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 Eternights is an action RPG released in September 2023 by Studio Sai and published by Sony. Ostensibly, this is a fusion of high-stakes action combat by day, and a dating sim where you can meet the love of your life by night. The game would really like me to call it "Devil May Cry meets Persona", but it falls pretty short of that pedigree for several reasons that I'm sure we'll get into. This combination sounds really weird at first blush, but hell, Sakura Wars had a new game in 2019. "[genre] meets romance" is neither a new idea nor necessarily a bad one. And to be clear, Studio Sai is a three-man operation, what they've done here is extremely impressive. Visually, it's not going to blow you away, and the music leaves a lot to be desired, but the dating system is as-advertised and there's a...we're gonna politely say "passable" combat system to whack zombies with. That is, unfortunately, where the praise stops. To start with, the visual design is absolutely atrocious; the game alternates between "too dark to see anything" and "too much colored fog to see anything". This exacerbates numerous problems with the combat design - enemies frequently blend in to the dark backgrounds, you'll be attacked from offscreen, you have no i-frames after getting hit, and getting in any serious counter-offensives all but requires you to parry attacks or The romance side of the game is...better, at least. Ranking up with a character unlocks new abilities and stat boosts in that particular character's skill tree, with the final two romantic ranks being locked behind social stat levels. While each character has one personality trait that they stick a little too closely to (the athelete! the idol! the science nerd!), the social links are mostly okay. None of them will really surprise you, but none of them are really poorly done either, which is more than can be said for most of the other aspects of the game. Plus, the game has a good way of adding some low-key characterization via scavenging - Once per night, you can go out to try and find stuff and it's genuinely quite funny when the otherwise demure and sweet girl tells you "Oh good, that's the kind of whip I was looking for" or you get back and half the porn mags you picked up are missing. Eternights, to its credit, is not a very long game. A typical playthrough is 10-15 hours, and even then most of that is on the social side. There's only three main "dungeons" that it requires before it kicks you into the endgame sequence, and the plot generally feels rushed. People show up and join you with little to no explanation, major events that drive the plot forward tend to come out of nowhere, and it's broadly best to not think too hard about what it's bringing to the table. Joining me on this ride are my anime-hardened compatriots Chaos Argate and nine-gear crow, with updates being on Mon/Fri unless otherwise noted.  Table of Contents Part 1: Swipe Right Part 2: You're Gonna Have to be More Specific Part 3: I Love Normal Part 4: The Toothpaste Conversation Part 5: Cloud Computing Part 6: Breaking Free Part 7: The Power of SCIENCE! Part 8: Feel the Burn! Part 9: Help me, Step-Yajirobe! Part 10: The Ballcycle Part 11: Team 11? No, Team 1 1! Part 12: Prepare for Interlocking Part 13: Tentacle MAN Part 14: Plushyboy Part 15: Dreamboat Part 16: The Kafka Lab Part 17: LOVE Assistant Part 17B: The Dates Part 18: The Cannon Part 19: Umbra Part 19B: Did These People Even Play the Same Game as Us? Artix fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Dec 25, 2023 |
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Oct 23, 2023 21:50
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| # ? May 6, 2024 08:07 |
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Part 1: Swipe Right We begin our tale by meeting our leading men, and frankly, I can't think of anyone I would rather have working on my dating profile than Chani.
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Oct 23, 2023 21:51
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I'll say one thing in this game's credit, some of its writing is very funny in a way I would think was brilliant satire if it was at all intentional.
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Oct 24, 2023 02:23
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girl dick energy posted:I'll say one thing in this game's credit, some of its writing is very funny in a way I would think was brilliant satire if it was at all intentional. That's sort of the conclusion we're at where we are right now in the recording. This game's got some legitimate heart and charm to it and an actually really funny script some times, it just needed a lot more polish to it. It could still poo poo the bed catastrophically between now and the end of the game and sour our opinions on it, but we'll see.
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Oct 24, 2023 02:31
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It does say a lot to the game's credit that after half an hour, it still hasn't made any "self-aware" nudge-nudge-wink-wink jokes about this being a zombie plague situation. I was bracing for it the whole video from the first moment we saw Umbrella Labs' hit new product on shelves, and then it never actually went there. I am prepared to be disappointed in this regard very soon.
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Oct 24, 2023 02:48
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I'm glad that Tenko #2 didn't last nearly as long as Tenko #1.
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Oct 24, 2023 04:46
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Poor Yajirobe, just wanted to go on a date with a weird woman and got thrown into a life or death struggle for the fate of the world. What's he going to tell Korin when the cat asks him how his date went?
