Search by tag:

Most Recent Reviews

• 06 Oct, 2026 Aion 2 is a Game of This Year

  Clickbait-y title? Yes. Do I think its funny? Also yes.

  Aion 2 came out today for everyone to play globally and boy howdy it sure is a video game of all time. If we ignore the biggest pain point in the mixed Steam reviews of Aion 2 (monetization), the rest of it is really a mixed bag too. Friends of mine will be aware that I've been an MMORPG player for a long time, and that Aion 2 is also an MMORPG, hence my interest. For those that don't know me and stumble across the ranting and raving of my lunacy, I've been playing WoW since Burning Crusade (2007ish) and have spent a lot of time playing WoW until BFA as well as a lot of FFXIV. I've dabbled in many other MMORPGs however, Aion 1 included.

  Aion 2 feels like a mobile game that's been upscaled and ported to PC. To be clear, I did not make it that far in the game if only for the fact that the game just wasn't enjoyable for me. According to some, it gets better in the late game but that circles back to the issue I didn't want to talk about (monetization), so we'll skip that. For now. I'll come back to what people have said about it later.

  The music is forgettable, the combat is bland, and the story is pretty awful to start. The game looks good by virtue of UE5 and the tendency for Korea to put out gooner MMOs. If you don't believe that's a trend, look at a dozen Korean games and tell me they don't goon-bait. Nikke, Lost Ark, TERA, Aion 1, Lineage 2, Stellar Blade, and I'm sure there are more. Aion 2 features crazy body customization including inhumanly thin waists, massive ASSets, and large uh... chests. This is assisted by a non-insignificant amount of armor also showing off the female form. I don't want to imply this as a negative, but just an objective note that it is a gooner game. Additionally, the UI is a dumpster fire. While the amount of menus isn't as egregious as Where Winds Meet, there are a LOT of menus.

  The music existed for the sole purpose of having background noise. I remember nothing from it. The English voice acting is in dire need of help. They state on their Steam page that AI was used for some in-game assets and frankly the English voicing might be one of those in-game assets. The Japanese voice pack wasn't much better, as many of the character designs and attitudes seemed strange when paired with their respective voices. I didn't try the Korean one, but I'd hope that a Korean company would use real Koreans to do their voices. Speaking of Korean voices, a fun thing I heard was that no matter which voice option you pick, your character sounds VERY Korean. Speaking gibberish, but still Korean sounding. The only thing I liked were the sound effects. They sounded mostly apt for whatever situation they were in.

  Combat was something I was hoping would be enjoyable, but it is very milquetoast. Nothing about it stands out. You can have a more modern action RPG control scheme or a more traditional hotkey MMO control scheme, but at the end of the day it doesn't really matter too much. You always have your basic attack as something you hold or toggle, you have your heavy attack, and some spells on surprisingly long cooldowns. According to the mixed reviews on Steam, a lot of the combat at endgame is fast-paced and frantic. That sounds great! BUT! Apparently people just macro it all together so you don't actually have to keep pace. I'm sure you could play manually, but it seems that the developer's intentions are for you to utilize macros. Now, I didn't get to that point myself but this is something multiple people that have been playin' early access have said.

  Story-wise, I really hope it was written by AI. The introductory story is awful. Spoilers start here, though I wouldn't consider it consequential. You escape a dangerous situation and get into a town. The townspeople seem nice, if not wary of outsiders. You later learn that they're being mind-controlled by a dragon or some nonsense. But this changes nothing for you. You need to go find people whose airship crashed. One guy is fine but oh no, his buddies have been captured! So you go to rescue them. One guy is dying but you learn one was a traitor! Oh no. I wonder why. You go to rescue the last guy and he warns everyone what's going on, because he's figured it out. He informs everyone, but nobody takes him seriously. Your character says nothing even though you also know what's going on, so the plot can happen. Suddenly in the night, surprise attack! Everyone in town, who previously seemed like a normal person are now basically zombies. People fall down a 15-ish meter cliff and get up to attack you. You eventually escape on an airship that's weirdly reminiscent of Pelican 1 from Helldivers (or the Halo pelican. I'm not a Halo person so I think Helldivers) and then immediately get taken down and have to swim to shore. Now I did play a bit more to see more of the plot but I just did not care and couldn't get invested, and frankly it did not improve.

