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 not Fon-poor and can’t upgrade my Industry level. So 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!