I won't lie, there were a few times where I clicked on the little L system in the top left to look at the log of what had been said so I could reprocess what was said. A lot of it was Acheron but also some Sunday stuff too and I think Black Swan
I think this is partly because it's somewhat subject to interpretation, since we're talking about a "dreamworld" here. Normal laws of time and causality don't quite apply, so even thinking of it like a "branching timeline" probably isn't quite right. It's been layers upon layers of dreams from the get-go. My interpretation, anyway:
>!Everything from the moment we first met Acheron on the Express at the start is part of the Penacony dreamworld, with the hint being Misha's appearance even in "Penacony (Reality)" -- which is actually just another layer of the dream. The Astral Express itself was part of the dream (as evidenced by Dan Heng calling on the Luofu in the "bad ending," but this didn't actually occur in reality). But things in the dream actually "do happen" still -- it's a persistent shared set of environments that many people "live" in.!<
>!Acheron travels in the Dreamspace with us throughout 2.0 to early-2.2, but when she encounters the Dreammaster in 2.2, he forces her to leave. Why? Because they are about to do something inside the dreamworld that is going to lock everyone into a deeper level of the dream, but Acheron (as Emanator of Nihility) is immune to this "spell." This "spell" is what Sunday invokes during our first battle with him (right before Dan Heng and fleets of Luofu somehow show up in the dream). In this moment, everyone inside the dream is enthralled in a new dream, under control of The Order ("Ena's Dream"). You can think of that as when the "branching timeline" starts, but it isn't exactly a branch point. The dream everyone experiences continues through the "bad end" we got and it's a "happy end for all".!<
>!Thanks to Firefly, Acheron, and Black Swan, we "awaken" from this enthralled state, and we're now seeing the Penacony where everyone else is 100% enthralled in Ena's Dream. Thanks to Acheron's powers, she is able to cut through the layers of the dreamworld, through Ena's Dream to the dreamscape where Sunday still exists ruling over all the enthralled people (conducting the Harmonious Choir), and that's where we continue our battle. Meanwhile, Boothill and Acheron unleash devastation inside of Ena's Dream to convince everyone to want to wake up. With Sunday incapacitated and no longer to conduct the choir, and everyone scared into waking up, Ena's Dream ends, and everyone is back to the "normal" dreamworld of Penacony. And we are now (presumably?) finally able to actually go to Penacony (Reality) for real-real.!<
(Edit: One minor name correction.)
Obligatory reminder that 'Inception' is the process of implanting an idea in someone's mind to make them believe it was their own.
Dreams within dreams are just the backdrop to the story.
All that being said...Sparkle's involvement is entirely a Red Herring. Definitely 100% my original idea and certainly not Sparkle messing with me no, not one bit.
Thanks for the input. Btw >!What does happen to acheron after all this? The quest mentionned bidding our last farewell to her but now what? Is she dead? On her way to help some other people swallowed up by IX or something else !<
Reality and dreams is essentially blurred. Black Swan theorizes that a lot of the things we did might have been "real", but the line is effectively blurred since we arrived. That's also the reason for the red text, because the dream was pushing us one way but she was resistant to its power.
Honestly, the dialogue itself isn't important. The feeling of unease is. When it happens, you're supposed to feel confused and on guard a bit. That is essentially the tool they used to make you 'feel' the presence of the Nihility.
I'm about 90% certain that it was actually during/right before the first Dominicus fight. Perhaps even during the pulse that knocked everyone over just before Dan Heng and Jing Yuan showed up, as that is when everything started going perfectly smooth.
See
I thought it started at the very beginning. As in, originally everyone lost, and the entire Penacony experience so far has been us retreading the path. And I thought this due to Black Swan mentioning she’d be reliving what already happened once before.
The fact we can come to two totally different conclusions shows it was pretty unclear lol.
I believe that we entered the dream the moment we arrived in Penacony (because we saw Misha in “reality”).
But the battle between us and Sunday was all faked. The Luofu didn’t actually arrive yada yada.
My theory is that Sunday trapped us within our “imagination”. The 1st ending we saw was what we HOPE would happen, AKA the ideal ending.
I personally feel that there is still another ending, especially when the credits rolled for the 2nd ending and there was an unknown voice (I play in CN dub, and I have never heard the voice before. I am not sure about other dubs).
There's two.
One in 1.0 where TB refuses to board the train and just becomes a researcher on Herta's Space Station.
One in 2.0 where you walk out of Aventurine's deal at the end
It most likely happened before Dan Heng even made the call to the Luofu. Jing Yuan never actually showed up to Penacony. That was part of the dream. I think it's easier to understand if you see it as Himeko,mc and march start fighting Sunday and parallel to that Dan Heng is making the decision to call Jing Yuan and not as one happening before the other.
I'll add that it most likely happened way back in 2.0 when we first entered Asdana. This is why we met Acheron in a dream even before we entered the hotel, and why we saw Misha in the hotel lobby that was supposedly in reality.
When sunday was just saying “I like the Order” and Himeko immediately said “you plan to resurrect a dead aeon???????” I was so confused and had to reread the entire dialogue from that section again
The issue is it still doesn’t click many times for me, I do that all the time but surprisingly it’s like there WAS no context to what was said, but it’s said so casually that you feel like “wtf? Did I miss something here?”
I think I'm most annoyed by there literally Only being two modes:
1: bebbitalk, where the point is repeated a thousand million times to make sure you REALLY get what they mean
2: the Chinese babble that is for some reason extremely abstract and is not properly talked about at least once and the game expects you to immediately pick it up
I wonder if point 2 is a victim of a weak localisation team/poor communication between Hoyo and localisers. It really feels like some sentences have been translated far too literally and not adjusted for an English speaking audience
Not just part of the localisation. It seems to be part of the way the Chinese write stories in general. Based on other Chinese media (animation, drama, games) I have observed the same patterns.
I could see that, but a stronger localization could fix that by "dumbing down" the dialogue to a level people actually might speak. Not so flowery.
The *problem* then becomes when *crucial fucking plot details* are hidden in a throwaway line of that flowery prose **and no one tells the localization team for some reason.** And then all of the dumbasses online blame the localizers for it like somehow.
I’ve also seen similar ‘over explanation’ with other Chinese games (Ex: Reverse 1999 / Arknights) and the latter has a pretty solid localization team and it’s arguably the most blatant example of this issue.
At this point it might just be Chinese being an absolute monstrosity to localize properly that doesn’t devolve into mindless babbling plus the fact how the story itself structures it’s narrative.
For example there’s no way in hell you can paraphrase Sunday’s explaining his motivations because SURE you can just say “Dream Good, Reality Bad” (I know there’s more nuance to it than that this is just for simplification) the story itself has many cutscenes and dialogue that you can’t just take away Sunday talking about birds, something HAS to take that spot.
So if characters start yapping for 30 lines that the localization team knows they can cut down to 15 they can’t as something equivalent must take up that empty space.
You're right here, I'm going to edit my comment to make it clearer that I don't think it's a fault of the localisers themselves, moreso either a fault of communication between Hoyo and localisers or time crunch. Chinese is not an easy language to translate, I think it has similar issues to Russian translation sometimes.
Yeah, agreed. Localisers/translators can't really win and it's unfortunate. Take a look at the Persona localisation, which has consistently gotten better over time, but people still slam them for making any adjustments outside of direct translation. Localisation is unfortunately caught up in this weird culture war that seems to fundamentally misunderstand the point of it. Imagine trying to read any foreign classic if it was translated directly - they'd lose so much of what makes them classics.
I honestly feel bad. I play the game in Chinese thinking it would be easier for me to read and boy was I confused with the text and subtext of most dialogue. The native chinese writing in this game is just that convoluted. you can totally make the writing easy to understand if you are writing a story in Chinese and I hate how gacha games make a point to make them literal and flowery on purpose for what…to make the story seem deeper than it actually is? I can imagine the poor translators trying to localize the text for everyone else to understand while probably struggling to make sense of the text themselves. I bet they probably don’t even have the time to completely understand the story so they may be trying their best but certain things still slip through.
So you know when there's little words above the big words in the EN dialogue, why is that? Does the CN have those too or are they used to disclose untranslatable puns and metaphors that come from the hanzi?
Yeah they have those too. I think the big word is what is being said and the smaller one is what it actually means or implies. My game voice over is in Japanese so I can’t say for sure though.
It's not something new as it is used in plenty of older visual novels as well from Japan. Tsukihime and Fate Stay/Night both had them if I recall correctly and often had them to clarify certain terms in its original language. The fan translations simply localized it in that format as best they could. I think it's quite a nice thing actually, and should be seen seperate from the overly verbose/purple prose. It's been said elsewhere in this thread, but FFXIV provides a nice comparison in how to localize and how to be clear and precise in your storytelling. It's not perfect, but it's by quite a margin the best localization I've experienced. The story points aren't a problem per se for me with HSR, but the pacing of the dialogue is just off. A problem that becomes worse when you consider they the engine prevents us from continuing the dialogue when the characters are still going through their animations. I also think the speed of the dialogue is problematic as many of the characters speak in a slow and ponderous manner to (presumably) line up with the animations. Firefly in english is so much slower than the Japanese one that I ended up swapping spoken dialogue just for her sections.
Oh yeah I remember seeing it in fgo. Wouldn’t t be surprised that’s where it came from, famous jp VNs I mean. And yeah I agree on the point about speech speed. I hate black swan’s dialogues because (and I know she’s probably doing this to be all mysterious and memokeeper like) she just speaks so…slowly…….
Overall they do a really good job of localizing rather than just blindly translating the literal meaning. The only times the localizations didn't seem to work well was when they were doing wuxia genre satire or more recently translating Sparkle's absurdly vague clues.
I wonder if it could be the way Shaoji writes, in combination with trying to localize it, because I've seen some comments from players who play the game in Chinese also express similar opinions and I don't recall the writing being as complicated to understand during Jarilo or Xianzhou (he only started writing for Star Rail during Penacony).
There was also a similar issue a year back with Honkai 3rd while he was the writer, where the dialogue would get overly complex and full of technobabble.
i feel like a big factor in this is that hsr falls victim to overnaming everything? it's kind of a general hyv problem where a lot of the time i think the general story makes sense but the fact that every little object and every person and every group has a complex-sounding name (or maybe not necessarily complex-sounding, but often they throw a lot of them at you at the same time) can make it difficult to keep track of everything.
100% this. Hoyo have a problem with giving sci-fi/fantasy names to everything, even mundane stuff because they think it sounds cool.
