The first week of sales for Super Neptunia RPG on PS4 in Japan (known as Brave Neptunia) is not looking good. A lot of gamers decided to skip out on the title and give it negative reviews on Amazon Japan. The launch week sales, in fact, are down by more than 72% compared to the launch week sales of Four Goddesses Online: Cyberdimension Neptune, which launched in Japan back in February of 2017 as a PS4 exclusive.

The news was made abundantly clear over on 4Gamer.net, where a number of Japanese titles released with solid sales, but Super Neptunia RPG launched in 18th place with only 11,521 unit sales. If you check Gematsu’s numbers from the Media Create sales figures between February 6th and February 12th back in 2017, you’ll note that Four Goddesses Online: Cyber Dimension Neptune launched with an impressive 42,508 unit sales on the PS4.

This isn’t some anomaly or the Neptunia brand losing steam. Twitter user Ryuzaki, a reviewer who contributes to VGChartz.com, noted that there is vocal and ample backlash.

#SuperNeptuniaRPG #PS4 sales down 70% from previous spin-off in media create https://t.co/p42jYnZsYx game is taking a huge beating on amazon JP. User defiance is growing, @CompileHeartWeb cannot postpone a full explanation of its hardware strategy any longer pic.twitter.com/svNyHlRrmu — Ryuzaki57 (@Ryuz4ki57) December 26, 2018

It’s pointed out in the Twitter thread that the sales dip was unlikely due to the censorship issue for Brave Neptunia (or Super Neptunia RPG for those in the West), since the censorship wasn’t discovered for the PS4 version until after it was released on December 20th, 2018.

If you visit the Japanese Amazon page for the game, you’ll find that a lot of the negative reviews are actually centered around the combat mechanics, the game switching from 3D to 2D (and the poor animation quality of the 2D sprites), and that the game suffers from “button mashing”.

Now amid the complaints about the game being boring and the animation quality, there are those who have given the game a lower review score due to Sony’s censorship policy, or as they call it in Japan “Sony’s regulation”.

Majority of the complaints are about the game not being anywhere near as good as Valkyrie Profile and that the general quality of Super Neptunia RPG just doesn’t hold up. It remains to be seen if the sales will see an uptick, or if word about the censorship will eventually cause a backlash. But overall the game did not get off to a good start in Japan on the PS4.

There is a lot of budding anticipation for Super Neptunia RPG on the Nintendo Switch, as gamers have begun pre-ordering it from over on the Amazon page for its upcoming Western release. Most are under the impression that the game will be uncensored when it released on the Switch on June 30th, 2019. If it turns remain uncensored then expect the sales to skyrocket for the Switch version.

(Thanks for the news tip zac za)