Last month, Idea Factory and Compile Heart unveiled Neptunia: Unlimited (Japanese: 超新時空ゲイム ネプテューヌ∞; official English title TBD), the first new mainline installment in the Hyperdimension Neptunia franchise in 10 years. To commemorate the big announcement, Famitsu interviewed producer Hikaru Yasui and illustrator Tsunako about the milestone, and asked them why it took so long for a new mainline title to come out in the first place.
According to Yasui, the development team was actually working on another “mainline title” before Neptunia: Unlimited, which ended up evolving into 2022’s Neptunia: Sisters VS Sisters. “It’s a spin-off featuring CPU Candidate Nepgear as the protagonist, but originally, it was planned to be a mainline title starring Neptune and the others,” he explains. “However, during development, Tsunako-san came to persuade me that ‘If we’re going to make a mainline title, I want to be involved with it from the planning stage and go all out…’ I think that was about 5 years ago or so?”
To add more context, at the timing of the production of Sisters VS Sisters, Tsunako couldn’t directly participate in development due to conflicting schedules. However, being the main illustrator and key member of the development team, she wanted to be fully involved if the Neptunia series were to release a new mainline title.
Apparently, the idea for Unlimited itself was conceived way back in 2021, however, it ended up not progressing much from the initial stage, as the devs had trouble deciding on a concrete plan for the game. While parallelly working on the spin off, they spent the first two years revising their past works, polishing lore inconsistencies, and refining details such as characters’ speaking mannerisms. With such a long “preparation period,” actual development of Unlimited got underway around 2023, when the new CPU goddesses were created.
“Development started in 2023, but it took some time before we decided to release the new goddesses,” Yasui notes. “We went through a lot of trial and error trying to figure out what kind of content to make next, but we figured out fans would prefer to get a sequel; a new game continuing from Megadimension Neptunia VII.” Even then, Yasui says that their original plan for Unlimited was to feature an “all-star cast” rather than new goddesses. The idea to introduce new characters came a bit later, with Tsunako wanting to “update Gameindustri to reflect the current era.”
Neptunia: Unlimited (tentative) is set to release on August 27, 2026, for Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5 and PlayStation 4. The official English title will be announced at a later date.
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