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Last time I pretty much only talked about the extremely well-designed world I’d had the pleasure to explore in Neverness to Everness, so now let’s focus on what the game actually is, shall we?

At its core this is an anime-style open world RPG with gacha mechanics to acquire new characters and weapons. If you’ve played Genshin Impact, for instance, you’ll have a good idea of what to expect in terms of character- and account-progression, daily routines and gacha systems.

Actually, you’ll know exactly what to expect for the most part. Seriously, I’m still astonished by how extremely alike gacha games are mechanically (at least the ones I’ve played), even if the actual gameplay hails from completely different genres.

The similarities really are manifold, but I’ll give just one example.

To make a character stronger you can raise their own level, as well as that of their weapon and skills. Every ten or twenty levels you also have to “ascend” them before you can increase their level any further. Doing all of these things requires various materials in ever increasing quantities, which you have to farm by killing enemies in the open world and (mostly) by beating certain mini-dungeons or bosses and then spending Stamina to claim the rewards.

Stamina, called Character Pixels here, regenerates slowly over time and is the main tactic these games employ to make you log in and do stuff every day. Fortunately NTE lets us increase the cap to 36 hours’ worth of Pixels though, so there’s not quite as much pressure to go and spend some all the time.

So what I’m saying is, while the finer details may vary, the overall mechanics follow established gacha game standards to a T. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing you’ll have to decide for yourself.

As for differences, I really like the combat in this game. When I played Zenless Zone Zero, for example, I felt too restricted in terms of team-building, and the harder fights basically demanded to rotate my characters and execute their combos perfectly, which I’m neither good at nor really interested in.

NTE allows four characters in a team, not just three, and the interdependencies, while certainly there, aren’t so powerful that you absolutely have to stick specific units together. Unless you want to have a go at the hardest content in the game (which is a carbon copy of Genshin’s Spiral Abyss) you can totally just use the four characters you like the most.

Another strong point of NTE’s combat is how awesome it looks. The characters are beautifully animated, and I especially like that many of them (basically all of the S-Ranks, I believe) have two-colored effects for their attacks. I almost caved and rolled for Nanally, although I’d decided early on that I’d skip the first couple banners, just because I like her color scheme, a mix of red and teal, so much.

Enemy types are pretty rad, too. We’re so used to fighting some variation of goblins, dragons and other fantasy tropes – beating up trash cans, record players and other curiosities feels quite novel.

I prefer NTE’s artifact system over the competition’s, too.

For reference, in Genshin or ZZZ you usually have to look for very specific combinations of properties – Correct set, correct slot, desired main stat, desired sub-stats. Even if you do find such a unicorn you then need to pray that only the most important sub-stats get increased when you level the piece up. It’s RNG-hell with a frosting of even more RNG.

NTE is considerably more lenient, for which I’m very grateful, and it’s also much more fun mechanically.

First of all, which set-bonuses a character can get is determined by only one item, called Console. To activate these bonuses you then have to equip four specific shapes of “Tetris pieces”, called Modules. In my experience that’s not overly hard, as a) there’s usually enough space for six or seven of them, so you can easily make up for a couple bad ones early on, and b) modules don’t have a main stat except for some flat attack and flat defense, meaning that only their shape and sub-stats are relevant.

To me the most impactful difference however is that random increases to sub-stats aren’t a thing here. When a piece drops, whether it’s a console or a module, you can always see which four sub-stats it has, and also exactly how much of a bonus you’ll get to each of those stats when levelled up.

Now, I’m sure some folks prefer the other system, because it allows – at least in theory – for overall higher bonuses to, say, Crit Rate and Crit Damage. Me, I can absolutely do without the repeated disappointment of having a potentially great piece drop, only to see everything go to hell when levelling it up, thank you very much.

Now let’s have a look at the gacha systems.

I’m a bit hesitant to call NTE “generous” because…well…it is a gacha game, and you absolutely can spend hundreds, even thousands of bucks if you so desire. They do some things differently than their peers though, and it would be remiss not to mention those.

The most talked-about feature is the lack of a 50/50 – and rightly so.

In most gacha games, when you pull on a limited character banner and you hit an S-Rank, there’s only a 50/50 chance to actually get the limited character. If you lose that roll you randomly get one of the standard banner S-Ranks instead. Usually the next S-Rank is then guaranteed to be the limited unit, but at that point you may well have spent currency worth north of a hundred bucks already. So not having that 50/50 is obviously a pretty big deal.

The weapon banners are a different story, because you only have a 25% chance for an S-Rank to be the limited one, unless you go all the way to hard pity at, I believe, 70.

However, there’s quite a selection of S-Rank weapons that can be earned via gameplay to compensate, and they’re no sham. All six standard S-Rank units, as well as the main character and various A-Ranks, can use one of these weapons to great effect and won’t ever need an upgrade (as far as I can tell and at the time of writing).

Speaking of the main character – they’re really good! I know, this should be a given, right? Well, other gacha games beg to differ, so it was rather unexpected and all the more welcome here.

So, yeah, overall I’m pretty satisfied with things.

That being said, we might be in for the game’s first big controversy. Next week version 1.1 will arrive on global servers. As China is one week ahead of us we already know what’s coming, which is, among other things, a Porsche collab.

Now, we already knew that, and also that we’d be able to get a cosmetic outfit and a car (duh!) during that event. However, since it’s already live in China we also know that those shinies will only by available via another gacha system, and the rates…aren’t great. While it’s good to know that we can also spend Fons (an ingame-currency) instead of funny money, the cost for pulls combined with the extremely low chances are a pretty big downer.

