They do say you never forget how to ride a bike, though, and that's certainly true for Neverness To Everness. I get myself into all kinds of trouble on the streets of Hethereau in anything on four wheels but motor-scooters and even motorbikes feel like a much safer way to get around.
When I saw that pushbikes were going to be added to the game with the last update, I knew I wanted one. Pedal power. That should suit me fine. Going too fast around corners is my downfall.
Not that I did anything much about it. Not at first, anyway. As soon as the update dropped, I forgot all about the bike in all the excitment. My only excuse is that there's always so much to do I just lose track. When I eventually remembered, I couldn't seem to find any way to get one other than through the Mystery Boxes, the drop rates for which are not great.
Fortunately, Mailvaltar mentioned in the comments yesterday that there's a bike shop somewhere in the north-east of the city where you can buy a bike for the bargain price of 800k Fons. That makes a bicycle eight times the price of the cheapest car! More than three times as expensive as a motorcycle! As Mailvaltar says, that's got to be one hell of a bike.
Even at such an outrageous mark-up, I bought one without a moment's hesitation. I must've really wanted one.
I'd just finished the Breezy Ride event, in which you get to cart ten different characters about the city on the back of your bike. I loved this event. It might be my favorite in the game so far. It has a delicious disregard for logic that's like catnip to me.
As I said, I didn't buy a bicycle until after I'd finished the whole thing but apparently Flora already had a bike and she's been riding it all around Hethereau without letting me know.
Every step in the quest chain, if we can call it that, involves the Appraiser just happening to run into one of her friends or acquaintances, standing around on a street corner or siting in a bar somewhere in the city. Conversation ensues, as it would, and inevitably concludes with the Appraiser offering to give whoever it is a ride to wherever they're going.
On her bike. That I had no idea she had.
What bike, Flora?! When did you get a bike? Why didn't you tell me? I guess there's a lot about our characters we don't know but this really brought home to me how they must all have their own lives, about which we know nothing..
Flora even seems to have given her bike a name. It's called Yesteryear. You can see the name next to it when it's parked in the street.
Wherever, whenever and however she got it, it's hers, not mine. She can summon it when she needs it for a quest but if I want her to ride it to go somewhere I'd like her to go, forget it. For that she needs a different bike altogether. One I'll have to pay for. Albeit with her money. Sometimes I think you need a degree in Metaphysics to play these games.
Then, when we get to wherever we're going, there's a little coda at the end of which we both, inevitably, decide we'll do something together again, soon. It's all just so nice.
I would literally play a whole game based on this concept. Actually, come to think of it, I already have, kind of. It's basically Neo Cab but without the commercial interactions and on two wheels instead of four.
When I say this series of quests is "nice", I maybe ought to caveat that a little. Most of the encounters are really sweet but not exactly all of them. The really charming ones involve the younger characters. Linko and Iroi are positively childlike. Chiz is shy and a little bit lonely; Shinku is funny; Mint and Nanally are confident and effervescent as they always are...
Lacrimosa would probably have been the most bittersweet. She's an enigma.
I did the quests in the order they came up and she was the last. I was really looking forward to seeing what she had to say but I was interrupted by real life just as she was about to get on the back of the bike and I had to log out briefly. I thought I'd be able to pick up where I left off but when I got back in, Yesteryear and the little vampire were nowhere to be seen.
Luckily, most quests in NTE that involve travel can be completed just by teleporting to the end-point so I was able to finish it easily enough but I missed out on all of Lacrimosa's on-bike dialog. I just watched it on YouTube and it's possibly the weakest of the lot so I didn't miss much. All the best bits are before and after the actual ride. Her very best line comes just after she gets off, when she says
Lacrimosa really is not of this world.
The other three characters aren't quite as "nice" as the rest, though. Not to say they're unfriendly in any way. It's just that there's something a little darker about all of them.
When the Appraiser meets Hotori she is, as you might expect, drunk. Very drunk. The woman has a problem, there's no hiding it.
