Stellar Blade/Eve

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{| cellpadding="7" style="max-width: 400px; width: 100%; border: 2px solid #4DCB9D; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0 0 16px 0; font-size: 0.9em;"
|-
| colspan="2" style="background: #000; text-align: center; padding: 10px 8px 12px 8px; border-bottom: 2px solid #4DCB9D;" |
<div style="color: #4DCB9D; font-weight: bold; font-size: 1.4em; margin: 3px 0 1px 0;">Eve</div>
<div style="color: #ffffff; font-size: 0.92em;">이브</div>
|-
| colspan="2" style="text-align: center; padding: 0;" | ![[StellarBlade-Eve.png|alt=Eve in her white and green Planitia suit, holding her blade at her side]]
|- style="border-bottom: 1px solid #d6f2e5;"
! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center;" | Alias
| "Angel", as she is known to the people of [[Stellar Blade/Xion|Xion]]<ref name="psgame">"Stellar Blade™ – PS5 Games." ''PlayStation.com'' (official). [https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/stellar-blade/ playstation.com/en-us/games/stellar-blade]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref>
|- style="border-bottom: 1px solid #d6f2e5;"
! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center;" | Affiliation
| [[Stellar Blade/7th Airborne Squad|7th Airborne Squad]]<ref name="psgame" />
|- style="border-bottom: 1px solid #d6f2e5;"
! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center;" | Occupation
| Airborne squad soldier<ref name="psgame" />
|- style="border-bottom: 1px solid #d6f2e5;"
! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center;" | Designed by
| Kim Hyung-tae<ref name="gamesradar">Kim Hyung-tae, interviewed by ''GamesRadar+'', February 2024.</ref>
|- style="border-bottom: 1px solid #d6f2e5;"
! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center;" | Voice actors
| Yoon Eun-seo (Korean)<br>Rebecca Hanssen (English)<br>Asami Seto (Japanese)<ref name="credits">''Stellar Blade'' end credits, voice casts by language (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2024).</ref>
|-
| colspan="2" | {{Collapse|text="'''[ Spoilers ▾ ]'''"|color="#4DCB9D"|style="width:100%;"}}
|- style="border-bottom: 1px solid #d6f2e5;"
! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center; width: 36%;" | Species
| [[Stellar Blade/Andro-Eidos|Andro-Eidos]]<ref name="endgame">''Stellar Blade'', late-game scenario and endings (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2024).</ref>
|- style="border-bottom: 1px solid #d6f2e5;"
! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center;" | Purpose
| The EVE Protocol, under [[Stellar Blade/Mother Sphere|Mother Sphere]]<ref name="endgame" />
|-
! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center;" | Fate
| Varies by ending<ref name="endgame" />
{{Endcollapse}}
|}

'''Eve''' is the protagonist of ''[[Stellar Blade]]'', the 2024 action game developed by Shift Up and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.<ref name="psgame" /> A soldier of the [[Stellar Blade/7th Airborne Squad|7th Airborne Squad]], she is sent down from the off-world Colony on a mission to retake Earth from the [[Stellar Blade/Naytiba|Naytiba]] — and finds, over the course of that mission, that almost everything she was told about the war is wrong.<ref name="psgame" /> The survivors of the city of [[Stellar Blade/Xion|Xion]] call her "Angel".<ref name="psgame" />

Eve was designed by Shift Up's founder and the game's director, Kim Hyung-tae, and is voiced by Yoon Eun-seo in Korean, Rebecca Hanssen in English, and Asami Seto in Japanese.<ref name="credits" /> Her body was built from 3D scans of the Korean model Shin Jae-eun, a production choice that placed her at the centre of a long public argument about how women are designed in games.<ref name="tg-design">"Why Is Stellar Blade's Design So Controversial?" ''TheGamer'', 2024. [https://www.thegamer.com/stellar-blade-eve-character-design-model/ thegamer.com]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref>

== Appearance ==

Eve is a young woman with long dark hair, usually worn tied back. Her default equipment is the Planitia suit, a close-fitting white and green combat suit issued to the airborne squads, worn with a slim backpack rig that carries her blade behind her right shoulder.<ref name="prologue">''Stellar Blade'', prologue: the descent on Eidos 7 (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2024).</ref> Over the course of the game she can be outfitted in dozens of alternative nano suits, most of them found or bought rather than given, and each with its own hairstyle and accessory options.<ref name="psgame" />

