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Stellar Blade is out and receiving (wait for it) stellar reviews from players and critics alike. Though many are focused on Eve’s (the protagonist’s) physical looks, there is one feature that particularly caught players’ eyes—the hair animation.
Several Reddit threads have cropped up since Stellar Blade came out, focusing on Eve’s hair and the way it is animated. An April 24 thread praised Eve’s hair as being the real X-rated part of Stellar Blade and included a video of her moving and jumping around and the hair flowing accordingly. It floats around and falls on Eve’s model fantastically, though many in the thread disapproved of the animation with claims that it looks “unrealistic.” Those players think the hair flows too slowly and feels floaty, almost as if Eve was submerged in water, and they say the clipping issues are also significant.
The hair animations do feel a bit floaty and slow, though it appears the developers went for more of an artistic approach rather than a realistic one. The clipping, though present, appears to be minimal as Eve’s hair falls on her model generally well and doesn’t phase through as much as we have seen in other games. “I would hope we could get realistic hair in this day and age, but I guess hair is still so dang hard to animate,” one disagreeing player wrote, criticizing its weightlessness.
Stellar Blade‘s director Hyun-Tae Kim claimed in one interview with Dexerto that Eve’s hair probably lengthened the game’s development by about a year. Indeed, even a much older thread from when the Stellar Blade demo was gaining traction called Eve’s hair animations “underrated,” and one user even said it looked “outstanding.”
Stellar Blade continues to receive overwhelmingly positive reviews from critics and players, even though it has caused some controversy and division as well among the gaming community. The hack ‘n’ slash is available exclusively for Sony’s PlayStation 5, and hopefully, the Japanese publisher will continue its practice of PC ports and bring it to Gaben’s kingdom.
