Welcome to Eyeforge: The Final Lash.

If you’ve been searching for a way to model anime characters, then look no further. This game is second to none within its field. The arsenal of tools at your disposal is incredibly robust, allowing for unrivaled precision in your creative vision. It’s an incredible thing when the primary constraint is your own mind and ability. In fact, its expansiveness only broadens the more you learn about the way it functions. As of writing, I’m closing in on 300 hours played and haven’t even thought about leaving the maker for the story mode. Because of that, this review won’t delve into that portion of the game, and will instead gauge the strength of the creator alone.

The creator is split up into the five main tabs of head, body, hair, clothes, and accessories. Within these are a lot of subcategories. You can also give your character different quirks and a choice of around 40 voiced personalities. The accessory category is especially powerful as it is through additional pieces of hair and different items that the character really gains its individuality. If you’ve played for a bit and find it enjoyable, what you’ll want to do is buy and install the two DLC packs (Personality & After School). Then install one of the community mod packs that not only bundles all the free updates into one easy installation, but also further expands the already large selection within each category of the creator. This will allow you to load images to be used as shirt motifs for instance. Unfortunately the DLC is not offered on Steam at this point in time, and as such you will have to purchase it through the Illusion’s Japanese storefront. The two DLCs offer additional personalities, 3P positions, and a new date location, but they are not a necessity by any means. If you don’t see the value in it or want the least amount of hassle, go and get the patch by itself. Otherwise you’ll be locked to the creator as everything but that is cut out of the Steam release.

You’ll be hard pressed to find many negatives with the maker itself. While fundamentally a good thing, it can be overwhelming to have the amount of settings offered when all you want is a minor tweak. Not knowing exactly what you need can at times turn aggravating as you find yourself adjusting sliders back and forth without making any real progress. However, all of this is linked with your own memory and skill, and is thus not the fault of the game alone. If you get frustrated, the best advice I can give is to stick with it. You will get better without really noticing it. Looking back at my first character made that evident and compelled me to redo her entirely.

To build on the above, one thing to note is that while the interface is user friendly, it does have a learning curve for knowing where all the settings are, how to efficiently move between them, what they do, and especially how they interact. As an example, it took me far longer than I’d like to admit until I realised that implementing a change in eye height in conjunction with lower eyelid shape offered far better results than pivoting the eye while adjusting the upper and lower eyelid shapes on their own. Cheek width, jaw width, and lower face width are three settings in particular that do similar things that you absolutely need to understand the interaction of in order to achieve the best results.

In practice, some problems do make themselves apparent. The positive side of that is how flexible the system is, especially with mods. Because this is a character creator, the player’s creativity is 95% of the time going to work itself around any roadblock that might appear. There’s nothing game-breaking, but certain things would be in need of a fresh coat of paint, with my own criticism also nitpicking at best. Hair and accessories, and as such accessory hair, don’t interact with each other as well as they could, leading to frequent clipping. It would look infinitely better if they were to merge into each other to create a better flow. The hair itself is also somewhat stale and it would’ve been nice to bend portions of it freely rather than in incremental angles. It’s most certainly possible to fine-tune it until it stacks the way you want, but it would be hard to argue against this being one of the more frustrating parts of the game. This becomes particularly annoying since you cannot save individual hair between outfits, so if you want a certain hairstyle tied to a certain outfit it’s necessary to create all the hair within the accessory category.

Regardless, there’s certain expectations with character makers and this game goes leaps beyond those. There’s little else for me to do but recommend this game and hope that Illusion’s next title will add some QoL features that will not only modernise it further, but in particular update the stale aspects that drags down the overall user experience.

Beware, for the strife for perfection will undoubtedly consume you.

Welcome to Eyeforge: The Final Lash. If you’ve been searching for a way to model anime characters, then look no further. This game is second to none within its field. The arsenal of tools at your disposal is incredibly robust, allowing for unrivaled precision in your creative vision. It’s an incredible thing when the primary constraint is your own mind and ability. In fact, its expansiveness only broadens the more you learn about the way it functions. As of writing, I’m closing in on 300 hours played and haven’t even thought about leaving the maker for the story mode. Because of that, this review won’t delve into that portion of the game, and will instead gauge the strength of the creator alone. The creator is split up into the five main tabs of head, body, hair, clothes, and accessories. Within these are a lot of subcategories. You can also give your character different quirks and a choice of around 40 voiced personalities. The accessory category is especially powerful as it is through additional pieces of hair and different items that the character really gains its individuality. If you’ve played for a bit and find it enjoyable, what you’ll want to do is buy and install the two DLC packs (Personality & After School). Then install one of the community mod packs that not only bundles all the free updates into one easy installation, but also further expands the already large selection within each category of the creator. This will allow you to load images to be used as shirt motifs for instance. Unfortunately the DLC is not offered on Steam at this point in time, and as such you will have to purchase it through the Illusion’s Japanese storefront. The two DLCs offer additional personalities, 3P positions, and a new date location, but they are not a necessity by any means. If you don’t see the value in it or want the least amount of hassle, go and get the patch by itself. Otherwise you’ll be locked to the creator as everything but that is cut out of the Steam release. You’ll be hard pressed to find many negatives with the maker itself. While fundamentally a good thing, it can be overwhelming to have the amount of settings offered when all you want is a minor tweak. Not knowing exactly what you need can at times turn aggravating as you find yourself adjusting sliders back and forth without making any real progress. However, all of this is linked with your own memory and skill, and is thus not the fault of the game alone. If you get frustrated, the best advice I can give is to stick with it. You will get better without really noticing it. Looking back at my first character made that evident and compelled me to redo her entirely. To build on the above, one thing to note is that while the interface is user friendly, it does have a learning curve for knowing where all the settings are, how to efficiently move between them, what they do, and especially how they interact. As an example, it took me far longer than I’d like to admit until I realised that implementing a change in eye height in conjunction with lower eyelid shape offered far better results than pivoting the eye while adjusting the upper and lower eyelid shapes on their own. Cheek width, jaw width, and lower face width are three settings in particular that do similar things that you absolutely need to understand the interaction of in order to achieve the best results. In practice, some problems do make themselves apparent. The positive side of that is how flexible the system is, especially with mods. Because this is a character creator, the player’s creativity is 95% of the time going to work itself around any roadblock that might appear. There’s nothing game-breaking, but certain things would be in need of a fresh coat of paint, with my own criticism also nitpicking at best. Hair and accessories, and as such accessory hair, don’t interact with each other as well as they could, leading to frequent clipping. It would look infinitely better if they were to merge into each other to create a better flow. The hair itself is also somewhat stale and it would’ve been nice to bend portions of it freely rather than in incremental angles. It’s most certainly possible to fine-tune it until it stacks the way you want, but it would be hard to argue against this being one of the more frustrating parts of the game. This becomes particularly annoying since you cannot save individual hair between outfits, so if you want a certain hairstyle tied to a certain outfit it’s necessary to create all the hair within the accessory category. Regardless, there’s certain expectations with character makers and this game goes leaps beyond those. There’s little else for me to do but recommend this game and hope that Illusion’s next title will add some QoL features that will not only modernise it further, but in particular update the stale aspects that drags down the overall user experience. Beware, for the strife for perfection will undoubtedly consume you.