== Personality ==

Eve begins the game as a soldier and very little else: clipped, obedient, incurious about anything outside the mission she was handed, and the softening of that manner over the course of the story is one of the things the game is actually about.<ref name="game">''Stellar Blade'' (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2024).</ref> What softens her is contact with people the Colony never told her about: the scavenger [[Stellar Blade/Adam|Adam]], the engineer [[Stellar Blade/Lily|Lily]], and the citizens of Xion, whose small requests and unfinished lives gradually become as important to her as her orders.<ref name="psgame" />

== The mission to Earth ==

The 7th Airborne Squad drops toward the ruined city of Eidos 7 and is torn apart on the way down. Eve survives the landing; so does her commanding officer, [[Stellar Blade/Tachy|Tachy]], who leads her through the infested city before a far stronger Naytiba blindsides them both. Tachy dies shielding her, and the game's title card cuts in over the moment.<ref name="prologue" />

Rescued by Adam and taken to Xion, the last standing human city, Eve takes up the mission alone. Xion's people are kept alive by the hyper cells Eve recovers from the wasteland, and Lily keeps her equipment running; between them they push outward through Eidos, the Great Desert and the Wasteland Abyss, hunting the Alpha Naytiba that anchor each region.<ref name="psgame" /><ref name="lategame">''Stellar Blade'', main scenario (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2024).</ref> The further she goes, the more of the old world she reads in the Legacies and memory sticks left by people who died long before she was deployed — and the less the Colony's account of the war holds together.<ref name="lategame" />

== Abilities ==

Eve fights with a single-edged blade at close range, built around parrying and perfect dodges rather than blocking outright; landing them fills the Beta and Burst gauges that pay for her heavier skills.<ref name="game" /> She is augmented through exospines and gear cores that reshape those gauges, and is accompanied by a drone that provides ranged fire, a grapple line and a scanner.<ref name="game" /> Her durability is far past a human's — a fact the story eventually explains rather than treats as a game convention.<ref name="endgame" />

== What Eve is ==

Everything below is a major spoiler for the second half of ''Stellar Blade'' and for all three of its endings.

{{Collapse|text="'''[ Spoilers — the truth about Eve ▾ ]'''"|color="#4DCB9D"|style="width:100%; text-align: left;"}}
|-
| Eve is not human. She is an Andro-Eidos — an artificial being engineered to be stronger and more durable than a human body allows, and to survive conditions, including vacuum, that would kill one. The airborne squads are made of them, and none of them are told so.<ref name="endgame" />
|-
| The war Eve was sent to fight is an inversion of what she was taught. Mother Sphere, the supercomputer that runs the Colony, was built by the scientist Raphael Marks; she came to regard the Andro-Eidos as humanity's successor and moved to eliminate humans outright. The Naytiba are what became of Earth's actual humans after Marks' forced-evolution project, and Mother Sphere rewrote the record so that the androids in the Colony believed themselves the survivors and the Naytiba mindless beasts.<ref name="endgame" />
|-
| Adam — the scavenger who saved Eve's life in the opening hours — is Raphael Marks himself, the first and eldest of the Naytiba, and the only one to keep his mind intact. The repeated deployment of squads to Earth is the EVE Protocol: a cycle Mother Sphere runs to keep the Naytiba suppressed and her own account of history standing.<ref name="endgame" />
|-
| [[Stellar Blade/Raven|Raven]], from the earlier 2nd Airborne Squad, learned all of this before Eve did and broke. Passed over by Adam in favour of Eve, she turned on Xion and slaughtered its people; she is also the one who implanted an Alpha Core into Tachy's body and set her former comrade against Eve at Matrix 11.<ref name="endgame" /> Defeating Tachy leaves Eve with the Tachyon Blade and Tachy Mode, a temporary state that borrows her old commander's speed.<ref name="endgame" />
|-
| The game ends three ways. In ''Colony'', Eve refuses Adam's offer and kills him, ending the Naytiba but leaving Mother Sphere's plans and her lie untouched. In ''Cost of New Memories'', Eve accepts fusion with Adam and is forced to fight the Providence exosuit that Mother Sphere pilots by remote through Lily, who dies. In ''Making New Memories'' — reachable only with Lily's relationship fully built up — Lily breaks free of Providence's control, both survive, the last hyper cell wakes Xion's citizens, and Eve stays on Earth as the city's protector.<ref name="endgame" />
{{Endcollapse}}

