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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 19, 2024 00:10 |
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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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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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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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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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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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Part 4: The Toothpaste Conversation Being an idol, Yuna has had extensive practice making banal small talk with weirdos at meet and greets. But how will she handle the one and only Tentacle Boy?
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Nov 3, 2023 22:08
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Part 5: Cloud Computing We're heading for the first proper dungeon today, which means we get to learn what Eternights considers a "puzzle".
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Nov 6, 2023 22:52
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Part 6: Breaking Free For as much as we rag on it, sometimes the game does manage to pull it all together and make a sequence work. This is one of those times. It's...one of the only times, but that's a topic for another day.
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Nov 11, 2023 00:01
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Part 7: The Power of SCIENCE! In which we meet our next two party members, an arrangement that we will surely not regret in the days to come.
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Nov 13, 2023 22:40
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Yuna's are all in her S-link, I think every single one of her excursions get one.  Plus, she had the locker one in the intro and the one where we walk in on her. Sia...doesn't really get any? Not that I remember, anyway.
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Nov 14, 2023 04:37
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Part 8: Feel the Burn! Our boy may have been a little uh...let's call it "inspired" by FF7R. Call it a hunch.
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Nov 17, 2023 23:22
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Part 9: Help me, Step-Yajirobe! There are at least two scenes in this video that are blatantly someone's fetish. See if you can spot them all!
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Nov 20, 2023 23:06
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Part 10: The Ballcycle In which we discover that our dear developer has definitely been playing too much FF7.
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Nov 24, 2023 22:32
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Part 11: Team 11? No, Team 1 1! Min offers up her uh...let's politely call it "tragic" backstory and I gotta say, I'm really starting to feel Team Train.
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Nov 27, 2023 22:42
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Part 12: Prepare for Interlocking Act 4 introduces our final new party member and skips over several scenes that I'm sure aren't that important, don't worry about that whole "budget" thing.
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Dec 1, 2023 22:18
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Part 13: Tentacle MAN   Now that we've reached the final free time section, it's time to start knocking these links out for good, and first up is our dear idol. She is...surprisingly straightforward and down with all of this? That might be a reflection of the rest of the party, though... Artix fucked around with this message at 21:45 on Dec 4, 2023 |
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Dec 4, 2023 21:04
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Part 14: Plushyboy   I regret to inform you that this video contains two horrifying scenes, only one of which is the Min romance.
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Dec 8, 2023 21:18
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Part 15: Dreamboat  It is officially time to pick our beloved from among this star-studded cast. Technically we still have to see the rest of Sia's link, but I think at this point we've seen enough of her to know what that entails. If you truly want to hold off until she gets her major plot moment, that'll be in Friday's video. For everyone else, you can vote here until Saturday.
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Dec 11, 2023 22:54
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Junpei posted:Would you say that this game is, while weak on it's own, a decent enough showing of potential for future projects? Like, the guy made it mostly on his own and the other people came in late. Would you be interested in seeing what he does next with more teammates, using the feedback he got from Eternights itself, etc? Someone in the thread said that while their shitposting is strong, it's pretty clear that they don't have a lot of interest in actual character writing (a statement I agree with) and as long as that's true, I can't say I would be very interested in anything else this studio puts out. The fact that he made this game at all is extremely impressive, the fact that he wanted $30 for it is...not. Part 16: The Kafka Lab Prepare yourselves, it's time for the dramatic confrontation with Delia over THE STONE.
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Dec 15, 2023 23:13
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He doesn't exist for gameplay purposes! The game just dumped him for me as soon as actual party members came on. Part 17: LOVE Assistant Part 17B: The Dates   With that, we have finally seen all the ~romantic~ content that this game has to offer. Which one of these lovely contestants will get to be our beloved?
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Dec 18, 2023 22:44
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Honestly, Sia doesn't seem interested in romance at all. At best she's a workaholic and at...uh, "worst" is the wrong word here but at the other end of that scale she just strikes me as full on aromantic/asexual. Is that what the devs were going for? Probably not! But who knows. She definitely has absolutely no chemistry with our boy Yajirobe at all. Part 18: The Cannon It's time for the endgame, and the plot twist that everyone saw coming from a billion miles away.
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Dec 23, 2023 01:55
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Part 19: Umbra Merry Christmas goons! I got you the thing you've been asking for all season: the end of Eternights! Sorry, what's that? "This gift sucks, Artix"? Well, just for you, I have a follow up video in which we dramatically read reviews from people who obviously played a completely different game than we did.
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Dec 25, 2023 21:21
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| # ¿ May 19, 2024 00:10 |
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Oh yeah, I forgot to link this earlier but it turns out the criteria for making the QR code show up (and I'm genuinely mad it didn't because it's such a hilarious "gently caress you, do you have your phone ready RIGHT NOW") is romancing only a single person. This gives you one of the following "true" endings for a character. They are exactly as low effort as you might imagine something like this to be. https://www.studiosai.dev/eternights/ending-videos/MinEN https://www.studiosai.dev/eternights/ending-videos/SiaEN https://www.studiosai.dev/eternights/ending-videos/YunaEN https://www.studiosai.dev/eternights/ending-videos/YohanEN
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Dec 27, 2023 02:23
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