Strategy In Your Pocket | Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart Review

The Hyperdimension Neptunia role-playing game series has always had a tongue-in-cheek tone about itself, parodying the “console wars” by featuring characters representing different home video game consoles (Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii) battling for world supremacy. This time around Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart, developed by Sting and Compile Heart, ditches the inner conflict ‘console war’ theme and instead unites all of the characters from the series to save a new world called Gamarket—where new games are released at an unrelenting pace, and features a large roster of characters to recruit representing different game genres and franchises like Final Fantasy, Street Fighter, Resident Evil, Metal Gear etc. Hyperdevotion Noire is also a spin-off of the popular Hyperdimension Neptunia series, now in tile based movement, strategy RPG form with a new adorable chibi aesthetic makeover, and features former supporting character Lady Noire, who represents PlayStation 3, as the lead protagonist of the story for this portable outing while the other familiar characters from the series fill supporting roles.

The plot of Hyperdevotion Noire is actually pretty thin to non-existent. There’s really just enough plot at the beginning to keep the momentum moving forward through the linear quest and ensure Noire keeps running into new genre or franchise mascots to challenge and recruit to keep her party roster growing. The story goes…through a turn of events, Lady Noire loses her power and ability to maintain control over the world which becomes overrun by monsters, thus requiring her to form an alliance with her former rivals to save the world once again, picking up powerful new allies along the way. The story parts of the game are done through a series of crisp 2D Anime-style stills with slight animations, voice acting and text which give each character a unique personality despite the dialogue and story being somewhat nonsensical– and there is quite a bit of jiggly boob bubble bath, bikini modeling, girl-girl love going on everywhere just for the sake of it.

Battle maps are somewhat small but filled with environmental hazards and elevated terrain to make things interesting, or annoying depending on how you feel about SRPGs that break up combat by including interactive environments that involve activating switches, building platforms, train rides, electrified floors and log jumping in order to get around. In keeping with the parody theme, some maps have enemies that resemble popular game characters like the ghosts in Pac-Man, and slimes from Dragon Quest, but the resemblances aren’t always very obvious. The environments vary in settings and you’ll visit caves, rivers, mountains—the typical JRPG backgrounds and settings, although quite colorful and beautiful to behold!

The combat portions which makes up the majority of the game is really pretty basic with job classes and weapon types locked into each character. The game lacks the ability to defend and instead emphasizes an overall offensive approach to combat with more of an in your face free-for-all type feel in favor of a defensive approach. You typically start a battle by creating a party of up to seven characters selected from your reserves and placing them on the map which you can zoom in and out of, rotate or you can also study enemy placements. Combat is turn-based with grid based movement so you can travel over a set number of tile spaces in any direction depending on the character and select actions from a menu interface including attacks, special attacks, and items. After your party ends their turn you have to wait for the enemy party to finish their turn and vice versa. You have an HP bar which decreases when you take damage, and since there isn’t an option to defend, you will need to rely on using restorative items from your inventory heavily, which you will be restocking every time you visit the item shop. You also have a secondary SP bar which allows you to perform stronger special attacks—with fancy animations, and you gain new special attacks as your character levels increase, while your regular attack damage increases by equipping stronger weapons which you can also craft.

The Affinity and Lily Boost Systems are supposed to add some layer of depth to the basic combat but it more often just seems to add unnecessary complexity. The Affinity Wheel system allows your characters to increase their attack damage by equipping elemental crystals that take advantage of enemy weaknesses –just like in Pokémon. There are also treasure chests scattered across the map requiring elemental attacks to unlock. Aside from the HP and SP meters there is also a third shared meter called the LP meter for Lily Points which you fill every time characters performs special attacks while standing next to each other referred to as Lily Boosts, and you’re usually treated to a cut-scene of the characters kissing each other every time you do this which also fills the LP meter. The LP meter also permits a few of the characters to transform into altered robot suit wearing warriors for a few turns that also allows them to levitate and hover over dangerous terrain or access hard to reach elevations. All of the characters can perform a third super special move which does a lot of damage but drains the entire LP meter which will need to be refilled with more kissing since it is shared.

I have to admit that the parody aspect of the game was somewhat lost on me. If I hadn’t gone back and researched the series it wouldn’t have occurred to me that the characters and world were trying to resemble other franchises or genres, except for the most obvious examples but the rest of the game looks like every other JRPG out there, or at least the better looking ones anyway, which is a shame because the game has a really great vivid and colorful graphical design, special effects and animations that makes it fun to play. The game allows you to replay through previously played missions to level up, and side mission open up as you progress through the main campaign which are chapter based. There is an element of farming which requires grinding through previously completed stages to collect items which you will be required to do if you want to craft more powerful weapons and items. You can also burn discs to equip which offer status upgrades.

Overall, I enjoyed the game and think it’s perfectly suited for a portable experience. The game doesn’t really have a great story for an RPG, and the combat isn’t particularly deep. It’s more of a light strategy RPG with a great presentation and a lot of characters to collect and level up with plenty of colorful maps to play through. The game also offers extra features like a room building simulator which you can upgrade with furniture and electronics and a media library where you can playback videos, cut-scenes, listen to music from the game or look through pervy photo albums of the scantily clad ladies—if you enjoy that sort of thing.

This review is based on a review code of the PS Vita version of Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart developed by Sting Entertainment and Compile Heart and published by Compile Heart.