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Before we go into the criticism of this game, it’s good to point out that this was mostly a solo project.
Look Mr. Yoo, I give you serious props for getting this entire thing out and done. Obviously there was assistance for things like animation and getting all the different studios for voice acting. It didn’t seem like it from the really beautiful 2D anime style visuals but it’s very much an indy game much like Stray. So with that in mind I just want to get out of the way that for an indy game this game is really great. However I personally could not enjoy it for several of the following reasons.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 had the joke “never remind the viewer of a better movie in your movie” and well that kept popping up in my head constantly throughout Eternights. Every time I was able to instantly solve a puzzle because “oh they used this same one in the Kaneshiro/Futaba/Mementos dungeon in Persona 5”, that’s what immediately popped into my head. Or uh, the bike race level.
System
This was the biggest pitfall for me. So the creator apparently based it on Devil May Cry (which in my terms is basically FF16 style). Now I have nothing against FF16 battle system, in fact they had so many things that even a dumbass like me could play it by just mashing the □ button on my controller. Unfortunately this game being indy and not quite that polished, was janky as fuck. It felt like my button presses weren’t going through, and Kanade figure it out but apparently all you do is wait for enemies to hit you so you can perfect dodge them, become invincible and finally beat them down. For the life of me I could not figure this out at all. If Kanade didn’t do every single battle for me, I would have either installed a trainer or just uninstalled the game. It was that unplayable to me, and that was on easy mode. Easy mode should have let me ignore this bs and just let me button mash my way to victory. Otherwise it’s not easy mode. So if you hate putting effort into battle systems like my lazy ass does, this game is not for you, stop right there and do not buy it.⛔
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh boy the combat system. The first, biggest problem that I had with it was that the controls are realllllllllllly bad. Even by the end of the game I had trouble dodging properly because the inputs never felt like they were happening when I was expecting them to happen. I realized pretty quickly that pretty much every fight boiled down to “stand around waiting for an enemy to attack you so you can perfect dodge, then perform a combo string on them, then repeat this again so that your special attack gauge fills, then do the appropriate elemental special attack to break their stagger gauge (complete with a Persona eye cut-in and the obligatory QTEs), then repeat this until the boss dies.” Because the combat boils down to doing this every time, it also makes many of the party member skills worthless. Min’s ability to tank hits doesn’t matter because you need to perfect dodge in order to attack. Sia’s AOE attack doesn’t matter since again, all that matters is building the combo bar and not doing pure DPS. And then to top it off, whichever waifu you claimed gets taken away at the end of the game, making this significantly harder if you lose Yuna since she’s your healer (and therefore by far the most useful party member).
Story
What can I say, the creator basically took his favorite games (Nier Automata, Persona, Scarlet Nexus) and mashed them all into this story. Even some of the dungeon puzzles were identical to the ones from Persona 5!! I understand being “inspired” by games you like but literally taking the exact puzzles? Come on now. 😂 The relationships were cliche as hell and the ending was like reverse Persona 3? Not to mention that every ending is basically copy paste all the way to nearly the exact same frame/headshot of every character. Therefore, if you’re gonna play this game, go for your favorite character because it’s not worth the repeated playthroughs for the exact cut scene. On that note, you can even have a gay end with Kaworu Yohan!! Zowey it’s yaoi! I guess I give them props for adding a BL route as an option for those who like it. But yea unfortunately the story is nothing to write home about and because it felt like I’ve seen it in like 5 other games it didn’t really move me emotionally. And the stupidest part? To see the “Secret Ending” you have to scan a QR code on your phone. I saw this comment on reddit before finishing the game and thought it was a joke. It wasn’t. ಠ_ಠ Please don’t do that again.
There isn’t much to do each day, but it also in a way helps to focus things better compared to the Persona games, where P3 doesn’t have enough to do, P4 isn’t clear what you can do, and P5 has too much you can do. You’ll do some social events and attempt the dungeons during the day and then do some stat raising at night. No need to get particularly complicated with planning out your time. Now what is annoying here are the minigames you do to raise stats will get old instantly, which made us shy away from doing any of them except the scavenging one (where you can just pull up a map beforehand to see where to find the item.)
