Neverness to Everness Platinum

 Hello everyone. I recently platinumed Neverness to Everness and wanted to talk about it.

 

 

 

Overall, a straightforward if drawn out Platinum. 

 

The game has the standard Gacha Game trophies of reach level 80 with a character and their weapon (called Arcs here) as well as completing a good chunk of the main V1.0 story and certain side quests. But surprisingly nothing for doing any endgame events or engaging with a huge chunk of the side quests. In theory, I wouldn't be surprised if it would be technically possible to Platinum this game doing like 30% of the main content and like 10% of the V1.0 side content. I wouldn't advise doing that since, best case, it would take you 3-4 extra months of daily quests to make up the deficit because, like every Gacha game, you earn 3-4x more Account EXP (called Hunter EXP in NTE) from activities that require Stamina than most corresponding story quests.

 

I think Honkai Star Rail is probably the only Gacha game on PS5 at this point you could realistically reach the requisite Account Level with your Account EXP coming mostly from Story Quest Content rather than Dailies because HSR has several years worth of story expansions that award decent EXP as well as an option to knock down the difficulty if you're underlevelled for later quests. With NTE, I completed most of the story content and side content around Hunter Level 33-ish after about a month of play. Out of 50. There are calculators online you can use to track how long to go:

https://nullcat.net/

I groaned when it told me I still had 70 days to go. I expect this to get faster as time goes on as NTE gets more Story Content that provides more Account EXP.

 

There are only 3 Trophies I'd say were problematic.

 "It said go for it! = Defeat enemies with Ultimate *500.". This Trophy is bugged. I remember around early June 2026, I decided to grind this one out. There's an in-game achievement system that counted up 300 and I was at about 100. I decided to replay one of the challenge boss fights called "Anomaly Commissions" against 3 extremely weak fish monsters that I could 1 shot so I could get 2-3 kills per run and each run took 20 seconds max (including load times and restarts). I counted manually up to 600 with no Trophy. I was so confused when I looked up that yeah, this Trophy is bugged and also wrong? I've seen some sources say you just need to do Ultimates rather than kill enemies but also the game "forgets" how many Ultimates you do if you close your game? I ended up resigning myself hoping this got patched and forgot about until, when I was grinding for World Drops to Level up, I just randomly got it doing an Ultimate.

 

So advice would probably be to not deliberately grind this one out and leave it to last and hope it pops along the way? 

 

"Mhm? Mhm? Mhm?! = Receive 30 Nacupeda's Punishments. " The game loves timegating stuff. There's 2 other trophies that require doing a daily thing: "Mhm! Mhm! Mhm = Receive 30 Nacupeda's Blessings. " and "Flip-Flopping Future - Perform 10 Divinations. " but these ones just require you to log in and talk to a thing 30-10 times respectively for guaranteed progression.

 

Nacupeda's Punishments are random. You go to a fountain, select the option to Steal Coins and roll a chance to trigger the punishment. Supposedly it's a 50% chance to trigger it every day but I had 8 day+ stretches where it didn't activate. I did the math for different chances:

 | Assumed punishment rate | Expected days left |   |
| ----------------------: | -----------------: | ---------------------: |
|                     60% |           ~42 days |  |
|                     50% |           ~50 days |    |
|                     40% |           ~63 days |   |
|                     30% |           ~84 days |  |

 Mine ended up being closer to about 61 days from when I started farming for this trophy. And was the final trophy I was waiting on.

 

 The 3rd long timegating trophy was "Affinity Master = Reach Affinity Level 10 with 5 Characters Total.". 

 

There's a nice Excel Sheet listing out the most efficient details and combinations: 

https://www.reddit.com/r/NevernessToEverness/s/HDEdESqQp9

 

The main way this works is that in order to raise a character's Affinity to Level 10, you need to give them gifts which offer Affinity Points. You need 56000 Affinity Points per character to max them out at Level 10. However, you can only give each character a max of 3 regular gifts per day and give a max of 10 regular gifts per day. Regular Gifts can have different prices and give different Affinity Points depending on the character. For example, "Asahi Inori - Moonlight" costs $18,000 a pop and gives Haniel 400 Affinity Points but only gives Adler 100.  Depending on your finances and choice of characters, it can take 2-4 months get 5 Characters to Max Affinity at the same time.

