Game:

Neptunia Shooter (2019)

Duration: 11:26

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Man, I bought the game on release and have only cleared it now even though it isn't that hard lol. But better late than never.

Neptunia Shooter is a cute shmup spinoff the JRPG series that stars Neptune and pits you against several other characters in the franchise, who act as bosses. When you defeat one boss, they will join you and you will be able to switch bewteen all the characters you have.

Each one has a specific shot type (forward shot, backshot, charge shot, etc.) and most are useful in certain kind of scenarios so you'll have to regularly switch between them during the stages or even the boss fights.

This is the best strength of the game but also its biggest downfall. The level design itself makes rather good use of the different character abilities, and even if there is only one enemy design, the multiple variations and palette swaps all have their own behavior and patterns. Bosses will also move around the playfield, forcing you to use the adequate character to deal damage.

However, the character switching controls are completely awful. They seem to have been made by someone whose only experience with shmups is at best a bad euroshmup where you toggle between weapons like you would in a FPS or something.

Instead of being able to assign one button per character shot (of which there are 6, which is more than enough for a standard controller, and also compatible with an arcade stick), you have one shot button and two buttons to cycle through the list of characters.

That terrible design choice adds a completely unecessary and unfun layer of mental overhead as you have to remember how many button presses you need to do in order to get to the character you want in order to deal with the current situation. By the time you get to the correct shot, it could be too late. And what's even worse in the context of this specific game is that the number of shots increases every single stage, so unlike games such as Hellfire or Andro Dunos, you can't even have reliable button press counts ingrained in your brain for the whole game, since the amounts required to get from one specific character to another can change over time.

The end result is that instead of choosing the best shot type you just stick to two that are close together even though they are sub-optimal. With so many characters it makes no sense whatsoever not to have the ability to instant-switch to a specific one. Imagine playing something like Radiant Silvergun or Chaos Field with a weapon toggle configuration, that would be insanely annoying. Well this is what happens here. This issue also makes the relatively slow character speed be even more annoying since you can't counter this low speed by always having the best shot to reduce the need for movement.

A shame because the game is cute and decent fun otherwise, though a bit barebones options-wise. It has button config but no stage select whatsoever alas. It didn't bother me that much for such a simple game but maybe it would have been annoying if I actually wanted to push the game further and practice the later stages for score optimization after getting the clear, which I don't feel any desire to do so because of the aforementionned control issues.

Played on PC, recorded with OBS Studio