Let the experiment begin.
Eternal Return: Black Survival is a free-to-play Multiplayer Online Battle Arena and Battle Royale Game. The game is developed by Nimble Neuron, and went into open beta on July 29th, 2020. The game's official 1.0 launch came on July 20th, 2023.
The game takes place on the deserted Lumia Island, where eighteen survivors are forced to be the last one(s) standing for an experiment by the organization AGLAIA seeking to create perfect transhumans. Players choose to play one character out of a growing cast with which to find items, craft equipment, hunt animals, cook food, and of course kill the other survivors on the island for the match. The Advancing Wall of Doom standard to the Battle Royale Game genre works very differently in Eternal Return: Black Survival compared to the others - rather than a contracting circle centered around a point, entire set regions become randomly declared to soon be "restricted" and these restricted areas do not slowly damage players within them. Instead, players have thirty seconds per match with which they can freely go into any sort of restricted area until their time entirely depletes and instantly explodes them. Unlike most Battle Royale Games, the vast majority of items are to some degree guaranteed to have spawned - but only within certain areas, making a planned "build path" (similar to that of the strategic patterns in other Multiplayer Online Battle Arena or Real-Time Strategy games) a necessity for players to hope to finish their desired equipment lest the areas with their desired items become out of reach to them or even having been depleted of the necessary items.
The game can be played solo against bots, with multiplayer matchmaking for solo free-for-all play, duos, or squad (threes), and finally custom matches.
Let there be glory to the pawns, who reached the end of despair:
- Adaptational Curves: Some of the characters from Black Survival are curvier than they were in the first game. Examples include Cathy, Sua, Eva
◊, Jenny◊, and Dr. Nadja◊. - Adaptational Modesty: A number of characters from Black Survival had significantly more Fanservice-laden designs compared to Eternal Return: Black Survival. For example; Nadine went from going around to just wearing a tube top and a ponytail above the waist to a black shirt that only causes for exposing midriffs, an short orange camouflaged cape, and an orange cap. Zahir was a Walking Shirtless Scene using a flimsy vest but instead has a closed shirt now. Fiora's pants were see-through. Exceptions to this exist though - Jackie's still pretty close to only wearing sports underwear along with gloves, boots and a torn apron only worn over her waist, and Magnus remains a Walking Shirtless Scene with only a black leather vest over top his very muscular upper body. Cathy also averts it with her Cleavage Window, short skirt and Zettai Ryouiki, as her Angel of Death skin from Black Survival is her default skin here.
- Alcohol-Induced Idiocy:
An official comic◊ had the probably-very-drunk Li Dailin mistake a portable toilet for a fridge. She gave the ramen and frozen pizza in it to Xiukai for him to cook, unbeknownst to him where it actually came from. - Applied Phlebotinum: "Vital Force" (abbreviated as VF) is a background element explaining the characters' capabilities ranging from the unlikely to the impossible. At least the scientists of Lumia Island are conducting the experiments to specifically study something so useful. VF is also explicitly titled on the Arcana weapon skill and Echion's VF Prosthetic weapon type and skill.
- A.K.A.-47: Zigzagged - some guns are given fairly exact names (such as the "Beretta M92F" among the pistols), others are less exact (such as the "Springfield" among the sniper rifles, which could refer to a very large number of rifles throughout history), and some are entirely non-specific (such as the "Machine Gun" among the assault rifles, the icon of which appears to be one of the QBZ-95 rifle family).
- Arbitrary Gun Power: Naturally, for balance reasons, guns aren't hugely different from bows, crossbows, throwing weapons, and shurikens and are not really any more lethal than close-combat weapons on the same tier. They also have to reload occasionally, though this isn't a terribly huge drawback considering the ammunition reserves that you load with are infinite, and wasting ammunition is difficult to do as it is only consumed by basic attacks that are guaranteed to go toward whatever you click to attack.
- Batter Up!: Bat weapons!...though funnily enough, none of the icons or names for any of the bat weapons imply that any of them are just baseball bats. Bats' weapon skill is "Full Swing", doing damage to all enemies in front of the survivor and knocking them back. If the enemy was knocked into a wall, they will be stunned.
- Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Some of the challenges' snippets state that some historical events or persons are suspected to be due to VF. The first "Level Up Your Skills" bracket, ends with the conversation's words being attributed to Minamoto no Yoshitsune and Musashibo Benkei (the latter is suspected to be a VF Awakener).
- Blinded by the Light: Cameras' weapon skill, Flash, has the camera set on really bright apparently - Enemies hit by it while facing it take a lot more damage and are unable to see from a short distance away from themselves.
- Cool Sword: The two-handed sword weapons set, as well as dual swords. Two-handed swords' weapon skill is Parry, which blocks all damage and becomes unstoppable for 3/4ths of a second before dashing through the enemy.
- Counter-Attack: Tonfas' weapon skill, Quick Spin, which has the survivor adopt a defensive stance for a moment that prevents them from taking any other action, but avoiding all damage and return some of it back to the attacker. However, it doesn't return very much damage back so its real benefit is avoiding all damage during its duration.
- Dash Attack: The Rapier weapon skill does also this, simply causing its user to dash right to a target and cause damage. Dual swords can do two of them, first performing a much shorter dash that continuously causes damage to any enemies within its distance, and then a much longer dash that does damage once becomes available if the first one hit a target for at least two-thirds of its potential hits.
- Defend Command: Tonfas' weapon skill will prevent the survivor from doing anything at all, be it moving or attacking, during its duration...but will also avoid any damage they would have taken too. It even returns some of the damage prevented back to the attacker.
- Depending on the Artist: This promotional artwork for Eternal Return: Black Survival has Jackie's clothing being fairly different from the details of any in-game context, the latter of which lacks any sort of text on her clothes, a gas mask left over her neck, and has her apron be entirely orange rather than red with black straps.
- Dual Wielding: The dual swords weapons. While the icons of the weapons portray them as being pretty much alike (aside from the Divine Dual Swords which evoke a samurai's katana and wakizashi "daishō" while mentioning Miyamoto Musashi's dual-wielding technique), the most basic weapon recipe itself brings to mind the more realistic short-and-long weapon pairs by requiring a kitchen knife and a rusty sword to make it. The weapon skill is Dual Sword Rampage, which is a Dash Attack that causes the user to rapidly attack six times to all within a rectangle in front of them as they travel to the other end, and hitting an enemy with it allows for a long-range dash at the end.
- Rozzi also goes Guns Akimbo, dual-wielding her pistols in combat.
- Handguns: The pistol weapons, or so they start out as since most of the available list are clearly either Hand Cannons or Revolvers (a snubnosed revolver even serves as the weapon skill's icon). Pistols' weapon skill is Moving Reload, which instantly reloads the pistol, increases movement speed greatly for three seconds, and reduces the characters' skills current cooldowns by six seconds (aside from their passive skill or Moving Reload itself).
- Hyperactive Metabolism: Food and beverages are consumables used to respectively replenish your characters' HP or SP over 18 seconds.
- Hyperspace Arsenal: Survivors have a limited inventory of ten slots and six spaces for worn equipment and generally clearly lacking carrying equipment. They cook food and beverages with a pan and portable stove or craft other items with a set of tools wrapped up that comes in and out of existence solely for the crafting animation. All worn equipment doesn't show up on their character at all, aside from a single model used for each usable weapon.
- Interface Spoiler: Before Lenox was in the game, the entire line of whip weapons in the game were (almost, as they technically could still be made solely to grant its maker Craft Mastery experience) completely useless to every character, since no-one could use whips...so it was safe to assume that a whip user like Lenox would be added in the future.
- Inexplicable Language Fluency: The test subjects are able to work together with each other in spite of how one would presume that the vast majority of them would be completely unable to verbally communicate with most of the others. This was Lampshaded with an official comic◊ where the Japanese Rio can't understand two Koreans, Hyunwoo and Hyejin, so Hyunwoo builds a smartphone and uses Gxxxxx Translate to compensate for this...and none of them can understand the English Jackie who burst into the scene (and naturally doesn't hold back on her violent and murderous urges despite a language barrier). Averted by some of the achievement lore entries, which include statements observed from test subjects that some of which have a note underneath which states the words were translated by AI and will be reviewed and localized further in the future.
