Eternights Score Explanation
Overall.
Eternights is a very well-rounded game, especially for a dating simulator with an action RPG backdrop. However, it ends up being a double-edged sword for the game, with it suffering from many issues in every aspect that could have been avoided if it simply focused on being one thing or another. Nonetheless, it's still an okay game with a good deal of replayability.
Story.
Filled with all manner of cliches and continuity problems, Eternights' story is a novel writer's worst nightmare (or a fanfic writer's fanciful dream). Although the characters' backstories have a bit of weight behind them, the same cannot be said about everything else that happens in the game. But, to be fair, it’s a common malady for many dating-type games.
Gameplay.
You'll be spending most of your time in Eternights either roaming the labyrinths or scavenging for supplies. For that, you'll have to get used to the game's combat system, which unfortunately lacks both style and substance. It's only really saved by its dating sim elements, a cookie-cutter experience that's nonetheless a time-tested method for video games.
Visuals.
Eternights' visuals look like they focused almost entirely on one thing: surface-level aesthetics. The models are pretty, sure, and the ambiance created by its lighting effects really elevates the mood. However, besides the game's gratuitous use of particle effects on everything, that's all that stands out visually. The game suffers from stiff animations, atrocious camera work, an utter lack of environmental storytelling, and several other issues that really pull it down.
Audio.
Eternights' audio is its strongest suit. Not only is its in-game voice acting pristine (near-perfect, really), but its soundtrack is also quite enjoyable. However, comments from your companions get tiresome after a while, and the sound effects lack a lot of personality, especially when compared to the characters making use of them.
Value for Money.
At $29.99, Eternights is a decent enough purchase for those who love action RPGs and dating simulators. However, those expecting a fantastic deal may be disappointed, as the game lacks a lot of personality that could have truly made it memorable. What does make up for it, though, is the amount of replayability it has, due to having multiple romantic interests.
Eternights First Impressions: Please Let The Night End
As games with "anime-like" aesthetics are becoming increasingly popular, there will inevitably be a pecking order for games that stand out above the rest. This can be seen from the wildly popular mobile games Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail to the console games with decently sizable followings, such as the Disgaea and Fire Emblem series.
Of course, there's no need for these games to be developed by a large team to gain popularity. Many notable examples of indie-developed anime games that have gained a lot of traction over the years include Doki Doki Literature Club and Little Witch Nobeta. And now, it seems like Eternights, a game by indie developer Studio Sai, seeks to make a name for itself and stand among those at the top.
But unfortunately for Eternights, it seems to have misunderstood what made those popular games so prolific. It's not simply a matter of looking good or sounding nice. And no, it's rarely ever about fulfilling some sort of fantasy. These games are judged on the same thing that all other games are subject to: quality.
Eternights is a beautiful game. But that's basically it. That description encompasses every aspect of the game, from its story to its design. It uses tropes excessively without fully utilizing their potential, delivering a very surface-level experience to its players.
Does that make it a bad game? Of course not. After all, being pretty is a great quality in itself. However, tropes are meant to be a template for developers to build on. Eternights simply uses them as they are, neglecting to fill in more details that would make these cliche, formulaic tropes into deep, more meaningful and memorable aspects.
The end result is an ultimately shallow game, replete with questionable continuities, jarring gameplay, and off-putting stories, but still miraculously culminates into an okay game.
Pros of Eternights
Things Eternights Got Right
Amazing Audiovisuals
Burdensome Backstories
Amazing Audiovisuals
Eternights is set in a post-apocalyptic modern society where people have mutated into horrible monsters with varying numbers of appendages, and the cities have been ruined into an abominable hellscape resembling a Walmart after a Black Friday Sale. The game delivers this vibe quite well, with its generous use of dark corridors, scant lighting, warm colors, and thick fog. You'll immediately know that everything around you is either dead or has become a monster the moment you take full control of your character.
In a strange way, this touch is only enhanced by the game's enemy designs, which take the term "body horror" quite literally, with each baddie being shaped out of dismembered or flayed body parts. While none of them look particularly terrifying, they do at least look cool, so you can play in peace knowing that mutated humans still know how to look stylish.
Well, at least until you see them writhe and spasm uncontrollably on the ground.
Eternights also features, among a few other things, cutscenes of both the fully-animated 2D kind and the relatively lower-effort 3D kind. While the latter isn't anything noteworthy to talk about, the 2D cutscenes are well-made enough to be praiseworthy. If only they had all of its cutscenes animated similarly, it could elevate the game enough to be truly special.
The voice acting in Eternights is also absolutely astounding. This is all thanks to its star-studded cast of voice actors and actresses who bring life to the game's characters. If the audio could have been scored purely from the quality of the voice acting, it would have earned an easy nine or even a ten. Certain pieces from its soundtrack are also bangers, and its few songs are catchy enough to make me want to dig through the internet and add it to my personally curated playlist. Everything else… Well, it does the job at least.
Burdensome Backstories
As you would expect from a game about teenagers tasked with saving the world, most of them carry a heavy weight on their shoulders. This influences how you, the protagonist, must treat them to develop your relationship.
But what's actually surprising about this is how well-defined their problems are. Not only are they quite realistic, but they're also intrinsically relatable to any ordinary person despite the in-game characters' special circumstances. This ranges from loneliness due to their inability to make friends, self-esteem problems because of cowardice, guilt from abandoning others, and much more.