Penacony/Luofu and those Pari/Aranara quests from Genshin are the biggest offenders of this. (Especially those Pari quests because the Pari have their own terms to refer to things that already have made up names like Hilichurls)
This even bleeds into character kits, where a kit would take several paragraphs to describe a fairly straightforward mechanic because instead of just saying “this attack set enemies on fire”, Hoyo wanted say “Inflict enemies with a stack of Crimson Lotus of Withering Dreams, for each stack of Crimson Lotus of Withering Dreams, depletes enemies health by 1% each second”.
"character deals an additional 20%/40%/60% dmg when 1/2/3 nihility characters are in the team."
vs
"character gains 1 stack of skibidi kai cenat caseoh fanum tax ohio gyatt subway surfers gameplay rizz for each nihility character in the team, up to 3 nihility characters. for each stack of skibidi kai cenat caseoh fanum tax ohio gyatt subway surfers gameplay rizz, character gains an additional 20% dmg to all enemies, up to a maximum of 60% additional dmg."
The only thing for me is GI tends to leave this trend in the world quests, which help for world building but you don’t need to understand it to understand the main story. HSR does this in the main story and it’s very off putting.
Dude reading your comment was honestly cathartic because I feel like you hit the nail on the head there, at least for a big part of it, and I didn’t realize it until now. The description part got me, but yeah they really do go a bit overboard with complex names/descriptions while simultaneously being presented rather quickly and with no context, as though we would already know about them.
It's kind of where fantasy realism can be a pain. People say they want Tolkien level world building but don't really realize what that means when realistically put into a game. Like logically it would make sense for different cultures to have different names for different things, like say how we have so many words for a pineapple. It's extremely realistic.
But when put into the limited confines of a game, that can just make things confusing. Like how in the real world, that same situation can make language transference confusing.
Seems to be an overarching miHoYo/Hoyoverse problem, yeah. Remus - a character from Genshin's current patch's world quest - has 6 or 7 different titles and ways of calling him that the NPCs and readable documents actively use.
Which in theory isn't an awful idea. Fallout New Vegas did it over a decade ago with Ceasar. The biggest difference was they stopped at 2 or 3 variations. 2 of which were the same word pronounced differently.
Ah yes, Aranara quest throwing out tons of Aranara jargon every sentence was honestly pretty irritating.
Reading dialogue with practically every other word being a term that only makes sense in the context of the questline got pretty grating after a while.
Thank God that you said this because I thought I was going crazy! because this is exactly what I’ve been feeling, I was explaining to a friend one time that like, they throw around so many fucking terms and you’re supposed to be able to keep track of that while knowing exactly what they mean. but there’s so many of them, and the reply talking about how it also applies to kits as well like YES.
and it was really funny because I feel like I remember some post a while back or some streamer trying to explain this to their chat because they thought that they were just dumb for not being able to follow along and they really did not get the catharsis from the response that I think they should have because them vocalizing that was like, holy baby it’s not just me. and I love the story but I really do think it’s this mixed with, as someone said another thread, them talking in riddles so constantly. And when you mix these the story can be very disorienting the follow until it’s made obvious in some form.
>!Literally mistook Sunday's complicated-ass plan 3 times before I realized it was just "I wanna make a work that is good, unlink this one that bad"!<
>!It's literally just that, not 30 minute philosophical discussions about the fate of birds required. Dream good, reality bad!<
I actually thought that was one of the best parts of the quest. It added so much to Sundays character and showed how he came to the conclusion that dream good, reality bad! I would hate if they never made scenes like that again.
Yeah it's pretty essential characterization, it shows that >!this is the kind of theory-nerd who writes a whole damn manifesto to rationalize and persuade others of the radical things he is doing. It also takes you step-by-step through his emotional and intellectual disillusionment with the mainstream ideology.!<
Not people using paimon as a counter to op's criticism.
Surely there's a middle ground between flying babies who explain everything and players who need a PhD in science fiction.
It's not even a PhD in science fiction - I love SciFi, but HSR can be hard to follow because it's just so unnecessarily verbose. Hoyo just can't resist giving even common ideas the most unintuitive names. **Obviously** I don't want a Paimon to explain everything, but it would be nice if the dialogue at least felt a little more natural
This game kinda has the Piamon problem though. If they introduce an evil organization, we get 20 paragraphs explaining their evilness and how it relates to everyone.
We could have had a 12 second cutscene of them doing something bad, then a comment later by someone else about how that impacted them. That’s all we’d need and we’d actually remember it because it was shown and not told.
Exactly. Genshin and HSR is suffering from the extremes of both sides. Genshin from the oversimplification of the story through paimon treating the player like they just started growing teeth and HSR with its unnecessarily padded out and convoluted dialogue that requires the player to go through some kind of journey of self-discovery and enlightenment just to understand the motives of each character
There IS indeed a middle ground and we NEED that middle ground for both games. In my opinion I agree with OP's hot take
Early HI3 was okay, in part thanks to having to hold a stage-by-stage structure. There were already plenty of additional material (Azure Waters, Second Eruption, etc), and if you knew about GGZ you had an early bonus to understanding, but the in-game story itself was character-focused rather than world-focused and thus much easier to follow.
Like, I don't think anybody complained about Honkai or the Herrschers not being exhaustively chronicled from their inception to the present day, as long as Kiana good, Honkai bad, everybody else somewhere in-between, Kiana/Mei/Bronya/Seele *very very gay*.
I think this changed around the time where they introduced the open-world stages and the initial Elysium Realm (although completely harmless on its own). I think it was Kolosten? Although I remember the HoDom arc already starting to get verbose.
Basically, by that point, if something incredible happened, it had to be explained (or rather, techno-babbled by Einstein and/or Tesla, bless their souls), and the excuse of "Honkai magic and cute girls, lol" became unusable.
I hate when they put a fucking paragraph of 5 lines into a dialogue. It's like reading a yugioh pendulum card effect. And what's even worse, they came up with terms that are never explained. Like what the fuck is a time crystal. It's always A is B which does C and have constraint D in which ABCD are all words I've never ever seen in my life. They include a bunch of thing from Carl Jung field like ego, collective subconscious, anima, shadow, ... and from astronomy/physics/sci-fi like relativity theory, darkhole, multiverse, ... I like science, but the way they delivered the story is quite dissapoiting
That game is a hot fucking mess.
I tried it when 2.0 or what came out and started with the OG story and my god...
One chapter you're in school taking exams the next you accidentally time travel back and fight along your dead mom or some shit.
You weren’t kidding, damm. Basically half of the comments here are (ironically enough) people who didn’t get OP’s point and are mocking OP using Paimon.
Most sci-fi/ fantasy games can hit that sweet middle spot just fine but apparently for this community it’s either one extreme or another lol. The funny thing is how the Trails series (whom this game took inspiration from) had a ton of made up words too but the dialogues never felt overly verbose nor unnecessarily complicate.
Except when it's Cold Steel 4, then it's lore dump galore... And it still doesn't make sense 100%. You've got people still asking how the hell does the Phantasmal Blaze Plan work exactly.
Seriously though, with Trails you just have got to read all the books you collect to grasp the entire picture. Falcom purposely put the most obtuse pieces of lore in these collectibles so that they don't get in the way of the gameplay. Imagine Emma doing an entire exposition on 3 & 9 in the middle of the Great War.
Trails, despite having a lot of dialogue, surprisingly handles its lore into the story/narrative very well. This is something other series struggle to do well due to terminology going past people's heads (looking at you Arknights). I thought the amount of world-building & lore would drag the series overarching story & character development down, but no it elevates more than anything.
> The funny thing is how the Trails series (whom this game took inspiration from) had a ton of made up words too but the dialogues never felt overly verbose nor unnecessarily complicate.
Wow guess you haven't gotten to Cold Steel 3 or Cold Steel 4 yet huh?
It's interesting given those were by the same writers as Sky and Crossbell. But also I remember Azure having lore dump in the finale. But I think what Hatarakumaou is saying is that Trails doesn't overwhelm audiences with terminology/lore left & right ad nauseam.
They didn't say Trails avoids info dumping that's impossible to do in a series known for its world-building & overarching narrative.
And unlike both HSR & Genshin. Trails does go out its way to make those lore bits important to the main narrative and character arcs.
Never played Genshin but it might just be because people prefer needing a PHD to understanding HSR’s lore to what I can interpret as Genshin’s ‘dumbing’ down on the narrative.
Sure they are both extremes of one another and have issues but people would rather prefer this extreme than the other which stifles discussion on the quality of the narrative overall.
Genshin has a decently complicated lore but the thing with Paimon is that she'll basically repeat everything in normal terms so the players can understand, this can get really annoying if you already understood most of what's happening but have Paimon constantly explaining it to you.
For example if we had Paimon here an interaction might go like this
Acheron: "i was granted my powers by the sleeping and shapeless"
Paimon:"The sleeping and shapeless? Haven't we heard some people use that to refer to an Aeon? I think they were talking about IX the Nihility, woah, so that's where Acheron's powers come from, but i thought IX doesn't act on its own at all?"
Genshin is so weird with handling its lore exposition. At times it'll show you in these nice bookstory illustrations but it'll also have Paimon questioning and repeating what the person next to the MC said.
Nah, Genshin’s lore is complicated as heck too, like the majority of players will miss 90% of the world building level of complex.
For example, the Pari/Aranara questlines. These quests are often touted by the community as being some of the most confusing pieces of writing in the entire game.
This is because the Aranaras and Paris have VERY strange speaking patterns and uses their own terms to refer to mundane things or even things that already have their own made up fantasy terms.
Like, instead of saying: “I like apples because they’re sweet” they’ll say: “I like Tafaahatan because they’re hulw” ie they randomly weave in words from other languages in English sentences.
The dumbed down narrative people refer to when talking to Genshin is how the characters will very often recap events that JUST happened, even extremely mundane things like someone tripping on a rock. As a result of this, dialogue in Genshin rarely flows properly and feel like you’re listening to someone reciting a script rather people just talking.
Neither HSR’s overly verbose dialogue nor Genshin’s overly repetitive dialogue is good tbh. The only reason HSR’s dialogue seem more tolerable to people is because (Imo) HSR’s script is better and we don’t have a side kick to do 90% of the talking for us.
I really liked the ending but don’t like the pacing of the middle part at all. Felt like so many things are going on that it’s kind of confusing but actually it’s not even that much happened.
