I will preface this by saying: I'm aware this is a review for a game that's been out for approaching a decade now. Most people who were going to play this game have already done so at this point. With that being said, I'll still give my piece.

As a Neptunia game, it definitely deserves the title of best Neptunia game. The story is incredibly good and engaging, and numerous characters get their own turn to shine. If you've played other Neptunia games and enjoyed them, you'll definitely enjoy this. Uzume, the new character we met, ended the story as possibly one of my favourite neptunia characters of the entire franchise. The antagonists are pretty interesting in their own right, ignoring the usual returnee of Arfoire who feels like she's only in because its Arfoire.
The story itself is split into three distinct arcs. The first is set in Zero Dimension, which was a very strong story from start to finish, with good character interactions.
The second part, by far the longest section, was itself split into 5 parts, one in each nation with a different CPU as the lead, and the last all together. The characters were slightly more scattered, but still very good. Each storyline in here felt different enough from each other to not feel samey
The last part is back to Zero Dimension and by far the shortest. It was pretty good, gave a lot of closure to the various plot points and had some very good speeches and touching moments

My problems with the game are two-fold:
1: Random encounters. Navigating around the map involves your characters 'walking' on routes to various dungeons or other locations. These roads have 'nodes' where you have a chance to encounter a monster. The problem is that this chance is far too high, and when it happens, it entirely ruins the flow of the story. I had a cutscene, needed to travel a couple nodes over to see the second part of that cutscene, but every single node triggered an encounter, forcing me to fight some monsters. I already have to fight monsters in the dungeons and bosses, I shouldn't be forced to fight monsters on what should be fast-travel.
Most annoyingly, NG+ actually gives an item that prevents these encounters. I used it, and the second playthrough was SIGNIFICANTLY more enjoyable. And they obviously knew it would be or they wouldn't have included that item. In which case, just get rid of those encounters in the first place.
2; My other problem with the game; actually getting the True Ending. It is so incredibly frustrating to learn , 60 hours into my playthough, that because I had missed a single, time limited, unmarked, missable quest 20 hours ago, I was locked out of the True Ending with no way to reverse that without replaying 20 hours of game. Then my second playthrough, now actively on the lookout for those quests, I STILL managed to miss one of them because I didn't check the Guild Tab in the exact right transition. Again I didn't know until I got to the end. This is especially eggresious since the only reason I'd do that quest originally is to get Shares, but I had already maxed them, so I had NO reason to do this unmarked random quest among a dozen other identical quests that in no way hinted it was critical to the story in any way.
TL:DR, if you want the True End, use a guide. Don't just try doing everything you see, because miss even a single thing and you're screwed. And then you've wasted 60 hours of careful gameplay.

Overall story rating: 9.5 out of 10
Overall gameplay rating: 4 out of 10

SEGA Dreamcast's tragedy could not be better told. Umio DLC is a must imho.

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