Summary
Stellar Bladeis a fantastic game, particularly when it comes to its combat gameplay and action sequences in general. It offers a flashy combat style with heavy anime influences, crowning it with responsive controls that are easy enough to get used to, and rewarding to master.
On the story side of things, however, the game has a lot of areas that are hard to follow. The motivations of many characters are left up to guesswork, and while the main plot ends up making sense at the end, the same can’t be said for the finer details of the plot.
8The Intro Cinematic
Looks Cool, But Makes No Sense
The intro sequence of Stellar Blade has an epic scale, showing a space fleet entering Earth’s orbit, getting under attack, and deploying hundreds of pods containing EVE and her comrades. It also makes no sense when you think about it for two seconds.
This is, at the very least, the 7th time an Airborne Squad has been deployed this way, and Mother Sphere’s forces haven’t figured out a better way in than face-tanking a million missiles. Particularly when said missiles are made to bypass your shields, leaving only a handful of surviving soldiers.
What’s more,we don’t even know who fired the missiles, since the main enemy of the game, the Naytibas, work more like deranged monsters than any sort of cohesive unit. The only Naytibas with working brains are Raven, Orcal, and Adam, but it’s highly unlikely that any of them had any hand in the missile attack.
7Lily Spending Two Years In a Pod
Are We Really Supposed To Think She’s Human?
Lily is part of an Airborne Squad just like EVE, yet she’s not a fighter, but an engineer, providing support to her fellow soldiers on the battlefield. She was part of the 5th Squad, and while she managed to land safely, she ended up right in the middle of an Alpha Naytiba’s nest, making it a death sentence for her to leave the pod.
The problem is, she spent two years tucked away inside the thing, but she comes out as if the whole thing was just a mild inconvenience. Even after it is revealed that most characters are androids, they still seem to need some form of food and water, but Lily just pops out of the thing perfectly healthy, and even with makeup on.
6Breathing In Space
It’s A Vacuum For A Reason
At the end of the Orbit Elevator section, EVE is thrown spiraling through space, and while the sequence looks very cool, it is also hard to follow when you have even the loosest understanding of how space works. The only part that is properly explained is that, since EVE is an android, she can easily survive in space.
How she’s able to stop her momentum to stay still in space, that’s a different thing entirely. But the worst part of it is when she’s talking to Lily, gasping constantly as she does so; where is all that air coming from? Just because you don’t need air to survive, doesn’t mean you don’t need it to speak.
5Flying Mech Out Of Nowhere
It Was Suspicious From The Start
Once EVE destroys the Alpha Naytiva at the Orbital Elevator, she ends up falling onto the Earth like space debris. It looks like the end for our heroine, but she ends up being saved in the nick of time by an exosuit that just happened to be flying nearby.
We can only assume that the idea is that this exosuit (called Providence) wasa trap sent by Mother Sphere, using the machine to monitor EVE’s actions and possibly kill her if it came to it, like in two of the game’s possible endings. But that doesn’t explain how it just shows up, since there wasn’t any real build-up towards the thing just being around in space.
4Adam Not Stopping Raven
She Seems To Go Against His Ideals
It’s clear that Adam and Raven worked together at some point, or at the very least know about one another, since a lot of dialogue suggests this (particularly from Raven). What isn’t clear is why Adam isn’t stopping Raven, since she keeps actively going against his plans.
It’s not like Adam lacks the means to stop her — he is the Elder Naytiba after all. Once Raven launches the attack on Xion, that’s a clear sign that she needs to be put down. But Adam does nothing, letting Raven try to kill EVE for the third time, when by that point Adam needs EVE alive and well.
3The 4 Cores Are Meaningless
Adam Was There The Whole Time
EVE’s mission throughout the game is to slay the Elder Naytiba, and she’s told that to do so, she needs to collect four Cores from Alpha Naytibas, since that would let her open the way to the Elder’s nest. While there is indeed a door that needs those Cores, the whole thing is pointless since Adam could’ve just opened the door.
Since Adam is the Elder Naytiba, and he wants to let EVE inside his nest (not to mention, he clearly has a way of going in without the Cores, since he’s already there when EVE enters), the Cores aren’t so important. One of said Cores was from Orcal, who sacrificed himself so EVE could have all Cores, a death that affected most of Xion negatively.
2The Importance Of The Word “Human”
There’s No Shame In Being An Android
The main plot twist of the gameis that Mother Sphere has been lying to her people, since most of the cast aren’t humans, but androids, and the Naytibas are “evolved” humans from the past. Lily, in particular, is shocked by this, since she refuses to believe they are just something someone made.
But what passed as “human” for them was a combination of flesh and technology, able to survive in space and likely being born with adult bodies. That isn’t changed by their species being called human, android, or Andro Eidos.
In fact, the whole lie constructed by Mother Sphere makes little sense, since she had no need to make her androids believe they were humans. She could’ve just said that the humans oppressed the androids (which is likely true), and the war was an uprising to gain independence; the only problem with that narrative is that Mother Sphere ceases to be the bad guy, something crucial to the game’s story.
1EVE’s Design
Why Is She So Different From Her Squadmates?
While there are a lot of outfits you can unlock for EVE, they aren’t exactly canon, so if you want her to look like a bunny girl or a teddy bear, that’s up to you. But her base outfit, the one she starts the game with, doesn’t make sense either with the world, or the rest of her Squad.
Big, cumbersome gloves, no arm protection, and a tie to finish up the outfit; while that combo looks good, she seems like she’s from a different Squad altogether. Tachy also looks fashionable in her Suad suit, but it still makes sense, all things considered.