  Okay now on to the last contentious point. Monetization. Those who know me will know that I support monetization when it has been earned. Helldivers is a game I quit due to their monetization. Yes you could get every warbond for free, but the amount of farming and praying to RNGesus required was too much with my limited free time. I've payed for gacha because I've spent a significant amount of time playing the games for free. Granblue, Umamusume, NTE, Genshin, Honkai Star Rail, and WuWa for a start. I'm not against microtransactions. However the allegations presented by people on Steam are damning, and the defense has been lacking in my opinion. The defenses presented are much like the ones given by glazedivers. You can earn everything for free! You don't have to pay! Paying isn't required. And from what I can tell, for Aion 2 that is also true. But the fact of the matter is that paying in Aion 2, much like Helldivers 2, gives you a tangible benefit. If you don't believe me, read the Steam reviews and see for yourself.

  This doesn't even discuss the non-progression related microtransactions, of which there are many. NCSoft even had to change their Founder's Pack rewards because of the negative reception. Initially, rewards were only available on one character for all rewards. Some rewards are still locked to one character. However there are multiple things that are tied to real money transactions that are character-bound. This doesn't sit particularly well with me, especially since many rewards in FFXIV and WoW were account-wide, and for those games the microtransactions that were character-locked were advertised as character-locked. You knew full well what you were getting.

  Overall I quit just before hitting 2 hours logged on Steam because I was markedly unimpressed. It is pretty and there's lots of character customization, but that doesn't make a game. I'm reminded of a very old Nintendo Power article. A game might not look great, but the gameplay is what keeps you coming back. Pear Stair 64 might be the most graphically realistic game, but you as a pear need to climb stairs. And pears don't have limbs so good luck with that.

  3/10.

• 15 Sep, 2026 NTE Patch 1.3

  I was hoping that NTE would continue to improve by adding interesting content, but as you may have guessed by my using "was hoping," it has not really improved in any significant capacity. I want to talk to you about the content we've seen since the last major story patch, and in my opinion, the current state of the game shows a notable decline due to bugs, poor translation, and a clear lack of QA.

  Limited-Time Events

  There were a few events that I didn't get to talk about from patch 1.2 that I'd like to cover briefly.

  Going Going Gone is now a permanent in-game event that's all about the auction mini-game, but now in a PvP format. Players have access to a shop to buy items to improve their odds of getting a bunch of goodies from the auction. If you're familiar with Storage Wars, this is a way for you to experience it for yourself. With occasional wallhacks.

  We had the Fishing Frenzy which was the easiest, fastest, and best way to burn your city stamina per week. While spear, net, and bomb-fishing, you were able to increase your fishing level rather quickly for minimal effort. In addition, you could finish your entire city stamina bar for the week in maybe 10 minutes per week. Excellent.

  The last "event" was the Warren Lucky Flip. Just when I thought we were done with 999 Nights, we got the Warren Lucky Flip. Which was just flipping 2 cards a day for 8 days. It was the biggest non-event event I've seen in a game. The rewards were mediocre at best, but I guess that's all you can expect from an event that requires a max of 2 minutes per day.

  Now let's talk about Patch 1.3, which in combination with the previously reviewed Patch 1.2, doesn't signal the death of the game, but certainly has me worried for the future in terms of gameplay.

  In terms of events, we have Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball, Wave Racer 64, Legally Distinct Survivors, a boss rush event, more 999 Nights stuff, Shipwreck Salvage and Brick-by-Brick.