- Inexplicably Preserved Dungeon Meat: Food found is always entirely edible, even if, as one official comic notes, it was found in a portable toilet◊.
- Item Crafting: There's a chance you might see an entire finalized piece of equipment you want from airdropped purple or yellow boxes...but trust us that your odds are much better if you instead go to where the items that you need to craft the equipment are. Food, beverages, and special placed items can also all be crafted.
- Just Add Water: We don't know how the survivors are able to craft freakin' Excalibur with just their portable tools, a bejeweled sword and a holy grail in a few seconds either.
- Katanas Are Just Better: Despite many of the two-handed sword users being non-Asian and the icons for many of the weapons being that of a European-style straight sword, the 3D models for characters using a two-handed sword is that of the gently-curved katana style.
- King Mook: Wickeline is the game's strongest wild animal and is guaranteed to drop some items required to craft legendary-tier equipment as well as a First Aid Kit. She also grants a temporary buff that causes the defeater's damage sources to cause an extra fixed damage-over-time effect.
- Knock Back: Crossbows' weapon skill does this innately to anyone hit by its cone. Spears' Shadow Stab weapon skill does this conditionally - they always cause some damage and slows enemies hit, but also knock back enemies who are too close to the survivor and causing the damage again.
- Kukris Are Kool: The icon for the dual swords weapon type and skill notably use a kukri-style for the blades, in spite of no actual dual swords items actually using a kukri appearance for its icon.
- Mercy Invincibility: Upon exiting a Hyperloop, you are briefly invulnerable and immune to crowd controls, but you are drastically slowed down and cannot attack or use abilities. This gives you a second to take in your surroundings and briefly protects you from anyone who might be right next to you after the warp, but means you can't take advantage of the invincibility to attack them.
- Mind-Control Music: Guitars' weapon skill, Love &... causes an enemy hit by to be charmed by it, causing them to move toward the guitarist for its duration while unable to do anything else.
- Mithril: "Mythril" is a chunk of a teal-coloured metal rare crafting material used to make Legendary items, obtained from killing an Alpha or bought from a kiosk. It is described as silver strengthened from long-term exposure to [Vital Force, and silver is the metal which is most reactive to the stuff.
- Pinned to the Wall: Crossbows' weapon skill is Expulsion Shot can do this. It shoots out a cone of bolts that will knocks enemies back. If it knocks them into a wall, they will take extra damage and be stunned.
- Power Fist: The "Glove" weapons. The weapon skill for them is "Uppercut" which causes the survivor to immediately perform a normal attack with greater range and damage.
- Public Domain Artifact: A large amount of equipment is either named after various mythological characters, real people, or is conceptually directly taken from actual mythological items.
- Rain of Arrows: The Bow weapon skill is named this, and pretty much does a one-man version of this exactly. It takes a while for the area targeted by the skill to be struck by the arrows (causing damage and slowing enemies hit, more so if they were at its center), but the Shadow of Impending Doom that warns enemies to get out of it doesn't appear until the last second until the arrows land.
- Resting Recovery: Players may sit down and rest by using the function while not in combat. It can be ended at will but also will be forcibly ended if the player takes damage.
- Three-Strike Combo: It takes three basic attacks to ready Axes' weapon skill, Maleficent Helix. Arcana's weapon skill VF Dispersion grants the survivor three "spheres of condensed VF energy" to drop onto enemies.
- Schmuck Bait: This is arguably the case for rare materials, including Meteorites and Trees of Life, as well as the androids Alpha and Omega. Inexperienced players will frequently rush to the sites for these resources as soon they become available, even if they aren't finished their build, have low weapon mastery, or will end up in very unfavorable match-ups. This often results in someone camping around them and killing hapless victims with ease, resulting in that player potentially snowballing and dominating the rest of the match (provided someone doesn't kill them immediately afterward). Even if a player doesn't die to this, they will likely waste a lot of time dancing around a rare material and not doing other things (i.e. hunting animals, cooking food, etc.), resulting in them falling too far behind to catch up. Experienced players are far more selective about contesting rare materials since they will be better able to judge whether the reward is worth the risk or not.
