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This version of my review is truncated from what I originally wrote. If you would like to read my uncut version, please click here.
Sisters vs. Sisters is IF/CH's latest spinoff entry into the Neptunia series, sporting all the usual things that come with that; a different gameplay style, new characters, etc. There's a lot to like here, but there's also a bunch of caveats that come with it.
World map and overworld navigation is much like any other Neptunia game, where you pick a location on a map and navigate around a monster filled level until you get to an event trigger. This game's levels are... not very good. Most areas are highly linear (this is true of most Neptunia games but you can really feel it here) and consist mostly of long walks through trenches of terrain occasionally split up by a monster or three. Sometimes there might be a fork in the road that leads you to either an item or a ladder that you can activate to act as a shortcut to a previous part of the map, a small mercy to the tedium of running back and forth across a level. Occasionally you might have to take an alternate path to push a button to open a door or lower a block, but level progression doesn't really go much more in depth than that. Visually several areas feel very muddy to look at, sporting unimpressive color palettes and textures. There's a few that look quite nice (such as Planeptune), but due to the game's nature of reusing areas they're few and far between.
Combat is... passable. Sometimes. SvS takes a real time approach to combat that isn't unlike a Tales Of game or FF7 Remake. There's a lot to like about it: whaling on an enemy with a few attacks to then quick switch over to one of your two other partners for a follow-up attack and a damage bonus to your combo feels quite nice, and being able to customize two sets of moves (these are completely separate movesets where you normally cannot go from using one move in one to a move in the other, I'll touch on that later) to fit different purposes feels very versatile, even if some moves are objectively better than others. There's a bunch of your typical action RPG stuff, like dodging and blocking, and a very inspired "Tactical" gauge that fills up passively during a fight, which lets you use special moves or items. It's not a half bad system on paper, and even in-game sometimes it works competently despite some of the repetition.
Except that everything in the system is stupid slow. If you use only one attack in your combo, you're completely locked down in the animation until it finishes. If you get hit by most attacks in the game you'll be cancelled out of whatever attack you're doing (this goes for Tactical gauge moves as well) and have to start the combo again. If you block an attack, depending on the strength of the blocked attack, you can get sent across the entire battlefield and then half to endure several seconds of delay before your character chooses to finally drop their shield, long after you've let go of the button. Enemies that have rapid attacks will throw you into stunlock with no way out, as being attacked will take all control from you until the pain animation has played out completely. You also cannot swap to your other partners in this scenario.
Some of these problems can be alleviated through the Disc Development system present in the game. For 500 of its unique currency you gather from every battle, you can input a game genre, a "Scout" character with its own genre, and an additional named item, those of which are found throughout the game. After a certain amount of real time, you'll recieve a Disc item, which contains 1-2 buffs that can be applied to a character, with each character being able to equip 4 Discs at a time. Some buffs are simple, such as increasing the damage of a specific type of attack, or providing resistance against a certain element. The most useful ones are going to be any of the ones that allow you to block/dodge out of a combo and the like. Unfortunately, the Disc system seems stupidly RNG-heavy, and I never did find a pattern to how it produces Discs. Maybe it was just my own fault, but because of that I ended up setting the entire mechanic aside about a third of the way through the game. It proved to not have a whole lot of effect on my playthrough, as barring the typical couple of unfair boss fights that a Neptunia game contains this game isn't very difficult, but refreshingly doesn't require any real grinding in the EXP department, taking more of a Super Mario RPG approach where as long as you occasionally stop on your path to fight an enemy here or there you'll be more than ready to take on whatever boss is up next.
The story is overall a decent step up from typical Neptunia fare (and even acts as an indirect sequel to VII!), but it only starts to get going over halfway through the game. Because of that, a lot of the plot's connections are dumped on you in the span of just a few hours, rapidly becoming a convoluted mess involving gratuitous amounts of time travel and paradoxes. This is especially felt due to the length of the game, being about half the length of a typical Neptunia (which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing, as it cuts out a bunch of the filler), which means about 14 hours of not a lot going on to suddenly being bombarded with 6 hours of all of the plot at once. I don't think it's written poorly, persay (I actually really enjoyed how different it was from any other Neptunia), but the pacing is pretty bad, and cutscenes frequently will end with you going "Huh?" towards the tail end of the game, and not in the inquisitive way.
There's some new characters present, and while they are unfortunately not playable (though I believe the recent Switch port has rectified that), they are enjoyable companions to listen to throughout the game, with entertaining personalities, believable motives, and actual character arcs. Even the previous cast of Neptunia characters feels like a surprising breath of fresh air, as most of them don't feel like the heavily Flanderized versions of themselves that have been thrown around the last several years, and the game is much better for it. However, me saying "listen" might be a strong word...
Because the English dub only covers about a 1/5th of the dialogue in the entire game. If you're a JP dub player this is obviously a nonissue, but as someone who has grown into Neptunia listening to the characters' English VAs it was very disappointing to hear how little of the game was actually voiced. Neptunia's English dubs have never been full coverage, but they do try to at least cover most of the major plot events. Even near the epilogue I was getting cutscenes that were completely unvoiced that were crucial to the resolution of the game's events. This game also features a good bit of mid-level/battle dialogue, and it's a huge pain to try to multitask fighting a boss and reading dialogue popping up in the corner. I can only assume that IFI's budget was super tight for this spinoff, and it shows.
So with so many flaws why the hell would I be recommending this? I think it's a mix of characters being more than one note combined with an overall decent plot despite the pacing issues, and even at times the combat itself is a bit fun when you aren't busy getting stunlocked or cancelled out of your moves. The game doesn't overstay its time, sporting a reasonable ~20 hour playthrough even with looking at side events and doing extra quests. It's certainly not a great game but I think there's enough going on here primarily with the plot and characters that it's worth grabbing if you're looking for a bit more of a fine-tuned Neptunia setting. To its credit as well, it's the only Neptunia spinoff I've played that feels like a mainline entry and not just some side project, even with the jank that comes from a lower budget and IF experimenting with new mechanics.