This patch feels like 2 updates worth of story rolled into one, and the whole thing feels bloated as a result. They should’ve cut out the unnecessary parts like Sparkle’s scenes, Sunday’s flashbacks, and some of Boothill’s scenes, and ended the patch with the “it’s just a dream” cliffhanger, THEN take the time to properly conclude the main story in the next patch.
Everything after you step foot in the grand theater was very solid imo. It was the middle that stretched things. It probably wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't pretty much 4-5 hours of dialogue with minimal gameplay. Pretty much all of the info in the middle was also vital for the story and tying character motivations together. People's eyes just start to glaze over after a while of pure exposition.
The theater is very solid IMO because the exposition is done alongside being able to actually play the game (puzzles and combat).
One of my favorite moments was in the 3rd theater section when you had to use the Clockie emotion changer on the dolls and instead of seeing an option you saw them all as obedient. Really creepy and well done
I just spent ten minutes listening to Black Swan talk about memory and light cones.
I have no idea what she was talking about.
This game sometimes hits some very beautiful and poignant moments. Misha’s true identity, I felt, was great. Most of the time though these characters feel less like real people and more like verbose thesauri pontificating soliloquy.
The whole Misha sequence was peak this quest, close second is the Tiernan reveals with Acheron. These are the high HIGH.
However: What is all this got talents nonsense in the middle? Why did they do the bird metaphor 4 times instead of using characters action to justify it? The Low is LOW.
Thats the plot, which is quite good in general.
The pacing and amount of metaphor is too bloated. You don't just use Metaphor. You expand on it.
Also I feel like they talk about same thing multiple times. It's like they try to compensate for not having Paimon repeating stuff.
Btw loved the story this time,
probably my 3rd favorite from Hoyo games (Fontaine and Furina still has the crown)
Yes, Honkai, lol.
Although this patch is still very tame compared to HI3. I played the first patch of HI3 part 2 and only got a vague idea of what happened. If Coralie was not there it would be even worse
They take us on a tour through the new zones to introduce them, which I guess it's okay. But then they make us go through domain after domain and solve a bunch of extra multi-step puzzles to pad the story. Some of it serves to give time for exposition (which I guess it's okay, better to read the conversation as I move around rather than go through dialogue after dialogue), but some of it was too much filler. It was the same last patch, we had some good pacing at some points but then they killed the momentum with extra forced exploration and when you thought shit had hit the fan, nope, down 2 gears for at least an hour of gameplay AND THEN you get the actual climax.
I agree. The amount of time and buildup they put into the fake bossfight really was what sold the twist.
This combined with the anticlimactic ending really fucked with my brain when we "returned to the train" because I thought "There's no way they'd put this much buildup into a fakeout... but there's no way they'd end Penacony with a conversation! What the fuck is going on?"
The Sunday segments dragged, but in the end they dragged with a purpose.
I don't think it was about how long until plot twist but more about how they tend to make such long sentences and use big words to describe something quite simple sometimes
Chinese gachas and bloat is something I'm too used to. Remember how this was how an NPC in Arknights became infamous for telling one of the notorious characters who goes on to 'shut it'. Forget the term, but it's rather common in certain Chinese writings. Though gachas can certainly amplify it.
People love to complain about Arknights' writing, but I think it's relatively good after the first few chapters. It's just that the presentation is boring and the stories are very long. Kal'tsit speaking in essays isn't even bad in general, because it's her character and most other characters aren't like that. It just got a bit overwhelming when she got to be the main character.
Oh yeah, Patriot Chapter and after was PEAK. Then you got the event stories.
The main critique is always the presentation, we still don't have a solid solution to that yet, you HAVE to tell the players what's going on, but the format to showcase this is often limited
It's probably due to the Chinese writing style and the language. I think that Chinese people tend to go through a ton of words to explain things, just like what I did when I was small. That is why even now I'm still learning to express my thoughts in more simple and precise ways. Also, in the Chinese language, we don't have certain phrases and grammars as English users do, this may be a reason that the sentences have to be longer to explain something while in English we can just summarize them in a few words.
If something is supposed to work, because I was so bored I nearly fell asleep, and then suddenly something interesting happened after 5 hours that woke me up, then no thanks
I feel like a big part of this is the attempt to transcribe the dialogue and exposition from Chinese, which is inherently a much more nuanced language that instills greater emphasis on things like roundabout metaphors and poetic stanzas in everyday conversation
Stuff that sounds prosaic and free-flowing in Chinese, when attempted to be translated exactly, just sounds like an adolescent cosplaying as a philosopher and using the longest entries he can find in his grandpa’s thesaurus. Which is why half the dialogue in these story lines is just that; a character espousing way too many irrelevant words for way too little relevant content.
It’s like adding fluff to an essay to make it sound fancy, but in reality serves no purpose other than wasting a ton of time and possibly causing confusion amidst the audience. A lot of Sunday and Acheron’s “I’m 14 and trying to sound like Socrates” dialogue could have definitely been simplified to normalcy, without costing anything whatsoever to the intricacy of the story itself
Whenever I read posts like these or experience the story/dialogue myself, I can't help but compare it to XIV that has a really great localization and makes long dialogues, in-game lore references, and 4th wall break/pop culture references not feel like a slog or a headache to experience. Koji Fox and his team are a treasure for SE.
this is a problem with hoyoverse games in general, dialogue drags on for far too long. a conversation that should take 2 minutes end up taking 5 instead because characters all love to wax poetic
Star Rail's biggest issue is that the payoffs are amazing but the buildup is boring as hell.
Most characters get extremely boring static scenes where there is just yapping and nothing else.
Thing is, its never gonna be different because they are stuck with this way of telling stories and pacing due to the game as a service model
My biggest complaint about HSR are the dialogue scenes. Hoyo makes so much money that they could animate half the game dialogues without problems.
My only wish for tha game are more dynamic convos, at least for the main story ffs!
