Stellar Blade / YMMV

Adorkable: EVE might be a formidable warrior, but she does have a sillier side. Whenever she finds a beverage can, despite not knowing what it is, she can't help but do a little pose with it, complete with the game using a "ta-da!" sound effect.
Demonic Spiders:
- Cricket Slashers are an absolute nightmare if you haven't gotten the game's parry and dodge systems down, as their attacks will drain 90% of your health if they catch you in their frenzy after their third arm appears. Their bigger and meaner brothers the Cricket Butchers are even worse; one wrong dodge or missed block, and it's curtains.
- Hydras and Mutated Hydras don't hit especially hard, your problem is going to be hitting them as they love to move out of your reach. This is especially bad in Eidos 9, where they love to bait you into falls to your death.
Friendly Fandoms: With NieR: Automata, thanks to both games having many similarities with each other such as having a female lead who went memetic thanks to how hypersexualized she is, and sharing a post apocalyptic setting. It also helps that Shift Up have been very open about how Nier:Automata was a very big source of inspiration for them. Automata's creator Yoko Taro himself has also done a shared interview with this game's creators where both parties heap praise on the work of each other, with Taro even mentioning to feel jealous of the kind of game Stellar Blade and wishing he could make something like it.
Goddamn Bats: Creepers are easy enough to deal with on their own, but the problem is they hunt in packs and love to gang up on you while you're trying to focus on a larger naytiba.
Good Bad Bugs: The demo has a glitch where, by using a move that warped Eve behind enemies, players were able to warp behind a wall to reach the area following the boss which should be the end of the demo. The area is surprisingly fleshed out, with additional enemies not seen in the "proper" part of the demo, even cut scenes, and most notably, upgrades for Eve. However, progressing too far leads players to a black screen, soft-locking the game.
No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: While many Western gaming sites have criticized Eve's appearance, it has also led to content creators becoming more aware of the game, flocking to it, and getting the game more attention. As of April 2024, it became the highest-selling pre-order on the PlayStation store.
Play the Game, Skip the Story: One of the points of contention in the game is that while the gameplay is indeed stellar, the story feels predictable and cookie cutter. This is especially the case among fans who also played NieR: Automata, a game with a similar premise which many consider to have done much better work with its plots, characters and themes in comparison to Stellar Blade. General discussion has been leaning towards considering Stellar Blade to have the better mechanics, combat, and exploration; while Nier: Automata has the better overall experience, writing and aesthetics. This is especially the case for international audiences, since Shift Up just doesn't have Square Enix's vast localisation resources and experience, resulting in much stiffer, less expressive, and less emotionally impactful foreign language dubs and subs (with special notes for the English and Latin American Spanish dubs) than Automata had.
Tainted by the Preview: When Eve's design was being marketed as a selling point of the game, some people took issue with it and called it misogynistic and over-sexualized, with certain gaming news outlets like IGN France going as far as to calling the design "a sexualized doll by someone who has never seen a woman" (despite not only the character designer having a wife, but also Eve being modeled off a real woman^note), though the article has since been retracted with an apology due to backlash.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Post-release patches for the physical version of the game (which came pre-applied in digital versions) removed some of the gore and altered some of the outfits to be less sexualized, which led many to accuse the game's developer Shift Up of censorship (and/or Sony of Executive Meddling)^note, which was especially contentious due to Shift Up originally promising the game to be fully uncensored in all countries.
The Un-Twist: Given the fact that Stellar Blade was inspired heavily by Nier and NieR: Automata, namely being the last survivors of humanity fighting against monsters that seek to exterminate them, it's not a big shock for fans of both games to piece together that humanity is not only just extinct and that you play as a Ridiculously Human Robot, but that the monsters you fight were former humans who devolved into mindless beasts to prevent total extinction.

YMMV / Stellar Blade

Edit Locked