Characters
For the most part, this was the most enjoyable part of the game for me. The characters were mostly cliche from the gang of Persona but that’s what makes it good. Chani was your Ryuji/Yosuke/Junpei, Yuna was your Ann/Yukari/Chie etc. Overall I mostly enjoyed the interactions but some of the went into some REALLY degenerate territory especially when you go into Min’s scenes. I didn’t do much of her scenes since you don’t have much time to interact with every waifu in the game and I was basically going after Yuna. However, the couple scenes I did with Min she is not only constantly getting joke-bullied, she was degraded by making the protagonist literally spit on her over and over. ಠ_ಠ There’s other gross things like the tissue box in his room that’s clearly there for fapping that he calls “his only friend”. Or how while protagonist-kun is hurt, Chani is like “remember the porn we stole from your grandpa!!” Bruh. ಠ_ಠ They didn’t have to go complete 4chan on some of the scenes and they would have still been entertaining. 下品でしたわよ。
It was definitely trying to go with a Persona 3 vibe with the ending but missed the mark. (The first problem is that even P3 botches its ending because of how much time you waste at the end of the game). Like they want to have your waifu die so it’s all tearjerking and emotional but also didn’t really want to commit to it which is the real reason why they left everything so ambiguous. Also uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh no seriously wtf was the deal with that QR code????? At first I thought it was gonna be kinda clever like “oh you get a text on your personal phone” but was really just like yet another little cutscene that didn’t really add anything more to the ending. Similarly the h*nd h*lding scene right before ended up becoming a “Press F to pay respects” kind of misstep that was like “wait so like what happens if I don’t hold down R2?”
Graphics
Again, since it’s an indy game I’m not going to be too rough on the graphics criticism. Most of the game was using these MikuMiku Dance style 3D sprites and they didn’t look that great but they got the point across and that’s all that matters. I think if they had used 2D illustrated sprites during the talk scenes instead, it would have been a little nicer especially since all the 2D illustrations in the game were really pretty. The backgrounds and zone looked a little empty but again, indy project, not as beautiful as Stray of course, but it was fine for what it was trying to portray: A post apocalyptic world about to end.
Other Thoughts
I played with the Japanese voices, which apparently were added last minute because they got enough funding. While most of the cast was ? to me, I at least will give props to the complete newb they cast for the protagonist and I wish he actually talked in the game a bit more than just here and there. I know the Persona games are like that too but since it’s a rando VA maybe they could have given him more lines without breaking the bank? 😂 The only other VA of note was Furukawa Makoto who voiced the yaoi route chara Yohan. For some reason it sounded like he recorded his lines in his room on his home PC and sent them over rather than at a studio but eh budget constraints I guess. I get the feeling they spent a bit more money on the female VA’s than on the male ones because buhibuhi waifus.
There were “Cgs” during certain scenes (like making out in Yuna’s room) but I was disappointed that they were repeated. For example if you went to Yuna for a date after maxing her out, there’s 2 different dates but they all end up with “and then they fuxxed in one of their rooms here’s that same makeout CG again btw lol.” Again, budget constraints, but I wish the budget went into this over the terrible battle system. In fact, I think this game would have done 23457298573892578923 times better as just a straight up visual novel. It has a visual novel and anime vibe to it, and probably would have cost way less money to make if all they had to do was just replace all the 3D animation/modeling with just some CGs.
It can feel kinda unfair then to ask “why is this game even the game it is?” but that really was part of our experience here. “Persona social sim and Devil May Cry combat” but why? The calendar-based setup of a Persona game ties in with the texture and themes of the games, where like “you know that you’re gonna eventually have to leave your friends” but here it’s more like “okay you can see 8 different character cutscenes during this segment of the game”. Being a pure visual novel wouldn’t really take much away from the game since it’s not even like the RPG elements do anything interesting either.
So in conclusion do I recommend this? Probably not. If you can find an entire scene game play on youtube, where you can quickly skip all the boring and tedious battles, then it’s probably a lot more fun to watch. As I mentioned above, I only enjoyed the “novel/cut scene” portions and the battle system was unplayable for me so if you are someone like me, this is definitely not the game for you. I do think the creator has some talent and this may have been a bit of a rough release but I think he could definitely create something more interesting in the future from everything he’s learned making this game. (PSS PSS make a visual novel next time sir. 😂😂)
That all said even though this review was quite negative I also can’t be too hard on the game because let’s face it, you gotta grade on a curve when you’re talking about a game that was made almost entirely by a single person. Yes, there’s a ton of jank, but you gotta just understand that coming in. But also consider that jank in many ways is like “walking with a pebble in your shoe” where it’s still super annoying even if you’re still able to get to your destination.
Bread Master Lee 
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