After doing four full playthroughs at over 60 hours, I think I've seen enough of this game to give my (contradicting) thoughts.

Like many others, I was looking forward to this back when it was revealed as Project Eve. Also like many others, I became viciously irritated when the coomers decided to make this game their personality (I don't mind sexy characters, what I really disliked was how weird people acted over Eve). I'm not interested in that trash, I'm all about the gameplay.

What I do take legitimate issue with was how the game was marketed as being like Bayonetta and Nier: Automata. I was hoping for a fast paced Platinum-styled action game but the combat is much weightier and more deliberate than I hoped. It's been compared to the Souls series, but I disagree to an extent (level design is very much Souls-y, the combat is much closer to Sekiro). Obviously it can be learned since the game is designed around this combat system, but I can't help but feel slightly frustrated when I try to instinctively cancel a recovery animation (I found it easier to pull this off by avoiding most combo enders unless an enemy was stunned). Thankfully there are accessories you can equip that make the combat much closer to a proper action game (my main build used three attack speed up gears + the exospine that made it easier to parry and dodge + def and shield boosts), and when you get into the rhythm of the combat it becomes pretty damn exciting. The boss fights are where the game shines, while they don't quite reach the peaks of Sekiro's roster (then again not much does), they're definitely some of my favorite bosses in the current console generation (I do few the endgame bosses could be SLIGHTLY nerfed. Hopefully the upcoming boss challenge update will let us fight any boss at any time, being able to practice them would go a long way).

The story has been criticized as being too derivative of Nier: A, and I don't disagree but I found it serviceable enough. The true ending does break into its own path and I hope a sequel builds upon this to make something super interesting and cool. The flavor text on the collectibles does a decent amount to make the world more fleshed out, and I think the story/lore is better here.

Side quests are pretty standard for the genre, ranging from fetch quests to outright hidden bosses. They're worth doing at least twice (once on NG and NG+) to get all the possible rewards, which brings me to another highlight.

The myriad of costumes is pretty great and there are a variety of cool outfits for Eve (and I don't just mean the super revealing ones). You can also unlock a barber shop where you can change her hairstyle and hair color, honestly playing dress up is half the fun in this game.

Platforming is another weak point of the game, the momentum and physics make certain jumps really finicky. A few moments in the endgame were genuinely awful designed (the Gears of War turrents section almost killed my first playthrough, thankfully if you drop on easy mode you only need to deal with one. I don't care if it's cheese, I refuse to play it any other way).

Still, in spite of the flaws I can't deny that I had tons of fun. I'd do yet another playthrough if I wasn't itching to clean up my backlog (I got Horizon Zero Dawn on my list next, I wanna get to it so I can make room on my PS5). I suppose this is my GOTY by default so far since it's the only 2024 release I've played so far (my copies of Infinite Wealth, P3R, and FF Rebirth are glaring at me). I hope Shift-Up learns from the mistakes made here and makes their next game an even bigger banger.

9/10

A pretty good game despite the admittedly stupid controversy.

This game feels partially inspired by Nier: Automata with the overall themes and narrative. The game has pretty good worldbuilding and side quests but an ok main story.

Gameplay-wise, this is where the game shines. The open world is quite fun to explore and find secrets. The combat is really good with how expressive you can be.

Stellar Blade

8/10

Apesar de toda a polêmica, como um bom fã de Bayonetta e Nier, esse jogo é indispensável.
A história está longe de ser tão boa quanto Nier, mas tem personagens e designs legais, ambientação detalhada e uma OST ABSURDA.
a Gameplay é simplesmente deliciosa!

I've actually been pleasantly surprised by Stellar Blade. Culture war shite aside, I find the explicit difference between the depictions of men and women in this game to be pretty lame. It's bizarre, since the world itself seems entirely unconcerned with gender, and there's never a moment where someone objectifies the protagonist or other women, at least from what I've played. In a game where sexuality is barely a factor at all, you're left to wonder why it's present at all, for any reason other than the assumed benefit of the ogling player.

To be honest, it's not a particularly significant feature in the game overall, so the fact that conversation around the game always comes back to that is a shame, though the developers do bring it on themselves when it is what appears on the box when you buy in.

What I find to be a more interesting part of Stellar Blade is the clear influence by NieR Automata, and more specifically the way that fact didn't bother me as much as I'd expected. It can feel a little hacky at first to see right away the ways in which this game mirrors its major influence, but as I continued to play, a lot of the creative decisions for this game felt surprisingly authentic. In every side quest, every collectible, every costume is a glimmer of humanity. A lot of blockbuster games these days are so bloated, and can often feel arbitrarily lengthened by studio mandate. Stellar Blade trims a lot of the fat, so what's left straightforwardly feels like an idea that somebody had on the dev team which was then built for the game.