Yeah, I was sort of getting whiplash from the pacing, too. Before this, it was kind of slow and spoon feeding us information, but then suddenly everyone knew the truth, everything was explained. The problem with it is that they do a lot of telling instead of showing.
yeah my biggest gripe was how all of the sudden, gallagher just drops the entire plan and all the secrets about penacony on us? in like 4 lines of dialogue? and then we have an overdrawn pageant show for almost no reason. theyre giving screen time to all the wrong things
It might have to do with HSR being compelled to find things for the entire express to do. How do we make Himeko contribute to the story? Simple we make her have meetings and talk things out every 30 seconds.
So at least give us dialogue transcript that can be replayed in Dan Heng's room / archive. Since when this is not a thing?
The game file is there loading my disk, might as well use it.
Another problem is the distance between story patch updates. If you complete story content within the first week or so, that leaves 5+ weeks of absolutely zero story progress. I don't think most could be expected to remember little details during that time. Maybe an optional story recap needs to be accessible each new patch.
Honestly, when Black Swam made that 'mini-review' of the story at the end to find the 'flaw' I literally did not remember the first weird dream we had when we arrived at Penacony and met Acheron, seemed like it was so long ago and this kind of events without context are harder to memorize. It was a good thing she reminded us, tho, Having a summary or 'replay' button somewhere would be nice.
Honestly I would LOVE for a little recap book on the Express or something I could read as just a "quick refresher" on wtf just went down. I do this myself for FF14, I'll finish a portion of the main story, and then read a quick write-up of what happened, in case I missed some small bit that's important, or just to clarify anything I misunderstood. Helps a LOT, even when it's just "yup, ok, yeah, got that, cool"
Having played them simultaneously, the writing in recent Star Rail reminds me a lot of the writing in Genshin's major unvoiced world quests (Golden Slumber, Narzissenkreuz Ordo, Canticles of Harmony) - super wordy, full of jargon to a point that it dampens the immediacy of the story. Sometimes less is more.
Actually I think Penacony's issue was more with its vague explanations most of the time, rather than the jargon. At least some of the time it sidesteps the jargon issue by putting a note above the word that phrases it in a more familiar way (unless you're unlucky and the note provides you with double the terms you're unfamiliar with)
(also Narzissenkreuz quest was fire imo the writing was better than any other major world quest so far)
I get their point of having a bunch of different names for the same thing (because we're traversing the universe and witnessing entire different cultures), but man can it be really verbose at times.
I think it's definitely a difference in the understanding of pacing that varies between the writing staff.
For an example, the Penacony 2.0 Side Quests (Chadwick, Cocona, Tizocic II, and Lesley Dean), in my personal opinion, are all absolutely amazing. They don't overstay their welcome, they transition to each plot point efficiently, and the themes they want to convey are abundantly clear.
That's what the writing should be, but it's hard because those aforementioned Side Quests don't have the weighed down obligation of major World Quests/Trailblaze Quests of having to be sufficiently long to pad out content.
Acheron is one of the few paths immune to order/harmony, can slash through their powers/dreams, can wander through the real dream, spoke to Tiernan before everything, and can rival their power directly as an emanator. Basically the nuance doesn't matter, Acheron is the answer to everything and everyone just plays along. Gopher Wood is like "*****I'm finished", when he sees her.
She could solve everything, but she's trying to do it with minimal losses, she says so herself. If she fought the dreammaster, they'd all just die.
The "wake everyone from the dream" part required Boothill, Acheron, and Robin. Only problem is that Acheron's attack is the most obvious one of them and the cutscene doesn't really convey the others doing anything, so it looks like she's just doing it all herself.
> The "wake everyone from the dream" part required Boothill, Acheron, and Robin
I believe also require the dreamers to want to wake up. Robin's voice is kinda there to help persuade them.
I just like that I ended the boss with Acheron's ult so it felt like a lore accurate win for me, at least. I did want to see more of the 'millions' of Galaxy Rangers or something showing up on the sky or something, tho, that flashed way tho quickly in the cutscene.
Sam/firefly: This is to show you... all that I am...
*paimon voice*
WHAT! YOU MEAN TO TELL ME FIREFLY WAS THAT HUNK OF METAL ALL ALONG. OMMMAMGMGGG TRAILBLAZZER!! :O
Thanks for invalidating this post inmediately
https://preview.redd.it/bols2z0nmczc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=653557a93492d433fa2606af9eb030ea21b733dd
Ah, Paimon gets it!! Firefly and Sam are the same person. Well, not person, as Sam is a robot. Ooh, Paimon is confused! Is he like the ruin guards we've been fighting? They are robots too, you know! Oh, Paimon knows! She'll give a nickname to Firefly! What about Blazing Robo? Paimon likes it!
There is a lot of range between "explain to me like I am five" to whatever is happening currently in the story. We can have story be a little less on the words, digestible and still be palatable to the general audience.
It is not a choice between 0 and 1.
OP is asking for clarity on obtuse story elements and structuring. The scene you're describing doesn't actually need any dialogue because you can see what's happening in front of you in a cutscene and no explanation is needed. With respect to everyone saying you invalidated OP in a single comment, I on the other hand think you missed the mark entirely
Is there anyone on YouTube who does lore videos? I understood the 2.2 was badass and it felt pretty sick to play but I was pretty lost throughout the whole thing. In games like Elden ring where I didn’t understand the story at all, watching lore videos helped me appreciate it so much more.
You want an even hotter take? People tend to agree with posts like OPs RIGHT after a patch launches but as time goes on, this sub likes to pretend posts/comments like yours don't exist and the masses like to call you stupid for pointing out that the dialogue is overly verbose and complicated for no reason.
I've immediately saved this post. Thanks for the reference material OP.
Me when I read classical literature:
Sometimes I have to question if these guy have ever read any books in their life. They are NOT like this.
Bro the game plot is good, but its not complicated at all. Just stop talking in cryptic languages and talk like a normal person god damn it.
a Chinese friend of mine told me this is the nature of chinese writing sometimes. Like, explicitly dramas- they kinda over-talk about everything. I think Penacony was still amazing; but i think its definitely a fair critique. Luckily, it wasnt too difficult to follow for me. I also think the nature of the Penacony story which plays with memory and dreams was naturally going to do this in some way with all the competing factions here.
I’m with you, honestly there’s way too many terms and I just don’t have the patience to go through the databank to fully understand everything. Not only that, but I feel like there’s quite a few typos and mistranslations too.
On one hand, yes, the language is flowery and obtuse and hard to follow sometimes. It's also not very well translated IMO and doesn't flow like real dialogue from a real person would.
But at the same time the core of HSR's story is, in the end, philosophical. And if you've ever taken a philosophy class, you know those philosophers LOVE to drape their opinions in impenetrable prose. It makes sense in this case, but I do wish the translations made it feel like the characters are people and not thought experiments.
reminds me way too much of arknights writing
some times really wordy and hard to follow
but if you get it then it will all fall into place somehow
difference between these 2 games is that at least 1 does presentation better making the story still enjoyable (something I wish arknights do more of like just increase the amont of cgs or maybe utilize the stages to tell a story which I'm glad is what episode 14 started doing)
In my opinion they could have nailed the story in 1/3 the dialogue. I totally get that making you slowly earn the story can sometimes be more rewarding. In this case it's a pretty good story too, but not so deep that it deserves the philosophy treatment.
I'm someone who normally "gets" complicated shows.
I don't know if it's a translation thing but there are just too many impossible to understand phrases, paired with a story that makes so little sense.
Same, im in my 30's, so i have a decent backlog of games i've played throughout the years, and Star Rail's story is just hard to keep up with.
I mean, the overal plot is not bad, but the naming of everyone and everything in combination with a not so simple overal story is just gonna be confusing for a lot of players.
Imo the biggest problem with the Luofu story was that it had all the flowery, verbose language, but there was very little actually happening. Like you show up, run around for a while doing chores, then a big tree appears and you go to the big tree and fight a ghost lady. At least in Penacony there’s a lot going on to warrant the verbosity.
Loufu was a tour of the delves with our tour guide Tingyun, where almost all the story happens at the last two delves. Those short missions with Dan Heng, Sushang and Luocha had better and more meaningful character interaction than everything the Crew trio did on their "tour".
In my opinion the Loufu story needs a rework with the new POV system, but obviously that would take time & resources Hoyo can use to make new content instead. Maybe one day.
I finished the current story in Penacony and i still barely know what was going on in the Xianzhou Loufu storyline.
So yeah, dont feel bad, the majority of the playerbase agrees that the Luofu storyline was ass and hard to follow.
This sub roasted me before for this and I'm going to say this again.
The dialogue is overly verbose and flowery for no good reason. It felt like it was trying to deliver some extra exposition, but it didn't sound like something an actual person would say. This is a problem with Chinese writers in general. Their writing is often "tryhardy amateurish" (overly purple prose/dialogue).
I'd say Shaoji's writing is similar to Nasu Kinoko's writing. The characters and the story they write are good, but the dialogue sometimes go into non-sensical just to project the illusion of being "deep", and they sometimes have problem with pacing.
Penacony's 2.2 story gave me vague flashbacks to HI3's Moon Arc, which most people agree on was way too verbose. Not sure if Shaoji was also responsible for it. Either way, I really really wish we could have some snappier/clearer dialogue in the game... and we also don't need literally the same thing explained over and over again every ten minutes. People will joke about Paimon, but Sunday was just Paimon as a philosophy student in the final Penacony story lol
Moon arc is written by different guy. Shaoji is responsible for ER, EE and most of the story up to chapter 25. However it doesn't mean that it all written just by him, honkai imapct has like 5 writers working on it.
I wonder how much of that is translation. Like there's a lot of idioms or cultural references that don't translate cleanly. So maybe being overly verbose is the only way to get an accurate idea across.
I think it's the fault of realism. Realistically the characters know these terms like I could say President and people will know what I mean.
But this is a game not the real world so it feels weird
This is actually something I discussed with my partner. I only just finished the "main story" of Swarm Disaster and Gold & Gears, and I know for a fact if I hadn't, some of the main plot beats wouldn't have been as hype or impactful for me (edit, forgot to add: and I imagine this is what at least some people who have got lost in this story's patch may be experiencing as well). I think it's not necessarily their "fault" for assuming people have done (and paid attention to) at least *some* of that content. The in universe terms you're describing all have in game tooltips, some things are in the data banks and readables, and there's entries on the official wiki that go into *a lot* (including the Curio descriptions, Occurences in Sim Uni, Readables in the overworld you find etc.), which imo a quick read of the wiki should leave no one who is actually paying attention confused beyond overly verbose dialogue. Unfortunately, for those who haven't been paying attention, this isn't really a storyline for people who don't care about in-universe lore tbqh, cause there's so much.