  Starting with Neverness or Everness Xtreme Beach Volleyball, this was 100% made to appeal to gooners. It gives the excuse to put Zankou and Mint into swimsuits and really focus on their assets, if you know what I mean. This is the fanservice beach episode. There's no 2 ways about it since the volleyball mechanics aren't particularly good. The characters stats' are somewhat nebulous and don't seem to affect things as much as they would seem to on paper. The available camera angles make it a tad difficult to line up good hits, but the AI is so inept that you can do a basic underhand serve and still get points occasionally. Winning is not super difficult, but finding the will to grind out the event is. Speaking of winning, if you choose to play as Mint and win, you get gratuitous cleavage and fanservice. Zankou's is a little less fanservice-y, but people with a certain inclination for the dogs will enjoy it a bit more than others. Also the keen-eyed among you might've noticed a weird visual bug when winning as Zankou. If you didn't see the bug, there were two random silver orbs: one above her navel and one above her cleavage although this appears to have been patched. As a side note, the volleyball mini-game is classified as a race going by the English text. I guess you could say it's a race to get the winning number of points, but that feels like a stretch.

  Wave Racer 64 is possibly the easiest racing event in a video game. You have tons of time to ride through easy courses, getting points that are actually difficult to miss due to the hitbox size of the objects you're required to hit, and there are few obstacles. The lack of opposition, the gracious time limit, the simple courses, and the easy point requirements make this feel like an ad for the newest mystery box. Also there's a fun bug where a sailboat will spawn 90% underwater on a certain track. That's two bugs.

  Hunter's Crucible makes a return being even less fun than before for me. I liked the first one and I thought it was a nice challenge, but I suppose the metrics back at Hotta HQ must have shown that too many people 100%ed the event. There's been a (Payday 2 Cloaker noise) "difficulty tweak" for the points required to 100% the event. There are now bosses that give nothing but in exchange give a higher point total when defeated. You need to have airtight team comps that are seriously geared to have a chance at full clearing the boss rush this time around.

  Shipwreck Salvage is a neat mini-game that gets old after an hour. You hop on a jet ski with a harpoon and winch, and you drive around in the sea to try and get loot. You need to manage the weight of the items you're carrying, the amount of fuel you have, and the distance to shore. If you run out of fuel without returning to shore, you get nothing. You can upgrade your jet ski and harpoon; your jet ski upgrades will increase the total fuel amount as well as the cargo capacity. The harpoon will allow you to grab heavier items from further away. They both max out at level 3, which doesn't take too long to get to. I think the event can be full cleared in an hour or two depending on RNG. However even with everything maxed out, occasionally the game will spawn a crate that you can't pick up. So that's another fun bug. We're at three now. Now for what it's worth, native English speakers will also notice that the dialogue with the event NPC also has grammatical errors. I'm not one to dock points for this, but considering how rushed content has felt, I think this might be indicative of QA not being up to snuff when combined with other bugs.

  Brick-by-Brick is accessed through the city activities menu and is decently entertaining, but it's more fun to go to them through the open world exploration. There are construction sites around the new zone of Duskmoor, where you can get into construction equipment and mess around on the construction sites. Only time will tell what this means, but this is by far my favorite thing. You can drive a roadroller, digger, some other heavy machinery, and as someone that was forklift certified, a forklift again. Hurray! Unironically my favorite thing from Patch 1.3.

  Lastly is Everness Survivors (Runaway Echoes). It's bad. I'm an avid fan of Survivors-likes, as I mentioned in my review of Warhammer Survivors. This isn't the worst one I've played but definitely leans towards the garbage side. Part of the fun of Survivors-likes is becoming incredibly OP and discovering fun combinations. NTE doesn't let you do that. You match elemental affinities and you build them up. They all are more-or-less the same. The actual ability affects are basically all the same, there are zero combinations of skills, all of the skills have levels that are hard-capped at level 15, AoE skills have a hard capped range value, and the skill tree is wholly uninteresting. It's easy, not many mobs spawn, and once you see what the skill tree gives you, it's even easier. You can clear all the basic stages with zero points in the skill tree by the way. You can run around in a circle, and as long as you pick good skills and get lucky with RNG for skill buffs, all 6 intro stages are an absolute cakewalk. Just run around in a circle. It's boring. I was hoping for something interesting to happen, but around 29 minutes in to the Endless mode, I just gave up. Also certain text pops up in Chinese! Bug number four, hurray.

  There's one more event coming up called Breezy Tour and I hope it's nice and chill. I just wanna spend some time with Linko. I think she's neat.

