Coming in at a 45 rating on Metacritic: Hyperdimension Neptunia.

Is it a bad game? Yes. It’s really bad. It’s an ugly game for PS3 standards, and the battle mechanics are borderline insane. It’s a JRPG where you can’t manually heal, but instead set a % chance to heal automatically in battles… which means sometimes you game over because RNG wasn’t going to let you heal. But regardless it’s one of my favorites. I’m a sucker for the core concept of the schoolyard console wars, with little gaming references everywhere and silly humor. I also love the theme songs for each console nation. It really drives home how different the console cultures are supposed to be as you are traveling around solving their problems.

And I mean, come on… When you first start the game and you are in the tutorial dungeon it plays this song during exploration and this song during battles. Games today would never do something that silly.

The later games polished the gameplay, expanded the character rosters, gave more depth to the story, and dealt with some very dark topics (Gehaburn trauma)… but to me none of them captured the lightning that the first one had.