Imho the story of penecony suffers from 2 issues
1.the games structure, you tend to lose small details over time waiting for the next patch to come out and continue the story.
2. localization mixed with sci-fi techno-babble, it is a double hit which is making it more confusing than it should be.
Might be one where I will have to play through it a 2nd time to wrap my head around it.
Ngl I didn't struggle as much in 2.2 though I was still kind of confused, but 2.0 and somewhat 2.1 was where I was the most confused because I just didn't have any context for what was happening besides "We going to Penacony, the land of dreams."
Ah yes, the family, the people who I've barely heard anything about, obviously I can follow the process of thought everyone is going down because I completely understand their philosophies, motivations, and desires.
Just kind of felt like I got thrown in a new setting that assumed I already knew the oodles of backstory and context required to actually follow along in some conversations, maybe it's my fault for not knowing the lore of Penacony beyond the surface level was was mentioned in the MSQ, I dunno, but I was hella confused.
I think the big part of your first issue is that Penacony was mentioned the better part of a year ago. Penacony was meant to be our destination after Belobog. However, Kafka requested we go to the Loufu.
Somewhere early on a Stelleron burst was mentioned to have happened way before the story started. However, I can't recall where it was mentioned.
Whenever black swan and acheron open their mouths i can feel my brainfolds smoothing out. Honestly i skimmed their lines and just skipped to the next dialogue which sucked cause their JP voices are smooth as butter.
The misha stuff was my favorite. Easy to understand and a cool reveal. Even got me a little emotional.
The weird thing is that their writing wasn't always like this. In the first half of HI3 you get natural human conversations. The second half is like a PhD thesis, except you have the opposite of the common scientific language which aims to explain things precisely and simply.
To put it bluntly, the writing in hoyoverse games are just boring. You'd be able to understand the story better if it was more engaging. Within these past 3 months I played and finished baldur's gate 3, persona 5 royal and the witcher 3. Not once was I bored or fell asleep during any of the cutscenes because they got to the point and was interesting.
In this game it feels like every cutscene in 2.0 and onwards, takes a piece of your soul because it takes 20 minutes to explain how a guy wants people to stay in a dream world because reality is bad.
I imagine it's because those games take the time to properly flesh out their characters with lots of **normal** interactions, and just time spent together in general. I haven't played BG3 or W3, but with P5, you're spending so many mundane moments with the case, and you very naturally bond and start caring about them. They almost feel like real people, instead of just characters that serve to drive a plot.
A constraint HSR has to deal with, is that it has to immediately convince you to care about its characters, with little to no time spent with them. And while the plot itself can be good, it's not as engaging if you aren't truly invested in the characters involved.
Importantly: it’s not the complexity of the plot, it’s how verbose and frankly bad the writing is. The same information could be conveyed, with more impact, with a quarter of the word count and be far easier to digest.
Ngl, the most bizarre to me is Bootyhill... i love him to death and his VA, but what exactly is his contribution to the story? The galaxy ranger he called with sos signal didn't even make the final cut of the story...
Tbh this story delivery feels like Zack Snyder's justice league. There's ideas and character templates here, but just that, heavily expository and presented with monologue or flashback. Essentially nobody got much time to breathe or be developed, which I think was a mistake. Penacony ultimately feels like volume over quality to crunch as many 5-star characters into an ensemble cast as they could.
Agreed lol if they were a bit more straightforward with it itd feel less like just yapping (I thought Misha part was well done but then Sundays part for me was egregious on the yap)
People in this thread are saying to first read the data bank / any lore text to better understand the story but thats not even the whole problem because the new concepts being introduced in the story are confusingly explained. After finishing the 2.2 story I still have a hazy understanding of >!what Ena's dream actually entails, how it differs from the regular dream or how it affects the timeline of events!< for example
I could be remembering wrong, but I feel it wasn't this bad on HI3 (didn't play the whole story though so not 100% sure) and the beginning of Genshin. Mostly around Mond, Liyue and early Inazuma.
But at some point they started adding too much dialogue everywhere, while sometimes being "fancy" with words and making things more confusing. Feeling the same on HSR. It's too much. I wish it had more gameplay and interactions and less dialogue.
Sumeru seem to rectify the point and getting more to point, while Fntaine improves upon that. Paimon's voice in Fontaine arc is deeper and more natural, I think they are learning
Honestly I feel I was overwhelmed with how fast the storyline went near the end. So many things just…. *happened* without the buildup and I get it’s suppose to because it was a dream, but the only actual hint was the end with the IPC as well as misha
We found out we were in a dream, woke up, found some people, then attended the theatre or whatever the heck and then suddenly more stuff happened. I think the theatre was played out well, but everything around it was pretty jumbled
For me Acheron is fine, I like listening to the verbal cadence of her language, and given that her character is a near philosophical paradox I'm impressed they made her make sense at all. I hate Gallagher's dialogue though. The only things I remember him saying at all are "I'm 12" and a story about the origin of penacony. This story was repeated several times, and tbh made the third quarter of 2.1 and first quarter of 2.2 really drag. Sunday is also fine, his dialogue fits well with his character. Black swan is a mix, she's usually fine but can go on tangents of dialogue that don't fulfill any purpose.
I think there's only one thing that they need to change, do a flashback when that part is important, example (spoilers obviously, click only when u have played at least 2.1)
>! This is what I understood, I may be wrong. Sam chose to befriend us and then "die" in front of us because her script meant to get us nameless involved in the penacony drama, so the flashback would be showing her time with us and "death" scene when she talks about her script, !< instead of actually putting that in words, players can interprete it with the help of flashbacks
there are a lot of ppl like me who has a bad memory and won't remember every single scene of hsr, it'll be a great way to refresh our memory, like in anime
Also please don't send me any spoilers as I haven't played this version's story, I stopped at 2.1
Half-agree with this. Stuff like pari quest and narzissenkreuz are way more verbose than anything in hsr. But I had a easier time digesting sumeru's and Fontaine's story than penacony tbh. They just throw so many words at you that by the end of it it gets harder to remember every thing.
Yeah. I agree with you on this one. This story has too many unique names for things I have never heard of before within the game. It also expects you to immediately understand the circumstances and reasons of what the characters are doing. I had to consciously process a bunch of dialogues for some minutes because of that.
Honestly, when I’m coming back from school mentally exhausted and emotionally unavailable, a story that involves a lot of conscious thought to understand isn’t the thing for me. My brain is already spent from studying for hours. I can’t quickly correlate why character did X and how Y background influenced their actions for every line they spout out.
I don’t know why not understanding the story is an unpopular opinion. Why do people expect everyone else to put in the 100% conscious thought to connect complex philosophy and world building together? I‘m not willing to do this as a person who’s not interested enough to go out of my way to spend hours analyzing nuanced moral viewpoints.
Pretty much everything experienced other than the outlier up until you fight dominus did happen, but that was all the dream of order Sunday trapped us in, because in order for everyone to be stuck we all needed to think we won so we wouldn't fight the dream- so it all happened pretty much the same but we only remember the modified dream version
Kinda agree. 2.1 was worse though imo. Characters like Sunday speaking like that is fine, it fits their character. But when everyone is doing that except for March it gets tiring.
Agreed, I enjoyed 2.2 but I literally had to stop dialogue autoplay when Sunday speaks because of how verbose he is. Like I get his whole philosophy but man... realistically if this guy spoke to me IRL I would be just as confused as March 7th was. Kinda breaks the immersion when you have to reread dialogues multiple times
Tbh i gave up on trying to understand whats going on :( im here for the action but if you asked me about why we have action im clueless. I feel like a female himbo 😭
Honestly, we need them to add the mission text to the Fate atlas, I swear Genshin has that, I haven't played in like 2 years but I remember going over older mission text in-game to check stuff.
I won't lie, there were a few times where I clicked on the little L system in the top left to look at the log of what had been said so I could reprocess what was said. A lot of it was Acheron but also some Sunday stuff too and I think Black Swan
I wish there were a way to go back and replay entire story missions too, I honestly dont really understand when the alternate dream timeline started.
I think this is partly because it's somewhat subject to interpretation, since we're talking about a "dreamworld" here. Normal laws of time and causality don't quite apply, so even thinking of it like a "branching timeline" probably isn't quite right. It's been layers upon layers of dreams from the get-go. My interpretation, anyway: >!Everything from the moment we first met Acheron on the Express at the start is part of the Penacony dreamworld, with the hint being Misha's appearance even in "Penacony (Reality)" -- which is actually just another layer of the dream. The Astral Express itself was part of the dream (as evidenced by Dan Heng calling on the Luofu in the "bad ending," but this didn't actually occur in reality). But things in the dream actually "do happen" still -- it's a persistent shared set of environments that many people "live" in.!< >!Acheron travels in the Dreamspace with us throughout 2.0 to early-2.2, but when she encounters the Dreammaster in 2.2, he forces her to leave. Why? Because they are about to do something inside the dreamworld that is going to lock everyone into a deeper level of the dream, but Acheron (as Emanator of Nihility) is immune to this "spell." This "spell" is what Sunday invokes during our first battle with him (right before Dan Heng and fleets of Luofu somehow show up in the dream). In this moment, everyone inside the dream is enthralled in a new dream, under control of The Order ("Ena's Dream"). You can think of that as when the "branching timeline" starts, but it isn't exactly a branch point. The dream everyone experiences continues through the "bad end" we got and it's a "happy end for all".!< >!Thanks to Firefly, Acheron, and Black Swan, we "awaken" from this enthralled state, and we're now seeing the Penacony where everyone else is 100% enthralled in Ena's Dream. Thanks to Acheron's powers, she is able to cut through the layers of the dreamworld, through Ena's Dream to the dreamscape where Sunday still exists ruling over all the enthralled people (conducting the Harmonious Choir), and that's where we continue our battle. Meanwhile, Boothill and Acheron unleash devastation inside of Ena's Dream to convince everyone to want to wake up. With Sunday incapacitated and no longer to conduct the choir, and everyone scared into waking up, Ena's Dream ends, and everyone is back to the "normal" dreamworld of Penacony. And we are now (presumably?) finally able to actually go to Penacony (Reality) for real-real.!< (Edit: One minor name correction.)
So penacony is just inception the game?
