B Rated Zombie Flick the video game! A MegaTagmension Blanc + Neptune VS Zombies review!

Tamsoft teams up with Idea Factory and Compile Heart to bring us the newest spin-off of the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, MegaTagmension Blanc + Neptune VS Zombies. Basing itself off of the Hyperdimension Neptunia Action U engine released on the Vita in May of last year in North America, this new title brings back the fast-paced Musou style gameplay back with a full story mode and online play.

In this spin-off, you follow Blanc and the others as they attend Gamicademi to learn more about how the people of their lands go about. The four CPU Goddesses learn that the school is due to close at the end of the year due to lack of new registration and Neptune decides to film a movie as part of her club activities to renew interest in the school. Lacking a proper producer and director, she requests the help of Blanc after she inadvertently ruined one of the scene trying to rescue her sisters, Rom and Ram, from “zombies”.

The story mode is broken up in different chapters called Scenes with each level within it called Cuts. The story follows along the two main characters; Blanc and Neptune, but never restricts the character selection as far as missions go regardless if the character plays a role or not in the current scene being filmed.

All the missions are broken down with simple objectives as “kill 50 zombies” or “kill all Dolems”. During the game, the only missions that took me longer than a minute were the boss fight missions. These short missions end up creating quite a bit of loading time jumping back and forth within menus which I did find a bit bothersome. All of the missions also have a ranking which from all the ones I’ve complete, only ever gave me “SSS” or “SS”. I’m sure there is lower mission rankings but I couldn’t bring myself to botch one so bad to verify it. The areas used in the story are limited and due to the shortness of the missions, large areas of the map go unused sadly.

The game’s cutscenes are handled in the series traditional format, however they are portrayed as 2 different stories, one where the characters are themselves and another while they’re filming. To make it easier to follow, the name of the characters will change based on the whether they’re filming their movie or not. One of the best feature is the voice acting which helps set the tone of the movie and how much similarities it shares with the good kind of B movies.

MegaTagmension Blanc + Neptunia vs Zombies features online multiplayer via both Ad-hoc and Online, a first for the series. When loading a multiplayer match, all characters in the game will be unlocked from the start regardless of story progression. Unlike the story mode, you’ll be able to select the HDD form for your character from the start as the “transform” feature is not present online.

The online mode features the same kind of scenarios that you’ll find in the single player, but introduces new areas, enemies and makes full use of the large levels that were ignored in the single player. The Boss Levels stand out the most in the online play, featuring large monsters with large pools of health with varying weaknesses and resistance, something that was also missing from the story mode.

The online mode can be done solo as well; but upon reaching 5 star missions did start giving me difficulty where I could no longer progress alone, even being 20 levels over the suggested level for the missions.

Keeping true to the HDN series, characters do have access to alternate outfits and accessories that can be equipped. While all accessories and weapons can be purchased via the game’s store, alternate costumes must be unlocked by creating “console treasures”. Accessories adds a bit of personal flare to the characters as you’ll be able to resize and place them in different places, regardless of how weird it may look.

Overall, the story mode offers a very fun “so bad it’s good” B-movie zombie movie experience but apart from getting “SSS” rating, which as far as I saw does nothing special, offers very little replay value for solo play.

On a side note, I was pleasantly surprised when I tried launching it on my PS TV first, before even trying my Vita, and seeing it launch. Being able to play this game on a larger screen with an actual controller did help make this game much more enjoyable for me.