It would be quite easy to call Stellar Blade shameless given the discourse surrounding it, and it's sort of true, but as a result it feels more human. This game is a series of Shift Up's personal indulgences, made manifest with a triple-AAA budget.

It's oftentimes a little tone-deaf, but it's also full of strangeness, just like a person. It knows what it is, wears its influences on its sleeve, and doesn't waste time feigning otherwise. I don't know if I'll finish it, but I enjoyed my time!

Stellar Blade was an extremely fun game, but the story is pretty straight forward. (No Spoilers)

The combat was incredible, action like Nier with a bit of soulslike when it came to bosses having attack patterns with timed parries. Even had segments that made the combat just turn into somewhat of a horror game. The animations were crisp. Everything felt like it hit with force it was so satisfying.

The soundtrack was beautiful, every fight scene had a banger of a song play in the background and just roaming around the song fit the atmosphere. One particular song that played during a boss fight near the end was amazing.

The graphics were absolutely stunning. The character detail, particularly EVE, was insane. She looked so lifelike you'd think it was a movie. The cosmetics to make EVE stand out in many ways provided many options, made me want to replay the game just to see her in different outfits in the cutscenes.

Like I said at the beginning, the story was pretty straight forward but they told it quite well. However, I did wish they explored the word they built more. Normally, I don't mind getting collectibles to discover more lore but I felt like I needed to go out of my way to learn more doing so. What did shine however, was the side quest line of a duo that I loved so much. At the end of the day, it was still a solid story. Replaying the game to get the platinum trophy really makes you focus on the cutscenes even more knowing the end.

My biggest issue with the game is some stuff out of combat. It could be a bit rough. Some segments slow down to a crawling pace, especially a few parts near the end. Sometimes the movement wasn't quite responsive, EVE would not listen to the inputs and would do whatever she'd like, normally falling to her death, which got frustrating. Some of the puzzles, although pretty easy, ended up being tedious.

Overall, the game is great. They had some minor issues that I think could be easily resolved with some patches. I definitely recommend this game to anyone who enjoys action games.

Stellar Blade is a surprisingly very polished game with good production values. The graphics looks nice in general from the environment to the character models. Lighting is decent most of the time as well. Loading times are very minimal and surprisingly did not run into any glitch or technical issue.

The story is a somewhat standard post apocalyptic story. It starts off with Eve and her airborne group of sister warriors descending from the space colony to destroy the Naytiba monsters populating the planet. Lots of issue arise and Eve becomes the sole survivor after the landing battle. Saved by the Scavenger Adam, he helps him retrieve energy cells to support the last known human settlement.

The story is rather straightforward and has predicable plot twists within the sci-fi genre. Not much actually happens for the first few hours which remains consistent for most of the game. The story takes the slow reveal approach.

That said, even a generic sci-fi story would keep me interested and that was the case with Stellar Blade's story. The plot twist at the end of the game did take me by surprise though and the endings did set up for a potential interesting sequel that I hope come to fruition.

There aren't many story characters in the game. The few of them are mostly undeveloped outside of the main trio. There are few notable side characters that are unrelated to the main story. They aren't developed much either outside of a few of them.

The music is good overall. Admittedly, I only liked a few tracks in my first playthrough, but have grown to appreciate more tracks in my subsequent playthroughs. There's a lot of piano pieces with soft vocals which didn't really move me much. The tracks use for boss fights are usually of the metal and rock variety which I vibed more with in general.

The combat is the biggest selling point of the game. I enjoyed it, but I do have mixed feelings about it. The combat isn't quite as fast paced as I would think based on the cutscenes. Well, at least the normal attack chain isn't as fast as I'd expected. The battle flow does move quick once you get accessed to all of the parry/dodge followups and Beta/Burst skills. In the regular attack chain, you can mix the weak and strong attacks for different combinations, but it's not really needed most of the time. All hits except for the final ones can be guard and dodge cancelled. The final hit forces you to commit and they have long recovery frames.

The combat isn't very difficult in general. You do take decent damage and can die in about 5 hits with the starting health amount. Blocking is not too effective considering that you still take chip and shield damage when blocking hits. A broken shield gauge will expose you to nearly the full damage and the shield breaks easily in just a few hits. Perfect dodge is one of the main defensive tool, but I can never pull it off consistently outside of the dodging projectiles. It's not that reliable, but it's very much needed since unblockable attacks are common. They come in three versions, yellow, blue and purple. Blue allows a special dodge counter if you dodge directly towards it at the right time (a flash will tell you when). The purple one requires a dodge directly backwards. Despite the supposedly easy counters to do here, the input is apparently very strict where a slight angle could be enough to fail the button press. Getting the right timing was never really an issue, but getting it to register forward or backward was a constant issue. The yellow unblockables don't have any easy counters like the other and requires the standard dodge.

