I wrote a long screed (lately all I do is screeds…I’ve been blocked from SO many comment sections…probably) on a recent Neverness to Everness post at Inventory Full. I only stopped scribbling because I remembered I was in someone else’s comment section and maybe I shouldn’t post a COMPLETE wall ‘o text.

I stopped but now I’ve been carrying around these residual NTE thoughts and I need to get ’em out. I’m gonna go ultra-cheese and copy/paste my comment then go on from there. Here’s the comment:

Old Comment

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I still struggle! The UI on console was getting a lot better but this week’s patch seemed to bring back some older nuisance bugs. Hopefully they get smoothed out again.

But what is with this mysterious texter that spams you every day? Hate that person!

And Sakiri is a psychopath. I was doing a quest and was forced to take her along and we met this dude, one of a pair of twins, and she tried to get her monster to eat the poor guy. I’d happily throw Sakiri in a volcano.

I DID get Hokori using the dice I’d been hoarding, so that was awesome. Love her. Love the main character, too. Most of the adults I really like (maybe not Adler) but all these kids… they’re all like fingernails on a chalkboard.

I was doing the quest where you’re at an auction trying to buy an anomoly and the kids from the Courier Service were there. I finally get away from one set of kids and now I’m dealing with another (though they’re not as grating as the Eibon kids who’re just awful to everyone, including each other.) Edgar is slowly growing on me a little just because I feel bad for the poor kid; the girls just savage him constantly.

I’m trying to figure out how to unlock stuff I keep reading about, like racing, delivering, real estate. I just never get very far. Many days I don’t even get the award for fighting 5 enemies because I spend all my time on txting with this scammer who pings me every day.

I’m not giving up, though! Why? Because like you I LOVE the city. I love seeing a busker in a plaza and folks are watching and dancing and such… driving my little scooter around at 40 kph cause that’s as fast as it goes. I think I can run ALMOST that fast if I sprint.

I’ve completely forgotten how to fight since I do it so rarely; I’ll have to redo the tutorials if I ever start seeing combat frequently again.

I don’t know what kind of feedback Hotta is getting but I hope future content skews away from all the annoying kids. But maybe I’m just a curmudgeon and most people like them.

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New Stuff

Since then I’ve pressed on. I realized I was completely ignoring the “Industry” icon on my in-game phone screen. I opened it up and was told to do a race. Went to do the race and someone politely pointed out that I didn’t own a car. I’d been to this point once before and my gamer brain assumed I would be tutorial-led to where I could obtain a car at some point. This time I just opened the map and found *gasp!* a car dealership. So I went and bought the cheapest car I could and did some races.

It was tough timing for NTE since I was doing this the same day Forza Horizon 6 (or is it 5?) came out, but in spite of that I found racing around the city to be pretty entertaining, and now I had the Industry bug. I’ve now bought a Cafe but am just learning how to run it.

I also started paying attention to Events and stumbled into some that were WAY too difficult for me, which I honestly appreciated because the game has been really easy up until now. I don’t want a Souls-like experience but I guess I at least want a reason to make my characters more powerful.

I’ve completed as much of the main story quest as I can for now; I have to raise my “Hunter Level” (which seems to basically be your account level) before I can continue. I didn’t mind this, though, since it somehow gave me the OK to just putz around and do whatever.

This has improved my enjoyment of the game quite a bit. I stay as far away from the annoying kids as I can while heading to different points of interest. Next up, fishing!

Also the mad texter that I mentioned in the comments has stopped for now, which I appreciated. I really wanted to Block that person.

Not to say there isn’t more work for Hotta to do. There’s still some UI oddities, I still have bugged quests I can’t finish (and as far as I can tell, I can’t abandon/restart them either) and haven’t been able to finish since the first week. Like the one involving Miss Patty:

I guess in a lot of ways NTE just throws too much at me at once, considering often enough my play sessions are like 30 minutes a day. By the time I attend to everything that has the red exclamation point that indicates “something new to check!” I’m out of time. I’m guessing this will ease as I get farther in and I run out of new tutorials and such, plus just get into an efficient routine of all the daily tasks.

Anyway, since I have been warming to the game, and my first post about Neverness to Everness was pretty ‘meh’, I wanted to do an update. I paid for the $5 daily login ‘subscription’ (using $$ I earned by filling out random Google surveys) which has me logging in every day to collect the goodies, and that’s worked well to keep me semi-engaged and get me through.