My Steam ID: http://steamcommunity.com/id/fantasyheaven/

The game that I am requesting is Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth2: Sisters Generation - it is currently on sale at 50% off.

I quite enjoyed playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 1 (the previous game in the franchise) and would consider it one of the few good JRPGs on Steam. I have spent 75 hours on the game according to Steam and it is currently the only game in my Steam library where I managed to unlock every achievement. Given that the game is of the same franchise and has the same developers, I believe that I will have just as much fun playing Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth 2 as I had the first game.

What I liked about Re;Birth 1:

A light-hearted parody of video games with numerous references, excellent visuals, and nice audio. It has good character designs that uses nice bright colors, which is quite rare for the JPRGs on Steam. The game's plot is essentially a parody of video game cliches, but it made up for the boring plot with hilarious dialogue ("It's dangerous to go alone. Take Nep!") and gaming references (it mentioned the mecha franchise Armored Core which I had totally forgotten about). For example, men are rare and useless in the game and all the girls wear either hats or hair accessories - I am fairly sure that this is a Touhou reference. And because hair accessories are serious business, each playable character can equip a tonne of different head-wear that will change their cosmetic appearance in dungeons and battle. The english voice acting (for the main character at least) is also quite good in my opinion.

Character portraits are displayed in scenes with dialogue - like in Visual Novels (not surprising as the game was ported from the PS Vita). I've always been of the opinion that anime character designs look better as 2-D artwork. 3-D character models tend to look terrible up close.

It is a JRPG with that doesn't use random encounters. It uses what is essentially the traditional turn-based combat with the effect that certain attacks can affect the turn order. The active party consists of three as the vanguard and three as support that can be swapped in. Having certain character combination in the vanguard/support will allow the use of combination attacks, but the number of pairings in the game is limited.

When in the dungeon, the enemy avatars are shown on the map. Battle is initiated when the (party leader's) avatar come in contact with that of an enemy avatar. If the party leader avatar hits the enemy with their standard attack animation, the battle becomes a "pre-emptive attack" and gives the party the advantage in turn order. Conversely, if the enemy avatar touched the party leader avatar from behind, the battle is a "back attack" and the party is disadvantaged. Basically like that in Persona 4.

During battle you have to move the characters to the enemies in order to initiate attack, but unlike most JRPGs the characters have a radial movement range. In addition, the range of your chosen attack is displayed as a wireframe AoE - allowing you to position your character to hit as many enemies as possible in a single attack. Basically like that in Phantom Brave and Makai Kingdom.

It is Game Over if the three members in the vanguard are all incapacitated. To be honest, the battle system felt like a combination of various other battle systems that I've experienced, with some superfluous additions (three different attack types, but one overshadows the other two as the game progresses) added for variety.

From what I have researched of Re;Birth 2, the following are my reasons to want to play the game:

It is a port of a remake of Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2. mk2 is the game that cemented the popularity of the franchise, so I am interested to see what was so good about the game.

There is no plot continuity between it and Re;Birth 1 as it takes place in an alternate universe, but the personalities of the characters remain the same. The main protagonists of Re;Birth 2 are the younger sisters of the main protagonists of Re;Birth 1. Since the younger sisters were effectively NG characters that had no relevance to the plot in Re;Birth 1 (they only really had battle dialogue), it would be nice to play a game that actually gives them characterization.

Unlike the original (Hyperdimension Neptunia mk2) which used 3D models during dialogue scenes, Re;Birth 2 uses 2-D character portraits. It is not only because Re;Birth2 was developed for the PS Vita - as far as I know, mk2 is the only game in the franchise that used 3D models. Even the other games on the PS3 (and thus would have no hardware limitations) used 2-D portraits.

Nine different endings, which ending you get is dependent on which faction that you are most friendliest to. But the most talked-about ending is the one that is a lot darker than the others. Said bad end has me morbidly curious.

The battle system is just a slightly refined version of that in Re;Birth 1. There are 4-member vanguards this time round three, and there are significantly more combination attacks available. The reason being that mk2 was the game in the franchised that first introduced combination attacks.