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Oct 24, 2023 05:48
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I know the game takes inspiration from modern Persona games, but we did not need the dopey, horny friend archetype.
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Oct 24, 2023 08:14
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this game has already made several Decisions and we've just begun. oh dear.
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Oct 24, 2023 14:21
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Flair posted:I know the game takes inspiration from modern Persona games, but we did not need the dopey, horny friend archetype. Chani is... a lot. He gets slightly better as the game goes on though.
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Oct 24, 2023 16:10
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Copenhagen? lmao Now that if anything feels like they were scrambling to come up with any other place for things to happen. And yet they couldn't come up with a fictional city to put the game in by all appearances. Also I can already sense this game has pacing issues, but they really went from 0 to 100 in less than 10 minutes. Cooked Auto fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Oct 24, 2023 |
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Oct 24, 2023 23:40
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Yeah, it seems a bit fast moving, but without the usual sense of urgency you get with a fast-paced intro. MC heads for his date (with a forty year old serial killer, seriously dude, what the hell), explosions happen, he heads to the shelter which is apparently just there and fully stocked? And has a giant screen TV so the shelter people can watch the news? Then three days pass. Door opens, now stuff happens, and now they need to get on a train. I feel like this would have improved if they'd either made the shelter stuff look longer than just a moving date, or removed the shelter stuff altogether and just had them run underground to catch a train to get away from here, but zombies happen. Also you weren't kidding, this game is very blue and foggy. I especially liked the part where half the screen was filled with some sign hanging from the ceiling, because transparency is for losers. I'm sure that'll never bite you during gameplay.
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Oct 25, 2023 07:37
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 that girl, died as she lived, freaking the gently caress outTo be fair, I'd probably be doing the same in that situation. I can't wait to see how many more vending machines and advertisements retain power while everything else goes dark, too.
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Oct 25, 2023 07:58
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Cloacamazing! posted:MC heads for his date (with a forty year old serial killer, seriously dude, what the hell), explosions happen, he heads to the shelter which is apparently just there and fully stocked? And has a giant screen TV so the shelter people can watch the news? I think the game is set in South Korea. Are there shelters in case of a war with North Korea?
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Oct 25, 2023 08:19
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White Coke posted:I think the game is set in South Korea. Are there shelters in case of a war with North Korea? The game feels like it's set in, how do I put this--a non-Japanese person's idea of what Japan is supposed to be like. Which is not at all surprising when you learn that Studio Sai is made up for four non-Japanese people and is apparently based out of Kirkland, WA. Though the LinkedIn pages of its five staff members say they're from all over the world: Washington State, Denmark, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. So again, Japan by way of four people who have probably never actually been there. The whole game has a very dreamlike quality to it where everything is very hard to pin down and just feels strange if you look at it for too long, like how all virtually all the text on every sign, screen and product in-game is this unreadable gibberish that looks like a mashup of DigiCode and Marker Script, or how all the characters have Japanese-sounding names, but they're not real Japanese names. It's weird as gently caress.
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Oct 25, 2023 08:37
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So, same energy as the fake names from that baseball SNES game but with reversed polarity.
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Oct 25, 2023 12:01
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Without having looked it up, Korean would have been my first guess too so...lmao. This is even better, somehow.
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Oct 25, 2023 12:31
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The writing on the back of the policeman’s jacket was Korean, though (or, deliberately designed to look Korean-like, I didn’t look it up)
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Oct 25, 2023 13:18
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Well this sure looks like it'll go places. I appreciate it giving you plenty of chances to dunk on Chani at least.
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Oct 25, 2023 16:12
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nine-gear crow posted:The game feels like it's set in, how do I put this--a non-Japanese person's idea of what Japan is supposed to be like. Which is not at all surprising when you learn that Studio Sai is made up for four non-Japanese people and is apparently based out of Kirkland, WA. Though the LinkedIn pages of its five staff members say they're from all over the world: Washington State, Denmark, the Philippines, and Hong Kong. So again, Japan by way of four people who have probably never actually been there. eat your onigiri Apollo 
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Oct 25, 2023 16:55
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Polsy posted:The writing on the back of the policeman’s jacket was Korean, though (or, deliberately designed to look Korean-like, I didn’t look it up) Yeah, the cop's vest had actual Korean writing on it, but literally every other instance of non-English text in the game so far has been that kind of "trying to read text in a dream" style vaguely-Chinese/Japanese/Korean character script that again looks like what you'd get if you asked someone who's only watched a bunch of anime and nothing else to write a full sentence in Kanji. It would not surprise me if the cop's body (sans mutations) was part of an asset flip and that's why it has readable Korean on it otherwise. I dunno. This game is kinda patchy in terms of where it puts the effort into things and what does or does not feel intentional, as we'll see in due time.
