I have mixed feelings on the update. In 0.8 I felt like the shooting cliffhanger got resolved way too quickly and easily - in this update, the transporting to Hyrilar (or however it's spelled) took too long to resolve. All of the LI emotion about Orion being missing should've been in the last update when he had literally been shot.
I really missed the action scenes. Even just making the "combat" challenge be swordfighting instead of archery would have helped. Orion didn't really get to do anything "cool" in 0.9.
The dialogue writing also felt a bit more... stiff? There were a few funny moments, but nowhere near as much as prior updates. The elf kingdom stuff was all very "by the books", it didn't feel quite right.
I think the update suffered a ton from having almost zero story advancement. Orion got back from elf land (which introduced a bunch of new characters and stories, but none of them impact the larger story), went to the Airbnb, planted the USB, then went on a date with Luna. Nothing really happened, and zero time was spent in Eternum servers.
You know what it reminds me of, is the most recent episode of Leaving DNA - an AVN praised for its story releasing an episode almost exclusively focusing on relationship arcs. The problem for me is that Eternum doesn't have the same level of interpersonal complexity as something like LDNA. That's in large part because it's a harem game - Dalia and Penny's whole feud ended up just being "okay let's share", because that's how it needs to work.
I can appreciate what Cari was trying to do by making a more character-focused episode - I just don't think it was executed super well. Eternum is at its best when it's super creative, fast paced, and lighthearted. The vibe of this update just felt... *off* to me
This was my 3rd update since I started playing Eternum, and the first I was disappointed with.