ALRIGHT. The time for the write my story entries is over, but do I care? No! This is a good idea and crossovers are fun.

Like, why?

No seriously, why would you use your time for this?

Well let’s see, Neptunia has 4 main female leads who use weapons to fight monsters to protect the people of their nations. RWBY has... 4 main female leads who use weapons to fight monsters to protect the people of their kingdom, so why tf not? That’s it, because I can….move on to the next section….you’re making me uncomfortable.

How will it be done?

In my challenge entry, I used a reference within a bit of dialogue, but with a more direct mirror, we can have fun with it. They can add the weapons as part of a DLC, they can have a reference in the dialogue, heck they can even have Neptune watching it. Vert could be playing the game seeing as it is an rpg like most of the SAO games. I don’t see them including a cameo in the games, since that would require too much of a plot hole, but yet again, since when has Neptunia cared about those?

Let’s finally get to the point

Whether this actually happens or not (which it probably won’t tbh), let’s get to why I decided that RWBY would be a good compliment to Neptunia, the characters.

Ruby

Let me start out by saying that Ruby is the equivalent of Neptune. Between the carefree attitude, the love for games, and only wanting to have fun rather than work, they are perfect counterparts. Despite seeming like the worst possible option, they both act like leaders in their group everyone follows them...for some reason.

The first tell about their similarity is their voices. It’s rare to ever hear Neptune sad. I already mentioned her carefree attitude, but it goes beyond that. Neptune is always cheery, and it rubs off on others according to Compa, she is like a bubbling spring of joy. Ruby is treated like a light in a dark world. You do hear her sadness considerably more than Neptune, but her high-pitched squeals of joy bring others to treat her like a naive young girl, instead of an aspiring murder machine.

We can look at appearance too. Neptune seems to be the youngest of the group. Even though we don’t know the age of the goddesses (just that they are hundreds of years old), Neptune’s attitude and appearance, such as her short stature, paints her as young. So much so that Nepgear is often confused to be the older sister. Ruby is actually the youngest of the group, being two years younger than the rest due to special privileges. Being the youngest, it’s pretty obvious that she would look like the youngest, so not much to say there. I could go into the significance of both characters having short hair, but I don’t know that symbolism, so let’s chock that up as an extra similarity.

Ruby uses a scythe, which is drastically different from Neptune’s katana, but that doesn’t rule out their similar fighting styles. We know from Noire in VIIR that Neptune’s katata allows her to adopt a unique fighting style balanced with good defense and a strong offense due to the curved blade and the nature of the sword. A katana is primarily a slashing weapon, and the curved blade is designed for maximum contact during a strike in order to slice like a knife, rather than a “blunt” impact with a sharp edge like straight swords. The katana also can be lighter than straight edged swords because the impact is spread out over a large part of the blade and a long span of time. Because of this, less metal is required to make the blade since it doesn’t need to be as strong. A scythe works similar to a katana with the curved blade, and is also designed to slice rather than simply chop. Swinging the scythe takes advantage of this feature. Both weapons have puncture capability, though the scythe is more adept than a katana for this. One big issue is that Neptune uses a bamboo katana and, well Ruby, “it’s also a gun.”

Yang

Ruby was easy to pinpoint her counterpart, but her sister is a different story. She has the character design of a Vert, but the ability of a Blanc, so let’s compare each bit to find a conclusion on which counterpart fits with our Goldilocks.

As already mentioned, character design. The point for that goes to Vert. With long blonde hair and, *ahem* assets, I don’t believe there is much of a contest.

Now we analyze the personality. One of Yang’s most recognizable traits is her protection for her hair, and anger whenever something happens to it. Blanc represents this quality well, with her hypertension over her lack of *ahem* assets, and anger in turn. Yang’s personality outside of battle is quite different, she isn’t as firey and actually seems pretty mellow, unless her sister is involved. This also sounds a lot like Blanc, and is especially evidenced by episode 2 of the anime. Fitting with her family, Yang tends to be the big sister of the group, providing advice and support to the other team members regardless of the situation.

On to weapons, Yang uses shotgauntlets (named that myself uwu) which use the force of her punch to fire shotgun shells which don’t even get me STARTED on how they work because the forces involved are just ridiculous. Fighting using punches and shotgun blasts seem like the perfect recipe for a hammer, and whatta ya know, blanc just so happens to use a hammer in hard drive and an axe in HDD.

So after going over everything, I believe that the best counterpart for Yang is… Vert. Honestly people do this kind of switch all the time, you should have expected it by now, but let me explain.

The character design is a big giveaway, so I won’t go further into that. About the protection of her sister: yes, Blanc is very protective over her younger sisters, but Vert is the same way about all of the candidates. It’s not unreasonable and even likely that Vert will be just as upset from something happening to Nepgear, or Uni, or Rom and Ram. Vert is very protective so we can’t rule her out just yet. Next, Vert displays many traits of a big sister. One example is obviously around the candidates, but she shows this with the CPUs as well. Vert acts like the most mature and supportive one of the group. She loves to give advice and watch all of the younger ones. You can’t forget how Yang is with her gaming. RPGs and fighting games are certainly worlds apart, but you cannot deny both of their love of video games.

