In and around the blogosphere I only know of 3 people playing Neverness to Everness. Bhagpuss, Mailvaltar and me. Bhagpuss is a blogging machine but even machines need some support now and then (to be clear, I don’t think Bhagpuss is literally a machine. He hardly ever uses emphasis crutches, binary contrasts or dramatic fragmentation. [I’m not 100% sure what these are but they are terms called out in a tool I was looking at called “Stop Slop” which is supposed to make AI writing seem more human.])
See if AI was writing this it would NOT start the post with irrelvant tangents. That’s how you know it is really me!
Anyway, I was feeling a bit off this weekend so I stayed in and played videogames all day, and mostly that meant Neverness to Everness. The next big content drop happens this week and I kind of wanted to be caught up. There are like 3 or 4 tiers of quests. I’m pretty sure I’m caught up on the Main Questline unless the next step is gated behind a high hunter level. I did the big side quests, including one that incorporates the rhythm game that I find extemely difficult. Fortunately you only had to play it 4 times and the rest of the quest was mostly teleporting around and talking to folks. I met Akane and Aurelia, I think? The former is an adult who I liked. The latter appears child-like but she was in a band with Akane so I’m guessing she is older than she appears.
Side note: In NTE certain people (including all the playable characters) have “Esper abilities” [we can call it magic] which have certain side-effects that skew towards growing animal parts (cat ears, tails, etc) and potentially long life. So a character might look like a child but be quite old. Sadly they generally still behave like children so tend to be shrill and hyper.
Anywway Aurelia seems much calmer so I look forward to learning more about her, including why she doesn’t walk but instead rides around on a floating jellyfish!
But most of this quest had me running around with Nanally and Haniel, both of whom present as tweens or young teens. I have hardened myself to get to where I can put up with one or the other of these two, but together they really gave me a headache. So I was both glad to get the quest over, but from a big picture point of view I enjoyed it. I hope they fix this mini-game to make it a little easier because it could be pretty fun.
After that was done I just started grinding, basically. My main team is at character level 40, with Mint pushed to 50. I unlocked a bunch of anomaly fights so that I can farm upgrade materials for characters, abilities and gear. I did a curious amount of fishing. I used up all my Character Pixels, consumed some recharge items and spent those, too.
There was a short-term event running where you got points for stopping crimes in progress. Those were pretty fun. Human enemies are nothing after you’ve been fighting anamolies all day. I wouldn’t mind more of these. Needing to stop a bunch of crime meant I spent a lot of time running around the city rather than teleporting, and that in itself was quite entertaining. The devs did a great job of making the world feel alive and I often stop to eavesdrop on conversations that are apparently only there for ‘color’.
Did a lot of climbing for magic crows that give you some kind of gee-gaw that you then take to a sexy witch who’ll take them and level up something that gives you rewards. I pay careful attention… notice the only detail I can recall is that Blackbird, the witch, is sexy (in that anime waifu sort of way). But this system is like the one in Genshin Impact where you collect gee-gaws to take to the shrines.
I still have a ton of ‘minor’ quests in my log, and I need to learn to play Mahjong as there’s a place called Little Sparrow where you can earn Fons (the in-game currency) by playing, but if they gave you any indication of HOW to play Mahjong, I totally missed it.
We’re past the first month of release and I’m playing enough that I renewed the daily login subscription thingie. I may or may not have spent 1,500,000 fons on an outfit for my character. In my defense I THOUGHT it was a bundle of several outfits but nope. It was a t-shirt and a pair of frayed denim short-shorts. Clothes are expensive in Hethereau! Anyway the daily stipend of Fons you get with the subscription will help re-fill the coffers as I’m now Fon-poor and can’t upgrade my Industry level. So buying that outfit was probably not a wise move, but I’ll recover. In some ways I LIKE having to actually earn materials for upgrades.
Yeah, this is a total ramble but I’ve been trying to stay off of social media so when I want to just chatter on about a game I guess I’ll be doing it here on the blog!
I, too, am still a bit irritated by the high percentage of “children” among the game’s cast. I don’t find them to be quite as grating as you do, but still, I’d rather deal with young adults at the very least.
Akane is basically my favourite character in the game right now, it’s a shame that she doesn’t appear anymore once that quest-chain is over. I’m betting she’ll become a playable character at some point, but if the predictions/leaks/whatever are to be believed that might take a good while unfortunately.
First up, thanks for name-checking me in the title. I’m pretty sure that’s good for my Google ratings although how long that’s going to matter when they replace search with AI is anyone’s guess. Second up, I’m in bed typing this on the laptop which ought to stop it turning into an epic comment, hopefully. Just as well because this post is stuffed with what we used to call “comment hooks” back in my APA days…
I’m 99% sure Chapter 4 is as far as the MSQ goes so far. I’m up to date too and if my PC doesn’t play up again I should be good for the new content drop. I’m a bit dubious about the island setting but it’ll be interesting to see what they do with it.
I have a whole post brewing about the dissonance in NTE between who the game appears to be made for (male teens and twentysomethings) and who the narrative is apparently aimed at (Female tweens and teens). Even if you factor out the anime tropes of everyone looking either like unblemished youths or stoop-backed elders with precious little inbetween, NTE is bizarre, both in its choice of characters and storylines. Half the main cast are actual children and spoken of as such by the other half, although that doesn’t seem to stop any of them having full-time jobs instead of being at school so what age they are and what age even means in their society is very blurred. That’s not as weird as the storylines, though. Hardly any of them involve adventure at all. They all revolve around social media, friendship rituals, employment, chores and all kinds of things I find it very difficult to imagine adolescent boys being even slightly interested in. I find all the gacha games I’ve played to be much more willing to explore social and cultural concerns seriously than most of the MMOs and RPGs from the West I’ve tried but NTE is off the scale! I love it, personally, but I can’t make much sense of it commercially. So far, about the only actual game-like plot that’s emerged is the thing about Daffodil and Mother and that’s about 5% of the whole thing.
I’ve seen Aurelia described as “canonically disabled”. The jellyfish is her mobility aid, I believe. I’m not sure if she can walk without it. I only learned yesterday that Adler is blind, too. They’re doing a good job on representation in that area without being overly obvious about it. Not sure how they’re doing on LGBTQ+ representation, which I have an idea might be more problematic in China. I ought to look out for examples.
Could say a lot more but I’ve had enough of this laptop keyboard. Happy to hear you’re getting into it, anyway. It’ll more than do me until Ananta comes out! (Speaking of which, I noticed in their features video that Ananta has clothing you can buy and equip *by item*. That’s the number one feature I miss in most of these games so I’m looking forward to it!
The 1.1 patch dropped pretty late for me last night so I didn’t get to the island, but I’m looking forward to your post about!
I’m a little disappointed that this update leans into multiplayer as much as it does, but I guess if I just ignore the ‘events’ it won’t really impact me. I did try the racing game and found it frustrating and unfun, and the Bagel “social media” thing is just not something I’m interesting in messing with, particularly since I play with a controller and typing out messages that way is something you’d only do if you really hated yourself.
I did see some interaction with Nanally where she couldn’t do some job because she wasn’t an adult, so she, at least, is a bona fide child!