If you don’t play the game this will mean nothing to you, but we’re talking about almost 13k Annulith or 20 million (!) Fons, worst case scenario, to get both car and outfit. For reference, with that amount of Annulith you can pull 81 times on any normal banner. At that price tag the fact that a total of 13 standard banner dice are among the rewards isn’t much of a solace.

I don’t think this will get changed at all over here, but I’m still curious how big of a pushback they’ll get from their western audience, if any.

Meanwhile I’ll just sit here and look forward to more of that awesome city to explore and enjoy.

I guess it’s a good sign when I don’t find the time to post about a new game I’m playing because I’d rather play some more, isn’t it?

Highly anticipated anime gacha game Neverness to Everness released on April 29th, and I’ve been playing every day since. It’s often been touted as “Anime GTA” after the first trailers showed up, and it’s…not that. Not really, anyway. Maybe a little bit. Ok, let me put it this way – it’s mostly set in a bustling city full of highrises and electronic billboards, and you can drive cars, ride motorbikes and buy luxurious apartments. That’s pretty much where the similarities end.

What it is, though, is a very fun game that looks and feels absolutely amazing. It’s also free – if you’re immune to the usual gacha-trappings, that is, but I’ll get to that another time.

To me, the game’s protagonist is clearly the city itself. It’s called Hethereau, and it’s by far the most alive-feeling, realistic and beautiful metropolis I’ve experienced in a video game.

So many people moving around on foot or by vehicle, so many shops and restaurants you can actually walk into and buy stuff, conversations you can listen in on when you’re close enough, stray dogs you can pet, food or drinks lying on tables or benches that you can nick (Unhygienic? Maybe, but my characters don’t seem to mind), people starting to run and holding something over their heads when it rains…

Speaking of rain, holy crap, it looks so real! Well, I guess it’s not so much the rain itself, but wet surfaces and the reflections on them. I mean, seriously, have you seen anything this lifelike in a game before?

What really knocked my socks off was a little interaction I had the other day.

I’d just accepted a mission to drive a delivery truck from point A to point B unscathed and within a certain timeframe. It was parked in a narrow backstreet, and the main road was blocked by cars waiting at a red light. When it turned green and the cars still didn’t start to move I honked, more out of habit than anything – I didn’t expect a reaction at all.

What I got, though, was the lady driving the fourth or fifth car in line shouting at me: “Stop it, you’ll just have to accept that there’s a jam!”…

What the hell? Who would take the time to record voice lines for and program something like that? I’ve often said that I really enjoy it when developers pour a lot of love and attention to detail into their games, and this definitely takes the cake in that regard.

Also adding to the feeling of realism are most buildings’ windows – instead of just looking at a dark or lit up square you can actually see through them into the rooms beyond, like shown above. Sure, if you look closely you realize that what you see is more like a wallpaper than “real” furniture pieces, but it’s pretty convincing from a distance, especially as they all seem to be at least a bit different. Again, the effort that went into all those details is astounding to me.

Now, they could have made exploring this fascinating city more cumbersome than it needs to be, but fortunately they decided not to.

Just like in Genshin Impact and other representatives of the genre our character has a stamina bar, but in Hethereau it doesn’t hinder exploration in any way because sprinting, gliding, swimming and climbing don’t consume stamina at all. Only dodging and speed-climbing do, and even then it takes quite a while to deplete, even more so once you’ve unlocked some upgrades for it.

So climbing the tallest of buildings is no problem at all…it would be a real shame to have done just that only to realize you forgot to bring a camera, now wouldn’t it?

Fret not, the game has got you covered. Not only does it sport a pretty good photo mode, you can even launch a drone and freely fly that camera to wherever you want it to be. Unfortunately photo mode can’t be used while climbing or mounting a vehicle (which seems to be a very weird and annoying genre-standard), but other than that it’s really great. I’ve made hundreds of screenshots by now, and many more will surely follow.

You can’t talk about NTE without mentioning the anomalies. My very first impression was that those are always just fancy looking baddies to beat up. There’s much more to them though.

Spread across the city you’ll find many anomalies that pull you into another dimension (or something like that), where normal rules of reality don’t apply anymore more often than not. To best these challenges you’ll have to solve riddles or puzzles, manipulate time, find your way through a rotating 2D-platformer (above) or hide from nasties in a hospital of horrors (below).

They’re really fun – some of them rather tricky, too – and the only thing I dislike is that there aren’t more of them.

So what about those vehicles and apartments then?

As for ther former, the driving physics definitely aren’t the best, so don’t expect a Forza or anything. They’re pretty fun though, and especially the motorbikes get you from A to B very quickly. Some can be modified performance- as well as optics-wise, others have only paintjobs available. Overall they’re a good and thematically fitting addition to the game, but by no means do they define it like some of the trailers seemed to suggest.

The apartments – more like penthouses, really – are very fancy. There’s five of them so far, and the average person would only be able (or willing) to afford the smallest one in real life, if that.

Now, I do like them quite a bit, especially the one with the infinity pool seen above, but I also can’t deny that I feel somewhat…out of place there. It’s the same feeling I get whenever I find myself in a high-class restaurant (every ten years or so) – I feel a bit uncomfortable, and kind of wish I had just gone to Denny’s instead.

I haven’t done any decorating yet though, because a) they come more or less ready-furnished, and b) I lack the currency to buy all that stuff. I guess they’ll grow on me once I start adding a personal note to them.

This is already more than a thousand words long, and I haven’t even talked about the story, combat or gacha systems yet.

For now let’s just say that if you’ve played Genshin (or, I assume, one of the other open world gacha RPGs like Wuthering Waves) none of those features will feel all that unfamiliar to you.

Which is to say, if you enjoy this kind of game and also feel that you’d like what I talked about today (or Bhagpuss, whose posts I also highly recommend if you want to know more about NTE), you really can’t go wrong with this one.