Neptunia Shooter is a horizontal Bullet Hell and is a spin-off of the Hyperdimension JRPG series. We play as Neptune, and besides that fact, there is nothing else to say as we are thrust directly into the action. Starting off, we can only move and shoot our way through a stage full of different colored slimes. Every color variant has different attacks and ways to take you down. Learning which does what will be vital to your survival as this is not an easy game by any means.
We are given three lives to get past all of the six stages and can earn more by raking in points by defeating enemies. It will provide you with a decent amount of lives if you play aggressively, though that too may prove to be dangerous as there is no bomb like ability to get you out of a tight spot. In fact, without counting movement, you only have two buttons to use. The first is used to attack, and the other is for switching to different characters to make use of their unique projectile patterns. Some of them can shoot to the left side of the screen, shoot straight up, or have bullets that droop down to get enemies underneath you.
Before you can change into a different character, you must first find and defeat them. They all reside at the end of a stage and will serve as a boss fight. All of the characters are from the Neptunia universe but have been darkened for some unknown reason, making them downright hostile. Taking these characters down is no easy feat. Each has quite a few tricks up their sleeves to burn through your supply of lives if you get careless. Once defeated, they are yours for the rest of that run to expand upon your options while fighting. All of them share lives, so having more characters doesn’t help in that regard. Think of them more like weapons.
This title is surprisingly challenging. It starts off simple enough, yet will quickly introduce many different enemy formations. They will attack from behind, below, and have several other methods to keep you on your toes. The beginning of a stage is usually suited to your new character’s bullet pattern, but will quickly start throwing enemy formations she is not suited for. You will have to learn about each of the five characters in that brief period before the game stops holding punches. With the title being under 15 minutes long, things move at a rapid pace. One of the main aspects that make it challenging is simply how overwhelming it is with its introduction of new things in such a small time-frame.
I never felt it to be cheap, regardless of that. Everything that it throws at you will not be anything new to people familiar to the genre, and enemy projectiles are quite slow, making them easy to dodge. The only real complaint I have is how character switching is handled. You switch between them one at a time with the controller bumpers. This is easily managed when you only have two or three, but when you have more, it starts to get confusing as you try to switch to the character you desperately need in the heat of battle. Eventually, you do get used to where each character is located, yet you will still waste some time switching to them. With all of the unused buttons, having each character’s attack mapped to one would make combat more fluid.
A brave decision on their part is the lack of any continues. Once you lose all of your lives, that is it for you, it’s back to the beginning. While not necessarily difficult in comparison to many other Bullet Hell titles, it may be a bit much for their core JRPG fanbase. Worse still for those here out of brand loyalty, there is no text or story aside from the “congratulations!” at the end, and it possesses none of the series signature humor. It is as bare-bones as it gets and not counting the bosses, the slimes are the only enemy types, so there isn’t much to see either. That does not make this a bad title by any means, it is just not something I’d wildly recommend just because you like the Neptunia franchise.
Coming from a relatively large studio, I was surprised at how indie Neptunia Shooter felt. Not only are all of the enemies different colored versions of the same slime, but the background stays exactly the same throughout as well. I honestly would not consider that “8-bit” inspired as it is marketed out to be, even NES games had better backgrounds and variety, not to mention 8bit computers such as the C64. This title doesn’t even give you the option to play in full-screen mode. You either play it in a tiny window or stretch it to a pixelated mess. The sprites themselves are quite nice however, their cutesy look does lend it some charm.
Neptunia Shooter finds itself in an odd place in where they decided to venture into a genre that may prove to be too difficult for their fans and ended up being more of an attraction to those that already like this genre. While it offers very little, there is nothing inherently wrong with it besides the lack of full-screen. The controls are tight and responsive, the enemy formations and bullets patterns are well thought out, and the boss fights are intense. Switching characters, while cumbersome, also offer plenty of options as to turn the tide of a battle once you gather them. It is not the most fully fleshed out title out there, but it is undoubtedly a ton of fun and well worth considering.
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