cyanshine

Basically I struggled through with Arlecchino teams in early stages, a borrowed Columbina with my Ineffa in middle stages, and hex teams for later stages (Fischl/Durin and then Durin/Lohen when he finally showed up).

Holy shit, if that new fantasy RPG game mode is as big as it seems, that looks insane. Fantasy open-world adventures in my urban open-world game?

The fantasy outfits are exciting too, I've been really wanting Zero to get a less city-casual alt outfit - I was thinking more like a nice dinner dress, but I'll absolutely take a dragonslayer knight.

Shinku's fantasy outfits look super cool too. (Less sold on Mint's and Iroi's.)

Since Iroi is a healer/buffer I was a bit worried I'd feel like I ought to pull her instead of the unnecessary third main DPS (Shinku) whose design I like better. But I couldn't really understand wtf was going on in Iroi's kit, so I couldn't feel any fomo over it either. Phew?

What else. Kind of crazy that they're giving us yet another standard S rank selector. I guess I'm getting Baicang to complete the set?

Overall it's definitely not on the level of the Nod Krai teaser - it feels disjointed on a story and theme level, and while the character designs aren't bad, there isn't a single character who's really firing my imagination on first sight?

Character design thoughts under the cut.

I haven't decided if I'm going to make a proper attempt at his gacha outfit or not. I have a decent number of wishes, but I do want Shinku too probably, and Exe has to be coming sometime in the not too distant, you'd think, since they put him in the launch image.

The most exciting elements for me were definitely the moon region, because I hadn't looked at any landscape spoilers, and holy shit. There's so much of it? All those different zones? I think because the little spacecraft crash valley we saw in the archon quest was so dead and tiny, I just assumed the new area would also be tiny and dead.

The old character buffs are also very exciting, but I'd looked at all the leaks and analysis videos etc for them so no surprises in the livestream. I'm so excited to play my girl Miko as an actually powerful sub-dps and support, and to not have to stress about balancing rotations around her short-lived turrets. Even though her golden troupe artifacts are one of the best sets on my account lols, little sad to have to jettison them for the new stellar-conduct damage set.

I'm hoping to pull Cyno from the new not-a-Chronicled-Banner, but since I'm pulling Sandrone first and I just got Lohen ... I can very much not guarantee him. Still, if I do manage to get him, very glad to know I'll be able to enable his stellar-conduct DPS capability in 7.0 with cryo Traveller, instead of having to pull a new five star enabler.

If I don't get Cyno then hey, maybe Wriothesley's gameplay will finally be fun to me now, with his buffs.

I'm also so freaking glad for Qiqi's buffs. Not even the stellar-conduct support stuff, I could cry about her skill cool-down reduction. She'll finally be able to have near-full uptime as a healer. She'll be as good as a normal four-star healer. She'll be at a basic playable level, like a real girl.

I wish Beidou's buffs seemed a little more meaningful, but maybe I'll be surprised when I actually play her post-buff.

I'm looking forward to Sandrone. I really enjoy her as a character, and I do like her new design, for the most part. Not a fan of the frilly cap, but I knew they were never going to get rid of that, people freaking love maid stuff. I really like her colours now though, especially the deep red of her skirt. And her playstyle looks really fun.

The summer event looks ... incredibly low effort. Maybe it will turn out to have much more depth than it seems, but the way they presented it in the stream at least made it seem like a vehicle for giving us the Charlotte skin and not much else, with all actual effort going towards the moon and voiced moon worldquest.

Charlotte skin is really cute! I can feel my interest in Charlotte going up from like a 5 to a 15 or 20. I'll probably build her soon ... ish. Soonish.

Citlali skin is also cute, but it doesn't make me want to pull her more, so largely irrelevant to me.

The Snezhnaya teaser was fun. I don't mind that they didn't show us the 7.0 girl, since I'm hoping to skip her anyway. Finally hearing the Tsaritsa's voice, seeing the Harbingers doing their Harbinger business, all those snow areas are exciting - it's been so long since Dragonspine. (I do think they could have given us at least patchy spring snow on the peaks in Nod Krai.)