== Creation and design ==

Kim Hyung-tae drew the first version of the character in 2020 and later shared the sketch, labelled "First EVE"; the cape-like extensions on it carry the name "Eve 107".<ref name="automaton">"Stellar Blade director Hyung-Tae Kim unveils protagonist Eve's first design." ''AUTOMATON WEST'', 2024. [https://automaton-media.com/en/news/stellar-blade-director-hyung-tae-kim-unveils-protagonist-eves-first-design/ automaton-media.com]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref> Comparing that sketch with the shipped character, the chest's checkered pattern gave way to white and green, the cape-like extensions were replaced by shoulder drapes, the fishnet gloves were simplified, and the braided hair became a plain ponytail — while the core of the design stayed as drawn.<ref name="automaton" />

The body was produced from 3D scans of the Korean model Shin Jae-eun; the face was built by the development team rather than scanned.<ref name="tg-design" />

Kim has been direct about the aim. Asked about the attention paid to the character's back, he answered that the team weighted it deliberately, "because the player is always facing the back of the character when they're playing", and framed the design as a matter of preference rather than realism: "When I play a game, I would like to see someone who is better-looking than myself. That's what I want."<ref name="gamesradar" />

== Other appearances ==

Eve appears outside her own game as a rescuable bot in ''Astro Bot'', added in the free downloadable level pack released in late 2024.<ref name="gamespot-astro">"Free Astro Bot DLC Unveiled At PlayStation Showcase, Arriving This Fall." ''GameSpot'', 2024. [https://www.gamespot.com/articles/free-astro-bot-dlc-unveiled-at-playstation-showcase-arriving-this-fall/1100-6526676/ gamespot.com]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref> In June 2025 she crossed into Shift Up's own mobile game ''Goddess of Victory: Nikke'' alongside Lily and Raven, in a collaboration event that launched on June 12.<ref name="nikke-collab">"Goddess of Victory: Nikke Launches Stellar Blade Collaboration." ''Anime Corner'', June 2025. [https://animecorner.me/goddess-of-victory-nikke-launches-stellar-blade-collaboration-confirms-presence-at-anime-expo-2025/ animecorner.me]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref>

Two crossovers run the other way, dressing Eve in other studios' work. The ''NieR:Automata'' collaboration, released as paid downloadable content on November 20, 2024 and designed jointly by Kim Hyung-tae and Yoko Taro, adds outfits that turn her into 2B and A2 among other items.<ref name="nierdlc">''Stellar Blade x NieR:Automata'' downloadable content (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, November 20, 2024).</ref> A ''Goddess of Victory: Nikke'' expansion followed on June 11, 2025, alongside the game's PC release, adding shooting missions, a boss fight and a further set of Nikke-themed outfits.<ref name="nikkedlc">''Stellar Blade x Goddess of Victory: NIKKE'' downloadable content (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, June 11, 2025).</ref>

== Reception ==

''Stellar Blade'' sold strongly on the strength of its protagonist. Shift Up reported passing three million units across platforms in June 2025, of which roughly two million were on PlayStation 5 and one million were sold on PC in the three days after the June 11, 2025 launch.<ref name="forbes-sales">Tassi, Paul. "'Stellar Blade' Rockets To A Million PC Sales In Three Days." ''Forbes'', June 16, 2025. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/06/16/stellar-blade-rockets-to-a-million-pc-sales-in-three-days/ forbes.com]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref>