Parrying on the other hand is a lot easier to pull off and safer to do in general. A failed parry usually means that you block the attack at least.

Mob enemies are more tanky than I'd liked for the medium and larger sized ones. I don't mind them too much when fighting 1v1, but fighting a group of them is a real massive pain. I don't think the game has sufficient tools to deal with groups. Parrying and perfect dodging them when attacked by groups is very difficult. A failed dodge or parry is going to lead to a death by stunlock. After replaying the games a few times, I find that I don't enjoy mob fights very much. It doesn't really feel satisfying parrying and dodging their attacks since fights get drag on longer than I'd liked.

Boss fights on the other hand are very fun. All story bosses and most of the ones in sidequest are fought 1v1. All of my attention can be focused on parrying, dodging and executing followups. The battle flow in boss fights are very satisfying.

The special moves, Beta and Burst skills are flashy and looks great, but they require building up a gauge to do.

The game does give you consumable attack items, but there's little variety and limited amount you can hold at once. The game also surprisingly has shooting elements where the drone can turn into a gun. The gun variety is decent, but it's not a useful option for most situations. The ammo that it can hold is limited and ammo drops are not that common. They are also near useless against boss fights since the time it takes to go into or out of aim mode is notable enough that you'll likely get hit by the boss in the mode transition.

One of the other highlights in the game are the level designs. They come in basically two types, the semi-linear ones and the opened areas. There are only two of the latter ones and while they are technically different, both are basically of the desert/wasteland theme so visual design is lacking. They are quite large in size too. They are decent at first, but after a while, it becomes a pain to move around.

The semi-linear levels on the other hand are quite good and fun. Some puzzles here and there and limited exploring for hidden items. They somehow remind me of some PS3 era action games. I wished they removed one of the opened areas and made more of these semi-linear ones instead.

Despite having a reputation as a "Souls" games, it's not very difficult or punishing. Resting at camps does respawn enemies, but that's mostly it. Dying and getting a Game Over just puts you back at the last check point or camp, but these are many of them close together. Progress like opened chests, items obtained, doors opened and exp gained are all retained. No need to go to a specific place to retrieve lost exp or anything like that.

The game has three endings which can be a pain to do since it basically requires playing the game three times outside of uploading saves to the cloud or something. Also annoying is that two of the endings are 90% the same.

There is a NG+ option which also unlocks Hard Mode. Enemies deal more damage and have much higher health. Since you keep everything on a NG+, most mob enemies don't become noticeably more challenging, but they get a lot more tanky to defeat. The same for the bosses, but the ones near the end of the game who were already challenging on normal, become a lot tougher where 1-3 hits can get you killed.

One thing I liked about the game is that there's a lot of outfits to unlock. There's about 35 and a different recoloring of those same ones can be unlocked on a NG+.

While I haven't heard much of the English voice acting since I played it with Korean voices, I thought they were quite good. Even Lily who does sound a lot older than I'd expected in English.

Since there's a lot of discourse on the fanservice, I'll put in my thoughts on the matter. If you remove Eve, the fanservice is nearly non-existent. The characters are filled with cyborgs with metal implants for limbs and even heads for a few of them. As for Eve, her design isn't that heavy in fanservice, but the camera angle does emphasis her behind at times. She does have jiggle physics as well. As for her outfits, a lot consists of fetish type costumes which are heavy in fanservice. Fortunately, there's also a good amount of normal ones as well.

Overall, Stellar Blade was fun to play with a story that kept my interest. I liked the main trio even though the remaining story characters are lacking. Definitely would like to see a direct sequel based on how the endings turned out.

A beautiful game with a super fun & satisfying combat system and a really fun world to explore but a story that is a bit undercooked.

The story has some charming characters, cool moments and great ideas but not all of them are explored as much as they should have been. The narrative takes a backseat for a majority of the game as the first half (or 3/4) focusses entirely on the worldbuilding and lore through the exploration and sidequests. Because of this, the world is really interesting and serves as a great setting but the story told within that world left me wanting a bit more...
It's not bad by any means. It's entertaining and interesting enough to get the job done, and it even has some interesting twists, but it's clear that their focus was on creating a fun gameplay experience. And they definitely didn't disappoint in that regard.

The combat is a satisfying level of challenging, there's a good feeling of progression, the costumization is really neat, the exploration feels natural & rewarding, the world doesn't feel bloated and the linear dungeons change up the gameplay nicely. The atmosphere is also incredible as this game looks beautiful and the OST is on point.

