Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart PC Review by LumpDizzle666
Genre: RPG, Strategy
Developer: Idea Factory , Compile Heart , Sting Publisher: Idea Factory International
Release Date: Apr 26, 2016
Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart is a Strategy RPG that takes place in the world is Gamarket, a world ruled by four goddesses known as CPU. You take on the role of secretary to Noire, one of the CPUs, who is the focus of the story and the strongest of the four. A mysterious stranger appears and offers Noire a chance to control all Gamarket without having to continue to battle her fellow CPU and their troops. This piques Noire’s interest because she does not enjoy having to fight. Things predictably go very, very wrong. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart has two art styles. First is the Anime style that the story unfolds in. The anime style has clean lines, great color, and is pure sexiness without being completely risque. I really appreciate the minimal risky-ness as I feel it can really take away from a game. (and anime) There are some alluring scenes in the game but they are tastefully done and not in excess.
Then there is the super adorable Chibi style art. The game’s combat makes use of the Chibi art style, and from the ridiculously adorable character models, to the over the top battle animation,s it is all so well done.
The dual art styles keep everything very fresh and as you move from one to the other it never feels jarring, in fact they complement each other so well that it it feels very natural.
The battle animations are cool, cute, and can be very over the top, in such a good way! Whether player animations or enemy units, the battle animations have a lot of thought behind them to make them look and feel as if they fit that particular unit. All special units have particularly good battle moves with great animations
The characters have a wide range of looks and have personalities that range from sassy to pushovers, they all feel as if they fell out of an anime.
Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart is a turned based strategy RPG that takes place on grid based maps. Imagine an oversized chess board with various elevations and obstacles. Battle comes in two phases: Player phase, in which you make all of your moves, and enemy phase when the AI makes its moves.
Every unit will have access to a number of attacks, from a standard attack to unit specific skills, and the four CPU will have access to HDD. HDD stands for Hard Drive Divinity, which is a special mode that the CPU can access that increases their stats and allow them to float around the game board circumventing obstacles and traps.
HDD, being as powerful as it is, requires that you have have accrued at least 30 LP (Lilly Points). You gain LP buy using abilities while another one of your units are adjacent to the character. The more of your units that are adjacent, the more LP you will gain. As a fun little cutscene to show you are gaining LP, the adjacent units actually will give the unit using the skill a kiss on the cheek! It’s very silly, but fun.
Between battles, you go to your home base where you gear up and do activities such as crafting and talking.
The shop is pretty standard, you use earned money to buy various items such as meds, weapons and equipment.
The Hotel is where your archive is. You are able to rewatch the cutscenes, listen to the different music tracks, and so on
In the Basilicom menu you will get the chance to act as Noire’s secretary, accepting and fulfilling citizen requests by conversing with Noire. You will also get to improve on Noire’s room, which can trigger special cutscenes
The Item Dev is your standard crafting menu where you use components you have acquired to craft the items you have found blueprints for such as consumables or weapons.
In the Disc Dev menu, you craft games that you can equip. You will collect different game and storage types throughout the game that you can combine to create items to equip that add passive buffs to your units.
The music is catchy and fun, and even after so many hours I never turned off the music. The voices of the characters during the cutscenes are very well done in both Japanese and English, I personally prefer the Japanese with subtitles as it makes it feel more anime to me. Sound FX are good and very enjoyable. I looked forward to hearing the attack sounds and the Chibi characters during battle
Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart is a solid Strategy RPG that is silly, fun, and has a little something special to bring to the genre with its mix of Anime and Chibi art, and very anime style story. If you are a fan of the genre of game, or love anime, and are looking to into a new type of game I DO suggest getting this game.
Pros
- The story is good
- The dual art styles are great and mix well
- The music is catchy and fun
- Easy to pick up combat
- Has some nice activities to do outside combat
Cons
- The game is a bit on the simple side if you are experienced with this type of game
- If not a fan of this anime style it, may be hard to take in
LumpDizzle666 gives Hyperdevotion Noire: Goddess Black Heart a Drastik Measure 8.3 out of 10 (83)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/415480/