No particular opinions on the Traveller's sniper gameplay as yet - I can't tell if it's going to be some essential new region mechanic or just a gimmicky sidegame.

Here's my rambling and personal review of Neverness to Everness. TL;DR is that I'm having an absolute blast, completely unexpectedly?

I've been playing Genshin Impact since the beginning of Sumeru (so about three and a half years), and I've given all of the new high-profile gachas that have come out since at least a bit of a shot - but NTE is the only one that's captivated my attention like this, other than Genshin.

Overall vibe: Unsubtle. Like this is just not a game that wants to be subtle. It wants to be over the top and every anime trope and brightly coloured in urban neons and sunshine.

The driving (ha) force behind most of the gameplay decisions seems to be: How fun can we make this? Whiiiich having just tried another recent gacha that was super polished with beautiful character designs but the devs seemed to have completely forgotten that games should be fun to play - well I was particularly in the mood to appreciate.

Some of the things the devs think will be fun are inevitably not things I'm excited about (the ability to cause GTA-style mayhem and property damage on purpose, being able to go on dates with anime girls, some of the specific fanservice-design decisions etc.), but there's a tonne that is, too.

Firstly, it's true open world: the enemies are all either out in the streets or in domains that often have animations disguising the loading screen so it feels doorless; the interiors of a good number of the buildings are fully modelled with again no loading screens so you can just walk inside or jump out of the windows down to the street; and you can run and jump and swim and glide and climb almost anything, or you can get into a bus or a train carriage and ride for however many stops you like, or drop onto the roof of a moving train and ride that way ...

... and of course you can drive a whole fleet of cars and bikes and what have you. The vehicles and the street racing are meant to be the big distinguishing factor for NTE that sets it apart from the other currently-live gachas. It's kind of more optional than I was expecting though; I don't personally drive that much in the game becauuuuuuse well skill issue for one (what is steering), but also I usually prefer the freedom of roaming on foot or teleport-hopping.

I didn't think I'd be that into exploring an open-world modern city, because I live in one of those (one of the reasons I've been looking forward to Silver Palace is because it's going to be urban without being a contemporary city), but turns out the freedom to walk along the train tracks and swim around bridge pylons and clamber about skyscraper roofs is super fun and not, in fact, something I can do by exploring my actual city. I often keep playing for about twenty minutes after I've stopped actually doing anything, because I'm just jogging aimlessly down backstreets and through parks and seeing what's around the next corner or at the top of the next staircase.

The anomalies are also really good and add a lot to the aesthetic of the open world. The little oddities you can interact with are mostly a fun cartoony vibe, the enemy designs are actually really cool and spooky (I'd seen a vending machine with arms from the open beta phase and I wasn't optimistic, but even that one's way more effective in context), and the anomaly domains often have really fun spooky horror vibes. Nothing hardcore scary, but enough to make you a bit jumpy, and good use of sound design and colours to bring out the unreality.

They've made some really fun creative use of non-horror style unreality in quite a few of the domains too, especially stuff to do with perspective - switching between 2D and 3D platforming to navigate a path, or rotating floors and ceilings etc.

Graphics-wise, the open world is pretty stunning. I am, in particular, hilariously blown away by the fact that there are actual waves rolling in and breaking on the beaches, and you can wade and swim through them. The surfing hot spots of the People of the Springs, I'm so sorry Mualani, could never.

Combat is fun and feels smooth, with quite splashy animations even for the free starter characters. There's a combat system with damage types, reactions, rotation mechanics etc, but basic combat is also pretty intuitive, so when they drop you into the early fight scenes, you can kind of just press buttons, without being punished for not doing anything optimally.

(if you're familiar with using a basic attack, special skill and ultimate like these games usually build their combat around, at least. Idk that I can say it would be intuitive without any context at all.)

Character designs: Also unsubtle lol. They've grown on me a lot, I'm charmed by about 80% of the designs now, but they go hard on tropes and bright saturated colours and fanservice.

