My initial reaction to Neverness to Everness was fairly tepid but there was enough there to keep me playing. Since them my enjoyment has increased a lot and I’ve played every day since launch. Yesterday I noticed I was at 49 hours heading in, so it’ll be at 50 today if I didn’t get that far last night.

For once I’m staying caught up with the story in one of these Genshin-Likes which I think helps keep me engaged. I’m looking forward to the next update to see where the tale takes us. There are a LOT of quests in NTE but I focus on the main ones and do the little side ones when the mood takes me. I shouldn’t really call them “little” since some of them are fairly involved and interesting. Let’s say “Side Quests” instead. Less demeaning.

Like all these games, NTE has a battle-pass thingie and like all of them, the amount of exp you can earn in the battle pass each week is limited. So the early part of the week I spend pushing on that until I hit cap, then I just putter around. You can spend a LOT of time just puttering around in NTE. It’s fun (for me at least) just to cruise around the city to see what’s going on.

I’m still focused on one main team which is Zero (the ‘you’ character), Mint, Hathor and Hotori. Hotori was earned via the premium gacha system, though using currency that I earned via playing rather than via purchasing. Hotta (the developer) is pretty generous with the handouts when you’re new. We’ll see if that continues. I have also rolled a lot on the standard gacha and got Mint so many times her skills are fully unlocked. Again, all using currency I got just by playing.

I like Mint because she calls me Coco because she thinks I smell like cocoa (and I LOVE her voice actor). I like Hotori because she calls me Precious. (I guess I’m revealing how shallow I am, eh?) And I like Hathor because she’s a badass on a bike, though in truth she IS the weak link in my loadout. Zero and Mint are level 60 and the other two are level 50 until I farm the appropriate “Ascend” materials for them. I hope I have that right. 60 and 50. Or was it 50 and 40? They’re maxed for Hunter Level 40 anyway.

I’ve been semi-avoiding the “Industry” system which is one of the hooks here. I own all the Cafes and keep them stocked in order to generate income (and I always do my own shopping so as to get the choicest ingredients!), I own two apartments because I needed two to qualify to level up my Industry Level, and otherwise I’ve mostly ignored all these mini-games for now. Oh, I fish now and then, too. I WANT to get into all these things but time is not infinite and the other parts of the game have been keeping me busy!

I spend very little time around Taygedo, who was a bit part of why I wasn’t loving the game at first. I did uncover at some point that Taygedo is female. A female otter with a TV for a head who talks about eating sea urchins all the time, which implies she is a sea otter so why is she on land? [Update: According to the Internet, this was a translation error and Taygedo is in fact male.] And when your head is a TV how do you even eat? There’re still a LOT of kids in the game but they’re slowly, slowly growing on me, to the point where if I’m hanging out with one of them they don’t bug me that much. When two of them are with me and start their chatterbox routine then I start grinding my teeth again. Baby steps.

In terms of bugs and controller UI inconsistences, the former seem to be mostly eradicated and they’re making progress on the latter. Also I suppose I’m just learning that different parts of the UI use different “Do it” buttons.

So yeah, Neverness to Everness has become a hit for me, like Genshin Impact and Wuthering Waves before it. I guess I just love these big-world, always-changing games full of combat and quests and ‘getting more stuff’ and making lots of numbers go up. And as with GI and WW before it, I limit my spending to $15/month which is a number I’m comfortable with from all those years of MMO subs. I spend $5 on the “log in every day and collect currency” subscription, and another $10 for the “Premium” battle pass. Actually the latter lasts for longer than a month so it isn’t quite $15/month but I’m not going to bother to do the math. The important take-away is that these are optional and people can and frequently do play completely for free and don’t spend anything.

Bottom line? You should at least give it a try. What do you have to lose other than an hour or two of your time!

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!