Eternights Review (PS5)

Just hanging out with my love interests…and Chani.

It’s both a blessing and a curse that I have such a wide appreciation of game genres. This does have me enjoy a lot of different games, but at the same time I end up wanting to play so many games that I don’t have time for. Where am I going with this? Okay, I swear I’m getting to the point. You need some way for your trailer to grab people’s attention, especially so when you’re being showcased with a bunch of other games, and one particular game did during Playstation’s showcase. That was Eternights and it not only had an attention catching trailer, that I actually still remember, but it had two aspects that spoke to me. That being that it’s a persona-like action game with dating sim aspects. So I patiently waited for its release and now that it’s out, how did it turn out?

Eternights has you play as a nameless (well, until you name him) male protagonist that isn’t doing too hot in his love life. His love life is like nonexistent. Luckily, your best friend Chani is there to help you out. He helps you make a dating profile! A perfect dating profile that would surely attract all the hotties. Has it worked for Chani? Well…not exactly, but you can’t expect to get matches your first day let alone every day. You guys hang out for the rest of the day, which includes watching some TV where you hear news about a new anti-aging drug called Eternights releasing the next day and a cute pop star named Yuna having a concert next month. Before you go to bed, Chani texts you to sign up for another dating app which is totally cool and totally going to be more successful. After all, this one has you do a personality test and you are guaranteed to match with someone based on your results. You do the personality test of course, let’s be honest Chani would not have left you alone until you did, and you actually get matched. You get messaged immediately where your match certainly knows how to break the ice and you even land a yacht date for the next day.

You go to sleep hopeful for your yacht date, but little do you know what would happen overnight. You wake up ready to go on that yacht date and everything goes to hell. Everything is thrown into chaos as most of the population gets turned into aggressive dangerous monsters, buildings collapse, and strange walls appear. You and Chani luckily make it to a shelter unharmed, but that soon also becomes dangerous and you two leave. This does allow you to meet up with Yuna and a woman you’ll soon learn is Aria through a drone, but you also run straight into the plot as one of the antagonists, Delia, cuts off your arm. Oh my gosh. This isn’t the end for you though, as you wake up on your yacht date in a dreamy location. Your date was actually Lux, an Architect that shaped the mind and souls of humans and last night another Architect known as Umbra stole The Stone. Whoever has The Stone has control of the direction of humanity and Lux loves humans as they are now. She wants to get it back before Umbra awakens it and so she grants you a new arm made from her power that you can fight with.

Before you know it, you’re roped in to help bring the world back from this chaos by helping Lux get back The Stone from Umbra and you meet others that got powers from Lux. Which are also your love interests here. It’s a hard and dangerous road, but you won’t be alone and you can do this.

I usually do this for visual novels, but since this is part dating sim, I believe it’s warranted to talk about the characters. The protagonist is the usual plain looking boy meant to be like a self-insert, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a personality. His personality peeks through with the actions he does throughout the story and the dialogue choices you’ll be able to select. He’s definitely a horny teenage boy, but you see how sassy he can be and he’s really considerate. Chani is also a horny teenage boy that you would initially think is the resident pervy character, but he isn’t. You see how he wants to be involved and get a power of his own, how respectful and caring he is towards those around him, and how supportive he is even though his power isn’t flashy.

Onto the love interests and they all have something tragic that happened to them before they joined up with you. Yuna joins first and she’s the popular pop star. She’s kind, strong-willed, and actually plays off well with the horny comments and moments that happen with the protagonist and Chani. Though, you get to hear that she has regrets over what happened in the past and when all this happened she was going to try and make amends. Next is Sia who is very passionate about science, but she tries to hide her excitement so she can be taken seriously. You also get to hear about her boss and how she totally doesn’t like video games. There’s also Min who is a sweet shy girl that’s trying to get more courage and she enlists you as her coach. This is due to what happened at the beginning of the apocalypse where she ran in fear instead of helping her friends fight. There’s a really sweet scene that happens during the story with Min’s side story. And lastly, there’s the mysterious Yohan who you meet in your dreams first and you learn is immortal. Yohan’s backstory ends up being connected to Delia’s reasons for why she’s doing this as you hear his regrets over what he said before he lost someone close to him. I especially liked Yohan’s side story as his is really sweet as well and I loved the progression, the reveal, and looking back at what he said previously and how it gained more meaning.