- Screw This, I'm Out of Here!: As of Season 7, you can now make use of an escape submarine if you find a rare item and use it to build a Rootkit. Using this, you can warp to a special section of the island and, provided someone else doesn't also warp there and contest you, use the submarine to escape the island. This is a good way out if someone else is dominating the match and you can't hope to beat them in a fight.
- Shout-Out: One of the randomized names for bots in the English localization is TobiasFunky, which is obviously almost the same as Tobias Fünke. The Blade of Truth tactical skill has a blade◊ that looks almost exactly like an energy sword◊ from Halo spin around the user.
- Sniper Rifle: A weapon type some of the characters use! Benefitting such a weapon, its weapon skill is Ballistic Advantage, which increases the user's sight greatly at a distance in a large cone and allows them to fire two long-ranged traveling shots (the second of which causes far more damage the lower the target's health it hits is), but requires they immobilize themselves to continue using it and prevents them from seeing around themselves outside of that cone.
- Stat Grinding: With a lack of endlessly-spawning Mooks running into towers to play wack-a-mole on unlike other Multiplayer Online Battle Arenas, players instead increase their survivors' levels by gaining experience toward masteries. This experience is summed up to allow for leveling up, and can be gained from doing basically anything at all save for standing still:
- Weapon-specific mastery increases by doing damage, making a weapon, and killing animals or players which further improves the player's ability to cause damage. Doing or taking damage from animals as well as killing them increases Hunt mastery to increase damage done against animals.
- Crafting items is done for Craft mastery which also increases the effect gained from items.
- Collecting resources, opening other item containers and using security consoles increases Search mastery and increases vision range.
- Moving around and making leg armor increases Move Mastery in additional to movement speed in and out of combat.
- Taking damage and crafting food increases Health mastery, improving your health and mana regeneration while out of combat. note
- Crafting armor aside from leg armor, taking damage, and killing animals or players increases Defense Mastery to further reduce damage taken.
- Crafting, setting, taking damage from and doing damage with traps (cameras count under this) increases Trap Mastery to additionally increase the damage caused by the survivor's traps.
- Stealth Expert: Daggers' weapon skill, Cloak & Dagger, allows a survivor to temporarily make themselves invisible and move a bit faster for two seconds with the first portion. Then they can Flash Step behind an enemy and cause damage to them with the second portion.
- Stock Ninja Weaponry: Shurikens are a weapon type, though darts, cards, chakrams, throwing knives and the Petal Torrent weapon are also included within the type. The main distinction between throwing weapons and shurikens seem to be that the former are less aerodynamic than the latter. The shuriken weapon skill is "Caltrops" which damage and slow enemies who run over them.
- Super Mode: Assault rifles' weapon skill, Overheat, is one. After using basic attacks with one to gain stacks, activating the skill again will cause the weapon to be immediately reloaded and greatly increase the survivor's attack damage and attack speed for a duration.
- Supernatural Martial Arts: The Nunchucks' weapon skill has the user spin them around for a duration before hurling a powerful gust of wind forward...yes, like some kind of wizard. Vital Force serves as an explanation here.
- Throw Down the Bomblet: Most of the throwing weapons, though some of them are instead slings. Their weapon skill is "Smokescreen", which slows movement for all enemies inside and reduces their ability to see around them majorly.
- Tube Travel: "Hyperloop" is available in certain regions for a survivor to teleport them to other regions. As it's only shown in-game as a phone booth overtop a closed sets of two doors and a spinning cylinder that goes into the ground after a survivor uses it, it can only be assumed the hyperloop works similarly to the design released by Tesla and SpaceX.
- You Will Not Evade Me: The weapon skill of the Whip weapon type has the user crack the whip along a line outward to pull an enemy toward them after being hit.