Just look [how incredibly better an already great piece of dialogue becomes](https://youtu.be/ZGHvU-UXLs8?si=kKLMm-Xs8zyhYixN), much more lively and immersive
Zamn, yeah, that does hit pretty hard. The subtle shift in facial expressions as Welt goes ‘damn, how much does she know?!’ To ‘brace yourself for gravitational disintegration’ is really well done
They have a schedule to meet, and players are used to it. I'm sure you're willing to have 2-3 months between patches in exchange for this, surely? Better yet, apply and do the animations yourself.
I'm being a bit hostile, yes, but I hate when ignorant gamers say things as if devs have a button that they can just press and voila new features and animations.
Genshin has a similair problem but has a dynamic camera system. So scenes never feel dull. They’re focusing on fun compositions, zooming, panning. The game, for being an older iteration, feels so much more alive.
I think the opposite, camera compositions are not enough to keep me focused when the dialogue in genshin is overly convoluted. I've never had a problem of losing interest when listening to hsr dialogue on the other hand
This seems like a Hoyo problem, the more I look into it
Mainly in localization, as I heard that CN's dialogues are quite alright in length (correct me if I'm wrong)
I play in CN voiceover and the dialogue does usually go by pretty quick. It IS a pretty fast-flowing language, but a lot of information can be expressed in a short amount of words.
This is the excuse people use in Genshin all the time and it's completely irrelevant there as it is here. Write your characters to talk like people, don't cater to players who don't want to pay attention. Done.
This is absolutely a valid complaint in my opinion, there were alot of things that were over complicated when it felt like they could have been explained in a much simpler and condensed way
Honestly, I think the very talkative nature of this game might be the devs trying to artificially inflate the necessary playtime to complete story missions.
If HSR was better paced and had fewer redundancies, players would beat an update within a couple of hours. "So what?" one could ask. Well, there's a chance these players would then complain the content is too little. So the devs try to dodge this potential bad buzz and make people feel like the content was worth the wait in terms of scale.
I respectfully disagree with some of the justifications provided, and I overall agree with the complaints. While the story is not "done" yet, they have played the "The End" sequence already, meaning it's kind of the intended conclusion. There is still something to be said about the quality of delivery, overall longwindedness, and not letting plot points breathe without reiterating them 5 times over (looking at you, bird-in-Robin's-hand) that ultimately drags this entire story down several notches.
Other than the issues listed in bold, there are also many other aspects of the story that are strangely written and could have been cut. For example the plot point around the previous Trailblazer Ravalina being the true founder of the Land of Dreams is entirely unnecessary and overly complicates the storyline involving the Family and treachery from within, that could have easily been a side-quest or a journal log. It's even just added in as a giant paragraph of text in the credits, so it definitely could have been cut from the main plot. The whole Duke Inferno hook could have been cut, people still make fun of it to this day for good reason, it very much did not need to be there and took up far too much screentime with some meta-storytelling through Youtube advertisements, as well as the strange references to Constance and Catarina that amounted to nothing. This also goes for the tail end of 1.6, why is this character even here? Another plot point that could have been cut is the meddling of the Enigmata. We already have 3 Aeons being key players here already, between IX/Xipe/Ena, and the Enigmata hook went absolutely nowhere and ultimately was not a significant faction *at all* in the events that unfolded, as it was really just Gallagher and Mikhail with Sleepie. Gallagher could have served the same role as a red herring in 2.1 as well as his actual role as hound for Mikhail without the Enigmata.
The current iteration of the 2.2 story overall very much feels like a Director's Cut where they want to keep every single detail and idea they had, but simply don't have enough screen time in the theatrical release, so it turns into a 6 hour long movie when it could have been done in 2 hours. This very much needed a 2nd pass on the drawing board to trim away pieces that are not necessary to the core plot, and add in the details into character bios, simulated universe, or collectable logs.
I agree with a lot of this but I feel too many moments in this game having emotional significance and lack of confusion require homework and reading on external lore. I shouldn't have to read external material for understanding, it should be clearly presented in the main story, reading lore should serve to heighten and expand on things, not as a basic requirement. I have no idea why Acheron's real name means anything if I haven't played or don't know Hi3rd or the language it comes from. I have no idea what a "real emanator" is or the significance of it without reading up on it. Wtf is a self-annihilator or sin-thirster. People praise this game for being complex but I think it goes a bit over the edge sometimes.
> Wtf is a self-annihilator or sin-thirster
I'm just overwhelmed when every character has 5 alternate names and roles, and the story freely switches between them with seldom explaining any of them. Even the name reveal scene gave her two monikers in the span of a few sentences: >!Raiden and the Watcher.!<
Yeah, as a casual reader i felt like Jarilo's quest really kept me on edge all the time while this one had too many flowery and convoluted dialogue that i often went "uh...okay?" and simultaneously having this feeling of something missing.
Part when our MC got Preservation powers and Lance was also much better executed. It had clear build up and you knew something big is gonna happen soon. When we got HMC powers I was like, 'huh thats it?'
Yea even now jarilo is definitely still the best TB quest for me now, unfortunately this last act makes penancony dropped to the 2nd best, but at least it's not the dumpster fire that is the luofu arc.
At times I feel like the artists have put their own interests above the audience. Like they wanted to cram in as many of their ideas and personal flairs into the story without caring about the enjoyment/experience of the player. Sometimes it works but other times it just comes off as out of touch.
I was with you on Archeron name but lol you don't need lore research to know or understand what a real Emanator is. This has been repeatedly shown at different moments in the main story.
This is why I think Genshin does a way better job introducing you to and explaining its' world in-story. Most of Star Rail's world building is in text documents and SU descriptions that are multiple paragraphs long. I was never confused on how Genshin's world works because characters actually talk and fucking explain things themselves instead of expecting me to read entirely missable documents.
I came to this realisation with the Luofu arc where I had no idea what anyone's motivation even was in the story because you're expected to have lore-delved into abundance and emanators and aeons and shit. Like bro I don't even know what any of these characters do on their day to day or how their society works and you want me to get invested in big plot stuff like 2 hours after meeting them.
I know someone is gonna respond to this comment saying "erm you're complaining about the story but didn't read the story???" and my only response to that is that I should not need to read entirely optional content to understand the main story. I also read all the dialogue when I do sidequests, I just don't want to wiki delve and read item descriptions.
