2 that really stand out to me. This is NOT a series you can just pick up just because....because the characters personalities and the humor don't make a lot of sense without playing the games.

The second Drawback is the English dub....at least for me, as a fan of the games. Because, They replaced 4 different characters actresses, and they chose to do an English dub for a song, which is one of my pet peeves when it comes to anime. the fact that that song also happens to be the song for the opening sequence of one of the games, makes it even more annoying to me.

And lastly, the first thing i thought when i watched the English dub of the anime was "wow, i just noticed that the more Purple Heart talks, the less cool she sounds." Because in the games, she doesn't talk all that much, and when she does, she's usually doling out either a good passive-aggressive insult, or passing on a few words of friendship and wisdom. So hearing her talk so much in the anime took some getting used to, but i understand why she talks more, it would be boring if The main character who by all standards, in her human form, is a regular chatty Cathy, were to stop talking when she transformed into her Goddess form.

Altogether, i give it a 9/10 for fans of the game, and a 8 out of 10 for others.

Reviewer’s Rating: 9

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Oct 20, 2013

GonzyChan

Mixed Feelings

It’s one thing when you are a fan of a video game that all of a sudden has been confirmed to have an anime adaptation and feel nothing but contempt and frustration in the reasoning why they would bother. However, when your game is already one that acts like an anime, you think to yourself that this will already be a slam dunk based on how it was born to become an anime show in the first place. So likewise, I was in the same mindset going into this. What I got in the end for Neptunia the Animation was nothing but partial disappointment that ... can only be described as a wasted potential for a series that had a lot going for it in terms of comedy and parody.

Neptunia plays off as your typical moe show with cute girls in suggestive positions. I can understand people passing it off as another generic moe show—not knowing that the Neptunia games themselves are parodying those types of moe tropes. The parody included in this adaptation is just as charming and lovable in portraying the girls as consoles of past generations. However, given how the Neptunia games have endless hours of non-stop comedy in their fun dialogue, understandably, the show is limited due to its 13-episode running time. This points to the show’s main problem: It doesn’t go as far as the games in terms of quality comedy.

It is nice to see the girls in full animation instead of just slightly animated portraits on-screen in your typical Visual Novel fashion. Still, sadly it doesn’t come off as underwhelming and average at best. When you compare the art to the show and the original game’s art done masterfully and beautifully by Tsunako, it’s not what you would call a great transition. The show's art can almost compare to Saturday morning cartoons where the colors look too bright and hardly have any excellent lush drawings like in the games. Calling the art to be “horrendous” or “terrible,” on the other hand, would be a stretch because, for what they’re worth, the fighting scenes are done relatively decent, and there are some moments where the art indeed does add to the humor.

As any fan of Neptunia can all agree, every single character is funny and charming to look at and listen to their witty dialogues with one another. Neptune is an absolute joy to listen to, as always, with her hilarious and sarcastic personality that initially annoyed me. Eventually, I grew fond of it after a while. The tsundere princess herself, Noire, has some great laughs in her hilarious attempts to hide her side. One scene involving her stalker and showing many pictures of her alone was enough to send me howling on the ground and laughing. Our other main CPU, Goddesses Blanc and Vert are great together in how they always argue over such silly things. The side characters, which are the CPU candidates, have equal enough screen time to bolster some memorable scenes together, though really, could they have at least given us more of Rom and Ram? And finally, Plutia and her rather exciting alter-ego once again never fails to be as sadistically hilarious as usual with her perverted antics. You can’t go wrong with Hanazawa mixed with sadomasochism.

This department has one crucial problem with the gushing about the characters themselves. There are hardly any other characters in the Neptunia universe that either don’t appear or aren’t shown very often. One of the best characters in the 2nd Neptunia game was NISA. Unfortunately, she is nowhere to be found, not even in a cameo appearance which is quite unfair considering that at least 5pb is shown only twice. The only reason for this is that they wanted to hold them off for a sequel because they haven’t appeared chronologically where the show is adapting, right?