I quite liked Eternight’s story. At first, I wasn’t too sure about it as early on there are some scenes that felt ended too early and getting your head wrapped around the lore, but once you get into it, it gets good. I also really liked the writing and it turned out to be really funny. The game does start out with some horniness and cheesiness, but the more you get into the game the more you see how well its written and how much care was put in. What I really appreciated was even though the protagonist and Chani are horny teenage boys, it’s not their whole personality. The horny moments are mainly used for laughs and even then it’s subtle most of the time and the game knows when to bring it on so it didn’t ruin a scene. Or a way where it didn’t ruin the tone. I’m someone that hates pervy characters and I had no problem with this game’s horny characters and laughed so much throughout my playthrough.

I was also pleasantly surprised with how the length was perfect. When you look into how long people took it seems short, but it felt like the perfect length with little to no filler or fluff. I even ended up being surprised with how much I cared about the characters and how hard the ending hit me. There were certainly aspects that could have been expanded or more clearly explained as it was left ambiguous, but overall it’s a great story.

One last thing about the story that I want to talk about. I did hear an inkling on what the ending pertained before I reached the ending. I was expecting to find the ending lackluster, but it actually hit me really hard. The game really hypes you up before going into the final confrontation and then you realize just how much you care about these characters. I do agree that there should be an option to see the secret ending scene in-game (or be able to get the link again just in case you missed it), but I did like the ending nonetheless. I totally didn’t tear up and had to step away from my console for the rest of the day.

Eternights uses a calendar system which you’ll be familiar with if you played a Persona game before. Once the game starts and a dungeon opens up, you’ll be given a certain amount of days to complete it and you can also hang out with any of the characters as well. I wasn’t sure what felt the best to start with, but considering your bonds affect your combat, I think I’ll talk about that first.

You’ll be able to do two actions per day, one during the daytime and one at night. During the day, going into the dungeon will clash with being able to spend time with the love interests and Chani. Spending time with an LI or Chani will grant you a scene and a rank up with their relationship if you have enough affection or will do a generic hangout if not. I only got to see Yuna’s and Sia’s generic hangouts, but I did find them funny in their own right. At night, you won’t be able to go out to the dungeon or spend time with anyone, but you’ll be able to scavenge with a LI. They’ll basically mention what item they’ll want and you’ll have to guess (or look up) which of the three available places it’s probably at. Most of them are logical, like books being at the library, but some are out there like a flamethrower being at a convenience store. Successfully finding the item will grant you White Essence and a boost towards a stat they’re associated with. Not finding it does still grant you a reward, but it’s smaller and you’ll be able to try again. I also want to add that this also does include some short conversations and some are pretty funny as well.

I do want to mention how much I really liked how there were scenes between days. Some are short, but I enjoyed how we still got to see the characters outside of spending time with them. You got to see the personality of these characters a lot in Eternights and this does allow some lighthearted scenes to happen.

You can train with a character at either slot. Training with the love interests gives you a little minigame and you’ll be able to raise affection with that LI and get some White Essence based on your performance. The minigames are decent, though I didn’t end up liking Yohan’s, but I found it’s best to just scavenge. Chani is a bit different though as his training is raising a social stat. Chani doesn’t have a minigame, but he basically talks you up which is really nice of him. This really helps towards the end when you want to max rank your favorite LI on your first playthrough.

When you’re picking dialogue options, or just looking at Chani’s training option, you’ll notice that you gain social stats. You have four, Courage, Expression, Confidence, and Acceptance, and each correspond with a LI. These might not seem that important at first, but if you want to get past Rank 5 and get the option to date them you will have to raise your social skill to level 3. And then to level 4 if you want to max rank them. You do get two dates once you max rank them and get their ending variation. You can technically end up dating more than two LIs, but I did hear you won’t get the secret ending if you did.

It’s time to go into the dungeon! While you’re outside of the train or in a dungeon, there will be numerous enemies running about that won’t hesitate to attack you. Not to mention the moments where the exits will be blocked off until the enemies are dealt with. Luckily, you don’t have to worry about carrying a weapon as your new arm lets you make a weapon with its Lux energy. Combat is pretty simple as you start with being able to do light attacks that can go into a combo and a dodge so you can dodge enemy attacks. You do get a dodge flash to help you with the timing, but I felt the dodging wasn’t that great at times as I thought I pressed dodge in time only to be hit. This may be due to the flash coming too late for certain attacks and requiring you to dodge moments before the flash. The game does have an emphasis on dodging as a perfect dodge slows down time and lets you get attacks in and hopefully a full combo. There’s also an Elemental gauage that gets filled as you attack and dodge. This has you do QTEs and lets you do a lot of damage, but more importantly it lets you break shields. You can’t hurt enemies with shields, which is a bit annoying, so it’s important to utilize. Once you get more LIs joining your team, you do get an addition of more Elemental attack options, which is important as enemies do have a weakness, and they do come with an ability that uses what I call the friendship gauge (the game doesn’t really tell you this, so yeah). Like Yuna is your only source of healing so her abilities are heals.