  New Vehicles, Home, and Zone

  Vehicles

  There are 3 new vehicles with this patch, and boy howdy they are certainly some of the vehicles of all time. While the Porsche collab for the Spyder was a must-buy (for me at least), all 3 of these vehicles are very much optional; not even nice-to-have like the Draco.

  First we have the Tide. The Tide is the only water-vehicle thus far, however it's stuck in a mystery box. The box itself isn't awful, if you have Nanally and want the Tide, and follows the trend of the other mystery boxes but I do think it's the worst box so far. While our last box had outfit colors that you might never get to see if you didn't get the outfit, this one gives you a new outfit for Nanally. I do not have Nanally. I wasted 2 million Fons for a character's outfit while lacking the character, while ALSO having zero plans to ever pull for said character. Even full clearing the box, I have a dead item. That said, the Tide is easy to handle and can be useful outside of just wandering around in the ocean.

  We also have the Sirocco ATV and Yesteryear bicycle. I called it on Bagel that we're getting a bicycle btw, you're welcome. The Sirocco ATV isn't particularly useful if you have the Draco. It's the most expensive ATV I've ever seen at a whopping 4 mil. I can't see a reason to buy it in terms of practicality, unless you wanna show off your Zankou livery. We also have the Yesteryear bicycle (with Linko livery!) which follows the theme of goofy slow vehicles that allow you to exist in Hethereau. At only 800k, I see no reason to avoid it aside from some jank, especially since the other goofy slow vehicles are a pain to get (also you tell the bike seller you want to buy a car smh).

  Stillmeadow House

  What an absolute disgrace. While it is cheaper than the most expensive property, it's also significantly smaller and features fewer anomaly furniture. Considering you have a house in the countryside, even though it is cheaper, you'd expect something that makes the house worth it. Instead, you have a small property with narrow hallways, fewer anomaly furniture than I'd like considering the price, and a garden. You'd think the garden would be great, but it's mostly for AFKing your city stamina to grow plants. Plant seeds cost Fons, which means you're technically LOSING money to grow plants rather than do other city activities. Aesthetically, it's fantastic because it does really look like a house in the countryside. It allows you to park a car in the car port to show it off too. However I think this is realistically on par with the apartment that got released with the Porsche... meaning it's a skippable property.

  Duskmoor

  Duskmoor is kind of an interesting zone, because it's the first non-urban area. While the other parts of the game (excepting the Bureau's island and the resort island) are very much urbanized, Duskmoor stands out. It starts as pine forest zone that might be familiar to people in the Pacific Northwest or northern California. At first blush, I thought it wasn't particularly beautiful, nor was it what I was hoping the next zone would be, but it did offer a nice change of scenery. However it does open up to a nice ring road around a lake with cherry blossoms, maples, and bamboo and mountains in the distance. It's a great driving experience. But it wouldn't be patch 1.3 without some problems at this point. When speaking to the old man that runs the jet ski mod shop, all of his dialogue and my responses were in Chinese suddenly. That bug has since been fixed, but would have been at least 5 bugs by now. The northern majority of the map is inaccessible, really killing the idea of dropping 4 mil to buy the ATV for me personally.

  Changes to the Bank Heist

  The bank heist was apparently too difficult or time consuming, so certain activities now contribute to the tycoon incentive fund. The tycoon incentive fund will pay out 1 mil every 2 weeks by doing certain marked activities (like volleyball), and this includes bank heisting. I personally wouldn't mind having the tycoon incentive fund be an addition to the bank heist 1 mil, but now the best way to reach the 1mil cap is to do your weekly volleyball tournament and complete the rest of your 400-500k through heisting, which should only take about an hour every 2 weeks. I dislike this change, since this is easily done with a static group, but I understand that not everyone has 1-3 friends to play with, and pugging heists is not a stellar experience. I'd honestly prefer if more activities gave the tycoon incentive rather than just volleyball, heisting, and the auction minigame.

  Story Progression - Fogden Game

  I don't wanna give anything away too obviously, but depending on your literacy comprehension and your familiarity with media terms such as "in media res", this will have spoilers.