The main reason the Appraiser offers her boss a lift is because she's worried she's too out of it to get home safely on her own. Hotori warns the Appraiser to take it slowly because she wouldn't want to throw up over the bike but when they get back to Eibon she's sobered up enough to tell Flora she needs to be ready for work tomorrow, which even the easy-going Appraiser finds a tad awkward.
Jiuyuan, another business owner with one eye always on the account book, has an ulterior motive for accepting the offer of a ride to a good place to watch the sun set. She cheerfully tells Flora, when they get there, that her main reason for going was to have another opportunity to make a psychological assessment of her. She's clearly still thinking about what use she can make of the Appraiser in future. Flora isn't entirely happy about that and Jiuyuan's promise never to use the intel she's gathered against her isn't as reassuring as it could be.
Finally, there's Fadia. Fadia is always scary. Flora comes across her drinking alone at a bar. Not, I believe, the first time that's happened. Fadia, as always, is flirtatious and that's being generous. She comes across as a borderline sexual predator sometimes.
Again, as we've become used to from her, all her talk is drenched with subtext. She purrs about how everything feels so much freer under cover of darkness and suggests the two of them go "do something more fun". As she says, "The city has fallen asleep and no-one will ever know what we did together..."
Unsurprisingly, Flora is wary but it turns out Fadia just wants go to the Hethereau Sky Tower. When Flora expresses surprise that it's something so innocent, Fadia makes it very clear it could be something more "dangerous" - if the Appraiser's up for it.
Which she is not. In the end, nothing untoward happens, despite a bleak aside about mortality from Fadia on the journey. But who knows what goes on ion Fadia's mind? As Flora says right at the end "Fadia, it's hard to get you, sometimes."
As with many of the character quests in NTE, there's a lot going on under the surface but one thing that's hard to miss is all the drinking and sexual tension. I just looked up the game's PEGI rating, which is 12 for "for moderate violence, simulated gambling, in-game purchases involving random items, and online user interaction." and I can't help feeling whoever did the assessment might not have gone deep enough.
It's also very noticeable where the divisions between the characters lie. All the potentially problematic behavior, the drinking, the sexual innuendo, the general louche moral attitudes, comes from the mature female characters. I think that means something but I haven't got a handle yet on what it might be.
It's always been very clear who the grown-ups are in NTE. While there's often some confusion over exactly how old the younger characters might be, it's always been clear which are children, which are young adults and who is fully mature.
In that regard, there's no questioning the maturity of Hotori, Jiuyuan and Fadia. Allowing for the inevitable perfect skin and lack age lines peculiar to the graphical style, Hotori and Jiuyuan are most likely in their thirties or even forties. Fadia is at least in her late twenties.
The mature male characters - Baicang, Chaos, Adler and Skia - are distinctly less prone to drinking and flirting than their female counterparts. In fact, they're mostly so stiff as to be made out of cardboard. Only Baicang really steps outside of his professional persona in any of storylines I've seen and he's a lot milder in his rebellion than any of the three women I just mentioned.
All of which seems like a long way to go on a bike ride. It's another reason why I like this game so much. There's a depth to the triviality that makes an impact. And there's so much subtext, all the time.
A couple more examples before I go. Things that speak to the complexity of the world-building here.
I'd forgotten all about Shinku, the "dragon" who we met in the fantasy land of 999 Nights. When Flora met her outside Little Sparrow, the maid cafe, I had to stop a moment to think who she was.
There's a whole bit where the Appraiser teases Shinku for her interest in whatever the heck happens in Little Sparrow, an interest Shinku most unconvincingly denies, but more interestingly perhaps, as Flora gives Shinku a ride back to her home in the suburbs, Shinku talks about how her house isn't really all that messy and how she knows where everything in her collections is. It's a beautifully natural, organic conversation and it told me a lot I didn't know about the character.
After Shinku got off the bike and disappeared inside and Flora was standing outside the house, I noticed the door was open. I was curious to see if I could look at Shinku's place so I took Flora inside. It turns out you can go into her apartment and look around. It feels a tad transgressive because Shinku isn't there but it's highly revealing. The whole place is exactly as I imagined it from the conversation.
