I will magnanimously forgive you if you always assumed the Hyperdimension Neptunia video games were the result of a perverted man's hard work. After all, there's all that fan service, all of those posterior shots and cleavage close-ups! But no, the license came from the mind of a woman. It turns out you don't have to possess a penis to like boobs. Who knew?

Playing the games, things stay fairly PG-13. I figured--correctly, as it turned out--that the same would be true of the anime. Which I bought. And watched. And... sort of enjoyed. But only sort of, because frankly, there are much better entertainment options available.

Like the games on which it is based, "Hyperdimension Neptunia: The Animation" takes place in the world of Gameindustri, where old video game consoles are represented by goddesses. As the story kicks off, several of those celestial beings have come together and have signed a peace treaty of sorts, so they can all be friends instead of vicious competitors. It looks like peace is on the horizon, except that would be really boring, so of course a whole bunch of things immediately go wrong.

Though I haven't played the first PlayStation 3 title in the series in any of its iterations (remember that it has also been ported to Vita and PC), I have at least played numbers two and three. That prior exposure meant that, in general, I knew what was going to happen ahead of time as I watched the animation. There are some differences, certainly (including a fan service episode to fill in for the hot springs trip most anime efforts seem to have these days), and some battles are expanded or just more explicitly shown, but for the most part this is a story you've seen before if you played through the video games.

Upon reflection, I'm actually kind of wondering why I even bothered purchasing the anime. Plot was never a strong point for the series. The series has a clever conceit, but then it fritters it away with petty squabbling and a whole bunch of dialogue while the characters stand around and don't do much. I guess I was hoping to see them finally get down to the business of being awesome in a 12-episode series, but instead the story rushes through three games' worth of content. That means there's not a lot of time for meaningful character development. And although there is time for some awesome battles, they happen only very rarely.

Meanwhile, the animation is rather poor. A number of environments and backgrounds aren't especially detailed, and you'll see more than the usual amount of scenes where characters stand around, static, while voice actors talk (yes, Funimation dubbed it). Even in the intro, there are places where music plays while a few frames flash past, in place of a properly animated effort. I wouldn't say things ever actually look bad, but the budget must not have been particularly huge for this anime. That, or it was drawn in a rush that did it no favors.

Though the artwork looks cute and inviting, don't mistake it as a project for kids. You can perhaps dismiss the boobs, but there are still some extended scenes based around innuendo that warrant your consideration. In particular, there's a scene from the second game where two young girls are caught by a monster with a giant tongue, which licks them creepily (much to their understandable disgust). It is presented essentially as sexual perversion, and it feels gross. There's a callback to it in the OVA, as well. Someone on the original writing staff must be really proud of that scene.

Another element that some might find uncomfortable is a character who transforms occasionally into a dominatrix. It's played off for laughs, but it feels creepy just the same. My wife likes anime and video games both. She sat down to watch some episodes with me but fairly quickly grew bored and left after remarking--without even seeing the most risque scenes--that it was all a bit perverted. She wasn't wrong, but I have a higher tolerance level for such things.

I'm not entirely sure where I was going with this review, actually. "Hyperdimension Neptunia: The Animation" is an animated take on a video game series that didn't do much of anything interesting after establishing its awesome initial concept. Rather than expanding things in a meaningful way, the anime mostly treads the same ground and feels every bit as much like slightly better than average filler as the source material did. Pick the set up if you just plain love the license, but otherwise you're pretty safe ignoring it. Virtually everything it does reasonably well, some other cartoon does better...