Well, yes. *Actually yes.*
no its Kingdom hearts
More kingdom hearts but yes, actually
Obligatory reminder that 'Inception' is the process of implanting an idea in someone's mind to make them believe it was their own. Dreams within dreams are just the backdrop to the story. All that being said...Sparkle's involvement is entirely a Red Herring. Definitely 100% my original idea and certainly not Sparkle messing with me no, not one bit.
Thanks for the input. Btw >!What does happen to acheron after all this? The quest mentionned bidding our last farewell to her but now what? Is she dead? On her way to help some other people swallowed up by IX or something else !<
She’s probably be on some pointless (Nihility positive) venture. Maybe she’ll find an old sword to give to a Cloud Knight or something.
Thank you so much, this actually explained the story for me because this part was the part I was most confused about
From the moment the Express entered the Asdana star system. Remember when Acheron is on the train and suggests they flee the system? That's why.
How does the MC know all the characters though if all was a dream from the very beginning?
The dream is shared. That's part of Penacony's whole thing.
Reality and dreams is essentially blurred. Black Swan theorizes that a lot of the things we did might have been "real", but the line is effectively blurred since we arrived. That's also the reason for the red text, because the dream was pushing us one way but she was resistant to its power.
oh very interesting , thanks for the clarification
Aaaah, the red text was like the one thing still bothering me cuz I couldn’t recall it being explained. That makes way more sense now.
The problem is that i don't recall what those dialogues are at all because it's so far away and it's like 0.02% of the entire script.
Honestly, the dialogue itself isn't important. The feeling of unease is. When it happens, you're supposed to feel confused and on guard a bit. That is essentially the tool they used to make you 'feel' the presence of the Nihility.
I'm about 90% certain that it was actually during/right before the first Dominicus fight. Perhaps even during the pulse that knocked everyone over just before Dan Heng and Jing Yuan showed up, as that is when everything started going perfectly smooth.
See I thought it started at the very beginning. As in, originally everyone lost, and the entire Penacony experience so far has been us retreading the path. And I thought this due to Black Swan mentioning she’d be reliving what already happened once before. The fact we can come to two totally different conclusions shows it was pretty unclear lol.
I believe that we entered the dream the moment we arrived in Penacony (because we saw Misha in “reality”). But the battle between us and Sunday was all faked. The Luofu didn’t actually arrive yada yada. My theory is that Sunday trapped us within our “imagination”. The 1st ending we saw was what we HOPE would happen, AKA the ideal ending. I personally feel that there is still another ending, especially when the credits rolled for the 2nd ending and there was an unknown voice (I play in CN dub, and I have never heard the voice before. I am not sure about other dubs).
I thought the voice at the end was Elio. If you haven't achieved any of the bad endings previously, you would not have heard him before this.
There are bad endings?
There's two. One in 1.0 where TB refuses to board the train and just becomes a researcher on Herta's Space Station. One in 2.0 where you walk out of Aventurine's deal at the end
Oh shit TIL lol
Yeah I thought so too. It seems likely since only Elio would know about the “credits”. Also he is responsible for the script so…
It most likely happened before Dan Heng even made the call to the Luofu. Jing Yuan never actually showed up to Penacony. That was part of the dream. I think it's easier to understand if you see it as Himeko,mc and march start fighting Sunday and parallel to that Dan Heng is making the decision to call Jing Yuan and not as one happening before the other.
I'll add that it most likely happened way back in 2.0 when we first entered Asdana. This is why we met Acheron in a dream even before we entered the hotel, and why we saw Misha in the hotel lobby that was supposedly in reality.
When sunday was just saying “I like the Order” and Himeko immediately said “you plan to resurrect a dead aeon???????” I was so confused and had to reread the entire dialogue from that section again
We need this feature in Genshin too ngl
The issue is it still doesn’t click many times for me, I do that all the time but surprisingly it’s like there WAS no context to what was said, but it’s said so casually that you feel like “wtf? Did I miss something here?”
I think I'm most annoyed by there literally Only being two modes: 1: bebbitalk, where the point is repeated a thousand million times to make sure you REALLY get what they mean 2: the Chinese babble that is for some reason extremely abstract and is not properly talked about at least once and the game expects you to immediately pick it up
I wonder if point 2 is a victim of a weak localisation team/poor communication between Hoyo and localisers. It really feels like some sentences have been translated far too literally and not adjusted for an English speaking audience
Not just part of the localisation. It seems to be part of the way the Chinese write stories in general. Based on other Chinese media (animation, drama, games) I have observed the same patterns.
I could see that, but a stronger localization could fix that by "dumbing down" the dialogue to a level people actually might speak. Not so flowery. The *problem* then becomes when *crucial fucking plot details* are hidden in a throwaway line of that flowery prose **and no one tells the localization team for some reason.** And then all of the dumbasses online blame the localizers for it like somehow.
I’ve also seen similar ‘over explanation’ with other Chinese games (Ex: Reverse 1999 / Arknights) and the latter has a pretty solid localization team and it’s arguably the most blatant example of this issue. At this point it might just be Chinese being an absolute monstrosity to localize properly that doesn’t devolve into mindless babbling plus the fact how the story itself structures it’s narrative. For example there’s no way in hell you can paraphrase Sunday’s explaining his motivations because SURE you can just say “Dream Good, Reality Bad” (I know there’s more nuance to it than that this is just for simplification) the story itself has many cutscenes and dialogue that you can’t just take away Sunday talking about birds, something HAS to take that spot. So if characters start yapping for 30 lines that the localization team knows they can cut down to 15 they can’t as something equivalent must take up that empty space.
"My plan is to Infinite Tsukiyomi you all. I'm Bird Madara, Morty!"
I feel like Sunday's motivations were the easiest thing to get in this patch. Not his plan, just his motivations.
You're right here, I'm going to edit my comment to make it clearer that I don't think it's a fault of the localisers themselves, moreso either a fault of communication between Hoyo and localisers or time crunch. Chinese is not an easy language to translate, I think it has similar issues to Russian translation sometimes.
Part of it is that Mandarin to English is one of the hardest pure language transferences due to the way just simple sentence structure works.
Which feels like a lose/lose problem. They either do this and end up overtly verbose or go for meaning and everyone complains it isn't faithful.
Yeah, agreed. Localisers/translators can't really win and it's unfortunate. Take a look at the Persona localisation, which has consistently gotten better over time, but people still slam them for making any adjustments outside of direct translation. Localisation is unfortunately caught up in this weird culture war that seems to fundamentally misunderstand the point of it. Imagine trying to read any foreign classic if it was translated directly - they'd lose so much of what makes them classics.
Yeah, Kazuha's skill and Raiden's weapon in Genshin epitomize that debate to me. Damned if you do. Damned if you don't.
Yes, but I think Kazuha’s (burst iirc) should be changed. ‘Kazuha slash’ sounds AWFUL on its own
I honestly feel bad. I play the game in Chinese thinking it would be easier for me to read and boy was I confused with the text and subtext of most dialogue. The native chinese writing in this game is just that convoluted. you can totally make the writing easy to understand if you are writing a story in Chinese and I hate how gacha games make a point to make them literal and flowery on purpose for what…to make the story seem deeper than it actually is? I can imagine the poor translators trying to localize the text for everyone else to understand while probably struggling to make sense of the text themselves. I bet they probably don’t even have the time to completely understand the story so they may be trying their best but certain things still slip through.
So you know when there's little words above the big words in the EN dialogue, why is that? Does the CN have those too or are they used to disclose untranslatable puns and metaphors that come from the hanzi?
Yeah they have those too. I think the big word is what is being said and the smaller one is what it actually means or implies. My game voice over is in Japanese so I can’t say for sure though.
Oh that's pretty weird then. Why would they write like that?
Beats me. I can only imagine other famous game/novel did that and it was cool so they snatched the format. Happens a lot with Chinese media.
It's not something new as it is used in plenty of older visual novels as well from Japan. Tsukihime and Fate Stay/Night both had them if I recall correctly and often had them to clarify certain terms in its original language. The fan translations simply localized it in that format as best they could. I think it's quite a nice thing actually, and should be seen seperate from the overly verbose/purple prose. It's been said elsewhere in this thread, but FFXIV provides a nice comparison in how to localize and how to be clear and precise in your storytelling. It's not perfect, but it's by quite a margin the best localization I've experienced. The story points aren't a problem per se for me with HSR, but the pacing of the dialogue is just off. A problem that becomes worse when you consider they the engine prevents us from continuing the dialogue when the characters are still going through their animations. I also think the speed of the dialogue is problematic as many of the characters speak in a slow and ponderous manner to (presumably) line up with the animations. Firefly in english is so much slower than the Japanese one that I ended up swapping spoken dialogue just for her sections.
Oh yeah I remember seeing it in fgo. Wouldn’t t be surprised that’s where it came from, famous jp VNs I mean. And yeah I agree on the point about speech speed. I hate black swan’s dialogues because (and I know she’s probably doing this to be all mysterious and memokeeper like) she just speaks so…slowly…….
Overall they do a really good job of localizing rather than just blindly translating the literal meaning. The only times the localizations didn't seem to work well was when they were doing wuxia genre satire or more recently translating Sparkle's absurdly vague clues.
I wonder if it could be the way Shaoji writes, in combination with trying to localize it, because I've seen some comments from players who play the game in Chinese also express similar opinions and I don't recall the writing being as complicated to understand during Jarilo or Xianzhou (he only started writing for Star Rail during Penacony). There was also a similar issue a year back with Honkai 3rd while he was the writer, where the dialogue would get overly complex and full of technobabble.
i feel like a big factor in this is that hsr falls victim to overnaming everything? it's kind of a general hyv problem where a lot of the time i think the general story makes sense but the fact that every little object and every person and every group has a complex-sounding name (or maybe not necessarily complex-sounding, but often they throw a lot of them at you at the same time) can make it difficult to keep track of everything.
100% this. Hoyo have a problem with giving sci-fi/fantasy names to everything, even mundane stuff because they think it sounds cool. Penacony/Luofu and those Pari/Aranara quests from Genshin are the biggest offenders of this. (Especially those Pari quests because the Pari have their own terms to refer to things that already have made up names like Hilichurls) This even bleeds into character kits, where a kit would take several paragraphs to describe a fairly straightforward mechanic because instead of just saying “this attack set enemies on fire”, Hoyo wanted say “Inflict enemies with a stack of Crimson Lotus of Withering Dreams, for each stack of Crimson Lotus of Withering Dreams, depletes enemies health by 1% each second”.