They did choose to put all their (to me) least successful/most unfinished-looking character designs right in the opening couple of sequences of the game, through wisdom that is beyond me. (Honourable exceptions from those early scenes: Lacrimosa is good, but she is VERY anime tropey unsubtle, the eepy little vampire girl dressed in red with half white/half black hair; and Mint's design I like more than I don't, but there is something incoherent about it; I feel like being the game's mascot character, she may have been plagued by some overdesigned-by-committee issues.)

The fanservicey character design stuff I can mostly either enjoy or roll my eyes at at this stage, but it will kind of depend how fanservicey they're willing to be with male characters, as time goes on. You don't expect equality but it can't be TOO unbalanced, or it starts to feel real uncomfortable. (The Chaos skins are disappointing, but it's early days and we'll see. The devs have shown themselves to be very, perhaps too, responsive to player feedback, so it will depend which players they're listening to I guess.)

Speaking of: oh gosh so many outfit skins, I love that? Genshin is so weirdly stingy with skins. So far iirc the MC has 6 alt outfits you can grind for in different ways, 4/6 of the standard S-class characters have one outfit you can grind for, and the limited S-classes in the current and previous patch all have between 2 and 5 outfits that are either gacha, paid or grindable.

Gacha skins (for outfits, gliders and vehicles) actually seem like the main way they mean to encourage non-whales to pull beyond pity on the gacha banners. There's no 50/50, and the pity and number of f2p pulls seem broadly standard, so it's not that hard to get the character themselves. But if you really want one of those skins, maybe going for that first awakening/copy looks a lot more appealing.

The other defining aspect of the gacha of course is the actual mechanics of the pull system, which are: moving around a little board game. Bit of extra gamifying in your game. Honestly I do actually find the board game pulling pretty fun, I like following along as my little counter moves around the squares and the different things it can land on. I hard dislike that they chose to make it look LITERALLY like a casino game, with all the flashing lights and gold coin motifs. I know we're normalising gambling here, or quasi-gambling, but did they have to double down on that QUITE so much, lol gods.

I'm enjoying the story so far, it's fun. Has some janky moments, and a couple of the quests could definitely have done with some tighter editing for pacing, but it's very character-driven, and funny with high enough stakes to keep me invested.

I assume that longer term we're going to be diving into the mystery of what causes anomalies, the Truth of This World etc. But right now we're just doing found family romps and attempted rescues and meeting some members of a villain faction with shadowy motives.

The worst element of the game absolutely for me, at the moment, is unfortunately the English localisation. I didn't notice it in the first couple of quests, so I assume those got some extra polishing, but later quests have some really yikes grammatical errors and unclear meaning moments.

The voice acting is very good, even for the NPCs, so it doesn't even really feel like they're cheaping out on the English version as such, they're just. Not running these scripts by a real translator and an actual English editor before they go to the voice actors.

Hopefully it's teething issues, and they get enough early complaints about it that they prioritise good translations more in future.

(Some of the errors seem to be over-reliance on MTL, like pronoun mistakes, and some seem human, like "She must have went to the beach". Either way they're problems that having a real professional translator and a real editor review all text would fix.)

Endgame stuff: There's one combat endgame mode, which I haven't reached the final chamber for, but it seems like a pretty standard Spiral Abyss-style series of chambers that resets each cycle with normal pull currency rewards. Like Abyss I imagine I'll only do it for the rewards.

But there are also minigame modes where the rewards are in-game currency for getting the outfits, cars, gliders, apartments etc, and those are way more varied, so you can pretty much pick your poison in terms of which you find most fun to do on a daily and weekly cycle.

Currently I mostly do fishing (very soothing) and the Pink Paws bank heist, which I'm kind of obsessed with.

Pink Paws is a "reality show" so the idea is that it's not a true bank heist, they're letting your character go in and find their way around the different rooms and levels, picking up figurines off desks and cash from drawers and paintings from walls and sculptures from display cases, fighting enemies and forcing open safes where needed, and then carrying out as much loot as they can before time runs out, which is exchanged for rewards.

What loot can be found where changes on every run, and which exit points are active also changes, and you can do as many runs as you like (although there's a cap on how much currency you can earn per cycle). So it's basically a little roguelike mode, and it's fun like roguelikes can be but Spiral Abyss-style ones never are.