Ask Not "For Whom The Verses Morn" Because I Have No Clue!

The next big content drop for Neverness To Everness is due in less than a week. It's called For Whom The Verses Morn because of course it is. I don't know which of the gacha games started this trend for incomprehensible, enigmatic chapter titles but hats off to whoever it was. To paraphrase Jeanette Winterson's mother, why be sensible when you can be weird?

The last update was called Rising From The Moonlit Fog and I did the preview post for that one on August 12. The pace is relentless. Is anyone playing an MMORPG that gets major content drops every six weeks? All year round? No, I didn't think so.

Perhaps a better question is would you want to be? And an even better question than that would be wouldn't it depend on what content it was?

I'm beginning to wonder if NTE might have an identity problem. The game's been out for five months now. This will be the fourth big update. They're running at around one every six weeks, which is par for the genre. So far we've had:

 

Dreamwalk Corridor (June) - The main storyline continues via the Corridor of Echoes episode, which expands on the Scarlet Letter plot and sees Nanally lose part of her soul. It also added a largely pointless and now forgotten resort island just off the coast of Hethereau. Has anyone been back there since? I know I haven't. Oh, and there was the Porsche collab, which was just weird.

999 Nights (July) - If you thought adding a resort island was a strange choice for the first update, the follow-up invites you to hold its beer. This one added a whole new game from a completely different genre. Not just some mini-game or holiday event, either - a complete fantasy RPG that could quite reasonably have been launched as a standalone title. It's now permanent content, so if you ever feel like playing a high-fantasy ARPG using NTE as the lobby for it, well now you can! As for the main plot, that had to wait until next time. Poor old Nanally.

Rising from the Moonlight Fog - (August): Back to the plot at last. In fact, not just back to it but through it and out the other side. The whole Scarlet Letter plotline concluded with what felt like unseemly haste, with the entire organization broken up and whatever threat it represented nullified. At this point it's unclear whether there even is a "main plotline" any more. We're left with some vague hints and sense of unease and that's about it. As for new territory, this one added a vast tract of largely empty countryside and... a resort beach. Are you sensing a theme here? If not, you should be.

For Whom The Verses Morn - (September) : And here we are again, anticipating what's coming next. According to the seven-minute promo video, we'll be starting a new storyline involving Blackbird, the witch from the Witch's House, who popped up at some point earlier as a consultant but now takes point for a tale involving a mysterious letter and a trip to a new location called St. Arbor. Does it have anything to do with anything else that's happened? I don't know but I very much doubt it. We're also getting a new district of Hethereau. Well, kind of. We're getting a theme park. And the bloody Porsche collab is back.

There's an hour-long "Preview Special" video that might make a bit more sense of all of that but I haven't watched it and I'm not about to. I have watched the seven-minute PV though and I'll watch again right now, to refresh my memory. Here, why don't you watch along with me? 

Yeah, well, that's seven minutes etc.

I didn't get the stopwatch out (I don't own a stopwatch, before you get any ideas...) but I'd estimate the story gets maybe thirty seconds of that seven minutes. About half the running time goes to showing off the new costumes. Pukaland, the unfortunately-named theme park, and the stupid racing cars get most of the rest.

It's becoming hard to ignore the priorities here. In four updates we've had three new open-world zones or areas, all of them focusing on leisure activities: two beach resorts and a theme park. Everything else is just open countryside. For a game originally predicated on life in the big city it seems like an odd choice.

Or should I say a series of odd choices. Two playgrounds might be counted a co-incidence but three makes a trend. 

And I'm not even mentioning the wealth of ancillary content that's been added since launch, the vast majority of which also revolves around mini-games, gambling and the kind of thing you might find yourself doing on vacation or at the weekend. As a working city, Hethereau sure takes its playtime seriously.

About this time in a post about an upcoming update to a game I'm playing, I'd normally start digging into the details to try and figure out where the story might be going. I'm not going to do that this time. It's increasingly obvious there's not much point in doing it for NTE. That's not how the game works.

It's taken me a while to figure it out. Coming from Wuthering Waves and before it Genshin Impact, I'd made an automatic, unconscious assumption that what would be driving player interest and retention would be the story. All the big gacha open-world games build a good deal of their reputation on the quality of the writing, which has frequently been exemplary. 

And the the writing in Neverness To Everness is excellent. There's no questioning the quality of the individual stories or the authenticity of the dialog. The voice actors bring the writers' words to life with flair and authority. All of that remains demonstrably superior to almost anything I've been used to seeing in a quarter of a century playing MMORPGs, where the standards are so much lower.

