I'm done with IFI ports

Before I start my, well lets call it a rant, I'm not looking for any help. I've already got my conclusion.

About a year ago, IdeaFactory International (IFI) released Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth2 on Steam. Without much though, I purchased it during the release week sale; May 29th to be exact. I had played, and enjoyed, the first game, Re;Bith1 off Steam, so getting the second only made since. Both games were ports from the PS Vita version of the game. Sadly, the game didn't work at all. Kept cashing within a few second. This seemed common and was treated as a "day one" bug. There was some suggestions in the game's Steam community, and late that night, got the game to load. It wasn't great though. The intro movie was choppy and gameplay was slow to respond. The game then crashed shortly after the first fight. Nothing like how Re;Bith1 was, which worked (and still does) perfectly. I though maybe the AMD drivers were the cause, but those were up-to-date, and Re;Birth1 still played as expected.

Since nothing in the Steam community was working, I contacted Steam Support. They basically told me I had to contact the developers, in this case IFI. Keep in mind this was before Steam's return policy (more on this later). I contacted IFI and they said there was a patch in the works. Sure enough, a patch was released. The patch, for the most part, got the game to load and I get to the Wold Mad. The game was still choppy, but maybe one of the fixes that didn't work before would help now. Unfortunately, IFI pulled the patch and reverted the game back to its day one state, claiming it was causing more issues for more people. Of course Steam automatically 'reverted' my copy and I was back to a nonfunctional game. I tried the 'fix' that worked the night I got the game, but that didn't work this time around. Removed the game, downloaded & installed, all with no change. The game would always crash within seconds of opening.

4 days after purchasing the game, June 2nd came, and Steam introduced it's Return Policy. At this point, I was still wanting to get the game to work. I spent several days trying a variety of things the get one single game to work. I even re-installed my Windows OS just because (my data is always backed up). Nothing changed. Re;Birth1 worked while Re;Birth2 crashed almost instantly. I decided I'd try for a refund and repurchase the game when a fix was released. Steam seemed unwilling to do this, maybe because I purchased the game prior to the policy, but tried walking me through some fixes. Back and forth I sent several emails asking for a refund and confirming I'd already done what they were asking. The delays between each message was about 12-24 hours. Eventually, the 12th arrived, aka 2 weeks, and I was told I was now outside their policy and to contact IFI, again.

I gave up on the game. Since I was now stuck with it, I'd wait for a fix. None ever came. Fast forward to late October and I though I'd give Re;Birth2 another shot. After all this time, still nothing changed. I decided to contact IFI again. Maybe something new would happen. I got a replay asking to try a few new things, but as I expected, the game still would not crash. After about a week, they told me "We will definitely let the dev team know about this problem" and didn't hear anything back. I even replied again a few weeks later with no response. As stated before, not a single patch/update has been released for Re;Birth2 since the one that was pulled. IFI has even released Re;Birht3 and other Neptunia games on Steam. At thins point, I was sure IFI had abandoned Re;Birth2 to work on other games.

During all this, I picked up a PS Vita, since I had a fair number of games I wanted to play on this system. I decided that if Re;Birth2 went on sale for under $15, I'd purchase it; effectively getting two copies of the same game. Well, even to today, that game has always hovering around $30. Last week however, I earned a $25 Amazon gift card at work and decided to use that to purchase this game I've waited nearly a year to play. Today, the my physical PC Vita copy of Re;Birth2 came in and is working perfectly on my Vita.

So, the take away from all if this is really simple, at least for me. Firstly, I won't expect Steam to actually provide a refund, even though to this day, my Steam copy of Re;Birth2 has only 1.5 hours of play [screenshot], and secondly, to never purchase another IFI port, since if it doesn't work with one's unique hardware configuration, you're likely SOL.

 

And to think I was considering getting all 3 of those Re;birth on Steam when they went on sale again. If 2 isn't going to work, I'm not going to bother getting 1 and 3. That would be like watching a 3 part animated series and only watching the first and third parts, because the second part just won't play because of a company's lack of porting ability and bug fixing.

I'm glad I read this, even though you had to get the crappy end of the deal to reveal it. It also gives me something to consider for my PS Vita too, since I only have 3 games for it so far (Assassin's Creed 3: Liberation; Gravity Rush; Ragnarok Odyssey).

 

I had problems with Re;Birth 2 as well. The game worked fine, until I got to the first fight. Nepgear had no face (it was just a black void) and doing anything would make the game not load at all. I would reload, and this time the monster never loaded in and it got worse each time.

Spoiler

I had pirated it because my laptop suuuuuucks and wanted to make sure I could run it before I bought it, so I thought it might have been a bad rip, but every other rip I tried, the game would not work.