NTE: Neverness to Everness

Just kind of feels like a worse, and far less engaging, Endfield and unfortunately they both suffer from sluggish vertical camera movement, too. The city stamina system is infuriating as it resets weekly so it's super easy to eat through then uses the same materials you use to buy things to do pulls to replenish and they introduced an event that doubles the usage of them so it felt even worse. Vehicle handling isn't great. It feels like the first second of a turn is one speed then it feels like it abruptly turns. That might be a keyboard and mouse issue, though. Climbing is sluggish and painful even compared to the slow pace of being on foot and there's plenty to find on high places. Movement automatically hops fences and other barriers, which will drop you down immense heights if you're doing jumping puzzles on a certain sky scraper trying to get all the fast travel points, for example. It's great for normal traversal, but when it's bad, it's extremely frustrating. There's also a stamina system, but it feels so tacked on because I don't think I've ever seen the bar empty. Combat is mostly click the left mouse button, a lot, then occasionally press your skill and once in a while you'll have your ultimate. They have a system where you can switch from one character to another when a gauge is filled to do a special move, but it's dependent on character attributes. The big gripe there is that any indication for it is very subtle during combat, to me anyway. These games are generally built for a smaller screen, like a phone, which doesn't lend itself to good UX on a larger screen sometimes. I have also fallen off of buildings because some attacks launch you backwards and then just drop you and it's hard for me to gauge where you'll land. I've also pushed enemies so far outside of areas they've reset the encounter because knockback is kind of insane sometimes. It might help if the characters were more enjoyable to be around, but I'm not a fan of large swaths of them and literally don't care if I ever see them again. On the topic of characters and story, Taygedo is pretty annoying. Not at a personal level, but he just says his name all the time where other Oddities I've encountered actually talk. With words. That you hear. There are a few times that the cutscene just ended his subtitles abruptly and I couldn't even read them all. If they don't care enough about there story to even do this in a chapter focused on him... Why should I care about the game? The exploration has been a lot of fun, despite the walking and climbing speed. Lots of stuff to run around and see or do. There are hidden quests if you talk to people, which is pretty cool to see, and fights all over the place. There is also a special tool to find some of the secret items you can place down and see in an area, which is a nice quality of life feature. I'm not a fan of managing the shop, though, because you have to spend well over 300 stamina to get to my next level and the minigame is extremely boring and time consuming. Also, there's a police system for some reason, but it generally isn't something you'll even notice or interact with even if you're being a really poor driver. It just feels tacked on like the stamina system. All-in-all I'd say there are other gatcha games, let alone other styles of games, you might enjoy that do essentially everything better so there's little point in trying this if you haven't gone and tried those ones yet.