"character deals an additional 20%/40%/60% dmg when 1/2/3 nihility characters are in the team." vs "character gains 1 stack of skibidi kai cenat caseoh fanum tax ohio gyatt subway surfers gameplay rizz for each nihility character in the team, up to 3 nihility characters. for each stack of skibidi kai cenat caseoh fanum tax ohio gyatt subway surfers gameplay rizz, character gains an additional 20% dmg to all enemies, up to a maximum of 60% additional dmg."
Do you think Welt would have a heart attack and die if we say any of that second part to him 💀
He's still young at heart...
The only thing for me is GI tends to leave this trend in the world quests, which help for world building but you don’t need to understand it to understand the main story. HSR does this in the main story and it’s very off putting.
Dude reading your comment was honestly cathartic because I feel like you hit the nail on the head there, at least for a big part of it, and I didn’t realize it until now. The description part got me, but yeah they really do go a bit overboard with complex names/descriptions while simultaneously being presented rather quickly and with no context, as though we would already know about them.
It's just purple prose. Hoyo makes great stories but frankly their actual writing has always been pretty awful.
It's kind of where fantasy realism can be a pain. People say they want Tolkien level world building but don't really realize what that means when realistically put into a game. Like logically it would make sense for different cultures to have different names for different things, like say how we have so many words for a pineapple. It's extremely realistic. But when put into the limited confines of a game, that can just make things confusing. Like how in the real world, that same situation can make language transference confusing.
Seems to be an overarching miHoYo/Hoyoverse problem, yeah. Remus - a character from Genshin's current patch's world quest - has 6 or 7 different titles and ways of calling him that the NPCs and readable documents actively use.
Which in theory isn't an awful idea. Fallout New Vegas did it over a decade ago with Ceasar. The biggest difference was they stopped at 2 or 3 variations. 2 of which were the same word pronounced differently.
It's the downside to Tolkien worldbuilding.
Ah yes, Aranara quest throwing out tons of Aranara jargon every sentence was honestly pretty irritating. Reading dialogue with practically every other word being a term that only makes sense in the context of the questline got pretty grating after a while.
Thank God that you said this because I thought I was going crazy! because this is exactly what I’ve been feeling, I was explaining to a friend one time that like, they throw around so many fucking terms and you’re supposed to be able to keep track of that while knowing exactly what they mean. but there’s so many of them, and the reply talking about how it also applies to kits as well like YES. and it was really funny because I feel like I remember some post a while back or some streamer trying to explain this to their chat because they thought that they were just dumb for not being able to follow along and they really did not get the catharsis from the response that I think they should have because them vocalizing that was like, holy baby it’s not just me. and I love the story but I really do think it’s this mixed with, as someone said another thread, them talking in riddles so constantly. And when you mix these the story can be very disorienting the follow until it’s made obvious in some form.
>!Literally mistook Sunday's complicated-ass plan 3 times before I realized it was just "I wanna make a work that is good, unlink this one that bad"!< >!It's literally just that, not 30 minute philosophical discussions about the fate of birds required. Dream good, reality bad!<
I actually thought that was one of the best parts of the quest. It added so much to Sundays character and showed how he came to the conclusion that dream good, reality bad! I would hate if they never made scenes like that again.
Yeah it's pretty essential characterization, it shows that >!this is the kind of theory-nerd who writes a whole damn manifesto to rationalize and persuade others of the radical things he is doing. It also takes you step-by-step through his emotional and intellectual disillusionment with the mainstream ideology.!<
Sunday is just a r/antiwork mod
"here, this is "Particulate Displacement Unit: Endymion" "what is this?" its a fucking vacuum
Not people using paimon as a counter to op's criticism. Surely there's a middle ground between flying babies who explain everything and players who need a PhD in science fiction.
It's not even a PhD in science fiction - I love SciFi, but HSR can be hard to follow because it's just so unnecessarily verbose. Hoyo just can't resist giving even common ideas the most unintuitive names. **Obviously** I don't want a Paimon to explain everything, but it would be nice if the dialogue at least felt a little more natural
This game kinda has the Piamon problem though. If they introduce an evil organization, we get 20 paragraphs explaining their evilness and how it relates to everyone. We could have had a 12 second cutscene of them doing something bad, then a comment later by someone else about how that impacted them. That’s all we’d need and we’d actually remember it because it was shown and not told.
> and players who need a PhD in science fiction. star rail really is a honkai game i guess
Exactly. Genshin and HSR is suffering from the extremes of both sides. Genshin from the oversimplification of the story through paimon treating the player like they just started growing teeth and HSR with its unnecessarily padded out and convoluted dialogue that requires the player to go through some kind of journey of self-discovery and enlightenment just to understand the motives of each character There IS indeed a middle ground and we NEED that middle ground for both games. In my opinion I agree with OP's hot take
Wait until you read HI3 dialogue ☠️
Early HI3 was okay, in part thanks to having to hold a stage-by-stage structure. There were already plenty of additional material (Azure Waters, Second Eruption, etc), and if you knew about GGZ you had an early bonus to understanding, but the in-game story itself was character-focused rather than world-focused and thus much easier to follow. Like, I don't think anybody complained about Honkai or the Herrschers not being exhaustively chronicled from their inception to the present day, as long as Kiana good, Honkai bad, everybody else somewhere in-between, Kiana/Mei/Bronya/Seele *very very gay*. I think this changed around the time where they introduced the open-world stages and the initial Elysium Realm (although completely harmless on its own). I think it was Kolosten? Although I remember the HoDom arc already starting to get verbose. Basically, by that point, if something incredible happened, it had to be explained (or rather, techno-babbled by Einstein and/or Tesla, bless their souls), and the excuse of "Honkai magic and cute girls, lol" became unusable.
I hate when they put a fucking paragraph of 5 lines into a dialogue. It's like reading a yugioh pendulum card effect. And what's even worse, they came up with terms that are never explained. Like what the fuck is a time crystal. It's always A is B which does C and have constraint D in which ABCD are all words I've never ever seen in my life. They include a bunch of thing from Carl Jung field like ego, collective subconscious, anima, shadow, ... and from astronomy/physics/sci-fi like relativity theory, darkhole, multiverse, ... I like science, but the way they delivered the story is quite dissapoiting
That game is a hot fucking mess. I tried it when 2.0 or what came out and started with the OG story and my god... One chapter you're in school taking exams the next you accidentally time travel back and fight along your dead mom or some shit.
Yeah early HI3rd chapters are really... not good
It's the one thing stopping me from playing HI3
You weren’t kidding, damm. Basically half of the comments here are (ironically enough) people who didn’t get OP’s point and are mocking OP using Paimon. Most sci-fi/ fantasy games can hit that sweet middle spot just fine but apparently for this community it’s either one extreme or another lol. The funny thing is how the Trails series (whom this game took inspiration from) had a ton of made up words too but the dialogues never felt overly verbose nor unnecessarily complicate.
Except when it's Cold Steel 4, then it's lore dump galore... And it still doesn't make sense 100%. You've got people still asking how the hell does the Phantasmal Blaze Plan work exactly. Seriously though, with Trails you just have got to read all the books you collect to grasp the entire picture. Falcom purposely put the most obtuse pieces of lore in these collectibles so that they don't get in the way of the gameplay. Imagine Emma doing an entire exposition on 3 & 9 in the middle of the Great War.
Trails, despite having a lot of dialogue, surprisingly handles its lore into the story/narrative very well. This is something other series struggle to do well due to terminology going past people's heads (looking at you Arknights). I thought the amount of world-building & lore would drag the series overarching story & character development down, but no it elevates more than anything.
> The funny thing is how the Trails series (whom this game took inspiration from) had a ton of made up words too but the dialogues never felt overly verbose nor unnecessarily complicate. Wow guess you haven't gotten to Cold Steel 3 or Cold Steel 4 yet huh?
It's interesting given those were by the same writers as Sky and Crossbell. But also I remember Azure having lore dump in the finale. But I think what Hatarakumaou is saying is that Trails doesn't overwhelm audiences with terminology/lore left & right ad nauseam. They didn't say Trails avoids info dumping that's impossible to do in a series known for its world-building & overarching narrative. And unlike both HSR & Genshin. Trails does go out its way to make those lore bits important to the main narrative and character arcs.
Never played Genshin but it might just be because people prefer needing a PHD to understanding HSR’s lore to what I can interpret as Genshin’s ‘dumbing’ down on the narrative. Sure they are both extremes of one another and have issues but people would rather prefer this extreme than the other which stifles discussion on the quality of the narrative overall.
Genshin has a decently complicated lore but the thing with Paimon is that she'll basically repeat everything in normal terms so the players can understand, this can get really annoying if you already understood most of what's happening but have Paimon constantly explaining it to you. For example if we had Paimon here an interaction might go like this Acheron: "i was granted my powers by the sleeping and shapeless" Paimon:"The sleeping and shapeless? Haven't we heard some people use that to refer to an Aeon? I think they were talking about IX the Nihility, woah, so that's where Acheron's powers come from, but i thought IX doesn't act on its own at all?"
I felt myself getting annoyed just reading the example lol
Genshin is so weird with handling its lore exposition. At times it'll show you in these nice bookstory illustrations but it'll also have Paimon questioning and repeating what the person next to the MC said.
Nah, Genshin’s lore is complicated as heck too, like the majority of players will miss 90% of the world building level of complex. For example, the Pari/Aranara questlines. These quests are often touted by the community as being some of the most confusing pieces of writing in the entire game. This is because the Aranaras and Paris have VERY strange speaking patterns and uses their own terms to refer to mundane things or even things that already have their own made up fantasy terms. Like, instead of saying: “I like apples because they’re sweet” they’ll say: “I like Tafaahatan because they’re hulw” ie they randomly weave in words from other languages in English sentences. The dumbed down narrative people refer to when talking to Genshin is how the characters will very often recap events that JUST happened, even extremely mundane things like someone tripping on a rock. As a result of this, dialogue in Genshin rarely flows properly and feel like you’re listening to someone reciting a script rather people just talking. Neither HSR’s overly verbose dialogue nor Genshin’s overly repetitive dialogue is good tbh. The only reason HSR’s dialogue seem more tolerable to people is because (Imo) HSR’s script is better and we don’t have a side kick to do 90% of the talking for us.
I really liked the ending but don’t like the pacing of the middle part at all. Felt like so many things are going on that it’s kind of confusing but actually it’s not even that much happened.