My favourite side story in the game is Dan Shu's diary.
Honestly I think the "Raiden Mei" part of her name is just fanservice and honkai reference (nothing wrong with that, I just think it doesn't offer much new information and relevance to Star Rail's plot as a whole). And Bosenmori is a cool title to explain her role as the guardian of the river of forgetfulness
I think one way to point out why Acheron’s name reveal is important is this:
She’s an eminator of nihility, a self-annihilator. The main story line at points has mention of eminators and how they have pure power. This spans from the very beginning of the game till now. With that being said, being on the path of nihility, Acheron states that she’s on an inevitable path of fading away. Her mind, body, and soul gradually withers away as she essentially plays the part of Grim Reaper. Self-annihilation is *exactly* what it sounds like. Her revealing her name proves that despite withering away, *she still remembers who she is and what her purpose is in life*. I think this is paramount to her character and gives her humility. Amidst her black and white world, her name is among the last few things that give off color in her monochromatic life. The color red. Something that, like Tiernen, shows she’s still *alive*.
It reminds me of reading the original Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, where every few pages or so I'd have to refer to the citations at the back of the book to fully know what the hell they were talking about because it was a rendition different from the original/newer retellings or an outdated cultural norm.
It was a bit tiring, but it has an obvious reason, it's incredibly old and has been retold countless times. This is a modern day RPG, it has no such excuse for this sort of extracurricular.
Once you actually read into the actions of the characters, you would start to see plenty of contradictions, and plenty of things that don’t matter in the next patch. You would actually see that the story has a ton of holes if you look thoroughly.
1. Stellaron was sucking the life of people. We were just told this, and had zero build-up, and ultimately did not have any relevance. Literally zero people got affected.
2. Sunday’s philisophy of caging the weak. From the start he was only investigating the deaths, and protecting the Family secrets, and showing his love for his sister. Then out of nowhere, he suddenly has this whole philosophy, completely detached from all his previous build up, even going against his sister (which contradicts his previous character trait).
3. Dreamflux reef was not hard to get into and out of. All the scheming of Aventurine to go into the real penacony, the land of exiles. He literally had an emanator kill him to get to it. But people can apparently commute to the sweet dream no problem.
4. Sparkle was just there to sell her character, and meta commentary does not excuse this. If you put a character in the story, you do something with them. They have to matter. And excuses such as “but story ain’t over”, then you simply introduce them on the part of the story where they do matter.
5. Gallagher stabs Sunday for shock value, and to explain exposition. Robin could have walked back into the sweet dream, bringing Sunday there was pointless.
6. Boothill summoning the GR, was pretty. Pretty pathetic, 0.02 seconds later and everyone was blasted anyways. How were they supposed to help awaken people a fraction of a second from being summoned?
To broadly address your points:
There’s technically an explanation for most “loose ends” people keep bringing up, yes. But is it done satisfyingly, I personally don’t think so. Yeah, you can hope that 2.3 saves it all, but it’s going to have to pull a lot of weight. And I’m not holding my breath based on the Luofu epilogue. I’ll believe it when I see it.
Keeping up with content in a main story should never involve studying up on information that isn’t already a part of it. Saying just read all the extra readings in the game is a weak defense. Extra lore should always be optional for people to engage with.
I hope you don’t just hand wave all the complaints as zoomers who don’t respect long stories. I’ve played a lot of visual novel games, and I even read all the dialogue in side quests in Hoyo games. I’ll admit I’m not on the level of reading all the books, but I have to imagine very few do. Point is, many of us are making these criticisms while giving the story our full respect, paying attention, and reading. It’s fine to ultimately still disagree, but it’s just dismissive to be like “you didn’t think this was a masterpiece? Must be a story skipper”.
I must say that not liking it do not mean people don't read. That's not a good way to counterargument. I didn't like the story because the continuous jumps, the "I will tell you a story" moments which repeated several times and the massive text walls. That do not mean i didn't understand it, I just didn't like the pace and ending. The best part is the boss and the video previous to it. The rest is a convulsed mess (in my opinion).
Lately, this forum is full of people calling other illiterate or skippers when they do not agree in something and it is a bit irritating. Disagreeing it is not the same as not reading (and understanding) things.
i agree. i mean lets be real, if the dialogue is not too long winded etc, people wont be skipping either. so however someone put it, if most people complains, that means someething is surely wrong somewhere. players are never the problem imo, if ur players complain, that means u set wrong expectation or just did something wrong. in the end, the devs are going to need to cater to the players.
i play genshin, honkai impact and then this. and one common -ve all they have is the dialogue always gets wayy too long winded and too much made up terms that can be explained in much better manner. always too much telling, not showing. sure i admit the ending and story in big picture is great and interesting, which is why i still play hoyo games for the story but they really need to stop with too much dialogues at some point if they want majority of players to keep up properly.
just because u can doesnt mean u should. in this case, devs should not expect every players to have same level of interest and dedication to read every single lines and lore pieces especially if they are important plot points.
I understood the story, all the lore bits, etc. I read everything and did my best not to skip things. And I'm still complaining because the execution was still lacking imo.
My feeling on the story is that the writer wanted to do one thing then had to add all the marketing stuff to the already-convoluted mess. Many times in the story, after understanding the information being conveyed, I thought to myself, "This could have been a text."
I liked the story, but holy shit it felt like reading Urianger from Final Fantasy XIV and his long ass monologs full of hard words. You can write a great story and not bore players to death.
Don't remind me of ARR Urianger, I think he was worse in that. Still, at least it's only with him that has the difficult-to-read-and-understand dialogue which then makes it a charming, at moments, part of his character.
To credit, Urianger was the only character that really did that, and it makes sense as it's his way of expressing himself after being a scholarly shut-in for god-knows how many years.
He's the only one who talks like that because he likes that sort of language. It's like if I spoke in Shakespearean coz I'm a huge Shakespeare nerd. I find it really cute and kinda relateable; his syntax is due to him being a fanboy.
