Tell Me About Your Childhood - Backstory In NTE

Hotta produces a lot of videos for Neverness To Everness. There are one hundred and forty listed the official YouTube account. They come in all flavors, from the exceptionally vivid and vibrant trailers that created so much of the buzz around the game a year or so back to the gameplay and combat and feature reveals. There are songs and cut scenes and appearances at conventions - promotions of all kinds.

None of those does anyone need to watch to enjoy the game, now it's out there to be played. Or to decide whether to play it, either, since it's Free To Play. If you want to know what the game's like, you can just download it, make an account, log in and find out for yourself.

If you do that and decide you like the game enough to keep playing, though, there are a few videos in that hundred and forty that you probably ought to make time to watch. Those are the vignettes, short stories and micro-movies that add background to the characters and also sometimes reveal them to be quite  different from what you might have thought just from seeing them in the game itself. 

Some of these ought to be in the game, not on YouTube and even when you know where to look, it's not just a simple matter of going to the channel and watching them. First you have to find them.

I was hoping to do that before I wrote this post but that was when I was thinking Hotta would have organized them in some way. Maybe they have but if there's any order or sequence, I can't figure it out.

It's not even a simple task to single the damn things out from the pack. There look to be several naming conventions in play but I'm not convinced whoever's using them pays much attention to how they're being applied. There are "PV" videos, "EP" videos, "Animated Shorts". I think PV means a take from the character's point of view, while an animated short is more objective. EPs are definitely music videos.

It's also a job in itself spotting when a new one arrives. I'm subscribed to the channel so they pop up in my YouTube timeline but that moves so fast I miss most of what's there. I get emails from Hotta but not about any of these. This is what comes from playing a game made by and for digital natives, I guess. The target audience doesn't need to be told to pay attention to this sort of thing.

I do, though, and since my audience here is almost certainly not part of the target demographic either, I thought I'd mention it as a kind of public service. If you'e playing NTE and not watching these videos, you're missing out on something you'd almost certainly enjoy and which might even change your perceptions of the characters you like or loathe or feel nothing but indifference for.

It certainly changed my feelings about a couple of them. Hotori was already my favorite character, purely for the slacker chic and anarchic undertow she brings to the game, but my appreciation and understanding of her deepened considerably after I watched this:

It explains nothing and yet it contextualizes everything. I know very little more about Hotori after watching it several times, other than she grew up rich and a Bad Thing happened and yet I feel as if I know her so much better. As for Adler, before I watched the video I thought he was a bit of an ass. Not any more. The gravitas he carries now feels like it comes from somewhere rather than just some pose he's taking.

Then there's this:

I have almost no clue what that's supposed to mean but it's a joy to watch. The animation is exemplary, the art design is gorgeous and it creates a sense of history that fills out the characters without really telling you anything about them. I welcome that approach in any medium. Don't tell me or show me - make me feel it. 

And finally in the Hotori trilogy there's this:

Which is basically a music video. I watch a lot of music videos and that's a good one. The song's not bad, either. And once again it works on emotion not reason.

All of those were released in the ten days or so running up to the arrival of Hotori as a banner pull so they're very much part of the marketing push, something that in no way undermines their value as narrative, lore and story. And, of course, mood.

Mood is really super-important to NTE. It's a mood piece, almost, as much as a game. Kind of a tone poem, perhaps.

At Hunter Level 21, Appraisal Level 2 and a couple of weeks into the game, I still have relatively little idea what the main storyline is, or if there even is one. I've been trying to remember if that was true of Wuthering Waves or Genshin Impact at the same stage but in both cases, later narrative developments have mostly overwritten my memory of how it all began.

Still, I'm fairly sure both those games and indeed almost every other RPG, online or off, multiplayer or solo, that I've played had a clearer through-line in the early chapters than this one. NTE seems to thrive on ambiguity and vagueness. It's an approach that sits very well with me. I do like not knowing what's going on.

For that to work, though, you have to really like the characters or at least find them fascinating. The game does a great job of that but the videos, even as they do almost nothing to explain the plot, do plenty to make the characters feel more empathetic. 

Nanally, for example, can seem bossy, harsh, brash and aggressive. Here's how she sees herself:

That's a PV video, which I'm taking to mean it's from the character's perspective. Here's one from the outside, looking in:

As well as making Nanally seem like a much more sympathetic character, these videos also go a huge way to explaining why such a young girl is part of a clean-up team nullifying and containing dangerous anomalies. She's a very powerful, skillful Esper, capable of showing a great deal of empathy for her targets. (How old is she, anyway? As with most characters in the game it's very hard to be sure.) 

Once again, watching these videos materially changed how I saw the character. I'm guessing - and hoping - that there's a lot more to learn about all of them inside the game but even if that's true, playing through character arcs takes quite a while. Assuming they even exist, it''ll be weeks if not months before I get to see most of them and I'd like to have at least some idea who I'm spending my time with before then.

Nanally also gets a music video. It's not as good as Hotori's but it's pretty good all the same. That means both characters have a PV, an Animated Short and an EP, suggesting maybe every character will eventually get a set of three.

So far, Sakiri, Jiuyuan and Fadia are the only others to get PV videos although for some reason the official Hotta PV Playlist also includes Mint's Character Short. So much for the naming conventions. I haven't seen those yet so I'll say nothing. I'm going to watch them later today, though. 

For now, I'll go out with a song. Chiz, who I would be happy to see more of, doesn't get a PV or a short yet but she does get a song. Here's her EP:

 Chiz is pronounced "Cheese". 'Nuff said...