Noire’s Vita Spinoff Turns Video Game Genres Into Characters

The Hyperdimension Neptunia series has a parody of the console wars with CPUs to represent the three major hardware companies and a few game publishers as party members. Sting and Compile Heart are making a strategy RPG spinoff starring Noire, the CPU of Lastation, and this time they’re poking fun at game genres.

Take Sango who loves action games and dresses in old fashion clothes as an example. She’s a riff at Shin Sangoku Musou better known in the West as Dynasty Warriors. You probably know who the other character is unofficially representing.

The site for Planet Destroyer Black Heart has a few more characters like the sporty Win who thinks about the team over herself. She’s probably Compile Heart’s joke about the Winning Eleven soccer series from Konami. Ain Ar is a stylish epic RPG character who might be a Final Fantasy joke and Lee Fey is clearly a Street Fighter gag.

Saori is the protagonist in a girl’s romance game. She dreams of love, but has never experienced it before. I think she’s a Tokimeki Memorial joke since she looks an awful lot like Shiori Fujisaki also Compile Heart just switched one kana out for another to make her name. Compile Heart makes fun of their own games too. Lestra looks like a Record of Agarest War gag since she likes bananas and has a keen interest in ecchi things. Lady Black looks like a reference back to arcade games, perhaps Pac-Man, since she has cherries as an accessory. Lady Black likes eating tasty things and she’s older than the other girls in the game.

Planet Destroyer Black Heart comes out on May 29 for PlayStation Vita in Japan. The game hasn’t been announced for the West, but NIS America seems committed to bringing over the entire line of Neptunia games since Hyperdimension Neptunia PP Idol is slated for release next year.