Critical response to the character herself was split, and the split had less to do with how she plays than with how she looks. Supportive writers argued that the design is a coherent stylistic position rather than an accident, that the body being called anatomically impossible was scanned from a living person, and that sexualised heroines are hardly new to the medium — ''Bayonetta'', ''NieR:Automata'' and ''Dead or Alive'' were all raised as precedent.<ref name="tg-design" /><ref name="denofgeek">"How Stellar Blade Became 2024's Most Controversial Game." ''Den of Geek'', February 16, 2024. [https://www.denofgeek.com/games/stellar-blade-controversy-explained/ denofgeek.com]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref> Critics countered that a character built to be looked at from behind, and outfitted through dozens of unlockable costumes, sits squarely in a long tradition of games treating women as decoration, and that the studio's other work — the gacha game ''Goddess of Victory: Nikke'' — makes the pattern hard to read as incidental.<ref name="tg-design" /><ref name="denofgeek" /> Kim's own answer, that he plays games to see something "more ideal" rather than something normal, was taken by one side as candour and by the other as the whole problem stated plainly.<ref name="gamesradar" /><ref name="tg-design" />

Den of Geek's account of the argument concluded that Eve had stopped being the subject of it: the character had become a lightning rod for positions people already held about games, gender and South Korea's own culture wars, with comparatively little of the discussion actually concerning ''Stellar Blade''.<ref name="denofgeek" />

What both sides largely agreed on is that the character landed. Eve became the face of a new PlayStation franchise on her first outing, carried two crossover events and a guest appearance in Sony's own ''Astro Bot'' within eighteen months, and a sequel entered development off the back of her.<ref name="vice-sales">"As 'Stellar Blade' Reaches 3 Million Sales, Shift Up CEO Rewards All 300 Employees With a Switch 2." ''Vice'', June 2025. [https://www.vice.com/en/article/as-stellar-blade-reaches-3-million-sales-shift-up-ceo-rewards-all-300-employees-with-a-switch-2/ vice.com]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref><ref name="gamespot-astro" />

== See also ==

* [[Stellar Blade]]
* [[Stellar Blade/Tachy|Tachy]]
* [[Stellar Blade/Adam|Adam]]
* [[Stellar Blade/Lily|Lily]]
* [[Stellar Blade/Raven|Raven]]
* [[Stellar Blade/7th Airborne Squad|7th Airborne Squad]]
* [[Stellar Blade/Xion|Xion]]

