I am having not-infrequent issues with combat freezing during enemy move cycles. The game itself does not freeze, but rather the enemy does nothing on their turn, going into a perpetual wait state where it seems unable to take any action. This is preventing the game from going forward and I have to kill it in Windows and restart it. It happens the most in the TRON-like floating arena environment, but I have encountered it in other settings as well.

Has anyone else experienced this? Is there a simple fix, such as changing the resolution perhaps?

I have. Running on Linux via Wine. Killing the game and reloading from the last save had been my solution so far. I became distracted by other games and the subs were really bugging me (IIRC there are better fan made subs). Never really looked into it further.

How did you even get that far?
I got it installed but when I try to run it in wine it crashes immediately.

Believe it needs some winetricks. I will see if I can remember to check tomorrow for which ones or what I did. Guess I should see if it still runs with the 2.0 builds.

The winetricks needed: This appears to suffer from bug 40767. Error is similar to this: Either apply the proposed v5 patch (deferred until after the code freeze) to 2.0-rc6 or use Wine 1.9.10 or Staging 1.9.10 (before the change).

It is a general process bug with the game, exist in all the three games. It happens more often on Win7 than on WinXP however. It is something with the engine because the PSVita version also suffers from slowdowns during fights for no reasons. I don't know if that is releated to this bug.

Windows XP ? OMG I am not kidding but I lastly used it 10 years ago . I even not sure it's supporting XP or 32-bit OS . (I know there was 64-bit version but never use it) And I am sure about one thing , generally people with INTEL cards trying to play this game and complaining about a lots of issues . This game don't support integrated cards too . It will be work . But it's not guaranteed %100 percent . Checked for a quick comparison and here you go :

System Requirements

Minimum:
OS: Windows 7(64bit)
Processor: Core2Duo 2.66 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: DirectX 10.x or OpenGL 3.3 or better graphics card with 1 GB RAM and support for v4 shaders
DirectX: Version 10
Storage: 7 GB available space
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
Additional Notes: Caution: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5xxx, 1GB VRAM 5000 series may not work properly with this game.

Recommended:
OS: Windows 7(64bit) or later
Processor: 3GHz Intel i3 or equivalent
Memory: 6 GB RAM
Graphics: DirectX 10.x or OpenGL 3.3 or better graphics card with 1 GB RAM and support for v4 shaders
DirectX: Version 10
Storage: 7 GB available space
Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
Additional Notes: Caution: ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5xxx, 1GB VRAM 5000 series may not work properly with this game.

Your main problem is probably Windows XP and 32-bit . If you are using INTEL card and it's too . For Vita slowdowns . Some of the games doesn't work well with their native platforms . There are many reasons for it , bad codding , hardware limitations etc . And generally PC version fixes that problem .

I used Win7 OS but had to set the compatibility to WinXP on Hyperdimension Neptunia Re:Birth1 to make it work. Still had problems and very often crashed or freezed. For my friend the game run perfectly and he's using WinXP. I guess the game itself not really support modern systems, that's the problem. Was not optimized for Win7.

Interesting . I used Windows 10 for my playthrough . 80+ hours in whole trilogy and I didn't see any single crash .

Maybe Win10 fixed something with the operation system. I doesn't know but won't install Win10 just for this. That system just keep messing in my workplace, I doesn't want to see that bugfest at home. XD

No crashes on my Windows 7 x64 rig either. My Laptop with Winows 8.1 also runs the game totally smooth.

If anyone still has the bug, which is kinda frequent on weak CPUs for RB1+3, setting the games process priority to real time fixed it for a lot of people in the Steam version.

I never encountered this bug during my 80+ hrs logged ( during several 2 playthroughs and on the 3rd). However when I started the game anew again for an LP that I am doing for my YouTube Channel is when I started to encounter this bug. From what I can tell for those who have tried to diagnose this problem is that this game does not like recording software for whatever reason. However when I set the priority to real time during my recording sessions it fixed the issue because I was able to record for over 1 hr with out any issues.

Another thing that this game does not like if you install the game to any other hard drive than the Drive with the OS on it and that is from reading the postings on the Steam message-boards of this game.

Re-Birth 2 however is the game that I have had the most issues with. With the Random crashing when first firing up the game and loading up an event or a dungeon.

For whatever reason some people had more issues with ReBirth 3 and I never had encountered any issues with just normal game playing no recording of footage at all.

I would recommend reading the Steam Message-boards with this game and with Rebirth 2 & 3 because there are plausible fixes.

The installation on any other Harddrive/Partition other than the one with the OS on it might be a Steam thing, currently having over 60 hours and never ran into this issue. Would be nice to find out what fully causes it.
Oh and I'm running it on a 64 bit Win7.