Kawasaki Sui’s Neverness to Everness Run Takes Her From a Building Climb to Prison

INDEPENDENT — Kawasaki Sui spent about five hours on Friday night in Neverness to Everness (NTE), an open-world game she introduced to newcomers as a Grand Theft Auto-style (GTA) title from a Chinese developer where “you can do anything.” By her own count she was about 10 hours in, and she split the evening among story events, side missions and sightseeing.

Early on she climbed the outside of a tall building, calling the route an “Only Up” situation after the climbing game, to reach a crow she was collecting and open a warp box, which raised her hunter level. She then tried a challenge mode in which players set their own conditions, likening it to the Contingency Contract mode in Arknights. A level 42 enemy barely lost any health, and she backed off, saying the level gap made it unwinnable for now. The main story stays locked until level 24, which she had not reached, so she turned to side missions. She said she mostly skips the daily hunting missions because she does not like being ordered around by a game.

“I like playing games, but I don’t like being moved around by them.” — Kawasaki Sui, on daily missions

Story scenes took up much of the evening. She passed an in-game test and sat through a long event about a man who called himself a hero, which she said left a heavy aftertaste. A later arc about friends forming a band at a live house suited her better: “There’s no stress in watching this,” she said. Its drum minigame at first showed no notes on screen, which chat called a bug, and she cleared it by pressing the menu’s freeze-recovery option. After rehearsals and an opening slot, the band entered Moon Dog Night, a scored live event for amateur acts that the game puts at its 99th staging, and earned 60 points, which a character called a high mark for a debut. The performance played out as a cutscene, and she said afterward that she had mostly watched for about an hour.

Later she set up a delivery business at the game’s logistics center, hiring drivers who handle deliveries on their own. She also won a match of a falling-block puzzle that she likened to Tetris, though its controls differ from the standard game, and visited the amusement park for the first time, where a claw machine’s grip was, in her words, beyond ordinary. “Amusement parks are exciting even in games,” she said.

Near the end a fight in town drew a police response, her wanted level rose, and she was arrested and sent to prison. She quit a power-washing work shift there as too tedious, beat a level 50 inmate who then handed over the post of boss, and paid to leave.

Chat spotted the drum minigame’s missing notes right away and cheered the prison scenes as even more GTA-like. Thirteen Super Chats and Stickers came in. She signed off a little after the five-hour mark, noting that she streams most nights around 11 p.m. Japan time.