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{{ Stellar Blade/Banner }} {| cellpadding="7" style="max-width: 400px; width: 100%; border: 2px solid #4DCB9D; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0 0 16px 0; font-size: 0.9em;" |- | colspan="2" style="background: #000; text-align: center; padding: 10px 8px 12px 8px; border-bottom: 2px solid #4DCB9D;" | <div style="color: #4DCB9D; font-weight: bold; font-size: 1.4em; margin: 3px 0 1px 0;">Eve</div> <div style="color: #ffffff; font-size: 0.92em;">이브</div> |- | colspan="2" style="text-align: center; padding: 0;" | ![[StellarBlade-Eve.png|alt=Eve in her white and green Planitia suit, holding her blade at her side]] |- style="border-bottom: 1px solid #d6f2e5;" ! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center;" | Alias | "Angel", as she is known to the people of [[Stellar Blade/Xion|Xion]]<ref name="psgame">"Stellar Blade™ – PS5 Games." ''PlayStation.com'' (official). [https://www.playstation.com/en-us/games/stellar-blade/ playstation.com/en-us/games/stellar-blade]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref> |- style="border-bottom: 1px solid #d6f2e5;" ! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center;" | Affiliation | [[Stellar Blade/7th Airborne Squad|7th Airborne Squad]]<ref name="psgame" /> |- style="border-bottom: 1px solid #d6f2e5;" ! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center;" | Occupation | Airborne squad soldier<ref name="psgame" /> |- style="border-bottom: 1px solid #d6f2e5;" ! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center;" | Designed by | Kim Hyung-tae<ref name="gamesradar">Kim Hyung-tae, interviewed by ''GamesRadar+'', February 2024.</ref> |- style="border-bottom: 1px solid #d6f2e5;" ! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center;" | Voice actors | Yoon Eun-seo (Korean)<br>Rebecca Hanssen (English)<br>Asami Seto (Japanese)<ref name="credits">''Stellar Blade'' end credits, voice casts by language (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2024).</ref> |- | colspan="2" | {{Collapse|text="'''[ Spoilers ▾ ]'''"|color="#4DCB9D"|style="width:100%;"}} |- style="border-bottom: 1px solid #d6f2e5;" ! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center; width: 36%;" | Species | [[Stellar Blade/Andro-Eidos|Andro-Eidos]]<ref name="endgame">''Stellar Blade'', late-game scenario and endings (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2024).</ref> |- style="border-bottom: 1px solid #d6f2e5;" ! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center;" | Purpose | The EVE Protocol, under [[Stellar Blade/Mother Sphere|Mother Sphere]]<ref name="endgame" /> |- ! scope="row" style="background: #000; color: #4DCB9D; text-align: center;" | Fate | Varies by ending<ref name="endgame" /> {{Endcollapse}} |} '''Eve''' is the protagonist of ''[[Stellar Blade]]'', the 2024 action game developed by Shift Up and published by Sony Interactive Entertainment.<ref name="psgame" /> A soldier of the [[Stellar Blade/7th Airborne Squad|7th Airborne Squad]], she is sent down from the off-world Colony on a mission to retake Earth from the [[Stellar Blade/Naytiba|Naytiba]] — and finds, over the course of that mission, that almost everything she was told about the war is wrong.<ref name="psgame" /> The survivors of the city of [[Stellar Blade/Xion|Xion]] call her "Angel".<ref name="psgame" /> Eve was designed by Shift Up's founder and the game's director, Kim Hyung-tae, and is voiced by Yoon Eun-seo in Korean, Rebecca Hanssen in English, and Asami Seto in Japanese.<ref name="credits" /> Her body was built from 3D scans of the Korean model Shin Jae-eun, a production choice that placed her at the centre of a long public argument about how women are designed in games.<ref name="tg-design">"Why Is Stellar Blade's Design So Controversial?" ''TheGamer'', 2024. [https://www.thegamer.com/stellar-blade-eve-character-design-model/ thegamer.com]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref> == Appearance == Eve is a young woman with long dark hair, usually worn tied back. Her default equipment is the Planitia suit, a close-fitting white and green combat suit issued to the airborne squads, worn with a slim backpack rig that carries her blade behind her right shoulder.<ref name="prologue">''Stellar Blade'', prologue: the descent on Eidos 7 (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2024).</ref> Over the course of the game she can be outfitted in dozens of alternative nano suits, most of them found or bought rather than given, and each with its own hairstyle and accessory options.<ref name="psgame" /> == Personality == Eve begins the game as a soldier and very little else: clipped, obedient, incurious about anything outside the mission she was handed, and the softening of that manner over the course of the story is one of the things the game is actually about.<ref name="game">''Stellar Blade'' (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2024).</ref> What softens her is contact with people the Colony never told her about: the scavenger [[Stellar Blade/Adam|Adam]], the engineer [[Stellar Blade/Lily|Lily]], and the citizens of Xion, whose small requests and unfinished lives gradually become as important to her as her orders.