What Neverness to Everness Hides in Its First Few Hours

The golden entity appears, tells Zero to stop interfering, and vanishes. That moment, maybe 20 minutes into Neverness to Everness, is the game’s first honest statement: you will not get answers quickly, and the mystery matters more than the spectacle. This is a spoiler-light look at how the opening hours work, who the key characters are, and what the factions are actually doing beneath the anime-style urban fantasy surface. Hethereau is designed to distract you. The city is the game’s real second protagonist. It is an open world that lets you swim, drive, scale buildings, browse shops, grab snacks, or walk into an arcade. None of that is filler. It is how the game tells you Hethereau is a place worth exploring, not just a hallway between fights. My advice: take one detour for every story beat you finish. The city rewards curiosity more than efficiency, and you will not miss anything permanent by slowing down. The Bureau of Anomaly Control and its Agenda: The Bureau is the first institution you meet. It is a high-rise full of workers, screens, and technology that looks bureaucratic even when it is clearly supernatural. You join as an anomaly hunter under the pretense that the work might jog Zero’s memory. That framing does two things at once: it justifies the mission structure, and it hints that the Bureau knows more about Zero than it admits. Mint is the emotional anchor in these early scenes. Her introduction cutscenes are genuinely warm, and that warmth keeps the opening from turning into pure exposition. The Eibon Antique Shop Crew: The second hub is Eibon, an antique shop that doubles as a quest board for supernatural jobs. The staff are anomaly hunters, and they are deliberately mismatched: Hotori runs the shop; she is frequently tipsy, rarely uninformed. Adler is the steady voice. Taygedo is half otter, half TV hybrid. Daffodill handles security. Nanally, Sakiri, and Edgar deal with low-threat anomalies. The opening fight teaches you how combat works: readable enemy silhouettes, contrast between heavy and fast archetypes. Fadia swings an oversized weapon with weighty hits. Skia and Lacrimosa move quicker and more precise. Three trial characters, three distinct combat rhythms. The story sets up three threads: Zero’s identity, the golden entity telling him to stop interfering implies prior interference, and anomalies tied to city history. Version 1.3 introduces Zankou, Linko, and Duskmoor district.