  First off, the intro. It takes us to the edge of the new Duskmoor zone to investigate a place that has some spooky stuff happening. There are some cheap attempts at jump scares but it creates a real spooky atmosphere once you enter the zone. I also got stuck on spawn multiple times when loading in, so bug number 6 is the first real scary part. The entire intro feels long and doesn't really add a lot for the amount of time it takes to traverse the zone and go through the lore. It also doesn't make a whole lot of sense if you think about the sequence of events prior to your entry.

  Potential Spoilers Start Here

  Once you learn about the Fogden Game and how it all works, you take control of characters that aren't the MC and progress through the world. I'm fairly certain that a bunch of stuff from 999 Nights is reused here, but there are some interesting bosses to face with fun gimmicks. You get a little bit of lore but nothing is really clear as to how this whole world works. It's ripe for fan theories.

  You also get to play as Linko, which was great because you got some unexpected lore about other characters you know through her journey. Also I just like Linko. I said it before and I'll say it again.

  At the end of the story there's an excessively long boss battle that isn't particularly fun to play through, but in terms of lore is very cool. There's an unexpected return and deus ex machina, which for me was the most interesting part of the patch.

  Potential Spoilers End Here

  I know that was very vague, however I want to say that this was unimpressive to me as far as story progression. It does wrap up the previous arc, so I'm curious to see where it goes from here since they've only really established one other major threat. I have concerns that this will go the way of WoW and start asspulling new major enemies now, so they need to start laying a lot more groundwork for enemies.

  Wrap Up

  Overall I'm at a strong 5/10 for the game right now. I also want to clarify something about scores. 5/10 is perfectly fine. Average. Stop setting 7/10 as your bar for "okay". Use the whole scale. Also I quit.

• 20 Jul, 2026 NTE 2 Months Later

  It's been just over two months since I wrote my initial review of NTE, and considering NTE is a live service game, I think it's healthy to have follow up reviews of content as long as I keep playing. If NTE continues on it's current path, I think I'll have plenty more updates to share. There are a lot of things to talk about, and I'm excited to talk about the good and bad of all the major content that has been released over the last two months.

  Limited-Time Events

  As NTE is a live service game, it's really important for them to give the players new content. Aside from the main story and sidequests, one way Hotta goes about giving players reasons to play are their limited time events. Not counting login-based events, we've had 6 limited-time events so far of varying degrees of quality.

  For Patch 1.1, we had the Underground Circuit and What's Baking limited-time events. Underground Circuit was a Mario Kart-esque PvP racing minigame, and What's Baking was focused on the in-universe social media app "Bagel".

  Underground Circuit was really mediocre to me. Cars had very high durability against weapons, which really made the utility weapons the best options for general use. The ice gun had a high rate of fire which allowed it to destroy objects in the way or hinder other racers' vision. The spike strip shotgun was probably the best weapon when you were in first place, as it really helped to slow down other racers. There were a few problems to the event: the Le Mans style start as well as randomized cars. The Le Mans style start really rewards players who have movement skills like Jiuyuan's redirect, or Daffodil's dash cancel. It could be argued that optimizing your movement is skill expression, but if a player doesn't have Jiuyuan or Daffodil, it made getting a good car at the start much more difficult. With random car spawns in set areas around the map, using these movement skills to get to them faster was also quite important. That said, many players were AFK farming the event after the first few days (I'd guess mobile players or console, since both have notable disadvantages when compared to PC player potentials) so the fun wore off quickly. There were definitely some fun quirks like the surprise co-op races where someone would get in the passenger seat of your car.

  What's Baking was focused around the in-universe social media app which is basically Facebook. Images with titles and captions could be posted, and the more interaction you got, the more event currency you received. It should be noted that Bagel is still active in-game at time of writing, as the Bagel shop is open however the limited-time rewards are gone. This event was also okay. It was really dragged down by a bug where you wouldn't be able to post. I think the event rewards were easy enough to get as long as you posted 5 screenshots on Bagel daily. However I think the core issue of Bagel is discoverability. There's an insane amount of Like For Like (L4L) and Follow for Follow (F4F) farming; people will spam comments on their own posts to boost "interaction" which causes Bagel to move the posts higher in the Recommended feed. While I think it's cool to have in-game, as the story dialogue and a loading screen tip mention it a few times, it's something that I don't really care about. I'd say this is the weakest limited-time event put out thus far.

