For Stellar Blade’s protagonist Eve, certainty is a slippery commodity. When she lands on a broken Earth from an orbiting space colony flanked by a squadron of buxom warriors, her purpose is clear: find and kill the Alpha Naytiba, the prime mover among a plague of grotesques that wrecked the planet and sent humanity packing. When her sisters in arms are decimated, though, she begins to discover that things aren’t so straightforward, and there’s more to do besides parrying, pirouetting and impaling monsters.
As Eve confronts an identity crisis, however, goes through one of its own. Indeed, the only real certainty here is that Shift Up wants to pay homage to The soundtrack,composer Keiichi Okabe, is a giveaway, but so is the post-apocalyptic rubble and Eve herself, apparently human but as convincingly android as 2B ever was. Yet even here, the pieces don’t quite fall into place. The music, for example, has powerful moments, but can feel misjudged, not least in the first act proper – a plodding, three-hour stretch among crumbling city blocks and metro stations backed by a warbling lament that only encumbers it further.
