Since I played 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Wuthering Waves for the first time, I sort of knew that we were entering a gacha-game golden age. There was more to WuWa than spending money and collecting characters. The world was enormous and actually fun to explore, and🎀 even its generic gacha story started to get more interesting with later chapter updates.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Neverness to Everness is already positioning i൩ts💫elf as something totally different, but it has clearly drawn on Wuthering Waves’ successes.
In NTE, you drive around a city in customizable cars, compete in online races, buy propertꦗies and businesses, and defeat strange anomalies, all while meeting a host of bizarre characters - including a small human with a TV for a head. There’s even a Grand Theft Auto-style wanted star system. Bash up enough property or steal items from shops, and the police will chase you through the city. NTE is an urban exploration RPG with some gacha tacked on the side.
When the trailer for Neverness to Everness dropped at S♒GF last year, I joined in with eve♌ryone else making tired old memes about getting anime GTA before GTA6.
Tired as they were, it turns out the memes were basically right on th🅰e money.
Neverness To Everness Doesn't Break Out Of The Typical Gacha Formula
Speaking of money, these games make an inexplicable amount of cash. Some of that money - though definitely not all of it - is poured back into the system: gacha games receive frequent updates, usually massive ones, and in the case of gacha ga💧me giants like Hoyoverse, completely new games built from the ground up.
Most of these g✃ames follow a precise formula. Your character usually wakes up with amnesia, and you’re thrust into an often weird and occasionally interesting world as the hero of the story, surrounded by a roster of characters who you can eventually capture and pull out of your backpack, like Pokemon. You complete missions to earn currency, which can be used to pull on character banners. If you’re lucky, you’ll get the character you want. If y🌠ou’re not, you can either keep playing or spend some money to try and get the character you want. So it goes.
Neverness to Everness is no different. It follows the same tropes and the same tired formula of gacha games. But all of these games - Wuthering Waves, Genshin, Zenless Zone Zero, Honkai Star Rail, and countless others, are all really in competition with each other. They duke it out over which one deserves your time the most. Each new game or chapter in an existing gacha has to outdo the previous one, and out♈do the market simultaneously.
From my brief time in the world of Neverness to Everness, I can safely say that this gacha game 168澳洲幸运5开♔奖网:goes above and beyond any of its predecessors.
But It Does Do A Lot Differently
NTE is set in the city of Hethereau. This place is pretty large, but not enormous. You can drive from one side of the map to the other in just a few 🌃minutes. Despite its modest size, Hethereau is packed with stuff to do. There are plenty of optional side quests and items to collect, inclu꧂ding figurines and furniture, as well as delivery missions and other “City Commissions” you can complete for character experience and upgrade materials, among other resources.
You have total freedom to explore the city. You can clim𒈔b any wall, explore any rooftop, and go into most, but not all, buildings. Despite this being an early build and the developers warning us repeatedly that bugs are to be expected, the experience has been unbelievably smooth for a game of this scope. A little screen jitter here and there, a couple of NPCs falling through the world, and a T pose sporadically isn’t enough to detract from how good this game looks, even in its unfinished state.
Neverness to Everness is a very pretty game. I kept catching myself stopping to admire the vista of the city, or the reflection of the world on the shiny chassis of my car. The chara🔯cters are detailed and have been clearly overhauled since some of the earlier testing. For those who play these games to become parasocially-attached to the characters, you’ll find no shortage of personas, styles, and dialogue here to dive into.
There’s even a text messaging system in the🌸 game. I don't even message my real friends, let alone these guys, so 🐭I left it largely alone.
As is the way with gacha games, there’s a lot of talking between action scenes. Some people love this, but it’s not really for me. I usually just watch the first few scenes to get the gist of what’s going on and then skip to the next bit. However, NTE has some seriously impressive cutscenes, the kind of stuff that made me hesitate to click the skip button. Sometimes it felt like I 🍸was watching an actual TV show, not just playin😼g a gacha game. Kudos to Hotta Studio for raising the bar like this.
Typical Story Beats
To vaguely cover the story, you’re a forgetful hero who wakes up in Hethereau with no idea how you got there. You’re naturally able to coꩲmmunicate and capture anomalies and inter🐼act with oddities. Anomalies are bizarre lifeforms drawn to Earth by something called the Hypervortex, and oddities are creatures large and small (some even resembling humans) that have been impacted by the same strange celestial event.
You’re taken into employment by the owners and opera🎉tors of an antique appraisal store called Eibon. Here you’ll meet Hatori, the owner of the shop, as well as her colleagues, Adler, Nanally, Sakri, Edgar, and Tadegayo. Your job is to investigate anomalous happenings for a series of clients. An ea▨rly mission takes you to check out a photography shop that has been experiencing some strange happenings: the quest sort of plays out like a detective point-and-click game, ending with an epic fight against a sentient roll of film.
I’m sure there’s some grand overarching story, but I haven’t really reached that point yet. I’m too 𒅌busy exploring the world.
Driving And Exploration Is Super Fun
Ho꧃tta Studios gave us access to all the characters available in the beta and, more importantly, all the vehicles. Driving in this game feels surprisingly good considering you’d expect it to be a bit of an oversight in a gacha RPG. But it turns out it’s a pretty core part of gameplay, as you’ll not only need to complete delivery missions at high speed, but you can compete with others in multiplayer racing lobbies. The drifting is particularly cool.
The driving - and the game in general - really reminds of an old game I used to play years ago called Drift City. Anyone remember 🌄that? Damn, that game ruled.
I als🍬o found myself naturally inclined to explore most nooks and crannies in the game. I purchased a property - the largest mansion in the game - and started to decorate it with some of the furniture I’d found just lying around, including a wooden table I found in an alleyway. By the time I’d worked my way through all this random content, I realised that I’d a) completely forgotten about the story quests, b) completely for💧gotten I was playing a gacha game, and c) understood that what Hotta have done here is create an experience that goes beyond a spinning wheel of content to grind.
The Ups And Downs Of NTE
Don’t get me wrong. I’🥃m sure there will be a grind in Neverness to Everness; it’s just in the early stages and I can’t see it yet. You can never truly escape the grind of a gacha game.
There are also plenty of issues with the game. The combat feeওls fine as it is - the new parrying system is great fun - but it lacks sophisticated combos and proper character synergy. All the enemies are really slo🥀w to kill as well. My team is now midway through level 30 and they struggle to defeat level 18 anomalies. It's quite frustrating, really, as the combat just devolves into button-mashing.
While I really enjoy how expansive the world of NTE is, I haven’t found myself completely entranced by it like I was during the opening of Wuthering Wavꦬes and Honkai Star Rail. The rewards for exploration are plentiful, but nothing feels that impactful. I’m not sure whether this is an issue with the rewards themselves or the way that theಞ game presents those rewards to you. I’m looking for a dopamine hit: really sell it to me.
Overall, Neverness to Everness has piqued my curiosity even more than I thought it would. I’m a fairly casual gacha enjoyer (I typically play the first doze💜n or so hours of a game before dropping it), but I think that NTE might actually appeal to a wider audience than your typical gacha game. There’s a lot more going on here, and I’m tentatively excited to see which direction Hotta Studios takes this game in the coming months.
