Neverness To Maybeness

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In my previous post I talked about how blown-away I was by the current story happening in Wuthering Waves, and how much the game has grown since its launch a few years ago. I also mentioned the amazing Endfield, and the newly launched, “Neverness to Everness”, an anime ghost-hunter Grand Theft Auto-inspired kinda gacha thing. And that is what I want to talk about today, because there’s … a lot to talk about.

Can you decipher what’s happening in this screenshot?

I’ve given this game my attention kind of on and off since it’s launch, partially due to the fact that it’s so unique, with an extremely polished interface, sometimes really impressive animations, and a slew of features that are also slightly overshadowed by the fact that the game itself also doesn’t feel very polished. Like, the UI is polished, but at the same time, there are elements of the UI that feel janky, like menu selection where selected items stay highlighted after you scroll away from them, or the start button on your controller will stop functioning to open your phone, suddenly.

Update: I forgot to mention that, sometimes, dialogue/story skipping doesn’t work either. I don’t know if this is a result of rushing the game out the door, or if they’ve utilized LLMs to speed up the development process, which is frequently prone to error if you do not review the code.

Also in my previous post, I mentioned how the character movement kind of feels like a tank on ice, and after revisiting Tower of Fantasy (also published by Perfect World Entertainment), I noticed that both games control and feel about the same. And, while some of the animations, especially during cut-scenes, are really great, there’s also the kind of blank expression your own character has while idling around.

There’s just something about this that feels … off.

The jank against the polish out of the way, there are a lot of features to be had. Some of which I haven’t even discovered yet!

But, you can pet cats around the city (I don’t know if you can adopt them), collect random things that I haven’t even discovered any use for, steal or commandeer an NPC’s car, own businesses, play multiplayer Mahjong??? Acquire a vehicle in your personal garage (I don’t have this yet, despite seeing people talk about it constantly), and customize it, acquire an apartment, go on dates with characters? And I’ve only really scratched the surface here, but you can also go to prison for committing crimes, which I have done. I spent seven in-game days in prison and failed an escape attempt.

I’m not sure how much I like the “go to prison” feature, since there’s no way to tell the game, “Hey, actually, I’d rather not do this. Just put me back into the regular game.”

It’s kind of like if Grand Theft Auto had features that people have been asking for, for years.

But it’s anime.

I do wonder, though, what GTA Online would be like if players were forced to spend time in prison (in-game, obviously), without any option for escape, for excessive antisocial behavior.

You’re probably thinking, though, “Okay, the game is like GTA? What’s the driving like?” And … I’d say, the driving is just, okay. It’s not perfect, but it’s not bad. You can speed around and turn on a dime with some drift mechanics, but the drifting doesn’t work exactly the way I’d expect it to in order to maintain a slide. At the same time, it doesn’t feel “on-rails” like some racing sims do, but also damaging your vehicle takes a bit more time than it would in GTA. In fact, I don’t even know what happens yet if you damage a vehicle too much.

And, outside of the driving, there are also random paranormal events around the city. Like, one time I was walking along and hit some kind of anomaly, and then the world flipped upside-down and I was fighting monsters in a blackened version of my surroundings and it was like, “What the hell just happened?”

This is a regular thing, and is directly connected to the story, and it’s not like I hate it. I like fighting demons!

Neverness to Everness is a game of chaos, and only having a little bit of experience with it, so far, I can’t really say whether or not the story is all that amazing, yet. I can say that it has one, but whether it’ll have a lasting impression remains to be seen. I could also say the same about Endfield, but Endfield is also much more polished than NTE, and sometimes even Wuthering Waves, in some ways.

All of that said, this game, like every other open-world gacha on the market, suffers partially from a playerbase that judges whether it’s successful or not based on how many players it has. A statistic I’m not sure how you could fully gauge, since a lot of players are on their phones (I’m on PC, plus my iPhone). But, this is an issue across all of gaming, where people watch Steam community numbers and take their opinions from Youtubers. Youtubers, who will say exactly what they need to say in order to make the most amount of engagement, and then money. This is a discussion to be had in a completely different post on the superficiality and gamification of opinions in gaming from influencers whose job it is to gain engagement.

That said, with my experience so far, I’d say NTE is tentatively really cool, and I want to see more polish and content development. And I want to adopt a cat for the apartment my character doesn’t have yet.