Year: 2024
Platform: PlayStation 5
Genre: Action/adventure
Review Date: 11/14/24
Rating: ***

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Earth has been conquered and overrun with aliens, forcing the remnants of humanity into space. The orbital space force launches a strike force of female cyborgs towards Earth, and only one soldier survives. Her name is Eve, and what she learns on the surface shatters her reality and challenges her world view.

"Stellar Blade" wants to be "NieR: Automata" (2017) so bad, that it's almost a blatant rip-off. Eve's constant companion is a floating drone that provides guidance and also serves as a ranged weapon, just like 2B's support pod. It even has its own ridiculous fishing mini-game (complete with whale sharks), in case you grow weary of fighting monsters all the time. Also similar to "NieR: Automata," humankind is already extinct, but the protagonists don't realize it. However, that's where "Stellar Blade" becomes really confusing, because all of the cyborgs think that they're humans, and that Earth is their rightful home. All history regarding organic humans has been erased by the "leaders of humanity," making the cyborgs the true invaders. But the biological nature of the cyborgs is unclear. They come in male and female genders, and have children that evidently age. They're also a dying race, which makes no sense. Do cyborgs actually have birth and growth life cycles, and why aren't they able to create new cyborgs to replenish their thinning ranks? Similar to "NieR: Automata," the space colony doesn't care about the surface dwellers' welfare, nor do they even acknowledge their existence.

Unfortunately, "Stellar Blade" falls short in the writing and storytelling departments, and often times the narrative makes no sense at all. The biggest logic hole regards Lily, a support engineer that Eve meets early in the game. Eve discovers her locked in a drop pod from an earlier air strike, and Lily claims to have been trapped in the pod for two years. And yet, she also has a secret lab where she and her cyborg bestie used to hang out, so how can that be reconciled? Unless she went back to space at some point and was redeployed with another strike force? That seems highly unlikely. Going to Earth is pretty much a one-way trip for any soldier.

Anyway, presentation-wise, the game is gorgeous and the production values are top notch. Since the protagonist is a female cyborg, the game developers obviously played up the sex appeal angle, and the game was admittedly responsible for me finally breaking down and buying a PS5. Until "Stellar Blade," there was really no compelling reason to upgrade from my PS4, which I still had dozens of unplayed games for. Whereas 2B's design favors Yoko Taro's gothic lolita sensibilities, the designers for Eve were completely focused on her enormous ass. Everything about Eve revolves around accentuating her plentiful posterior, which is laughably offensive. My first question after playing the game for a few minutes was, "Why would anyone design a female combat cyborg with such a large butt?" Of course, this question is a bit hypocritical, because we really should be asking why combat cyborgs that resemble teenage girls exist in the first place. So the answer is obvious: aesthetics. It just so happens that the game designers really like thick and juicy hindquarters, while I prefer a slimmer, more athletic build. The ass is so prominent, that when I told a friend of mine that I was playing the game, his response was, "Is that the game with the butt?" So yeah, despite all of its merits as a big budget science fiction action game, people know it as "the butt game." Even so, another friend of mine said, "Dat ass ain't big enough to carry a story."

Since you'll be staring at her huge hiney the entire time, the game offers 37 different costumes to collect so that you can show off that bountiful booty however you see fit. Unfortunately, Eve's taste in footwear is absolutely awful and I utterly loathe her shoes. They disgust me. The designers favor the heel-less horse hoof style, which looks appalling. Thankfully, a small percentage of outfits feature more reasonable looking heels, which I naturally gravitated towards. Surprisingly, one outfit has her wearing flats, which is noteworthy because they actually change the shape of the model's feet. Most games don't bother with that detail. Of course, this raises the question of why a female combat cyborg would be wearing 5" heels in the first place, but I'll let that slide. Because, you know, aesthetics.