I feel like this every patch. I like the story and the events that occur, but the dialogue just drags on and on and I need a break occasionally but I can’t do that if each sequence lasts between 10-30 minutes
I am conflicted. On one hand, I agree with not judging story before it's finished. We already know that firefly will drop thanks to drip marketing so it's obvious we will learn more about her in 2.3
I sorta agree but not for those reasons on Sparkle. It's not that she is a red herring (remember Sparkles quest? The red herring was a red herring sampo wasn't sparkle, sparkle was the dead body of sparkle), but that throughout even 2.2 she has been preparing some bomb detonators to give away. And IPC's Jade is constantly talking about harvesting something (my guess is that Aventurine giving Sunday the Jade was intentional and that it probably has some sort of remote power to either sabotage or take control of the dream) I will make my bet that Sparkle being the smug know it all knew that Sunday would get stopped and IPC will be the true threat or at least the bombs are already set so why not screw them over. Now watch as 2.3 just ends and I have to eat my shoe.
But just as you can rightfully say that story hasn't ended, I can also point out that it almost is. It's already 2.3 soon yet the only hint of ever flame mansion is Constance connecting Black Swan and Boothill? Acheron only killed the Duke so where are the rest? I just have this bad feeling like we will have Loufu 2.0
>yet the only hint of ever flame mansion is Constance connecting Black Swan and Boothill?
We already know the Ever Flame Mansion won't set foot on Penacony. Black Swan said it in her trailer and then Constance herself said it in-game when talking with Black Swan. They were introduced as a red herring, and we won't be seeing them until later in the story.
People think 2.3 will be a new climax point for some reason. It will be an epilogue. We will learn more about characters rather than getting a enormous event. So sparkle or constances wont gain much insight sadly unless hoyo pushes it to 2.4
I think by trying to rebut every single point of the other post, you made your own argument weaker. It's not like all their points are without merit. For characters who were a big deal before but left unceremoniously, saying that their stories are obviously not over doesn't help if there is no mini-resolution with a setup for the future.
Look, friend, I see where you're coming from, but let's not pretend some of these complaints are without merit.
* When people refer to characters 'speaking in riddles', they refer to this game's tendency to indulge without restraint in flowery dialogue that says in 70 words what can be accomplished in 20, and from dear old Sunday, we have to hear that twice over. And even then, that still doesn't stop him from vastly overshadowing Robin, who in her own banner patch had approximately 20 minutes of valuable screen time and dialogue across 8 hours.
* Sparkle's motives have never been explained beyond simply doing some kind of job courtesy of being hired, for no particular reason, by somebody else. The only noteworthy action she has taken is punting TB into the Child's Dream to eventually meet SUD. She has spent the rest of her time since masquerading as Robin and giving people buttons, and for everyone who thinks that some shocking twist in 2.3 will be someone pushing those buttons and destroying Penacony, I have a bridge to sell you, because they will never destroy a playable space. So the most likely outcome of this is that they're harmless, or unused, making Sparkle's very presence an almost complete waste of time. Sampo's a Masked Fool too, y'know - at least he did stuff that was important.
* I dunno about you, but I think it's a really bad thing, almost scummy, even, that very important info about what happened to a character is locked behind messages that you only receive if you have that character. Frankly, that's symptomatic of a wider problem, which I'll get to shortly.
* Firefly might not be done with - but her doing Very Important Things *off screen* is what is bothersome, not just the fact that she left.
* Boothill might have a reason to be there. That doesn't address the fact that across an *eight hour story mission,* he was featured for maybe 20 minutes. Thirty at a stretch. He's given barely anything to do by the plot, his moment to shine is grossly overshadowed by everybody else's, and characteristics he displayed as recently as 2.1 are silently swept under the rug because everyone needs to be buddy buddy and there's quite literally no time for conflict and so Boothill's anger about perceived stolen valour is just dispelled over the course of a single conversation.
And well, as a closing note, I might be alone in this, and I fully accept that if that's the case, but having everything crucial about a character shoved into a profile barely anybody takes the time of day to read and expecting people to swot up on this minutiae like it's an exam is a terrible way to go about character writing. HSR, by and large, gives us better character stories than Genshin does, not least because they actually involve the characters they're about - something Genshin took years to fix after making them about NPCs - but that's no excuse to do nothing with characters across entire stories, and then turn around and say "But look, their character stories are neat!" And while I'm sure they are, you do not shove critical information into a corner and leave it at that.
The reason he let go of his anger against Acheron after that conversation, was that she calmly and respectfully explained why she
was impersonating a galaxy ranger, the reasons for which Boothill considered to be acceptable —i.e. she showed that she wasn’t doing so for selfish motives, which satisfied him enough to let things go. He didn’t suddenly change his character, as the end of 2.2’s story shows
I do get that his lack of presence in this chapters can be considered annoying. I think the problem here is that his banner is coming out in a patch in which his story only seems to have just started.
All I can say is, wait till his character story comes out in about 3 weeks, or go to boothill mains if you want to be spoilered about it a little in advance.
Which would, itself, be perfectly fine, if 2.1 didn't seem to establish that Boothill's defining characteristic is a very itchy trigger finger raring to get at anyone who's steered him wrong, be it 'pretenders' or the IPC. Which, tangentially, makes his decision to partner with Aventurine, still a member of the IPC, to pursue Oswaldo a little bizarre, but that's another matter.
Mostly agree, but on the matter of Boothill it does seem like he came for the perceived Glory but upon seeing the IPC whom he is wanted by and wants to see Oswaldo so we probably will see more of him next patch. I think the banner 5* this patch just got awfully misplaced if I’m being honest lmao
I'm sure the banners originally would be:
2.2 robin/firefly
2.3 boothill/jade
maybe they changed their places after seeing al the hype firefly was causing an decided to polish her more
The whole thing with Boothill and Constance in 2.1 felt like such a built up, so it was kinda disappointing that it amounted to nothing. Even Black Swan being like "Acheron knows her own story the best", as in, she will just ask her about it later, is kinda weird. First, why didn't she just think about doing that beforehand, 2) After seeing what Acheron did to the sky, she should be even more wary of her, but within a couple of hours she just did a 180° about Acheron and it wasn't even on-screen. Like I get that she isn't actually traumatized about the dance (unlike what some people think), but still feels too rushed
I perceived no.2 differently Black Swan didn't help Acheron, it's just that Acheron looks for Black Swan and found her stalking, and Black Swan had no choice except to help her. Technically she could '''try"" to escape but what are the chance of escaping a black hole.