The plot for the show follows nearly every single game that has come out. The writers honestly try to put different spins on it by placing characters in various roles that they were initially suited for another one, i.e., Neptune doesn’t get transported to an extra dimension like in Victory. Yet, she still falls on Noire amusingly enough, and this time Plutia gets transported into their world instead of the other way around. At this point, it’s clear that the writers didn’t want to put their time and effort into fitting all 300+ hours combined of all three of the games and wanted to make one show that isn’t trying to be a point to point adaptation but instead represents the entire series as a whole in spirit. So with this in mind, many plot points in previous games aren’t shown or bothered with, which isn’t bothersome considering how some aren’t needed. Unfortunately, there are some points in the show where the rushed plots could’ve worked for the better.

What makes the Neptunia series addictive and fun to play and experience? If you ask any fans, including myself, it sure isn’t for drama or profound moments in any of the games. Not only did they have the will and power to make a show into anything they wanted based on the core concept, but they decided to put in their effort in putting two or three episodes devoted to those two aspects I mentioned before. First off, the drama wasn’t very well-handled anyway in the previous games before Victory, which is by far the least serious of the bunch. Second, if you want to put drama into your moe comedy show, at least try to put more effort into making it believable and somewhat endearing. Granted, the episodes devoted to this aren’t that many, but it can leave a sour taste in your mouth regardless of the quantity of uninvolved drama thrown into you and expects us to be invested in it. Hell, there aren’t that many newly added comedic scenes that have not been seen before in any games, with only a select few that are somewhat amusing.

Thankfully, all original voice actresses from the games are here and fill in their respective roles with the same amount of chemistry as in fun. Amai Isumi, once again, never fails to embark into dangerous territory in becoming the next queen of Tsundere voice acting. Rie Tanaka has perfect charisma whenever she works as Neptune and successfully fulfills Neptune as a larger-than-life character. With our two leading ladies getting out of the way, our supporting cast consists of Yui Horie, Kana Asumi, Rina Satou, Yui Ogura, Kaori Ishihara, Kana Hanazawa, and Eri Kitamura. All of them make for a terrific ensemble cast. You couldn’t have asked for better casting than all of them combined.

To conclude my thoughts, Neptunia the Animation isn’t a terrible show to sit through. It’s one of the better video game adaptations out there, whether or not how much you care a lot for the medium in general. It is not something you would recommend to your friend if he wanted to get into the Neptunia universe firsthand. They’ll most likely think of it as nothing but pure moe pandering at its purest if they aren’t into that whole thing already. It is nothing more than pure fan service to the people who play the games to see the static portraits come to life before their eyes, even if the result isn’t as mind-blowing as previously expected. If you are a fan like me by chance, you could probably try to see what is in store and how it is taken in animation. You’re better off just firing off another new game, plus my fellow Neptunia brethren.

Grade: C

Reviewer’s Rating: 5

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Sep 28, 2013

jiroutachi

Not Recommended

I don't think that there's something that represents better what is an extremely tryhard show than Hyperdimension Neptunia.

First of all, I have never touched the game, so this review covers only the anime series. Now, I'm not even going to start by sugar-coating things: Hyperdimension Neptunia: The Animation is a dirty mess. Hyperdimension Neptunia: The Animation represents everything you shouldn't do with an anime that's supposed to be lighthearted and cute. It tries so hard to succeed and please that it ends up setting itself to being a failure.

There is little to no plot in this show. The basic premise is that four young girls ... are goddesses in a planet called Gamindustri, and each of them rule over a country (all of them being really blatant parodies of video game companies). We follow these girls and their little sisters and friends going through adventures to solve whatever kind of weird thing is troubling Gamindustri at the time in mini-arcs that usually last between one and three episodes.

One thing I do need to praise is the parody aspect. If you are at least a little familiar with anything video game related, you are bound to catch a few of them, since they range from subtle to blatant - in one of the episodes, the girls go to a theme park in the country of Lowee that is pretty much an interactive Super Mario game. The fact that every single character personificates a video game developing company from their design to aspects of their personalities, making Gamindustri a gigantic parody of the real life game industry, is original and pretty clever.

