I had REALLY been looking forward to the launch of the new urban fantasy gacha game Neverness to Everness. It had been the game I was waiting for and I’d anticipated falling down, down, down an NTE rabbit hole until summertime or beyond.
I’m sad to report that this hasn’t happened. I really really WANT to love the game the way Bhagpuss is loving it, but some things can’t be forced.
My dissapointment can be sorted into two buckets.
Bucket #1 is a lack of polish, at least on the Playstation 5 version. Mostly we’re talking Quality of Life things. There are a lot of places in the UI where you have to drill down a few levels to get to the task you want to work on, but then backing up takes you all the way out of the UI and you have to drill back down again to pick the next option on a list. Doesn’t sound like much but it just adds a certain amount of friction and frustration to getting things done. Then there are the voiced dialog segments where you can’t skip forward as quickly as I’d like to. For whatever reason when a character starts talking, but I’ve already read the text on the screen, hitting the “next” button doesn’t do anything immediately. Eventually it does, but I like to advance at the speed I’m reading and it is all much slower than this. Sometimes even after the character has finished their line, I STILL can’t proceed unless I wait for 10 seconds or so. More frustration. Lastly I’ve encountered some bugs that make certain quests uncompleteable, but maybe that’s just me being unlucky.
I’m guessing all of the above will get cleared up as updates roll out and rough surfaces get smoothed down.
The second bucket, though, I don’t have as much hope for. This is the content. I expected something like an anime-themed Grand Theft Auto that had my character and their friends going on adventures and getting into trouble. Instead I got what feels like a babysitting simulation. My character is a young adult; let’s say late teens-early 20s, based on appearance. But they’re surrounded by children who behave like annoying shogun anime children. They tend to be tropes. The shy young boy who is really smart, the way over-excited young woman. The mysterious but child-like character that can’t stay awake and talks like she is an infant. Others who fixate on getting desserts constantly. They’re all pretty annoying.
But the worst… the absolute WORST, is this character Taygedo who is an otter with a tv for a head who says one thing over and over again but somehow everyone understands him, and he just… ugh, just thinking about him is irritating me, and he seems to be a main character, at least in the early game. He says something like “Togee-dogee” over and over again while being manic. That’s him at the top of this post. He needs to go away.
Now let me be very very clear… bucket #2 problems are very personal and highly subjective. You might find all these characters to be just delightful. A lot of people, I’m told, actually LIKE kids. Can you believe that? I don’t understand it but let people like the things they like, right? 🙂
It’s not all bad. I love the style of the game, and the music is pretty good. I like the main character just fine; I took the female MC and she is voiced really well and isn’t the least bit annoying. The city itself is fun to wander around in. It feels very ‘alive’ as you overhear conversations going on around you.
I’m not giving up. I’m hoping that as I get deeper into the story I’ll meet more adults and have to spend less time with Taygedo and the children. If you thought Paimon in Genshin Impact was annoying, let’s just say you ain’t seen anything yet!
I’m really enjoying it but I’m on PC and the UI and controls are fine. Identical to every other gacha game, near enough. Also I’ve barely touched the story so a lot of the content issues you mention just haven’t come up often enough to be annoying. I’ve met all those characters but only briefly, except for Mint, who I like. The rest of hem seem like they might be interesting as I get to know them but it’s too early to say yet. Then again, I thought Paimon was just about the best thing about Genshin Impact so we may be coming from very different places.
If I have a problem with the game it’s that it doesn’t look like I expected. From the videos and trailers I was expecting something a lot grainier and grittier visually, and also more futuristic, more like the Edgerunners anime. NTE is very clean, aesthetically. All straight lines and flat surfaces. And it has an almost contemporary feel, barely even near-future. The other thing I don’t like much is how hard it is to steer the vehicles with the keyboard and mouse. It feels like that was made with a controller in mind.
Overall, though, I’m very happy with it. Maybe it’ll grow on you. It’s always a problem when you come in with high expectations.
The driving is actually pretty good on Playstation. It even supports the fancy pressure sensitive buttons!
I played today on Google Play and had the same text speed issues. Under the text there’s like an ‘audio playing’ icon, then a “ready to hit the button” icon loads after it. But even once that happens the game won’t let me progress. I’m sure it’ll get fixed, though.
I haven’t actually noticed the disparity in speed between the voice acting and the written text because I’ve been chosing to hear the whole of the voiced part every time so far. If I like the voice acting in a game I usually let it play out, even if I can read the text much faster.
Even so, I do still sometimes see the same issue you report. After the actor has finished speaking, the audio playing icon sometimes hangs around for a few seconds before the game lets me click to the next piece of dialog. I assumed i was lag, though, so I didn’t really think much more about it. It doesn’t particularly annoy me anyway but obviously it shouldn’t be happening. Also, it doesn’t happen every time, which was really why I thought it must be lag…
The slow text speed also bugs me. It’s bad enough I may just give up until they patch in a speed-up.
I want to try this, but I haven’t yet. This post is making me lean towards PC over the PS5. Though I do like the idea of playing a pretty game on a giant TV screen, it sounds like the UI might work better on the PC.
After a few more days of playing I realized what was happening on the PS5 (or generally when playing with a controller).
So for example you click into a screen full of activities. There’s a sub-menu on the left. You hit X to go into the first one, do whatever you need to do. Then hit your back button and it seems like nothing changes, so you hit it again and now you’re completely out of the UI. That’s what I was doing. Then I finally realized that hitting Back WAS working just with no visual indications. If I hit back then up/down on the D-pad I realized I was once again on the sub-nav.
Also you can link accounts and play on both PC and PS5 with the same account, which is what I’ve been doing.
I find the driving is really good on the PS5, if you like the adaptive triggers, which it supports. So I’d urge you to at least try it on PS5 for that reason alone!
Those delays during conversations are due to the fact that they only let you carry on when the characters have done all the animations you’re supposed to see, because they‘re deemed as important to the context as what‘s being said.
I find it irritating, too, but I‘m pretty certain that‘s their reasoning.
I don‘t mind Taygedo as a character, but they really should have made up a „real“ language for him or just have him talk plain english. I can‘t stand too much repetition when it comes to language and sound in general, so, yeah, he‘s unfortunately really annyoing due to that.
Yeah for me it isn’t so much the character himself, just the constant repetition. Sounds like you and I have the same sensitivity to repeated noise!