 

My advice/approach was the following:

 

-1- Choose your 5 characters early and Opt for a 2/2/2/2/2 configuration where each of the 5 characters gets at least 2 gifts a day. Even giving them each 100 Affinity Point gifts in the early game is helpful as it would cost, worst case, $5000 daily. Then once you finish the main story and develop the Cafes enough to earn about $2000/h and can comfortably earn about $500,000 from Weekly city activities, begin transitioning to the 400 Affinity Point Gifts. Unfortunately, these can max out at $20,000 per 400 Point gift for characters like Jiuyuan. Fadia is thankfully the cheapest at $5,400 per 400 Point gift.

 

I went with Mint  ( $18,000 per 400 Points gift), Adler ($10,000 per 400 Points gift), Haniel ($18,000 per 400 Points Gift), Fadia ($5400 per 400 Points Gift) and Jiuyuan ($20,000 per 400 Points Gift). My thought process was that as Mint, Fadia and Jiuyuan are "Special Characters" that you can invite to a single daily Hangout which gives an extra 200 Points, I can alternate between them for the Daily Hangout to get them an extra 200. So when they finish, I shift to giving more 3 gift configurations.

 

-2- Something I do when Platinumming Gacha games I never intend to play again after Platinumming is to blow all my Premium Currency on speeding up the process. There kinda is a way to do this for Affinity. 

There are "Special Gifts". These have no limits and can still be gifted regardless of the current gifting caps. One are "Cinema Tickets". They give 400 Affinity Points each and are only obtained from events. The other Special Gift is "Handwritten Letters". They give 2000 Affinity Points each. Handwritten Letters Can be obtained by spending 60 Warp Pieces. Warp Pieces come from pulling "duplicate Characters, A-class Arcs, and Hero Chest" from the Game's Gacha System. S-Class character duplicates typically award 40 Warp Pieces (for copies 2 through 7) and 80 Warp Pieces for every subsequent copy. A-Class character duplicates award 6 to 12 Warp Pieces.

 

Because the game guarantees at least 1 A-rank every 10 pulls, I was likely to get, worst case, 0.6 Warp Points per pull. And I did have every A Rank in the game before long. So it would slowly shift towards giving me 1.2 Warp Points per Pull.  All my combined pulling got me an extra 5 Handwritten Letters saving me multiple days. I did have to focus all my pulling on the standard banner since NTE being player friendly with No 50/50s meant I needed dupes of characters from the standard banner to get Warp Points more effectively.

 

So yeah, NTE can be an annoying game to Platinum if you're zooming through it because there's essentially 3 parallel daily timers going on simultaneously that are the real bottlenecks. Nacupeda, Hunter Level 50 and Affinity.  Still, my order ended up being Hunter Level 50 (about 74 days from starting the game on April 28th 2026), Affinity (about 86 days from starting the game) and then finally Nacupeda (about 108 days from starting). At least with this combination, once I got Affinity, I no longer had to play the game anymore. Nacupeda only required me to log in, check a fountain and log out and repeat.

 

As for the game itself, separated from the Platinum, I am mixed on it.

 

When I first downloaded the game, I expected it to be like Anata as this "Anime GTA". Instead it's more like "Genshin Impact but with a GTA Gimmick". I remember back when Arknights Endfield first launched, there was an article talking about how every open world Gacha Game tries to be "Genshin but with a gimmick" and it's making harder for Open World Gacha games to distinguish themselves. Funnily, I don't think Endfield did a great job with that technically neither does NTE.

 

But to be positive, I think NTE is the first Open World Gacha game I played that I actually liked the story, characters and scenarios enough to not skip most cutscenes. NTE's story is a mix of oddly charming "slice of life Anime", workplace humour and "PG13 SCP stories". I found myself oddly invested in the side stories of helping Mint study for her exams, the entirety of the DnD Campaign added in the "999 Nights" updates, but also the Horror stuff.

 

The MC works as part of a supernatural entity hunting organization. These entities, called Anomalies, manifest as anything from haunted appliances trying to prank people, to actually kinda creepy horror sections that the game has to legit warn you about as being scary that even got me a few times. To giant monsters that are epic to fight against. The game has like 40 side quests spread out across the map called "Anomaly Commissions" that are easily the highlight of the game. Some are disappointing "fight this regular enemy that you'd be fighting anyway when grinding" but some are puzzles and platforming challenges that play with your POV in 3D space like those Escher diagrams. Some are Silent Hill style "avoid the monster" with legitimately scary atmospheres. Some are multi hour Adventure Game style puzzles across an entire school with multiple moving parts.

 I'd even go so far as to complain here that there's only a trophy for killing the Whale Boss Fight Anomaly. It's a shame the game doesn't encourage you to try out more of these with trophies.