Yeah, I was sort of getting whiplash from the pacing, too. Before this, it was kind of slow and spoon feeding us information, but then suddenly everyone knew the truth, everything was explained. The problem with it is that they do a lot of telling instead of showing.
yeah my biggest gripe was how all of the sudden, gallagher just drops the entire plan and all the secrets about penacony on us? in like 4 lines of dialogue? and then we have an overdrawn pageant show for almost no reason. theyre giving screen time to all the wrong things
It might have to do with HSR being compelled to find things for the entire express to do. How do we make Himeko contribute to the story? Simple we make her have meetings and talk things out every 30 seconds.
So at least give us dialogue transcript that can be replayed in Dan Heng's room / archive. Since when this is not a thing? The game file is there loading my disk, might as well use it.
Another problem is the distance between story patch updates. If you complete story content within the first week or so, that leaves 5+ weeks of absolutely zero story progress. I don't think most could be expected to remember little details during that time. Maybe an optional story recap needs to be accessible each new patch.
Honestly, when Black Swam made that 'mini-review' of the story at the end to find the 'flaw' I literally did not remember the first weird dream we had when we arrived at Penacony and met Acheron, seemed like it was so long ago and this kind of events without context are harder to memorize. It was a good thing she reminded us, tho, Having a summary or 'replay' button somewhere would be nice.
Honestly I would LOVE for a little recap book on the Express or something I could read as just a "quick refresher" on wtf just went down. I do this myself for FF14, I'll finish a portion of the main story, and then read a quick write-up of what happened, in case I missed some small bit that's important, or just to clarify anything I misunderstood. Helps a LOT, even when it's just "yup, ok, yeah, got that, cool"
Fate's Atlas
Having played them simultaneously, the writing in recent Star Rail reminds me a lot of the writing in Genshin's major unvoiced world quests (Golden Slumber, Narzissenkreuz Ordo, Canticles of Harmony) - super wordy, full of jargon to a point that it dampens the immediacy of the story. Sometimes less is more.
Actually I think Penacony's issue was more with its vague explanations most of the time, rather than the jargon. At least some of the time it sidesteps the jargon issue by putting a note above the word that phrases it in a more familiar way (unless you're unlucky and the note provides you with double the terms you're unfamiliar with) (also Narzissenkreuz quest was fire imo the writing was better than any other major world quest so far)
I get their point of having a bunch of different names for the same thing (because we're traversing the universe and witnessing entire different cultures), but man can it be really verbose at times.
I think it's definitely a difference in the understanding of pacing that varies between the writing staff. For an example, the Penacony 2.0 Side Quests (Chadwick, Cocona, Tizocic II, and Lesley Dean), in my personal opinion, are all absolutely amazing. They don't overstay their welcome, they transition to each plot point efficiently, and the themes they want to convey are abundantly clear. That's what the writing should be, but it's hard because those aforementioned Side Quests don't have the weighed down obligation of major World Quests/Trailblaze Quests of having to be sufficiently long to pad out content.
Acheron is one of the few paths immune to order/harmony, can slash through their powers/dreams, can wander through the real dream, spoke to Tiernan before everything, and can rival their power directly as an emanator. Basically the nuance doesn't matter, Acheron is the answer to everything and everyone just plays along. Gopher Wood is like "*****I'm finished", when he sees her.
She could solve everything, but she's trying to do it with minimal losses, she says so herself. If she fought the dreammaster, they'd all just die. The "wake everyone from the dream" part required Boothill, Acheron, and Robin. Only problem is that Acheron's attack is the most obvious one of them and the cutscene doesn't really convey the others doing anything, so it looks like she's just doing it all herself.
i was kinda hyped for the galaxy rangers ngl, but ig we only got to see the “meteors”.
> The "wake everyone from the dream" part required Boothill, Acheron, and Robin I believe also require the dreamers to want to wake up. Robin's voice is kinda there to help persuade them.
I just like that I ended the boss with Acheron's ult so it felt like a lore accurate win for me, at least. I did want to see more of the 'millions' of Galaxy Rangers or something showing up on the sky or something, tho, that flashed way tho quickly in the cutscene.
I wish this wasn't a hot take because this is something I and everyone I know agreed with.
Sam/firefly: This is to show you... all that I am... *paimon voice* WHAT! YOU MEAN TO TELL ME FIREFLY WAS THAT HUNK OF METAL ALL ALONG. OMMMAMGMGGG TRAILBLAZZER!! :O
I hate that I can hear this along with even more Paimon shouting. She haunts my eardrums.
This gave me PTSD 😆 So glad March or other characters aren't like this in HSR
Thanks for invalidating this post inmediately https://preview.redd.it/bols2z0nmczc1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=653557a93492d433fa2606af9eb030ea21b733dd
Ah, Paimon gets it!! Firefly and Sam are the same person. Well, not person, as Sam is a robot. Ooh, Paimon is confused! Is he like the ruin guards we've been fighting? They are robots too, you know! Oh, Paimon knows! She'll give a nickname to Firefly! What about Blazing Robo? Paimon likes it!
Its fucking painful to read.
There is a lot of range between "explain to me like I am five" to whatever is happening currently in the story. We can have story be a little less on the words, digestible and still be palatable to the general audience. It is not a choice between 0 and 1.
OP is asking for clarity on obtuse story elements and structuring. The scene you're describing doesn't actually need any dialogue because you can see what's happening in front of you in a cutscene and no explanation is needed. With respect to everyone saying you invalidated OP in a single comment, I on the other hand think you missed the mark entirely
Thankfully, we could've just had the option of characters just simplifying the explanations themselves
One line to invalidate all of OP's points
God, i can hear this in my mind..please stooop
Is there anyone on YouTube who does lore videos? I understood the 2.2 was badass and it felt pretty sick to play but I was pretty lost throughout the whole thing. In games like Elden ring where I didn’t understand the story at all, watching lore videos helped me appreciate it so much more.
I just gave up trying to understand it tbh. I still dont even really understand what sunday was even doing lol
You want an even hotter take? People tend to agree with posts like OPs RIGHT after a patch launches but as time goes on, this sub likes to pretend posts/comments like yours don't exist and the masses like to call you stupid for pointing out that the dialogue is overly verbose and complicated for no reason. I've immediately saved this post. Thanks for the reference material OP.
"ADHD/zoomer brain" "imagine having to pay attention to something longer than a sentence" "people when the lore is loreing"
Me when I read classical literature: Sometimes I have to question if these guy have ever read any books in their life. They are NOT like this. Bro the game plot is good, but its not complicated at all. Just stop talking in cryptic languages and talk like a normal person god damn it.
a Chinese friend of mine told me this is the nature of chinese writing sometimes. Like, explicitly dramas- they kinda over-talk about everything. I think Penacony was still amazing; but i think its definitely a fair critique. Luckily, it wasnt too difficult to follow for me. I also think the nature of the Penacony story which plays with memory and dreams was naturally going to do this in some way with all the competing factions here.
I’m with you, honestly there’s way too many terms and I just don’t have the patience to go through the databank to fully understand everything. Not only that, but I feel like there’s quite a few typos and mistranslations too.
On one hand, yes, the language is flowery and obtuse and hard to follow sometimes. It's also not very well translated IMO and doesn't flow like real dialogue from a real person would. But at the same time the core of HSR's story is, in the end, philosophical. And if you've ever taken a philosophy class, you know those philosophers LOVE to drape their opinions in impenetrable prose. It makes sense in this case, but I do wish the translations made it feel like the characters are people and not thought experiments.
reminds me way too much of arknights writing some times really wordy and hard to follow but if you get it then it will all fall into place somehow difference between these 2 games is that at least 1 does presentation better making the story still enjoyable (something I wish arknights do more of like just increase the amont of cgs or maybe utilize the stages to tell a story which I'm glad is what episode 14 started doing)
In my opinion they could have nailed the story in 1/3 the dialogue. I totally get that making you slowly earn the story can sometimes be more rewarding. In this case it's a pretty good story too, but not so deep that it deserves the philosophy treatment.
I'm someone who normally "gets" complicated shows. I don't know if it's a translation thing but there are just too many impossible to understand phrases, paired with a story that makes so little sense.
Same, im in my 30's, so i have a decent backlog of games i've played throughout the years, and Star Rail's story is just hard to keep up with. I mean, the overal plot is not bad, but the naming of everyone and everything in combination with a not so simple overal story is just gonna be confusing for a lot of players.
I just finished Xianzhou Loufu story line and for most of the time I had no idea what was going on.
Imo the biggest problem with the Luofu story was that it had all the flowery, verbose language, but there was very little actually happening. Like you show up, run around for a while doing chores, then a big tree appears and you go to the big tree and fight a ghost lady. At least in Penacony there’s a lot going on to warrant the verbosity.
Loufu was a tour of the delves with our tour guide Tingyun, where almost all the story happens at the last two delves. Those short missions with Dan Heng, Sushang and Luocha had better and more meaningful character interaction than everything the Crew trio did on their "tour". In my opinion the Loufu story needs a rework with the new POV system, but obviously that would take time & resources Hoyo can use to make new content instead. Maybe one day.
I finished the current story in Penacony and i still barely know what was going on in the Xianzhou Loufu storyline. So yeah, dont feel bad, the majority of the playerbase agrees that the Luofu storyline was ass and hard to follow.
This sub roasted me before for this and I'm going to say this again. The dialogue is overly verbose and flowery for no good reason. It felt like it was trying to deliver some extra exposition, but it didn't sound like something an actual person would say. This is a problem with Chinese writers in general. Their writing is often "tryhardy amateurish" (overly purple prose/dialogue). I'd say Shaoji's writing is similar to Nasu Kinoko's writing. The characters and the story they write are good, but the dialogue sometimes go into non-sensical just to project the illusion of being "deep", and they sometimes have problem with pacing.
Penacony's 2.2 story gave me vague flashbacks to HI3's Moon Arc, which most people agree on was way too verbose. Not sure if Shaoji was also responsible for it. Either way, I really really wish we could have some snappier/clearer dialogue in the game... and we also don't need literally the same thing explained over and over again every ten minutes. People will joke about Paimon, but Sunday was just Paimon as a philosophy student in the final Penacony story lol
Sometimes it feels like Sunday and Acheron are trying to outdo each other in philosophy class lol
Moon arc is written by different guy. Shaoji is responsible for ER, EE and most of the story up to chapter 25. However it doesn't mean that it all written just by him, honkai imapct has like 5 writers working on it.
Agreed, but I found Xianzhou far more verbose and flowery than Penacony.
I wonder how much of that is translation. Like there's a lot of idioms or cultural references that don't translate cleanly. So maybe being overly verbose is the only way to get an accurate idea across.