It's quite untidy, with all kinds of things lying about all over the place, but it's clean and feels pleasantly lived-in. And there are a lot of collectibles. Shinku has display cabinets filled with figures and dioramas and there's a whole wall of board games stacked semi-neatly on shelves al the way to the ceiling. I didn't spend a long time there but the detail is impeccable. Someone's clearly taken a lot of trouble mirroring Shinku's personality as it's written. I don't know if there's a storyline that supports that level of effort or if it's just someone having fun but either way it's powerfully immersive.
And finally, there's Linko and her Tamachi obsession. When you meet her, she's near the coast, talking to herself. It transpires she has a day off and she's going to spend it looking for rare water Tamachis.
I had never heard of Tamachis [Edit: I must have because apparently both Linko and Mint talk about them a lot but it obviously didn't stick in my mind.] but it quickly became clear from context that they're Hethereau's equivalent of Pokemon and Linko was playing the local equivalent of Pokemon Go. Flora gave Linko a ride around the bay and Linko caught several Tamachi.
It was an entertaining insight into the hidden life of the characters who live in this world we, as players,only get to visit. In fact, the entire Breezy Ride event was like that. I'm very happy I spotted it be.
Now Flora has her bike and she can invite any of those ten characters to ride on the back of it, whenever she likes. As soon as I bought it, I had her ride around Hethereau for half an hour with the UI off. It's the most fun I've had just riding around in a game since I stopped playing Once Human. Next time I might ask Chiz to come with her. Or Linko. Or Mint. Just not Hotori or Jiuyuan.
And definitely not Fadia...
800k well-spent, I'd say.
Notes On AI Used In This Post
None. But I did look a few things up on Google and Gemini always gets its two cents in first, which almost caused an upset. I was googling to see if Tamachi is an actual game of some kind and it was pretty clear it wasn't but just to be absolutely sure I googled "tamachi neverness" and this is what Gemini told me:
In the supernatural urban open-world RPG Neverness to Everness (NTE), Tamachis are collectible virtual pets or digital creatures that players can hunt, collect, and raise throughout the city of Hethereau. Heavily inspired by real-world Tamagotchis, they function as a core slice-of-life minigame and collection system.
The AI then went on to give me bullet points on how to play Tamachi in NTE.:
Key Features of Tamachis in NTE
- The Tamachi Index: Players track their findings in an in-game Index. Finding every standard version and unlocking the elusive secret variants is required to fully complete it.
- Tamachi Hunting: These digital creatures emit signals across Hethereau. Players must explore the map—often climbing skyscrapers or navigating hidden urban spots—to track down rare variants.
- Linko's Specialization: The playable S-class character Linko is deeply connected to this mechanic. Known as one of the top "Tamachi pros" in Hethereau, he features unique outfits and abilities that make tracking and picking up rare Tamachi signals much easier.
Let me make it clear right away, almost none of this is true.
Oh, it's true that Linko plays Tamachi. So does Mint. But I can't and neither can you. There is no "in-game index" where players track their findings. Players do not "explore the map—often climbing skyscrapers or navigating hidden urban spots—to track down rare variants" because there's no Tamachi game a player can play. I wish there was. Gemini makes it sound like it would be a lot of fun.
The sources that Gemini quotes to back up these claims are from in-character posts by Linko on Instagram, a beta video on YouTube and a reddit thread where a bunch of people talk about how cool it would be if the Tamachi game ever became playable. Which it would. So get on that, Hotta!
Honestly, it's a textbook example of why you should never trust an AI summary without carefully checking the sources it cites. I actually had half a paragraph written about how I must somehow have missed it when they added creature collecting to NTE, when I thought "hold on a minute..."
I do find it very amusing that an AI, which is effectively a fictional entity, finds it difficult to tell the difference between the social media posts of real people and those of other fictional entities. I know it's fashionable to hate this sort of thing but it's getting to feel like the future I imagined living in, back when I was younger, and it's not that far from being the reality that's existed in my head all my life.
Who can say what's really real, after all?
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