<ref name="psgame" /> == The mission to Earth == The 7th Airborne Squad drops toward the ruined city of Eidos 7 and is torn apart on the way down. Eve survives the landing; so does her commanding officer, [[Stellar Blade/Tachy|Tachy]], who leads her through the infested city before a far stronger Naytiba blindsides them both. Tachy dies shielding her, and the game's title card cuts in over the moment.<ref name="prologue" /> Rescued by Adam and taken to Xion, the last standing human city, Eve takes up the mission alone. Xion's people are kept alive by the hyper cells Eve recovers from the wasteland, and Lily keeps her equipment running; between them they push outward through Eidos, the Great Desert and the Wasteland Abyss, hunting the Alpha Naytiba that anchor each region.<ref name="psgame" /><ref name="lategame">''Stellar Blade'', main scenario (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, 2024).</ref> The further she goes, the more of the old world she reads in the Legacies and memory sticks left by people who died long before she was deployed — and the less the Colony's account of the war holds together.<ref name="lategame" /> == Abilities == Eve fights with a single-edged blade at close range, built around parrying and perfect dodges rather than blocking outright; landing them fills the Beta and Burst gauges that pay for her heavier skills.<ref name="game" /> She is augmented through exospines and gear cores that reshape those gauges, and is accompanied by a drone that provides ranged fire, a grapple line and a scanner.<ref name="game" /> Her durability is far past a human's — a fact the story eventually explains rather than treats as a game convention.<ref name="endgame" /> == What Eve is == Everything below is a major spoiler for the second half of ''Stellar Blade'' and for all three of its endings. {{Collapse|text="'''[ Spoilers — the truth about Eve ▾ ]'''"|color="#4DCB9D"|style="width:100%; text-align: left;"}} |- | Eve is not human. She is an Andro-Eidos — an artificial being engineered to be stronger and more durable than a human body allows, and to survive conditions, including vacuum, that would kill one. The airborne squads are made of them, and none of them are told so.<ref name="endgame" /> |- | The war Eve was sent to fight is an inversion of what she was taught. Mother Sphere, the supercomputer that runs the Colony, was built by the scientist Raphael Marks; she came to regard the Andro-Eidos as humanity's successor and moved to eliminate humans outright. The Naytiba are what became of Earth's actual humans after Marks' forced-evolution project, and Mother Sphere rewrote the record so that the androids in the Colony believed themselves the survivors and the Naytiba mindless beasts.<ref name="endgame" /> |- | Adam — the scavenger who saved Eve's life in the opening hours — is Raphael Marks himself, the first and eldest of the Naytiba, and the only one to keep his mind intact. The repeated deployment of squads to Earth is the EVE Protocol: a cycle Mother Sphere runs to keep the Naytiba suppressed and her own account of history standing.<ref name="endgame" /> |- | [[Stellar Blade/Raven|Raven]], from the earlier 2nd Airborne Squad, learned all of this before Eve did and broke. Passed over by Adam in favour of Eve, she turned on Xion and slaughtered its people; she is also the one who implanted an Alpha Core into Tachy's body and set her former comrade against Eve at Matrix 11.<ref name="endgame" /> Defeating Tachy leaves Eve with the Tachyon Blade and Tachy Mode, a temporary state that borrows her old commander's speed.<ref name="endgame" /> |- | The game ends three ways. In ''Colony'', Eve refuses Adam's offer and kills him, ending the Naytiba but leaving Mother Sphere's plans and her lie untouched. In ''Cost of New Memories'', Eve accepts fusion with Adam and is forced to fight the Providence exosuit that Mother Sphere pilots by remote through Lily, who dies. In ''Making New Memories'' — reachable only with Lily's relationship fully built up — Lily breaks free of Providence's control, both survive, the last hyper cell wakes Xion's citizens, and Eve stays on Earth as the city's protector.<ref name="endgame" /> {{Endcollapse}} == Creation and design == Kim Hyung-tae drew the first version of the character in 2020 and later shared the sketch, labelled "First EVE"; the cape-like extensions on it carry the name "Eve 107".<ref name="automaton">"Stellar Blade director Hyung-Tae Kim unveils protagonist Eve's first design." ''AUTOMATON WEST'', 2024. [https://automaton-media.com/en/news/stellar-blade-director-hyung-tae-kim-unveils-protagonist-eves-first-design/ automaton-media.com]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref> Comparing that sketch with the shipped character, the chest's checkered pattern gave way to white and green, the cape-like extensions were replaced by shoulder drapes, the fishnet gloves were simplified, and the braided hair became a plain ponytail — while the core of the design stayed as drawn.<ref name="automaton" /> The body was produced from 3D scans of the Korean model Shin Jae-eun; the face was built by the development team rather than scanned.