Dressing Up In Stellar Blade Is So Much Fun

Stellar Blade is a solid PS5 exclusive from first-time console developer Shift Up. It isn’t perfect, but the excellent action makes up for its many shortcomings. Let’s be honest, though. The real draw of the South Korean team’s character action game is the fashion. Stellar Blade’s Eve is gaming’s latest fashion icon, joining the likes of Bayonetta’s eponymous heroine and Nier: Automata protagonist 2B, with a bevy of outfits that puts any fashionista’s wardrobe to shame. And frankly, I seriously love dressing Eve up.

Out on April 26 for PlayStation 5, Stellar Blade features some 30 outfits for you to find and unlock. They’re quite varied in aesthetic, too. You can dress Eve as a teddy bear, give her a shearling-lined aviator coat, outfit her in some Sailor Moon-esque cosplay, style her in a variation of Uma Thurman’s iconic yellow jumpsuit from Kill Bill, and more. It’s quite staggering, actually, the amount of outfits you can store in Eve’s closet. But the best part is they’re all pretty easy to get. That’s what makes dressing up so fun.

How to unlock Stellar Blade’s outfits

Many of the outfits in the game are found in the world. What you’re looking for are small, black-and-grey square chests with a red dot on the front of them. Opening these up will give you clothing schematics for either Eve or one of her three companions: the accompanying drone, the himbo scavenger Adam, or the plucky engineer Lily. Once you snatch them from inside these chests, you’re just going to head to a repair console at certain camps in the many open zones or at the main camp in the hub world of Xion and construct the schematic using some resources to add them to your inventory. At this point, it’s just a matter of customizing Eve’s appearance in the Equipment menu.

Scouring the world looking for tiny chests to loot isn’t the only way to acquire outfits, though. There are myriad NPCs in Xion, a few of which run shops that sell goods like healing items and stat-boosting gear. Buying anything from these shops increases your friendship with that NPC, with Rank 3 being the max bond you can have. By increasing your friendship with NPCs, you’ll unlock new customization items to purchase for Eve, some of which are new outfits while others are accessories such as glasses and earrings. Again, you’ll need to construct the outfits first, but once you do, they’re in your Equipment inventory for good. And now comes the fun part: Playing dress-up with Eve.

Bitch, I’m conceited (in Stellar Blade)

Outside of the Skin Suit, which leaves Eve practically naked and removes her shield to increase the game’s difficulty, none of the outfits have an impact on gameplay. So, you can change Eve’s outfits whenever you want. In the Equipment menu, you can spin her around to get a good look at all the angles and zoom in on the clothing to check out the details. It’s all impressively done. The proportions of the outfits are superb. The color theory is on point. And every outfit is completely different in terms of vibe. Do you dress Eve up in a biker outfit, even though she doesn’t have a bike? Do you ready her for a dinner event in a red leather-looking mini slip dress? Maybe you want her to dress for the weather, so you style Eve in a knitted dress with thigh-high boots. Or maybe, if you’re a fan of Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 tragicomedy Lolita, you might dress her up in a full black dress that feels right at home in that French novel. There are a lot of options.

This is where a lot of my time in Stellar Blade was spent: looking around for and constructing outfits, spinning Eve around in the Equipment menu, choosing the best glasses and earrings to match the outfit I’m whooping Naytiba ass in. It’s a lot of fun, especially when you find a combination that’ll make for a solid Instagram fit check. Hell, there are even hairstyles you can buy and equip from a salon in Xion, so you can really elevate Eve’s drip to the highest level. And I just love that in every single outfit, Eve is walking around in heels like it’s nothing. If that’s not slaying the digital runway, then for real, what is?

Eve is a style icon, no ifs, ands, or buts about that. Her outfits are impeccable, an inspiration to anyone either looking to get into fashion or wanting to up their own style. I imagine that, like 2B and Bayonetta before her, Eve will inspire a whole new generation of cosplayers, and I can’t wait to see these outfits at conventions. For now, I’ll just keep playing dress-up in Stellar Blade.