  For patch 1.1.12, we got access to the Fight Championship and Hunter's Crucible events. Fight Championship was a PvP game mode, and Hunter's Crucible was a boss challenge game mode. Of the two, I really enjoyed Hunter's Crucible.

  Fight Championship was a decent event however it suffered from some text problems and a lack of explanation in some areas. The core idea was simple enough; fight barehanded in the gulag against 3 other players. However much like the Underground Circuit event, this one was heavily AFK farmed as well as far as I could tell. I think the gameplay loop was entertaining but ping differences and lag caused a lot of problems for me. I'd see players teleporting around or I'd get hit when nobody was near me on my end. I think this issue might stem from NTE's netcode, as I also see rubberbanding and sync issues when playing with my friends in MY and PH. For full transparency, I'm located in Japan and I play on SEA servers. I have a ping of around 40-60 ms. I've played Battlefield on 120 ms ping and had fewer sync issues. Now the other major issue of the Fight Championship event was tied to the PvE portion of it. You were required to unlock the Tornado fight in the prison and based on the event UI, many people, myself included, thought it would unlock the PvE challenges closer to the end of the event. But on the last couple days of the event, the PvE challenge button never unlocked. After some quick Googling, I saw that you'd have to do all the PvE challenges in prison and that the PvE button in the event UI didn't actually do anything. After doing the PvE challenges in prison, I got the rewards from the event. It was poorly laid out to the players, but this won't be the last time we encounter the issue of bad explanations and bugs.

  Hunter's Crucible was a great event that really pushed the PvE content. It gave players access to a variety of bosses with a bunch of modifiers. The more detrimental the modifiers, the more points players would earn on a clear. Of course, these points were required to get everything out of the event shop. I'd say this is probably the hardest content I've seen in the game so far, since I wanted to max out my points. Damage resistance, increased enemy HP and damage, and a time limit made it much more fun because it was mildly challenging. Especially for my team since I didn't invest or use any primary DPS characters (Chaos, Nanally, or Baicang. My Lacrimosa wasn't even close to built at the time). It was a fun challenge! Arguably anyone that used a mostly built primary DPSer wouldn't have had much of a problem.

  At time of writing, we're on Patch 1.2 and we've had 3 events with more to come if the livestream is accurate and nothing goes wrong. We have 999 Nights, Shadow-n-Seek, and Mews Flash. One of these events is okay and the other is actually awful. Mews Flash is scratch cards, and 999 Nights is a whole new game mode. I don't really need to go too much into Mews Flash since they're just scratch cards that are likely to put a big dent in your wallet. But 999 Nights is pretty big, and Shadow-n-Seek is prop hunt.

  999 Nights takes you, Mint, Shinku, and Iroi into a high fantasy boardgame world. Shinku is the latest new gacha character at time of writing, with Iroi to follow once Shinku's banner is over. The combat is more or less the same as the base game, however it introduces a Diablo-esque loot treadmill. You are locked to the 4 characters presented and you start with nothing. No money, no gear... nothing. This is completely cut off from the base game. There are unique quests, unique gear, and now gear sets. Gear in 999 Nights can give bonuses much the same as your cartridge and modules in the base game. You can get crit rate, crit damage, HP, and so on. It is a bit simplified in terms of raw stats, but is changed significantly by sets, uniques, and passives. These sets will dictate how you approach the challenge and nightmare modes, which are unlocked after beating the previous difficulty level. As of time of writing, after you buy out the shop, this event is basically skippable unless you really enjoy the gameplay. However aside from the meta currency used for the event shop, I don't know if there's any point in playing aside from trying to farm the meta currency for when the second part of the shop opens. There is an item in the shop that refreshes daily but I haven't used any of the Heterogenous Units yet so I don't see much of a point in farming too heavily. I'm not a huge fan of high fantasy and I started playing NTE specifically because it isn't fantasy. Aesthetically, I couldn't wait to be done with the event however the gameplay is arguably better than the base game due to all the extra items you have access to, which can allow you to make some really broken builds. The most difficult bosses can be cleared in well under 30 seconds if you invest the time. The game mode does have a few bugs and there are times where the text in the achievements doesn't match other parts of the game. In addition, the lack of checklists make certain aspects harder to figure out such as which minigames you need to do to complete certain achievements.