No, the thing that makes NTE quite different from all those other gacha games is the apparent lack of a through-line or even a structure designed to facilitate the telling of an epic tale. What, after all, is going on in Hethereau? Really, not all that much. 

In most games there's a crisis of some kind or at least we enter the world at some moment of decision. There's tension and threat. Not so in Hethereau. It's a peaceful city where everything seems to be trucking along nicely with no dark clouds looming on the horizon.

The crisis happened forty years ago. It's long over now. The Appraiser, who suffers from the inevitable amnesia trope, hasn't woken up to an ongoing conflict in which she plays a key part so much as she's been rounded up by social services. They've found her a place to live and given her a job to do. There are suggestions that there might be some government work to come later but so far, in nearly six months, all she's had to deal with is a series of minor family crises, most of which affect no-one much outside of Eibon Antiques.

I ought to make it clear I have no problem with a game having a central plot that never rises above the quotidian. On the contrary: it's very refreshing not to have to go out and save the world every goddam time. 

What I do find problematic is the randomness of it all. It's not as though there's even an episodic or picaresque storyline, where the pieces slowly start to fall into place and the bigger picture becomes clear.

Or not yet, at least. I did have the sense last time that there might be something brewing along those lines, with the Rules Anomalies starting to cause some existential issues for BAC and the rest of the authorities. I can only hope the Blackbird plotline ties in to that somehow but looking at the video I get the much stronger impression it's going to be something they've cooked up for Halloween. I mean, witches, bonfires, creepy, spooky, shadowy villages... in October?

 

And then the next update, six weeks after that, is going to be the Christmas one, isn't it? Are we going to go heavy on the storyline then, in the biggest of all holiday seasons? I doubt it. I'd put my money on some kind of winter sports resort opening up, somewhere off  in those snow-capped mountains we can see in the distance.

It seems so much more likely that way. NTE is all about the fun, not the drama. That's where it's pitched. Sure, there's a story for those that like that sort of thing but I don't get the sense that story is driving anything. If you look at the promo video, it's not even pushing the new characters' combat skills. It's far more interested in what they're wearing, most of which looks like it's meant for going clubbing or lounging around at home.

I didn't even mention the characters, did I? Obviously, as a gacha game, every update has to come with characters to roll on (And their weapons, but I'd have to say that weapons in NTE really are very much an afterthought. They barely get a mention in the promotional material.).

The two characters this time are Blackbird, of course, and Akane. I may be jumping the gun here because I have no foreknowledge of the plot for St. Arbor but I'd be very surprised if Akane plays much of a part in it. There's a major side-story in the update involving Nanally's band, The Whoots!!!. Akane will be in that and, I'd predict, only in that. 

If I'm right, it makes the whole team-building aspect of the game even more abstract than it already was. Last time I wondered how Zankou could be in the player's team when she's a) a baddie and b) in prison. Now we're adding Akane, a retired rock musician currently tending bar in a cellar club. What, exactly, does she know about combat?  Is she even an Esper?

It might sound like I'm complaining about all of this but I'm not. Not really. In a way, all of this chaos and confusion is a big part of what makes Neverness To Everness so appealing in the first place. You never know what's going to happen because none of it makes any sense. And I've always liked entertainments that don't make sense.

 

The entire set-up is fraught with inconsistencies, of course. Not only is all the action forty years in the past but there's the whole thing about how a government agency sends the player character to work for a drunk, who employs children to fight extra-dimensional entities, the logic of which remains as fuzzy as ever. I guess with that kind of background, having a guitar-playing bartender tag along for the fights isn't exactly going to break immersion.

In the end, perhaps the only problem is applying real-world logic and values to a fantasy world. We don't have any experience to go on so how can we judge? Who knows what it would be like if extra-dimensional entities popped up anywhere and everywhere and half the population mutated at puberty, grew tails and horns and started reading minds and throwing energy bolts. Who knows what might seem normal and logical after nearly half a century of that?

For all my apparent skepticism, I'm still very much looking forward to For Whom The Verses Morn. I'll be rolling for Akane, not that I'll have any idea what to do with her if I get her, other than that it would be cool if she could hang out with Flora. I'm also very much looking forward to seeing where The Whoots!!! go next, event though the music they make is really terrible and Flora can't play the drums to save her life. Which, I suppose, might be something she ends up having to do.

Blackbird isn't a character I've ever had much time for but maybe she'll show something more of her personality now she has the spotlight. And as for Pukaland, well, who doesn't love a trip to the fairground? 

I think as long as I can keep reminding myself the plot's almost certainly going nowhere, it'll all be fine. And then, if it actually turns out I'm wrong about that, it'll be a lovely surprise.