Once you get further into the game, though, the combat does open up more. The game is all about your bonds giving you strength and the majority of the skills require a character to join your team and then ask for you to rank up your relationship before you can unlock them. Well, you do need White Essence (given when hanging out, training, and scavenging) for the LIs and Chani’s skill tress and Black Essence (given by fighting enemies or finding some hidden away in corners) for your skill tree, but still. These skill trees let you unlock more moves for you or an ability for an LI, strengthen them, and strengthen your stats. Once you head towards the end game, you’ll soon find yourself with a lot more moves you can do. Not only making combat more enjoyable, but also feel more powerful. Going from only being able to do the basic combo to being able to do heavy attacks, SP attacks like a long-range swipe, and having Min grant you a shield or Yuna do a direct heal.

The dungeons here are all different and are the perfect length. They don’t feel too long where it overstays its welcome nor too short. Each has their own puzzle type as well. There are some gimmicks thrown in, which I didn’t mind, but I did find the dancing gimmick disappointing and the motorcycle one a tad annoying considering you have to restart after one hit. I also think the bosses were a good challenge. They, dare I say it, have a souls-like quality to them and even though I did get a bit annoyed, I did enjoy learning their moveset and getting that golden run where I just confidently stand still until it’s time to dodge and kick the boss’ butt.

Just like with Persona, I do recommend doing most, if not the entire, dungeon in one day so you can bond with the characters more (don’t worry it won’t do a timeskip if you finish it early). Your friendship gauge won’t refill until you go bac to the train or go into the boss fight, but you can pretty much push through as dying will just take you back to the last checkpoint and respawn all the enemies. It makes it more difficult, but you’ll eventually get past it. Though, I’m sure it’s fine to use a couple days as that does seem like the intention.

I wasn’t expecting it, but I did end up liking the combat. You can’t really get a sense on a game feel from video, but I did like how it felt once I got used to it and unlocked more combat skills. The shields and the dodge were occasional annoyances, but I enjoyed it enough that I wanted to go into NG+ so I can get my revenge on the early game enemies.

Talking about New Game Plus, there’s a New Game Plus! You can’t do everything in a single playthrough so there is a NG+ for you to dive into. For your first playthrough, I wouldn’t stress out too much and I do recommend going for the love interest you like the most. For NG+, unlocked skills, combat stat boost values, and your social stats carry over. Your friendship ranks and scavenged items (the boost you got from your first playthrough does stay though) are reset. However, there is no option to skip dialogue and skipping it yourself can be annoying as you need to wait a second or two before your inputs will be registered. I do hope we get text skips for NG+ saves in an update as this is the only thing stopping me from doing another run.

The voice acting is pretty good. Eternights is partly voiced and I do think the English voice actors did a good job (I also checked out the Korean and Japanese voice acting and it sounds good as well). Though, there were a few voice lines that were delivered weirdly, there was one scene I wished was voiced, and the ending cutscene is noticeably off sync (but considering it’s off sync for every language, I’m guessing it was a compromise). I also did end up liking the game’s visuals. The models are a bit wonky, but I enjoyed the amount of expressiveness they had and the scenes that were able to be created. I thought I would be bothered by the portraits by the text boxes being vtuber-like, but I didn’t mind. I also really liked the artwork for the anime cutscenes and the CGs. I do wish the anime cutscenes lasted for a tad longer though, especially the one where the protagonist’s arm gets sliced off.

Verdict

Eternights is rough around the edges, but it’s charming and you can tell a lot of passion went into the game. There are aspects that could be improved, like the dodging, fleshing out certain story beats or characters more, and adding a text skip for NG+; but it’s an overall great game. The combat, for the most part, feels good and gets fun once you unlock more, the characters are great, the writing is great and manages to be funny even to someone that hates pervy characters, and the main story and character side stories were well written and really hits you with emotions when you’re least expecting it. I’m really happy that I was able to play Eternights.

I also found out this was made by a one person team, who did receive some help from others, and I gotta say I’m impressed. If this was the first game that was put out, I’m looking forward to their future games. And trust me, I’m not just saying Eternights is great because it had a solo developer. If I didn’t like it, I would have said it.

That said, I definitely recommend Eternights. I found the price reasonable, both with the game’s quality and my playtime being about 18 hours, and I enjoyed the game a lot. Just go in with the right expectations.