In fact, Hyperdimension Neptunia would have been good if it focused more on that instead of spending 90% of the time in a maze of indecisiveness. The show simply jumps from cute slice of life activities to dramatic teary scenes to a full-detail shot of a girl being tentacle raped by... Anything that can possibly tentacle-rape someone. These changes are so abrupt and unbalanced that it confuses the viewer, and we end up in confusion, not sure if we should be taking what we are seeing seriously or not.

It doesn't help how extreme Neptunia is in every single thing it tries to approach. The slice of life scenes are moeblob-ish, saccharine segments with boring humor that could easily be part of a bad children's show if it wasn't for the fanservice. The drama is out of place and forced. The ecchi is extremely vulgar and sometimes downright disgusting - the girls are trapped in ropes half-naked, and for some reason moaning and blushing with their asses shoved on the screen, in their sexy, mature goddess forms? Well don't worry, conveniently enough they can't keep their transformations for too long so you get to see them in their lolilicious human appearences in the same situation! There isn't a single tasteful fanservice scene to be seen. The parody aspect is swallowed by this huge mess.

As if to complement this, the characters are... Extremely poor. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that they exist only to fanservice purposes and to be moe in an extremely obnoxious and forced manner. The four protagonists especially are just literal blobs of moe without anything else to them. Forget character development, look at how moe-moe-kyun-kawaii Neptune is! Forget personality, look at how big Vert's boobs are! They're so forcefully cute that sometimes it's unbearable, to the point of me watching half of an episode on mute due to one of the most annoying characters I've ever seen (Peashy) getting a bigger amount of screen time. The villains are also all annoying and flat, with the exception of Rei Ryghts, the only one of the bunch with a decent motivation and enjoyable personality.

But are all, literally all of them that bad?, you ask. No, they aren't. Two of them in particular stood out for me: the goddess from another dimension, Plutia, and Neptune's caring little sister, Nepgear. They actually felt genuinely cute. Plutia was really entertaining to watch in action, and Nepgear was very likeable and had the best character development in the show. The goddesses' little sisters also surprisingly display some growth, even more than our protagonists.

The character designs are honestly where the show truly excels. Not an exaggeration to call some of these my favorite character designs ever; all of the girls LOOK absolutely adorable and unique in their own way, and they also nicely embody which video game company they represent. The goddesses' transformed designs are pretty fanservicey, but they look neat as well. The animation is also pretty crisp and beautiful. It kind of saddens me that all of this went to waste on such a poor show. Sound was ok, some good BGM tracks, a catchy ED song. The VA cast was top notch, but most of the voices were too forcefully cute to be truly appreciated.

In the end, did I actually enjoy Hyperdimension Neptunia? Well, sometimes I did. But do I enjoy watching lolis as shallow as a teaspoon of water walking around doing forced stupidities for the sake of moe? Do I enjoy gross, raunchy fanservice pushed towards my face every ten seconds? Do I enjoy the things that composes 90% of this show? No. So I didn't for the most part. You might if you're into this kind of stuff, but I can think of at least ten shows that did whatever Neptunia tried to do much, much better.

I hope we won't see much more shows like Hyperdimension Neptunia: The Animation coming out anytime soon. Because they aren't whole series, but more like aberrants that tried to build itself with parts of others, but in the end, couldn't get to stand up.

Scores/tl;dr
Story: 4/10 - Plot divided in smaller arcs, all stuffed with forced slife-of-life, moe and ecchi, tossing the parody aspect aside.
Art: 9/10 - Gorgeous character designs, fluid animation. Sound: 6/10 - Pretty fair. Annoying voice acting at times.
Characters: 3/10 - The cast is mostly composed of blobs of moe with boobs more proeminent than their personality traits.
Enjoyment: 4/10
Overall: 4/10

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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