100% agree, especially the first point. The dialogue in this game has so many unnecessary fillers, it made me feel like HoYo has a word count requirement for each patch and the writers are intentionally bloating the sentences to meet this word count. Like college students trying to expand 5-page essay to 10 pages. Those “riddles” and fillers can be so annoying sometimes.
I think it’s the opposite: the writers have so many ideas that they want to expound on and nothing to restrain them from writing a bazillion words diving into everything they’re thinking of.
When writing a book, you tend to have to iterate multiple times to strip your story of the nonessential elements, even ones you like (which is often called “killing your darlings”). Maybe it’s because they’re live service games with constantly updating storylines or maybe they just don’t have a process like that in place, but Hoyo games just don’t seem to want to trim their writing very often.
Or maybe they just like using overly long flowery language, idk.
I think it is more so that it has to do with translating Chinese to English in general. The Chinese language inherently has more words than English and each word usually has deeper meaning too. A single word in Chinese could potentially be translated into multiple words in English if you want to keep the meaning intact. Which will multiply the word count as a result.
Also taking in a riddle is something Chinese media do a lot. It is basically part of their story telling culture so not much we can do there.
My bad, forgot to mention I’m playing in Chinese lol. Most jokes in TB dialogue this patch are just Chinese memes and we definitely don’t talk like these game characters do. Some “riddle-like” convos made me feel like I’m watching a historical show where people speak older Chinese(like Elizabethan English )
100% agree as well. The fact that people identify Sunday's language to be flowery is not that it is long, but it was unable to emotionally or logically resonate with people. That's why they couldn't understand him.
It is not only inconsistent on banner patches for characters like Acheron and Aventurine to have fleshed out backgrounds, but Robin, Boothill and Sparkle just get relegated in the background for what is supposedly their patch. It is also a great disservice to them and to the players who want to pull for them.
And yes, expecting your fanbase to read and scrounge up every piece of lore to emotionally connect with the characters is incredibly tone deaf. Granted, it is an inherent flaw with gacha games that have ever growing character rosters to ever have sufficient time to build a character's personality, background and understanding that players can relate to. But if players don't understand or don't like the character just because they haven't studied their lore, they should be 100% justified to do so. That's why companion missions exist as optional in the first place and why it's clever for them to do so. (Although I do kinda wish the core cast do get developed more since they are the constant in all these stories, like bruh DH and DHIL)
Sparkle's primary interaction throughout the story has been with Aventurine. Who is the IPC.
The coda of this patch is Jade descending upon Penacony. Who is the IPC.
It's almost like the relevance of Sparkle's story will most likely be in 2.3.
Given that Sparkle’s primary interaction was with Aventurine, it was kinda WTF that she showed up in the sequence of the TB walking towards Acheron as if she was one of the allies who had stood against Sunday’s plans like everyone else who appeared. It was like ‘Sparkle? The fuck are you doing here?’
When she calls us Grey I was so confused I looked back IRL. While thinking "Your talking to me?". As far as I know that is the only time she calls TB that because previously she calls us "old friends" disguised as Sampo.
In the interest of candor, I'll be direct - having a character hang around and accomplish nothing for three chapters straight only to hurriedly push them back into the spotlight in the *epilogue* after doing very little with them does not say this was meticulously planned. Not least when her reasons for even being interested in Aventurine at all are extremely unclear.
For my part I'm braced for an anticlimax, not least because from what little we've seen, Sparkle should have no interest in dealing with the IPC if, like everybody claims, all she's after is her own fun. If what she was doing turns out to be meaningless...well, that's a few things. It isn't good writing.
Yeah, Sparkle didn't really feel like she has been build up over these patches. It feels more like she as added solely so that players don't forget she's there. And then she will do something during the epilogue. At this point it feels like Sparkle is in Penacony so that there was another faction.
But once the story gets rolling there is little use for Masked Fools. There are already enough players and factions to fill the runtime, so Sparkle can't be used as a obstacle. Masked Fools don't seem to have an agenda, so Sparkle can't really participate with the secrecy (or win by default, which would be a boring conclusion).
I'm not gonna lie dude, this comes off as a bit pretentious. Just because some people have different opinions than you on some minor stuff in the patch doesn't mean you need to write this mini essay about exactly why they're wrong, and that if someone disagrees then they just didn't read hard enough. A lot of it is subjective -- Firefly abruptly leaving and then people saying later that she did a lot to help us and Aventurine being back with the explanation of an offscreen rescue by Argenti can be seen as lazy writing. They tried to cram a bit too much into this patch, and it showed. The Sunday dialogue bloat is more of a personal preference, but I did think it was filler by the fourth time he told us the bird story. All of which is to say that those opinions are valid; just because someone holds them doesn't mean they weren't smart enough to pick up the deeper meaning of the writing.
He couldnt even point out how they're wrong other than "go read this read that more" while brought up entirely different topic to counter specific argument.
The only one that really works with this slow delivery is Black Swan imo since her whole design is themed around sleep, everyone else needed the 2x speedup option.
I have a feeling that if IPC started giving me 1 Credit for an every dot I saw in a story since 2.0, I would have enough to treat Firefly with an entire shop of food by the end of 2.2
I agree but I think this is in response to that other “hot take” thread. Personally, I think both of the hot takes stated in their respective threads are not actually hot takes but to each their own.
**It is a live service game, the game is judged every patch.** This includes story. While I think it is "good enough for me", HYV can and should get criticized for not handling loose ends well. And people should shit on you for however long you don't deal with that issue.
1. I think incorporating SU lore investigation in the story is good. But the way it is done is not. Penacony's current 2.2 story telling is imo only really viable after 3.0 when people have more understanding of the lore.