  Shadow-n-Seek is a pretty simple prop hunt. There are 5 hiders and 1 seeker. The hiders get to rotate between 3 different props that seem to work in sets. Some are hard to work with, while others are pretty ridiculously overpowered. Of course, the props available change depending on the map. Seekers get a radar ability that tells them if any hider is within the AoE of the radar. Hiders are allowed to spawn a few decoys that will trigger the radar and taunt. Hiders can also move during the round however their movespeed is greatly increased during the prep time. Overall, I think it's simplistic but really fun. I haven't seen any issues with people trying to AFK, though this may be due partially to the fact that this style of prop hunt allows hiders to go AFK.

  Quality of Life (QoL) Limited-Time Events

  While not proper events in their own right, we've had a few QoL limited-time events. These are events that allow you to finish your weekly city stamina more quickly for increased rewards, increase the fons you get per Pink Paws Bank Heist, or give increased drops in certain character pixel dungeons. While not worth writing home about, they are definitely worth a shout out because when they're on, it's nice to be able to do stuff more efficiently.

  Monetization

  There have been two mystery boxes and my god I really hope they don't make these a regular thing because if they do, I may quit and I really don't wanna quit.

  The first mystery box was the Everdriving Mystery Box, which as far as I can tell is an official Porsche collab. While most of rewards in the mystery box were good, the costs were far too high if you wanted to get everything. It's very unfriendly for F2P or light spenders. There were a lot of great items like the Porsche 918 Spyder which is objectively the best car in the game at the moment. While customization of the 918 is prohibitively expensive and the oversteer does leave a bit to be desired, the acceleration and top speed are second to none. If you were able to buy it out, you could get some very useful items! Again, I think the prohibitive costs were what held this box back from being good.

  The second mystery box is the Neon Rift Mystery Box and is still good but has problems of bloat to nickel and dime the players. On the one hand, I think the Draco motorcycle is the best way to travel around the city. Like other motorcycles, it can be summoned almost anywhere however it can make incredibly sharp turns, has instant acceleration, and can jump. It also has infinite durability at the moment. The big issue with this mystery box is the inclusion of reskins of the main character skin. The reskins take up 2 out of 15 boxes and are objectively the worst items in the box since they do literally nothing without the character skin. Everything else is usable regardless of whatever you get from the box. The total cost however is notably lower than the Everdriving mystery box.

  Overall, while none of the items in any of the boxes are truly necessary, the Draco is a big QoL and the Porsche 918 is the fastest car in the game. I would advise checking the pull charts on websites like Game8 to figure out how much you're willing to spend, because you are unlikely to get the best items in the mystery boxes until the last pulls.

  Story

  Circling back to the overall story and plot of the game, we've had one main story episode since 1.0 and that was the Dreamwalk Corridor which also unlocked the Sunward Island location. Dreamwalk Corridor had lots of good moments and focused on Nanally; if you've read my previous review of NTE, you may recall that I didn't care for Nanally. I still don't, but Dreamwalk Corridor did a good bit of work to try and make me like her more. It also gives a bit of info about Daffodil's "family" which is an interesting dynamic. The writing is much better than I expected, but I also know that NTE's writing team can do a good job. I'm really hoping they continue the trend of having more serious moments getting time to breathe.

  999 Nights is also technically story content because it gives you more insight into Iroi as well as Shinku's backstory. That said, Shinku's backstory is poorly set up. She acts like a lone wolf because she's afraid of getting close to other people. Consequently because of her lone wolf act, she doesn't get enough screentime or development for the players to actually care about her. The reveal of her backstory lacks any impact or weight. It's difficult to empathize with her since you just don't know who she is. Overall, I'd say 999 Nights' backstory for Shinku is much worse than Dreamwalk Corridor's backstory for Nanally.

  Search posts by tag:

  #aion 2 #gacha #mmorpg #nte #open world #rpg #survivors-like #warhammer