 

The prison system is also surprisingly complex. In other GTA games, getting arrested just means you respawn at the Police Station. In NTE, getting arrested has you getting shipped to a prison island and required to serve your sentence. You can wander different areas of the prison depending on the time of day, converse with other prisoners, do daily events and tasks, get a job to earn money .... and try to escape. There's 5 ways to escape that require you collect resources over several days (or just use your platforming skills to do a tricky set of jumps to just escape). It is legitimately cool and I remember on my first day getting the game just spending hours exploring every inch of the prison, listening to every NPC dialogue. If you do want to get the Prisoners' outfit, you're required to get arrested daily and repeat the same activities to slowly accrue Prison currency over an entire month which does kill the replayability. 

 

The recent patch added in a new game mode called "999 Nights" which feels like NTE trying to do a comedy take on DnD style campaigns, RPG video games, and Expedition 33 (complete  with one sheep wearing a yellow 33 Banner you can summon, one wearing a 66 and one wearing a 99). This entire side mode adapts the game's systems to become a Dungeon Crawler where you get loot and EXP in an entirely self contained mode. The story, world and setup is legitimately engrossing. Like, I was hooked.

 

There was one boss fight between a Swordswoman and my God, it felt epic. I don't know how to describe but it felt like,  NTE wanted to become like Metal Gear Rising Revengence and did its damnedest to try to make it happen just once. It was the only time in the game I felt truly in love with the combat experience.

 

The open world map of Heterau is legitimately cool and super detailed. I remember exploring random rooftops in the downtown area to find the NTE's equivalent of Crackdown Orbs or Assassin's Creed's Animus Fragments and admiring random pools on rooftops, billboards etc. You can run into other Gacha characters randomly chilling in the open world and their dialogue is usually engaging. I think hands down, this is the best open world in any Gacha Game I have ever played (granted I've only played like 4 open world Gachas).

 

You can buy property and customize it and it is legitimately cool. 

 

Graphically, the game looks so beautiful and smooth on PS5. And on my iPhone, I can actually crank down the visuals considerably to preserve battery life and heat (something Arknights Endfield wouldn't let me do as much I would have wanted). 

 

With all that said, here are my negatives with the game:

 

For one, the game feels like it's torn between its aspirations as a GTA-Like and its obligations as a Gacha Game.

 

Take the currency system. One major currency in the game is called "Fons" and is used to purchase city based stuff like cars, property, food, gifts etc. You earn this passively from a cafe you can invest in at a rate around of $2500 per hour when max upgraded even when not playing the game. You can also earn about $20,000 per day from doing dailies and from Story missions. But the main source of Fons is from your weekly City activities called "Hetearu Hobbies" (and also the premium Battle Pass). These activities include Taxi Missions, Cargo Driving Delivery Missions, Street Races, Fishing, a Bank Robbery, Dominoes, Rockband, a version of "papas pizzeria" etc. But in order to actually get Fons out of these actvities, you need to use "City Stamina". 

 

The conversion rate is about  $1000 per 1 City Stamina and City Stamina only recovers to full on a weekly reset on Mondays. You start with around 500 City Stamina per week and can unlock higher amounts. I currently get refilled to 700 City Stamina a week and spending earns me (in the worst case), about $600,000 a week. If you don't have City Stamina you can still do these activities but you don't get any Fons out of it which killed my motivation to engage with a lot of the Hetearu Hobbies because I felt like I shouldn't be wasting my City Stamina.

 

But you also have separate currencies for upgrading Gacha characters that requires spending "regular Stamina" that recharges about like in regular Gacha games. I typically spend about 200-ish of these daily to do grinds for  Character, Weapon and Ability Upgrades.

 

I often found myself in scenarios where I was swimming in Gold Beetle Coins, Appleseeds and Badges .... but functionally broke because I was low on Fons. Or the opposite. Ways to exchange City resources for other Gacha resources was relatively restricted. 

 

In between my daily NTE sessions, I was also platinumming Assassin's Creed Shadows. That game also requires a fair amount of grinding and replaying content to collect currency, gear, EXP and materials. But I found myself feeling more "grateful" to Shadows' economy. If I wanted to go farm iron and wheat for my hideout, I could go redo Outposts to my heart's content and also earn EXP and money along the way. If I had an abundance of Money, I could use it on merchants to buy resources. If I had a lot of resources but needed more money, I could sell resources. I could either sell my weapons or break them down into materials.

 

Obviously Shadows is a Premium Boxed Product and NTE is a F2P Gacha Game and it's unfair to compare the two. And I could also mention the ways NTE gives you more content to do for Free than many other Gacha games. But I feel it highlights that NTE's generosity will likely forever be capped due to its nature as a F2P gacha game. 