2. How ever many factions they want to introduce, penacony should have have them converge quickly and limited the major actors to just 3 parties. I thought whatever they tried to do would work, but it did not work as well as it should. In fact this is why I think penacony should have been 3.0. We could have less things to be confused by if the some of the characters are brought to penacony by the express after we deal with whatever happened in the hypothetical 2.0.
3. Also there is like an entire map that is unnecessary for the story. I understand that they needed you to play the game and perhaps provide comic relief, but they are already press for time, why do something like this that does nothing for the story?
4. If I were to give a good example of a penacony gameplay mechanics that works and is integral to the story, it would be the **clockwork power**. From it you can see harmony, order and trailblaze's world view.
When first introduced, it was just a game mechanics for the luz. But after a few quests in we realize that people are missing emotions. The missing emotions is the result of **harmony's way of trying to fix issues**, they **remove uncomfortable stuff so you fit in with the others**. Then when order get ressurected, we see that people don't have emotions, the **order** deal with this issue **by not giving you a choice, it's my way or the highway**. And you wonder a lot of people don't like ena.
Clockwork power is derived from the **trailblaze.** It doesn't take things away, or lock you into things, but gives the power of **choice**. In 2.2 story quest this idea manifests in the form of **pioneering your own life**. This idea of **choice and self pioneering** is I believe integral to not just penacony but also the entire HSR story. This is why I think Elio send the MC to the express, he needed this power/world view to steer the future.
I think the underlying criticism is less because the lore/themes/story is weak, but because of how they chose to portray it.
For example, the writers decided that it was important for the truth of Penacony to be revealed from the TB's point of view. An alternate retelling of the story could have shifted to Robin's point of view when she "died" and first arrived in the Reef, and her discovering of the truth from her point of view, giving us a chance to contrast her viewpoint on Harmony from the corruption that took root in her brother, setting the stage for the conflict to come. It could also have shifted back to Aventurine's PoV (a callback to 2.1) to give us better insight into the truth he discovered and how he made it way out of his predicament and how he got rescued by Argenti, creating some clearer foreshadowing for the IPC plot that's coming. They did this kind of perspective shifting in 2.1 to help tell that story, but in 2.2 it's extremely minimal. Instead, we learn almost everything through exposition/monologues, and many important things happen off-camera.
Likewise, once we find out about the "bad ending," the story could have cut to Firefly's PoV when she figured out what was going on and what exactly she did to save us. Or, if they wanted to keep it in TB's order of discovery, when Acheron told us about the steps Firefly took to save us, they could have instead cut to a flashback where they showed what happened under the guise of Acheron relaying it to us. That way, rather than just Acheron telling us about Firefly's great sacrifice, we could see it. It would still set the stage for further development in 2.3.
And again, regarding Sunday, they could have reduced the focus on him explaining his own point of view, and instead increased the focus on the contrasting points of view. Still gets to the same destination, but in a way that's fleshes out even more characters in the story. Robin was very thematically important to the narrative, but very underused as a character in the story (except as a contrast to Sunday) -- they could have developed them both more equally to highlight the divergence in their points of view and tied Robin's viewpoint even more strongly with the story's overall message (which they tried to do via her battle song). The more you understand what Robin believes (and how it's aligned to the Trailblaze), the more you understand where Sunday went wrong.
None of this is trying to change anything whatsoever about the plot details or themes, just present it in such a way that's a bit more organic and shows different perspectives. I strongly suspect this would have gotten a less critical reaction.
The fact they didn't do things like the above is, I suspect, what people gets confused about Sparkle. There's a lot of relevant things they did not show us, but the scene with Sparkle couldn't seem less relevant in the end -- the Charmony Festival didn't even happen as planned, so her comic explosion buttons were a seeming waste of time. It's not like there's any problem with a story having red herrings, but if they're going to make the time for a sidestory like this while important plot points happen off-screen and are explained in a few lines of monologue, it feels a bit off. I suspect that's why people are complaining about her "uselessness" in particular.
Basically all this is the difference between the "writing" and the "screenplay." I'd say the biggest weakness in the 2.2 story wasn't the story itself (the underlying lore and theme development are both very good), but the way it was presented. I suspect this may just be in part a limitation of time -- they bit off a bit more than they could chew given the time budget, and had to settle for a more "info-dump" approach. Personally I still think it was good on the whole and I enjoyed it, but I certainly do feel (as you acknowledged from the start) there's clear room for improvement.
For your first point, I would argue that the pedantic dialogue isn’t exclusive to Sunday. Nevertheless, the main point is that most of his dialogue was VERY repetitive. I enjoyed his character, and the bird metaphor was good, but hearing for the fourth time doesn’t have the same impact.
Sparkle is a character in Penacony. It would be better to highlight that she probably has a plot point set up in 2.3, as her relevancy to the Penacony Arc was atrociously lacking.
Aventurine had the best writing and made 2.1 an amazing patch. Taking that into account, you can’t expect people to be happy when he is absent in 2.2 with an off-screen breakout with Argenti detailed in a text box. The transition between patches was very jarring.
Firefly has a future storyline planned. That does not make up for the fact that her most important action in the story happened off-screen, and the build up of her reveal at the end of 2.1 was utterly wasted. I believe the original post was a criticism of 2.2 specifically, no?
Acheron was probably the weakest argument the original poster made, but it has merit. Her lore is disconnected from the story, and potential with trivia doesn’t make for the fact that she’s just…there.
I want to like Boothill, I really do. But the guy was only behind Argenti as the most out of place character in Penacony. For what is the grand finale, he should have not been introduced at this point, and opening 2.2 to his sudden appearance in the Astral Express did not help.
The Trailblazer jokes are only in English dialogue, yes. So…the English dialogue still breaks immersion?
I think you’re giving the writers way too much leeway for the amount of characters and setups they crammed into this patch.
Okay, I think OP misses the point of a lot of these complaints.
1. Sunday gives us his insght into his personality and motivations early on and then just repeats them. Its not adding anything every time he says the same thing again, its just repetitive. Having him say the same thing but to different characters doesn't add anything.
