I use Windows 10 21H1.

Hmm, unfortunately it would appear that the operating system is not the culprit here; GOG support says they can't do much to move anything forward until they can better narrow down what's causing the issue, hopefully we'll manage to stumble upon something.

Has anyone tried under Linux with Proton or something?

So, after reading through this and finally having some time to mess around some. I believe this may be processor related.

I decided to try this on my Intel machine, and my Surface, and it launches without issue.


However on my main rig, which is a Ryzen 9 3900x, it bombs out each time. Question is do any of you use Ryzen as well?

Intel i7-5700HQ.

In my case, my PC is a Intel Core i5-10400. So, it's not a problem with Ryzen. It's very likely some kind of incompatibility, but I believe it's more likely on the software side rather than hardware. Maybe it's driver related?

Would it help GOG support if we could send them dxdiag files (or something similar)? They might see something that we have in common that would explain this?

I inform that I managed to download and reinstall the Steam version of the game and it works without any problem. I have both versions installed, I tried to run the GOG one after the Steam one worked but it still can't run, and also that I have my suspicions that it is the Galaxy64.dll and steam_api.dll files that are generating the problem, it seems that the game tries to access the client and it gives problems in certain hardware...

I passed this along to the GOG support person who's been working with me, and this was his reply: As such, if anyone hasn't already opened their own ticket with GOG support it's suggested that you either do that or post your own dxdiag results here.

Interesting. This means that there's something wrong with the GOG build of the game. Most likely it's some kind of edge case happening only in some specific circumstance that isn't properly handled. IFI probably did something slightly wrong while modifying the game to implement Galaxy, and only with this one. In the end, odds are it will be up to IFI to fix the issue in their code and publish a new build.

I'm not really comfortable with posting a dxdiag file on a public forum. So, I'll open a ticket with GOG support and send it to them this way. Hopefully, it will help identify the cause of the issue.

So after bashing my head against the wall, and the above blowing my CPU idea out of the water.

Do you guys use System Locale for playing other Japenese locale games?

If so this might be breaking it, i changed my Laptop to use the Japanese Locale (as my main rig is setup to be), and the game no longer launched, once i moved it back to English ( United States ), it worked.

IF you're on windows 10, make sure you change it in control panel, not just in the settings "Region", has to be the System Locale.

Yeah, my system locale is Japanese.

Changing back to English would break stuff in my case, so I can't/won't do that.

Wondering if you can use that system locale emulator software to test, but it appears, at least for me, that did work. My main rig won't be able to change but I can play this on a different machine.

Very odd behavior I'm curious if Gsocorro, above, has the same system locale and if Steam handles that different than GoG's does.

Hopefully some of this helps others.

Using Microsoft Apploc also causes a crash...

It would appear I owe you a beer - my non-unicode language setting was indeed on Japanese, and after switching it to US English and restarting my laptop Nep RPG started right up.

Cheers for discovering this and passing it on: I wonder if it turns out to be the linchpin for others in this thread as well.

No problem, followed the thread from early on, but didn't have time to do testing with my workload currently, so to my surprise when my Surface launched it without a problem, had to be either Chipset or System Locale.

Wouldn't doubt many who are playing Neptunia games have or play other Anime/Japanese games that require System Locale change.