So even if the story wasnt perfect, the game was just so much fun to play through and so much fun to complete!

very impressive that a game can try to be ninja gaiden, nier, devil may cry and sekiro all at once, yet still somehow fail to capture the essence of what it aggrandises.

here’s the thing: this is not a real action game, it is a hollow facsimile of one. stellar blade tokenises action game design traits and shoehorns them into a dull modern template until it coalesces into god of war 2018: titty edition. mechanics lack any real depth while combat design is shallow and simplified. why is it combo-based if these are so heavily disincentivised? why are enemies so static, not playing to the strengths of the system? i’m glad they took the ninja gaiden route (e.g. letting you cancel an attack with a block) over sticking to animation priority, but my respect for the combat system mostly ends there. level and encounter design also lack anything beyond perfunctory consideration. enemy configurations often feel like a copy/paste job and never encourage a change in playstyle (e.g. switching between singular enemies/groups) or utilise risk-reward strategies. btw, there are only so many times you can pull the ‘enemy laying in wait behind the door/wall’ bit. if you must, then at least show me some intent, some playfulness. this shit just feels like getting 40 minutes into dead space and realising you’ll be repeating the same boring jump scare for the next twelve hours. bosses are, unsurprisingly, the best part, but sorely lack the dynamism required for what (i think) they were going for. all of these things are literally, categorically, the most important aspects to nail for a successful action game! it speaks volumes that they all feel half baked.

we can only assume that, at some point, an active decision was made to focus on adding AAA bloat instead of further developing and refining these most crucial design aspects. had shift up not been so enamoured with sonymaxxing every aspect of their game, we could have seen something legitimately interesting. instead we have a bird’s nest of disparate influences, filtered through the money-making machine until a big grey bowl of no-identity slop comes out the other end. who would’ve thought!

Not sure what to say. I’m too old to care about the drama surrounding this game. I saw a cool action game with a sexy lady a la Bayonetta and I threw money at it. Unfortunately Eve (and the rest of the cast) has the personality of a wet rag. She’s no Bayonetta or 2B for that matter.

What this game does have going for it is some seriously fun combat. When it clicks it clicks and you’ll be pulling off slick dodges and parries in the most stylish way imaginable. The animations for Eves moves are pretty incredible and it never got old doing a blink dodge and watching her slide around the enemy for some damage.
I did feel some awkwardness when facing groups of enemies sometimes and the gun play isn’t perfect. But those were pretty minor issues.

I wish the studio had been more inventive or ambitious with the world and story because man does it just feel like a Nier/Nier: Automata clone. I mean that literally. The stories and concepts are so similar that it feels almost legally actionable. I was definitely hoping for more in that department.

There’s not really much in the way of “builds” but you do get gear that leans towards different play styles. More aggressive or defensive, speed or criticals, etc. I also had fun finding new fashion to try out. It’s a good dress up game even if a lot of it tends to be unnecessarily revealing. I guess it depends how much that is gonna bother someone. shrug

Anyway it’s just a pretty solid action game with some sci fi nonsense and a pretty lady. Playing through ng+ for a platinum.

Refreshing and engaging with new mechanics and abilities that always kept on being introduced throughout the entire game. Great OST, looks great, plays great and the story while a tad uninspired carries itself moreso with a genuinly likeable central cast and side characters you must protect!

Can't help stressing out how fun it is to play around with all the costume unlocks and alternate hairstyles, a rare treat to have this much cosmetic content actually as base content!

While at times difficult, the game is always generous with checkpoints and stocking up on consumables, this combined with how fun the mechanics are makes it a fun game to keep on mastering. Outside of combat there is a neat variation of different gameplay elements ranging from shooter sections, platforming and puzzlesolving to open world areas.

Still got new game+ to play through which apparently has a buckton of whole set of new unlocks and extra content.

In short, it's peak.

ASS story, ASS characters, ASS VA.

Some Bosses have way too much health, its like they really want you to spam beta moves, skills and Taki mode. Normal attacking just feels like a way to build the beta.

Open world was mid, sidequest give you no motivation to do more, pretty boring.

Combat was good most the time besides the stun lock when u miss 1 parry.

Stellar Blade, to me, felt like a B-movie whose budget was randomly doubled while in production. What I mean by this is: The production quality is top notch, but everything beneath that would be perfectly at home in a lower budget ""AA"" effort. From the sleazyness to the slightly undercooked gameplay to the agressively overconfident story (the story is mostly plot holes), Stellar Blade is highly polished trash. And I think that's very fun! It's not the best thing ever, but I enjoyed my time with it.