Now, Yang’s gauntlets don’t match up at all to Vert’s spear, but it doesn’t have to, these are two different series’ with different characters, so not everything is going to line up nicely.

Blake

This is our Blanc. It was hard to pick between Blake and Yang for Vert and Blanc, but what sold the deal was how well Blanc fit the role of Blake.

Character design means absolutely nothing here. Last time I checked, blanc wasn’t also a cat. I could check again, but I’m pretty confident in my conclusion. Another thing to consider is colors, which I haven’t mentioned yet. Each character from both series’ is represented by a color. For Neptunia it corresponds with their CPU name. Neptune is purple, Noire is black, Blanc is white, and Vert is green. In RWBY their color corresponds with the first letter of their name. Ruby is red, Weiss is white, Blake is black, and Yang is yellow. Based on colors alone I should have included Peashy and….oh wait there is no red CPU, sorry, Uzume is orange. So that is one reason colors don’t matter, another is because color symbolism is very broad. To bring in black, Blake is quiet, relatively emotionless, and dark. Noire is none of those but yet still represents black because it is the default color of the PlayStation series, and it is literally her name. It’s French, but still. In reality, the only similarity in character design is the lack of *ahem* assets. Yeah, this isn’t very convincing yet.

That’s where personality comes to save the day! Heh, Blake’s personality saving the day, that will never happen. But anyway, Blake is a bookworm at heart, they make that clear in the first two episodes by introducing her reading a book with a desire to be left alone. She stays that way for the majority of the series, secluded from the others unless necessary, left to her books. Let’s be real honest, Blanc is the exact same way and if given the chance, would die of sleep deprivation either reading or writing. I’d be willing to bet that she has probably even come close before, or can that even happen? Well, a theory for another day.

I’ll go back to voices for this next bit. Depending on the language you play the games in, you may experience a different Blanc. I’m going to use Japanese Blanc since the games are originally in japanese, and the anime has her with the same soft voice regardless of language. Blanc’s voice is quiet and somewhat cold. It doesn’t show much emotion and portrays her as generally unamused by everything. Blake has a bit more emotion to her voice, but that still doesn’t change the fact that she sounds annoyed, and unamused by everyone else. She may not be the Ice Queen, but a bit of hearing her speak may have you convinced she is.

Something unaccounted for is Blanc’s rage. Blanc may seem mellow and hard to crack, but she has a temper shorter than her and her sisters. Blake simply cannot mirror this, she gets upset, but doesn’t have violent outbursts when doing so.

So it’s not a perfect match, but let’s face it, it’s not going to be, but I still think Blake fits better than Yang.

Weiss

So we have one left from each series, and those are Noire and Weiss. Here we fall into the same white/black pairing, but as discussed previously, it doesn’t matter. Weiss is white because of her high standing and her proclaimed purity within the group. Noire doesn’t have a higher status than the rest of the CPUs, but she is the hardest working and most prepared. Also, it’s hard to deny that Noire is slightly narcissistic, not nearly as much as Weiss though. This can be seen during her prologue of VII. Both characters have a knack for acting high and mighty around their fellow teammates, especially Neptune and Ruby. They are also both tsunderes, so let’s discuss that.

Noire is the stereotypical tsundere, the games even tell you in her character profile, no need to go further into detail there. Weiss exhibits the same quirks, although to a less drastic scale. How do you think Ice Queen got her nickname? Think about other characters known to be “as cold as ice” (lol puns), and bingo, tsundere, next topic.

Weapons came up for most of the previous characters, and it is a pretty major factor here. In fiction, the weapons characters are given are made to compliment their character or personality. So knowing that, and knowing that both Noire and Weiss are rapier users, is it becoming more clear? We learn from Noire that she chooses a rapier because of the tremendous skill it takes to wield it. Whether she is actually skilled in using it is a different story, since she only uses it in player-controlled battles, where it would be a real kick in the pants by the developers if a character was programmed to be terrible with the only weapon they can equip. Also, we know Weiss is skilled because she attended the best combat school in her kingdom, and is enrolled in the best combat academy in the nation at the start of the series. This is easier than I thought

Ships

I usually stay away from these, but I’ll throw in a bit of fanservice by mentioning the popular ones.

Ha! Do I even have fans?

NepNowa, the only one in Neptunia commonly given a name, would like up with WhiteRose, the pairing of Ruby and Weiss. Likewise, Bumblebee (great name btw), the pairing of Yang and Blake line up with the pairing of Vert and Blanc

No personal opinions on any of them, don’t you even ask smh.

There you have it? How each character lines up from both series’ along with some ideas of how it could be implemented in a nep game. I hope you enjoyed and feel free to leave your thoughts and corrections in the comments, even with my research, I was bound to get something wrong.

#ivvibait