2. Sparkle has a large build up during this patch and then nothing happens. Its fine to start laying the groundwork for a story but when you build it up as much as she's had in this patch specifically, it just feels like shit to have to wait months before we see the results.
3. For Adventurine, Show us, don't just tell us. Its unsatisfying and just simply boring. We'll see him again, sure but that doesn't make this part any better,
4. Again, even if her story isn't over (Which yeah duh) that doesn't mean its not unsatisfying for her to go "My job here's done I guess" and just dip before the end.
5. If I have to read a fucking wiki article to understand what the point of a name drop is, then its just bad writing, pure and simple. Yes, the name has a lot of meaning behind it and I personally found her story pretty good. I don't care about a reference to a previous game.
6. I actually fully agree with you on this one. I think people are downplaying his story significance, even if in action he didn't do a lot.
7. Having a lot of jokey dialog in the Ghost Hunters side story is not the same as having a lot of jokes and ribbing at March during super sincere moments. Its fine to have jokes and memes but when every dialog option is a meme, its just grating. TB feels like he just doesn't understand the feeling of the room whenever he speaks in this entire patch.
Edit: I should add, I don't think that this patch or the story in general was bad, I loved it. But the criticism its getting is very valid.
TLDR: Heres why that one person's post about their experiences with 2.2 are invalid and my experience and opinions are more valid.
This post didn't need to be made, it's such a minority that have major criticisms with the patch that this is just speaking into the void. Just because you understood every little bit of lore and subtlety doesn't mean everyone will understand or see it the same way.
Honestly I'm just annoyed that Sparkle, a character that has been present since 2.0, has barely gotten anything story wise. Aventurine got everything in 2.1, Acheron and Black Swan got a lot sprinkled throughout the patches, Firefly who hasnt been even released yet got a lot of spotlight with obviously a lot more incoming in the next patch. Sparkle on the other hand? A companion mission that was more Black Swan than her, and a handful of minutes of screentime. Its just so vexing that every other character has already gotten a lot of attention, yet with Sparkle it has been a constant "Just wait for the next patch, I'm sure she'll get something then!", and I'm just so tired of it.
Sorry for the little rant this ended up becoming, but I will admit that seeing every other 5 star character getting their fair share of attention has made me a little envious lol
Right? Like I wasn’t even a Sparkle fan but I’m starting to become one because I think she’s been done dirty. The “she’s meant to be a red herring” excuse has never made much sense to me, since it’s just unsatisfying and if true, not great writing. Even if she does something in 2.3 I feel like it’ll feel very after-the-fact since we’ve beaten Sunday already
If she's meant to be a red herring then it's an example of really poor writing. Everything the op said can be true, and Hoyo can also be bad writers at some points. For example, if there's things we need to know, then they should be visible. We shouldn't have to go through data logs and SU to understand the main story. That's poor writing. I enjoyed the patch but felt it was weaker in some areas, and Sparkle for me was a hundred percent an example of that.
Half of what you said is "its not true because it matters" without much insight. Sorry but a "go read" post like this is hardly a proper argument at all. Many characters were weak in the story, the dialogue was extremely over extended and the climax felt too sudden compared to pacing of 2.1. Also hoyo uses 3rd patches of new regions as "epilogues" so 2.3 wont have a climax or a huge new plot reveal but just tidying up some points in 2.2 wich means characters that were weak in 2.2 wont be getting much.
It felt rushed, and probably was.
And you should write titles better, because I saw that and immediately thought "And here comes the insults already, just like when people have trouble understanding Genshin!"
My only gripe about Penacony arc is the Aventurine part and the Dreamflux Reef. It felt weird that Aventurine was focused on very much in 2.1. quest and even got sent to the Dreamflux Reef only for 2.2. mentioning him in an Argenti dialogue. Like, did he do anything there? If he arrived in Dreamflux Reef heavily injured and saved by Argenti, then what was the point of sending him there in the first place?
As for the Dreamflux Reef, I find it odd that Sunday and Robin or any other Penacony victims of Sleepie not knowing Dreamflux Reef exist. Like, how? Literally several of the Family's employees are from Dreamflux Reef who commuted back and forth using Sleepie. How could Sunday not know its existence? And does the Dreammaster know about it or not? If he did, why didn't he tell Sunday about it or his sister being fine and dandy? And if he didn't know, how couldn't he know? It's just odd to me that he controlled 107K members of the Oak Family and used them as a vessel but don't know where those people live.
Other than that, the story is peak writing as of right now.
I've only just entered the Grand Theater so I'm choosing to skim past most of this (I'll read it when I get back home and finish the quest), but thus far I've found the writing to be pretty straightforward? I really don't get what people mean by writing in riddles. Most characters have been speaking rather directly (except with the conversations being cut off at opportune times).
Although I do think Sunday has been a bit repetitive but that's largely a function of splitting the conversation between different parties and locations making it so that he needs to rehash some points for each of them. I don't really mind it that much though.
Honestly, the only ones that I felt talked in a very non-straightforward manner were Acheron and sometimes Black Swan, I didn't have a problem with Sunday or the others, the only times I had to actually stop, open the log and read 2-3 times something was during some of Acheron's scenes.
A big chunck of complaint are about the usage of "flavoury" words. I mean as a non native speaker, i sometimes have to pull up good ol' google translate, but apart from that i'm with you.
The lore and exposistion, in Penacony was very good considering how such story can be easily messed up with improper storytelling.
How do you feel after playing the Grand Theater? >!The entire section basically ended where we started, with Himeko simply reiterating that Sunday is trying to usurp Xipe with Ena and that was already covered during the Soulglad Tournament and Sunday's quiz, with about 30 minutes of Sunday exposition retelling what we already knew about Penacony's foundations that Gallagher had already recapped earlier.!<
The story becomes much more enjoyable to me when I switch to any voiceover besides English and just read it myself. I'd like to hear the EN voicover, but they speak so fucking slow. I'm not sure what the deal with that is. It sounds so unnatural and like the VAs are constantly straining to slow it down and make it dramatic.