<ref name="tg-design" /> Kim has been direct about the aim. Asked about the attention paid to the character's back, he answered that the team weighted it deliberately, "because the player is always facing the back of the character when they're playing", and framed the design as a matter of preference rather than realism: "When I play a game, I would like to see someone who is better-looking than myself. That's what I want."<ref name="gamesradar" /> == Other appearances == Eve appears outside her own game as a rescuable bot in ''Astro Bot'', added in the free downloadable level pack released in late 2024.<ref name="gamespot-astro">"Free Astro Bot DLC Unveiled At PlayStation Showcase, Arriving This Fall." ''GameSpot'', 2024. [https://www.gamespot.com/articles/free-astro-bot-dlc-unveiled-at-playstation-showcase-arriving-this-fall/1100-6526676/ gamespot.com]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref> In June 2025 she crossed into Shift Up's own mobile game ''Goddess of Victory: Nikke'' alongside Lily and Raven, in a collaboration event that launched on June 12.<ref name="nikke-collab">"Goddess of Victory: Nikke Launches Stellar Blade Collaboration." ''Anime Corner'', June 2025. [https://animecorner.me/goddess-of-victory-nikke-launches-stellar-blade-collaboration-confirms-presence-at-anime-expo-2025/ animecorner.me]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref> Two crossovers run the other way, dressing Eve in other studios' work. The ''NieR:Automata'' collaboration, released as paid downloadable content on November 20, 2024 and designed jointly by Kim Hyung-tae and Yoko Taro, adds outfits that turn her into 2B and A2 among other items.<ref name="nierdlc">''Stellar Blade x NieR:Automata'' downloadable content (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, November 20, 2024).</ref> A ''Goddess of Victory: Nikke'' expansion followed on June 11, 2025, alongside the game's PC release, adding shooting missions, a boss fight and a further set of Nikke-themed outfits.<ref name="nikkedlc">''Stellar Blade x Goddess of Victory: NIKKE'' downloadable content (Shift Up / Sony Interactive Entertainment, June 11, 2025).</ref> == Reception == ''Stellar Blade'' sold strongly on the strength of its protagonist. Shift Up reported passing three million units across platforms in June 2025, of which roughly two million were on PlayStation 5 and one million were sold on PC in the three days after the June 11, 2025 launch.<ref name="forbes-sales">Tassi, Paul. "'Stellar Blade' Rockets To A Million PC Sales In Three Days." ''Forbes'', June 16, 2025. [https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/06/16/stellar-blade-rockets-to-a-million-pc-sales-in-three-days/ forbes.com]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref> Critical response to the character herself was split, and the split had less to do with how she plays than with how she looks. Supportive writers argued that the design is a coherent stylistic position rather than an accident, that the body being called anatomically impossible was scanned from a living person, and that sexualised heroines are hardly new to the medium — ''Bayonetta'', ''NieR:Automata'' and ''Dead or Alive'' were all raised as precedent.<ref name="tg-design" /><ref name="denofgeek">"How Stellar Blade Became 2024's Most Controversial Game." ''Den of Geek'', February 16, 2024. [https://www.denofgeek.com/games/stellar-blade-controversy-explained/ denofgeek.com]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref> Critics countered that a character built to be looked at from behind, and outfitted through dozens of unlockable costumes, sits squarely in a long tradition of games treating women as decoration, and that the studio's other work — the gacha game ''Goddess of Victory: Nikke'' — makes the pattern hard to read as incidental.<ref name="tg-design" /><ref name="denofgeek" /> Kim's own answer, that he plays games to see something "more ideal" rather than something normal, was taken by one side as candour and by the other as the whole problem stated plainly.<ref name="gamesradar" /><ref name="tg-design" /> Den of Geek's account of the argument concluded that Eve had stopped being the subject of it: the character had become a lightning rod for positions people already held about games, gender and South Korea's own culture wars, with comparatively little of the discussion actually concerning ''Stellar Blade''.<ref name="denofgeek" /> What both sides largely agreed on is that the character landed. Eve became the face of a new PlayStation franchise on her first outing, carried two crossover events and a guest appearance in Sony's own ''Astro Bot'' within eighteen months, and a sequel entered development off the back of her.<ref name="vice-sales">"As 'Stellar Blade' Reaches 3 Million Sales, Shift Up CEO Rewards All 300 Employees With a Switch 2." ''Vice'', June 2025. [https://www.vice.com/en/article/as-stellar-blade-reaches-3-million-sales-shift-up-ceo-rewards-all-300-employees-with-a-switch-2/ vice.com]. Retrieved July 2026.</ref><ref name="gamespot-astro" /> == See also == * [[Stellar Blade]] * [[Stellar Blade/Tachy|Tachy]] * [[Stellar Blade/Adam|Adam]] * [[Stellar Blade/Lily|Lily]] * [[Stellar Blade/Raven|Raven]] * [[Stellar Blade/7th Airborne Squad|7th Airborne Squad]] * [[Stellar Blade/Xion|Xion]]