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Oct 25, 2023 17:39
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nine-gear crow posted:I dunno. This game is kinda patchy in terms of where it puts the effort into things and what does or does not feel intentional, as we'll see in due time. We have already seen how patchy this game is. At the 29 minute mark, there is a text transition: "A green energy appears from her hand. You feel the wound on your head closing." This transition connects two different scenes which are both in the same place and at almost the same time; this transition could have been replaced one second of animation, but it was not. Are you telling me that we will see more of that?
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Oct 25, 2023 19:58
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Flair posted:We have already seen how patchy this game is. At the 29 minute mark, there is a text transition: "A green energy appears from her hand. You feel the wound on your head closing." This transition connects two different scenes which are both in the same place and at almost the same time; this transition could have been replaced one second of animation, but it was not. Are you telling me that we will see more of that? There's literally a scene coming up where Argate and I both go, basically at the same time "wait, are they doing something artistic with the model scaling, or did they just gently caress up and place something in the wrong spot? I can't tell what's going on here in this otherwise static scene."
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Oct 25, 2023 20:43
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The main dev grew up in Korea (ref: Reddit AMA (maybe mild spoilers outside this specific link, from people who've watched the trailer and played the demo)), not that that prevents him from being a guy who doesn't really know anything about Japan except through anime. He says he did most of the work solo and only got two extra people working on it a month before release, so I imagine anything of substance is down to him. But yeah the writing on the signs is obviously not anything specific. Not sure if the lettering is self-consistent or they're just using the same word textures repeatedly, hard to tell because virtually everything we've seen so far is a repeated advertising board or a subway directions sign.
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Oct 25, 2023 21:04
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Ok I am genuinely impressed that this was largely a solo effort until the last month of development, goddamn.
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Oct 25, 2023 22:36
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Hello I spent like 12 hours at work yesterday and came home and immediately died. Part 2: You're Gonna Have to be More Specific Good news! We've caught up to the lady cutting off people's arms. Bad news, we've uh...caught up to the lady cutting off people's arms.
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Oct 28, 2023 13:25
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Cloacamazing! posted:MC heads for his date (with a forty year old serial killer, seriously dude, what the hell) Okay, fine, 800 year old serial killer. Serial killer description may be up for debate. Still close enough.
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Oct 28, 2023 14:13
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Cloacamazing! posted:Okay, fine, 800 year old serial killer. Serial killer description may be up for debate. Still close enough.
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Oct 28, 2023 14:15
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It's polite to round down.
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Oct 28, 2023 14:18
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I was caught off guard by the genuinely funny dialogue in the new update.
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Oct 28, 2023 22:38
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Hunt11 posted:I was caught off guard by the genuinely funny dialogue in the new update. It's gonna be thing, yeah...
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Oct 28, 2023 23:54
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The Stone. I feel that is going to wear out its welcome pretty fast.
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Oct 29, 2023 00:12
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There's definitely a passion for the game by the dev that shines through, but hearing that the combat is at NG+ levels has me immediately understanding the summation of the combat being not good.
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Oct 29, 2023 01:34
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I pull back the curtain in part 3 so you can see what it looks like without any of the boosts, but generally speaking NG+ feels like what the base game should have been. Even without mechanics I technically shouldn't have yet like the deathblow, everything dies so much faster and is so much less of a slog.
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Oct 29, 2023 02:13
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Was that supposed to be a yacht date? It looked like a row boat instead of a yacht.
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Oct 29, 2023 03:56
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It was the cheapest option the yacht place had, I think she was kind of a cheap date.
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Oct 29, 2023 04:00
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The River Styx is also not exactly a hopping tourist destination, I imagine she didn't have the best selection available to her.
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Oct 29, 2023 04:28
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Even God can't afford a proper yacht. The economy's hosed, y'all.
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Oct 30, 2023 09:11
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I just finished watching the first episode. It really does make me laugh a lot, and yes, for a lot of reasons that don't feel intentional. I also think they overdid it with the panicking girl, because she went so far into annoying it was honestly a bit of a relief when she left the stage.
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Oct 30, 2023 20:00
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| # ? May 6, 2024 08:07 |
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Part 3: I Love Normal Don't kid yourself, Yajirobe. You were going to go on a yacht date with a person you'd never met that turned out to be an 800 year old goddess. Anyway, now that we've met our first batch of characters, we need a name for this group of dipshits. Bold your suggestion, if you would.
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Oct 30, 2023 21:33
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