Since we're still talking about Eve, another one of her physical attributes is her super long ponytail. Again mimicking "NieR: Automata," Eve is armed with only a sword, and while 2B can summon hers out of thin air, Eve somehow stores hers in her ponytail. Her default ponytail is about five feet long and reaches the ground, but it looks terrible. It feels like a failed tech experiment in ribbon physics that the developers could never get to work. It looks so bad, in fact, that there's a gameplay option to switch it to a much shorter and more reasonable length, which I did after only a couple of minutes in the game. Unfortunately, the game doesn't offer an option to tone down the breast physics, so Eve and Lily are annoyingly jiggly in that regard.

So far, all I've talked about is Eve's appearance, and that's probably because she has absolutely no personality. She's as emotionally dead as 2B, but she lacks 2B's bitter cynicism, battle-hardened stoicism, existential angst, and compelling sense of curiosity. Eve is also annoyingly vapid and naïve, and seems to have the intelligence of a child. At several points while exploring the ruins of humanity, she asks "What's a book? What's a map?" And then later on she seems to be smarter than everyone else in the game. Speaking of maps, the game is sorely lacking in that department. There are three open world areas in the game that get maps, but the rest of the levels don't have them. While these levels are mostly linear, having a map would really help in gauging your progress and tracking down camps and other objectives.

As far as gameplay goes, Eve's primary mission is to wipe out the monsters (called Naytibas) that are infesting Earth, and in particular go after the Alpha Naytiba that was responsible for killing her squad leader and mentor, Tachy. Combat is exciting, fluid, and looks fantastic, but it's overwhelming and very difficult. A friend of mine said the game should be called, "You will die. A lot." The difficulty is especially high at the beginning of the game, when you have no skills or resources, and the only way to level up your experience is to die in the same battles, over and over. I'm not a fan of that approach and it burns a lot of good will, because all I'm interested in is making progress and seeing what's next. I don't need a constant feedback loop of failure - I get enough of that in real life. There are no auto saves, and save points are placed perilously far apart. While stopping to rest at a camp restores all of your health, it also respawns all of the enemies in the area, so you have to be very strategic about health management. Eve can carry a disappointingly small number of health consumables, but it takes time to use them, and if her animation is interrupted (as it often is during combat), the item gets cancelled and you face instant death. After about six hours of levelling up, I finally started being able to handle basic combat, but dodging, parrying, and countering are consistently difficult and overly complicated, even with all of the combat assistance options enabled. Boss battles are exceptionally challenging, even at the easiest difficulty level, and there were several times when I gave up on the game for weeks at a time.

Fortunately, once Xion and the desert areas open up, you can explore at your own pace and take on numerous side missions for gold, experience, and other rewards. These help flesh out the details of the world and its inhabitants, and also build out the lore. The side quests were where I found the most enjoyment in the game, especially when I was tracking down new costumes (and hoping to unlock some decent looking shoes). It's really amazing how much more enjoyable the game is when Eve is wearing a nice pair of shoes. Eve can also change her hair style and color at a salon in Xion, since that's another important aspect of being a monster-killing machine. Earrings and eyeglasses are available from other merchants to accent Eve's appearance even more. I prefer Eve wearing glasses, in case you were wondering, which also raises the question of why an android would need to (or even want to) wear glasses.

Despite looking great and having a superb soundtrack, the increasingly difficult gameplay eventually becomes tedious. While the Internet generally agrees that the game is only 30 hours long, I finally put it away after 80 hours, and I still hadn't reached the 2/3 mark. While I wasn't able to get any story closure, I didn't really mind because I never became fully invested in any of the characters. The game's foreshadowing also gave me a pretty good idea of where things were heading, and I didn't really care. While it's definitely a glossy and well-crafted game, it suffers from numerous shortcomings and has an emotionally flat and uninteresting protagonist. Your mileage may vary depending on what you want to get out of the game. If you're mostly in it for the slick and stylish combat, you'll likely be pleased. But if you want more depth, storytelling, and world building, you're probably better off sticking to the games that it's trying to emulate.