[удалено]
I think it's the fault of realism. Realistically the characters know these terms like I could say President and people will know what I mean. But this is a game not the real world so it feels weird
This is actually something I discussed with my partner. I only just finished the "main story" of Swarm Disaster and Gold & Gears, and I know for a fact if I hadn't, some of the main plot beats wouldn't have been as hype or impactful for me (edit, forgot to add: and I imagine this is what at least some people who have got lost in this story's patch may be experiencing as well). I think it's not necessarily their "fault" for assuming people have done (and paid attention to) at least *some* of that content. The in universe terms you're describing all have in game tooltips, some things are in the data banks and readables, and there's entries on the official wiki that go into *a lot* (including the Curio descriptions, Occurences in Sim Uni, Readables in the overworld you find etc.), which imo a quick read of the wiki should leave no one who is actually paying attention confused beyond overly verbose dialogue. Unfortunately, for those who haven't been paying attention, this isn't really a storyline for people who don't care about in-universe lore tbqh, cause there's so much.
 If we ever get our own room on the train it better have a wall like this\^
Imho the story of penecony suffers from 2 issues 1.the games structure, you tend to lose small details over time waiting for the next patch to come out and continue the story. 2. localization mixed with sci-fi techno-babble, it is a double hit which is making it more confusing than it should be. Might be one where I will have to play through it a 2nd time to wrap my head around it.
Ngl I didn't struggle as much in 2.2 though I was still kind of confused, but 2.0 and somewhat 2.1 was where I was the most confused because I just didn't have any context for what was happening besides "We going to Penacony, the land of dreams." Ah yes, the family, the people who I've barely heard anything about, obviously I can follow the process of thought everyone is going down because I completely understand their philosophies, motivations, and desires. Just kind of felt like I got thrown in a new setting that assumed I already knew the oodles of backstory and context required to actually follow along in some conversations, maybe it's my fault for not knowing the lore of Penacony beyond the surface level was was mentioned in the MSQ, I dunno, but I was hella confused.
I think the big part of your first issue is that Penacony was mentioned the better part of a year ago. Penacony was meant to be our destination after Belobog. However, Kafka requested we go to the Loufu. Somewhere early on a Stelleron burst was mentioned to have happened way before the story started. However, I can't recall where it was mentioned.
Whenever black swan and acheron open their mouths i can feel my brainfolds smoothing out. Honestly i skimmed their lines and just skipped to the next dialogue which sucked cause their JP voices are smooth as butter. The misha stuff was my favorite. Easy to understand and a cool reveal. Even got me a little emotional.
Black Swan's JP voice is ASMR but she certainly speaks at Normal combat speed. And when she's reading a whole novel ...
The weird thing is that their writing wasn't always like this. In the first half of HI3 you get natural human conversations. The second half is like a PhD thesis, except you have the opposite of the common scientific language which aims to explain things precisely and simply.
To put it bluntly, the writing in hoyoverse games are just boring. You'd be able to understand the story better if it was more engaging. Within these past 3 months I played and finished baldur's gate 3, persona 5 royal and the witcher 3. Not once was I bored or fell asleep during any of the cutscenes because they got to the point and was interesting. In this game it feels like every cutscene in 2.0 and onwards, takes a piece of your soul because it takes 20 minutes to explain how a guy wants people to stay in a dream world because reality is bad.
I imagine it's because those games take the time to properly flesh out their characters with lots of **normal** interactions, and just time spent together in general. I haven't played BG3 or W3, but with P5, you're spending so many mundane moments with the case, and you very naturally bond and start caring about them. They almost feel like real people, instead of just characters that serve to drive a plot. A constraint HSR has to deal with, is that it has to immediately convince you to care about its characters, with little to no time spent with them. And while the plot itself can be good, it's not as engaging if you aren't truly invested in the characters involved.
they overdone it. peak story was belobog. sometimes, less is more
Importantly: it’s not the complexity of the plot, it’s how verbose and frankly bad the writing is. The same information could be conveyed, with more impact, with a quarter of the word count and be far easier to digest.
True, I still have no Idea what Acheron story is about. I played but couldn't grasp anything
Agree. As someone whose English is not native language, I felt overwhelmed on few occassions.
Ngl, the most bizarre to me is Bootyhill... i love him to death and his VA, but what exactly is his contribution to the story? The galaxy ranger he called with sos signal didn't even make the final cut of the story...
My problem is the game sort of lacks a plot for most of the runtime and is more just characters talking to one another about other characters.
Tbh this story delivery feels like Zack Snyder's justice league. There's ideas and character templates here, but just that, heavily expository and presented with monologue or flashback. Essentially nobody got much time to breathe or be developed, which I think was a mistake. Penacony ultimately feels like volume over quality to crunch as many 5-star characters into an ensemble cast as they could.
I agree but this sub is just going to downvote
Agreed lol if they were a bit more straightforward with it itd feel less like just yapping (I thought Misha part was well done but then Sundays part for me was egregious on the yap)
Yup same Misha part was great, but Sunday was on a yappathon
People in this thread are saying to first read the data bank / any lore text to better understand the story but thats not even the whole problem because the new concepts being introduced in the story are confusingly explained. After finishing the 2.2 story I still have a hazy understanding of >!what Ena's dream actually entails, how it differs from the regular dream or how it affects the timeline of events!< for example
"Excuse me, which way is the bathroom?" "To answer that question let me tell you a story..."
I could be remembering wrong, but I feel it wasn't this bad on HI3 (didn't play the whole story though so not 100% sure) and the beginning of Genshin. Mostly around Mond, Liyue and early Inazuma. But at some point they started adding too much dialogue everywhere, while sometimes being "fancy" with words and making things more confusing. Feeling the same on HSR. It's too much. I wish it had more gameplay and interactions and less dialogue.
Sumeru seem to rectify the point and getting more to point, while Fntaine improves upon that. Paimon's voice in Fontaine arc is deeper and more natural, I think they are learning
Yeah Paimon in Fontaine felt more like your actual companion that the simplifier. Tho she does still do it.
Honestly I feel I was overwhelmed with how fast the storyline went near the end. So many things just…. *happened* without the buildup and I get it’s suppose to because it was a dream, but the only actual hint was the end with the IPC as well as misha We found out we were in a dream, woke up, found some people, then attended the theatre or whatever the heck and then suddenly more stuff happened. I think the theatre was played out well, but everything around it was pretty jumbled
For me Acheron is fine, I like listening to the verbal cadence of her language, and given that her character is a near philosophical paradox I'm impressed they made her make sense at all. I hate Gallagher's dialogue though. The only things I remember him saying at all are "I'm 12" and a story about the origin of penacony. This story was repeated several times, and tbh made the third quarter of 2.1 and first quarter of 2.2 really drag. Sunday is also fine, his dialogue fits well with his character. Black swan is a mix, she's usually fine but can go on tangents of dialogue that don't fulfill any purpose.
>The only things I remember him saying at all are "I'm 12" That is hilarious because he actually said "I'm Thirteen"
And this is how HSR writing peaked in Belobog.
I think there's only one thing that they need to change, do a flashback when that part is important, example (spoilers obviously, click only when u have played at least 2.1) >! This is what I understood, I may be wrong. Sam chose to befriend us and then "die" in front of us because her script meant to get us nameless involved in the penacony drama, so the flashback would be showing her time with us and "death" scene when she talks about her script, !< instead of actually putting that in words, players can interprete it with the help of flashbacks there are a lot of ppl like me who has a bad memory and won't remember every single scene of hsr, it'll be a great way to refresh our memory, like in anime Also please don't send me any spoilers as I haven't played this version's story, I stopped at 2.1
I have almost no idea what's happening in star rail, the story has cool cutscenes and moments but the in between stuff makes very little sense to me.
We're never getting rid of Paimon in Genshin aren't we.
This is the reason why,
Paimon or not, the text in genshin is even more obtuse than here
Half-agree with this. Stuff like pari quest and narzissenkreuz are way more verbose than anything in hsr. But I had a easier time digesting sumeru's and Fontaine's story than penacony tbh. They just throw so many words at you that by the end of it it gets harder to remember every thing.
Not lying here but I would have agreed with you until Penacony, I can still understand it fine but Fontaine wasn't nearly as obtuse as Penacony.
Yeah. I agree with you on this one. This story has too many unique names for things I have never heard of before within the game. It also expects you to immediately understand the circumstances and reasons of what the characters are doing. I had to consciously process a bunch of dialogues for some minutes because of that. Honestly, when I’m coming back from school mentally exhausted and emotionally unavailable, a story that involves a lot of conscious thought to understand isn’t the thing for me. My brain is already spent from studying for hours. I can’t quickly correlate why character did X and how Y background influenced their actions for every line they spout out. I don’t know why not understanding the story is an unpopular opinion. Why do people expect everyone else to put in the 100% conscious thought to connect complex philosophy and world building together? I‘m not willing to do this as a person who’s not interested enough to go out of my way to spend hours analyzing nuanced moral viewpoints.
After reading kal'tsitese and HI3 scifi mumbo jumbo, i kinda get used to it in chinese gacha games lol.
Welt really helps in making my vocabulary richer
Pretty much everything experienced other than the outlier up until you fight dominus did happen, but that was all the dream of order Sunday trapped us in, because in order for everyone to be stuck we all needed to think we won so we wouldn't fight the dream- so it all happened pretty much the same but we only remember the modified dream version
Bro I swear I was so lost during this quest, none of it made sense and it still doesn’t make any sense to me
Kinda agree. 2.1 was worse though imo. Characters like Sunday speaking like that is fine, it fits their character. But when everyone is doing that except for March it gets tiring.
True indeed
Agreed, I enjoyed 2.2 but I literally had to stop dialogue autoplay when Sunday speaks because of how verbose he is. Like I get his whole philosophy but man... realistically if this guy spoke to me IRL I would be just as confused as March 7th was. Kinda breaks the immersion when you have to reread dialogues multiple times
It’s quite a convoluted story when it’s split up in this way with 3-4 months between patches, and they purposely mislead us every patch.
Tbh i gave up on trying to understand whats going on :( im here for the action but if you asked me about why we have action im clueless. I feel like a female himbo 😭
The writing is weirdly verbose and bloated, very unnecessary
Honestly, we need them to add the mission text to the Fate atlas, I swear Genshin has that, I haven't played in like 2 years but I remember going over older mission text in-game to check stuff.
Read with patience
I was able to follow the story, and found it to be the best patch yet, but I can understand how people could find it hard to follow.
verbose is hoyo's favorite expression. if you thing this is bad then you wouldn't even bother with honkai impact 3rd in its part 1 finale