NTE: Neverness to Everness

Day one player here, and I enjoyed the game for a while. The concept is great, combat is fine, story has been ok so far(a lot of it is chill slice of life that is slowly building up to something more serious which I like but is obviously not for everyone) and the game is very well made. Great characters and environment which is I think is the game's strength. I was also very surprised that I was able to run it quite well considering my pc specs is just around the minimum requirements. The gacha for the characters is also quite F2P friendly and normally I would easily recommend this game to anyone. However, as more time passes the less I found myself playing the game. First of all, I am the type of player that takes my time. I play gacha games like watching anime that updates monthly. I don't even care if I miss my dailies or even my weeklies, but even then all the grinding in this game has got to me. During the early parts of the game it has always been grindy but I dismissed it as that early grindy phase you always get from gacha games where you have to level up a bunch of your characters that eventually eases up once you start to finally build your teams. In this game however almost every update is just a new mode of more grinding on top of the already existing weeklies. Most of it does not feel very rewarding as well, at some point it just feels like they're distracting you to make you feel like they added a lot of content. Its always repetition of a new mode where you earn a new currency to buy the rewards you want. This game is also where I experienced the worst limited events in gacha games ever. The racing, the fight club, the bagel app, mainly the multiplayer events (maybe except for the prop hunt clone) has all been frustrating, these were so bad that players just started to join rooms then afk just to get the rewards slowly. The only events I liked were the ones that reduced the weekly grinds. Events are supposed to be fun temporary game modes where you can take a break from the main game while earning additional rewards but in this game seeing events feels like seeing a chore to be done. Also while the main gacha, the characters and weapons, have been very forgiving and very F2P friendly, the game actually occasionally releases a second gacha mode (special vehicles and skins) to siphon your pull resources. Others might defend this since you can also use your fons(in game currency) for this but this banner is definitely a resource drain trap. I am not particularly affected by this since I don't get fomo easily but its still worth noting. Some praise this game due to it not having 50/50 but its still a gacha game trying to get your money in the end. Let me address this one as well, the use of genAI. Yes this game uses genAI and does not disclose it here on steam. When the first backlash happened they did get rid most of the AI generated assets back then, even if they did not remove all of it I was willing to turn a blind eye since I believed that they learned their lesson. However, recently they got caught using genAI assets again because they missed a watermark on one of them. This is frustrating because the main game itself is very well made and their ruining their reputation just to save a bit of time and resources on some the assets. People start to dismiss this game as AI slop even if the only AI slop are the few small assets that you might not even notice (although this is just pure speculation but I feel like AI was used on some side content dialogues as well, it might just be poor writing though lol). Players are going to be more hesitant on spending their time and money on this game if this keeps up. Other negative points I can think of are: the combat camera being hard to work with sometimes, typical gacha game difficulty on story fights(you don't even need to try, also fake QTE), the endgame mode is just another enemy HP sponges on a timer, and stuff you buy with fons are very expensive compared to the fons you earn. Overall, the game still has a lot of potential but the level of polish the game had from launch is slowly dropping every update. Every event and additional content drop feels like they are going for quantity over quality. Don't get me wrong there are still great content being released but it all feels watered down or bloated with grinding. Grinding in games is fine but within reason. I will still keep an eye on this game and hopefully in the future I will come back and change this review to a positive one.