While nothing they present is novel and exciting, the mere fact that your romantic interests are able to display a level of humanity that's both sensible and engaging allows the dating sim elements of the game to be treated almost like a real-life simulation.
Cons of Eternights
Things That Eternights Can Improve
Annoying Audio Usage
Bad Battles
Cringe Compositions
Dubious Developments
Annoying Audio Usage
This might be confusing considering I just praised its audio. Eternights' overall audio experience is a mixed bag of amazement and disappointment. Sure, the voice acting is incredible, and certain music from its soundtrack can almost hit as hard as those "isekai" trucks that can take you to another world, it suffers from its usage of extremely generic sound effects and annoyingly persistent character quips. The latter, in particular, happens so often that you’ll likely grow tired of the voice acting's excellent quality within a few hours.
While you could argue that your companions' persistent post-encounter dialogues add a bit of color to the dull, post-apocalyptic landscape, I’d like to add that there are only a few lines they could speak, depending on the situation. It wouldn't be strange to hear the same thing three times in a row within the same dungeon-crawling session.
As for the game's sound effects, they're just… there. It doesn't feel like they're specially made for the occasion, or perhaps its creation was just to ensure a complete set of sound effects to work with. It just lacks personality.
Bad Battles
Unlike Eternights' audio, which is technically salvageable by its fantastic voice acting and soundtrack, its combat experience is unfortunately too far gone to save it.
While the game provides you with a myriad of abilities through your companions' powers, little care was taken to enhance the quality of your experience using them. For example, the camera angles used when you unleash your Elemental Fist, your primary method of breaking barriers, are so bad that they might as well count as one of the bosses in the game. It's set so that you'll either have no idea what the hell you or your companions are doing, or is sometimes shaking so badly that you can't see anything properly.
To add to these problems, the combat experience itself is painfully average. Your attacks, special moves, and usage of the Elemental Fist are primarily bogged down by messy or sloppy controls that will challenge your patience. For instance, one big offender is its lock-on mechanic, which demands that you face your camera toward the enemy you want to target. This could have been improved by leaps and bounds by prioritizing the target that your character is physically facing instead and panning the camera toward it afterward.
And even if you do get a lock on your enemy, it'll disappear the instant something even momentarily blocks your line of sight from the part of the enemy you've set your sights on. Yes, even the humble telephone pole will break your lock-on if it crosses that thin line between you and the baddie.
The game is meant to be fast paced, but it suffers from companion skills that execute slower than a month of Sundays, quickly killing any momentum.
Cringe Compositions
One of Eternights' essential tasks is for you to raise or improve your bonds with your team as you progress through the mission. This involves simply hanging out with them and answering with the proper dialogue choices, training with them through different minigames, or scavenging for certain items they’ll need for their everyday life.
In other words, Eternights is partly a dating simulator. Shocker, right? I know. Unfortunately, this also means that it suffers from the same plague many games of the genre are infected with: cringe.
Most of the game's story segments are thus riddled with dumb dialogue that you'll have to sit through to progress. These include the characters laughing profusely at blatantly unfunny jokes, your romantic interests blushing over the strangest or the subtlest of smutty references, etc. Have I mentioned that there's a gratuitous amount of lascivious scenes? Not only that, some are unwarranted at times and completely absent when they aren't. Strange.
They're also prone to making the dumbest responses in an attempt to have a little humor in the writing. However… I suppose in a certain way, this could be taken as a pro. The game's inappropriate humor does have an audience, after all.
Dubious Developments
Perhaps due to limitations imposed by its game design, Eternights's progress is littered with baffling, eyebrow-raising developments that even a barely attentive gamer would notice. For example, how the hell is a random train parked in a subway/shelter suddenly equipped with this high-tech gadget that is able to measure the levels of Umbra, a malevolent pseudo-substance, in the air when the world-ending scenario only happened recently? How is your VTuber of a companion (I’m kidding of course) so familiar with how the world will end and where you need to go when you, who has had direct contact with the deity asking you to save the world, barely even know the basics? And why the hell do these mutant abominations use a giant color-matching puzzle game to protect their bridges? So many questions, so little in-game time.
While the latter problem can be explained away by a modern game’s unreasonable need to have puzzle minigames (I’m looking at you, Resident Evil), the issues with the story's loopholes and continuity errors are much trickier. It's not even an excuse to say that it'll be "explained in due time" since the opportune moment to do so have long passed before these problems became apparent.
This might have been caused by Eternights' need to throw you into the meat of the game without suffering a prolonged cutscene to explain every little thing. But while that makes sense, it doesn't mean it's forgivable.
Eternights Overview & Premise
On the way to his first date, our protagonist suddenly finds himself amid a global apocalypse. An airborne malignancy called Umbra infects everybody on the planet, twisting their forms into abominations that seek to kill everything around them. Desperate to survive, the protagonist escapes their failing shelter with his friends and gets caught up in the Architect's, the designer of humanity's souls, plans to save the world.
Who Should Play Eternights?
Eternights is Recommended if You Enjoy:
• Akiba's Trip
• Persona Series
• Agarest: Generations of War
If you enjoy dating sim elements to your action game, then Eternights is for you. Be warned, though. The game is quite halfhearted about what it wants to be. Though it has the kind of dumb dialogue that certain people would enjoy, it doesn't commit to it like Akiba's Trip does. It also doesn't commit to being a serious horror action game, either, with a fancifully abundant amount of vanilla romance to contradict it. Overall, the experience is just average, only propped up slightly by its surface-level beauty.