 

But on a more concerning note is how limited NTE's GTA influence is on its main story. There's only 1 mission in the game, a tailing mission/chase with Hathor on her bike chasing a limo, that actually had me engaging with the open world driving in a main story mission. The rest of the time, it might as well not even be a GTA-Like. You can't even run over Monsters in your car to kill them. Most gameplay during missions is "go to a place, watch cutscenes, fight enemies with the same combat system I grew tired off, repeat".

 

I think there's a reason why most GTA-likes are also 3rd person shooters rather than melee focused games. You can shoot while driving and use cars and the environment as cover and tools so there's more versatility. In NTE, if you're in a car, you can only really drive the car. You can't attack from the car. But also, NTE can't guarantee what car you'll even have given the Gacha system and limited number of Fons. You can "hijack" Cars off the road. Pressing Circle will have Mint try to request the NPC hand over their car (which they can sometimes refuse) or you can attack their car for 10+ seconds causing them to flee at which getting into the car triggers a Wanted Level. But the cops are dumb. I remember getting arrested every day for a month straight to go to prison to do some dailies there and half the time, even when I was sitting there after stealing the car, the cops would often get stuck getting to me. And eventually once I got a Motorbike (that cost half a mill), I never had to hijack cars off the road again.

Another major complaint is the game's controller support of all things in menus. This game is very clearly a mobile game first and foremost. When in gameplay, the gamepad controls generally work fine. The more consistent issues I noticed is when driving right and letting the stick return to neutral. The game will sometimes jerk my car to the left (causing me to sometimes crash). My theory is that the left stick is emulating a virtual stick so letting go off the left stick as it's pointed right makes it "register left" as it returns to neutral.

 

But it's at its worst in menus. Take the Bond Menu. You have to press on the Dpad to navigate between submenus and the Left Stick to switch between characters .... except sometimes the game seems to forget which one controls what so left stick now needs to be used to navigate been submenu items. And sub-sub menu items (such as which gift to scroll through) require pressing X to go in, then using the left stick as the dpad might swap a menu higher up. On top of that, pressing on the Dpad even in menus will sometimes swap characters in the overworld because the game forgets to swap the dpad binding from character switch or menu actions.

 

This was especially funny in the Papa's Pizzeria Activity since you need to use the Dpad to control certain ingredients. And a couple times, this caused my character to switch and completely mess up the fixed camera to point in a completely different direction. 

 

While the character swap bug in menus is funny and never caused any problems, actual menu navigation is a pain because the game forgets which sub-sub menu you're in, swaps left stick and dpad controls, and pressing O to back out sometimes backs you out entirely rather than just the current sub-sub menu. It's such a bizzare experience that a Destiny or modern Assassin's Creed style cursor to navigate menus with a controller would be 100% an objective improvement. Seriously, if there was an option in certain menus to press R3 have a cursor take over, it would legit improve the menus so much it's not even funny.

 

Regarding combat, it's .... generally fine. It feels like a more lenient version of Arknights Endfield. One button strikes, One button Ability, a jump and jump attack that's useless, attacking generates an ultimate. A dodge. Meeting certain requirements in combat lets you switch to another character while doing an attack (such as doing an Ability Move with MC instantly charges up Mint's Swap in Attack).

 

The combat system is relatively basic because it needs to work for touch screens. The game is a lot more generous with dodges and "red ring attacks" compared to something like Arknights Endfield. Almost all Attacks you can dodge will have a small red line flash which you can visually and audibly rely on to press the dodge button. Instead of i-framing through an attack, attacks you dodge will give you a nice looking dodge animation. And the game is usually very generous in doing these red flashes for almost every attack enemies have and counting your dodges.

 

Attacks which can't be dodged will have a red ring that turns yellow. If you attack the red ring with an Ability, or a yellow ring with any attack, you can make the enemy cancel their attack and get stunned. On tougher enemies, they will do more frequent attacks or overlap attacks and stage hazards to offset the more generous dodging which can do serious damage to your health. 

 

 

In closing, I think I can make the case NTE is my "favourite" open world Gacha game. Its story and world are the few that got me, someone who normally skips that aspect of Gacha games, legitimately invested. The platinum is held back by some annoying time gates. And even aside from that, while game doesn't feel as predatory as other Gacha games, it still feels like it's somewhat held back. I think I want a Persona-like game in this style that can afford to go all out. But until then, I suppose I can appreciate that fact if, nothing else, this might end up being my rarest platinum.