Hello readers, Jae here, founder of Studio Sai. Today I have some exciting insights to reveal about the importance of the relationships you form in Eternights and how they can affect your combat options, help you defeat monsters and ultimately face the apocalypse with you. Studio Sai was founded on the principle of making games that emphasize relationship forging, so you can see that this is an incredibly important element of the game to me and always has been throughout development.
Eternights’ combat is inspired by many hack ‘n’ slash greats, unlocking more and more special moves and combos as you progress through the game. You have a special ability meter that gets a boost every time you perform a ‘perfect dodge’. Those perfect dodges will be your fuel as you unleash a variety of skills and counters on your enemy.
What we’ve done with the battles in Eternights is that companions fight you. Each companion has its own support abilities that can be used in battle, such as Yuna’s various healing abilities, Sia’s ice attacks to debuff enemies, and Min’s barrier abilities to increase your resistance to enemy attacks and hazards. Companions can also unlock new elemental attacks for your character, which you can use to break elemental shields that some stronger enemies may have and use super-effective elemental attacks that are beneficial against an enemy’s element.
This is when relationships become vital to succeeding in battles, as to gain these support skills you need to increase your relationship rank with each companion. This unlocks a variety of abilities and upgrades abilities related to each companion’s specialty.
You can increase your rank with different characters by improving your relationship XP with them. You can do this through a multitude of activities, sometimes platonic, sometimes romantic, if you choose. Some examples include searching different areas for items that are important to each companion, training with them by completing their special mini-games, spending time with them and getting to know them through your dialogue options, and exploring the city and fighting with one companion specifically. The catch is that the end of the world is near and you have limited time to arrange all the activities with your companions. Some of these activities can only be done during the day or at night, so you need to choose your activities and plan your agenda wisely.
Before you can achieve deeper relationships with a companion, you must also improve your own character’s traits based on what your chosen companion would admire. You can do this by choosing dialog options that indicate that property and giving more XP for it. For example, with Yohan, he admires courage, so you need a certain level of courage by interpreting and choosing the most courageous dialogue options. Yohan provides great buffs to your character and other companions, which is another great reason to date him.
I’m so excited that Eternights will launch on September 21st this year and be available for pre-order on PS5 and PS4.
