12 Days of Waifus – Day 2: Nepgear (Hyperdimension Neptunia)

Well, this is a toughie.

Hyperdimension Neptunia, just like the Love Live series, is a franchise chock full of waifu-capable characters. I’m actually hard-pressed to choose between Noire, Nepgear, Uni, Blanc, Rom, Ram and maybe even Plutie… Damn, that’s nearly all of the main cast. Can I choose all of them..? No?

It’s a very good thing I prepared these 12 Days of Christmas posts early. So after months of contemplation and pulling my hair strands, I decided to go with Nepgear. With Plutie’s sadism, Noire’s tsundere, Uni’s a-little-restrained-tsundere (is that an archetype?), Blanc’s dual personalities, Rom and Ram’s contrasting personalities inherited separately from Blanc-Nepgear falls a bit short here. That’s not even including the other characters from the main cast too, who certainly had unique quirks of their own. Where does Nepgear fits in all these?

A CPU candidate of Planeptune, her character is a juxtaposition of her older sister, Neptune. Nepgear is down-to-earth; polite and honest, and unlike her sister, shy and timid, and at times very serious. Sure enough, she lacks vibrancy as far as personality goes, but I think having such main character-dynamics to her characterization helps. That, and since she’s a little different from the rest of the quirky cast, ironically, her normality and blandness actually gets the most of my attention. Victory/Rebirth 3 also plays a lot with her character with how she’s constantly having an attention-seeking complex, well, who wouldn’t when you used to have one whole harem to yourself? (mk2, mostly). Victory played it to the extent I would charge “Nepgear-abuse”, but there’s no denying that it’s still adorable as hell to watch.

D’awwww.

There’s also the fact that she’s just damn cute.

Armed with an “X” hairband, Planeptune’s customized white seifuku, an overall lovely design, and an incredibly adorable voice (God bless Yui Horie!), Nepgear is the walking epitome of “hng-ness”. This may be just me, but whenever her sprite emerges on screen, with her voice and design playing their parts I believe-I always develop an odd urge to pinch her cheeks… this is probably just me though.

Last but not least, I’m sure a lot of people can identify with Nepgear’s natural affiliation with softwares and technology.

In the end though, aforementioned, it was still a pretty daunting task to pick just one Best Girl out of the Hyperdimension Neptunia series, unless I didn’t mind flooding half of my 12 Days of Christmas posts with Hyperdimension Neptunia entries. Even though Nepgear takes the cake, the others-Noire, Blanc and the likes, honestly aren’t that far behind. Who’s your Hyperdimension Neptunia Best Girl?