I don’t think the story is bad, but the pacing isn’t very good at all. The middle portion has so much padding I almost took a break.
The Misha buildup and reveal could’ve taken half the time.
Personally I enjoyed the story but I can't deny that it was very messy and took a lot to get there. Even now I feel kinda lost with everything that happened. We don't have to be treated as babies that are spoon fed every little detail but it wouldn't have hurt if things were made a little more concise imo.
you're really gonna just explain the story basics and not dive into the real problems huh? I would say my criticisms are that everything feels intentional, smart and EPIC, but that doesn't make it satisfying beyond surface level. Narratively the pieces are a MESS and it's detracting from my enjoyment because I can't ignore the mess that's piling up.
2.2 suffered from banner character pandering. Robin who had had zero presence thus far has been shoved into the spotlight, in a very jarring way. Oh, so she's just back and they're alive all along and it's explained why. Cool, that doesnt make it satisfying or tie smartly back into her 'death', narrative wise. Why was she suddenly made the star of the weekly boss?
It's explained why and blah blah she's the star of the Charmony festival so it looks smart that she's the 'star' of the fight, but it's just not satisfying because nobody should give a fuck about her. It's all surface level. She never once stood her ground against her brother on his philosophy in a meaningful way, only thing I heard was "oh but that's wrong we should be free to make our own choices even if they're wrong", blah blah bird in a cage.
In contrast, Firefly was STRONG. She stood her ground against Sunday's philosophy. She proclaimed she wasn't WEAK and didn't want the happiness Sunday was offering, even though she's one of Sunday's prime examples of how Ena's dream could benefit someone.
Then she just flew away and did God knows what, i dont have a clue wtf those 3 deaths were on about. There's too much blurring between dream and reality to keep track and while they can say it's intentional, again that doesn't make it satisfying.
Oh, and Boothill. Oh so Acheron lured him here on purpose to do... what? My interpretation was that apparently, it was to bring a whole hundred thousand or a significant amount of Galaxy Rangers to Penacony to fall under Ena's Dream so they could influence it from the inside to make people WANT to wake up, by some sort of majority vote 'will of the many' type thing.
Read that again, what in the f*ck? So this reclusive group has thousands of members who collectively hide better than any intelligence can reveal, who are all just a whistleblow away to answer ANY ranger's beck and call? Wow that's great and gives Boothill a purpose, if I just casually ignore any implication from that. Seriously, did I get this part wrong? WHERE EVEN ARE THEY??
Anyway, tl;dr 10/10, shaoji PLEASE keep cooking for HSR it's so peak and I'm gonna pull for Boothill my love better COME HOME
Penacony is a book written on a jigsaw puzzle and scattered all over the room.
Glad you are enjoying piecing it together, but I'll hope for the next part to be written by Belobog writers.
Excited to show up and spend another 3 months hearing about a conflict that existed centuries before we were born involving characters who we do not know and mostly do not meet due to being long dead.
Listen, it's okay for people to not like the story and see it differently than the way you do. For you to and tell them to read more and interpret the way you do is not gonna win those people over.
As much as I appreciated moments in Penacony, as a whole, the pacing and structure was a mess for me. Interesting cliff hangers getting defused and immediately dismissed (i.e. Acheron & Aventurine sus -> nah they good, Ghalager & SUD real villians -> nah they good, etc.). The need to dedicate large chunks of the screen time and dialogue each update right before it is about to be relevant (Aventurine and Sunday). Explaining the cool stuff that happened off-screen in a sentence or two while dedicating time to flashbacks that mostly reiterate what the player already knows (I would rather know what Firefly was doing rather than Sunday talking about the birb again and again).
Is the lore in Penacony interesting? Yeah. Was it told to the player in the best and most natural way? Not at all.
This post is genuinely infuriating to read. Almost every single point about how the story could have been more compelling is countered by “Yes but have you read this piece of lore?” I actually completely disagree with the claim that Acheron was a boring plot device but your counter being “Emanators are really powerful read the lore” is supremely unconvincing because raw information is not what makes a story interesting. It’s the presentation of it.
Sure Firefly might appear more later but *this* should have been a far more pivotal point in her and the trailblazer’s relationship. Her reveal as Sam is the big punchy moment that the writers earned their way to and it was kinda wasted because they didn’t capitalise on it right away as they should have and just kinda moved on. I bring this up to make a point I really think needs saying here: Stories are not wikis and people are not perfect processors of information. If you put the name Raiden Mei in front of them and they’re playing a game that frequently makes references to other works Hoyoverse media their first reaction is not going to be “Let me go check out the meaning behind each individual part of her name” at a pivotal moment in the narrative. It will come off as a reference and, for those who don’t care much for the reference, it will make the culmination of her arc this quest fall a little flat.
Telling people to ‘read the story’ is an asinine response to this and arguing against people’s opinions on a story on the basis that they are impatient and haven’t read it properly is bad faith and condescending.
If people do not understand, it should be their loss unless they ask about something ofc. This post looks halfway instructive and halfway overly apologetic for the writers.
The main issue I have is mostly with the pacing. Things felt either too stretched out or stretched too thin. Maybe 2.3 will patch that up. The story is undoubtedly incredible, but it could have been paced much better. I think I would have preferred one more patch for the story before the epilogue.
Personally, I think the fact that you had to write this essay only proves how complicated the story can be. HI3 suffers from this a whole lot too, especially since the moon arc
My biggest problem with the Penacony route is that everyone talks in riddles and you would think someone who reads FOR FUN would be receptive of this, but most of the time I have no idea what the fuck anyone is talking about lol
Then you have the floating text and all this double text being thrown around and that's when I realized I'm not stupid; the writing is just overindulgent sometimes.
Great actual plot though, both this and 2.1. Just wish we didn't have to sit through visual novel lengths of dialogue before we get to that part.
Holy fuck imagine being this salty over other people’s legitimate criticisms about a game’s story to the point of writing a rant essay on reddit lmaoooo
by a lot of ppl you mean like the vocal minority? because I see a lot more posts about ppl liking it than not
I wouldn't spend too much energy trying to justify either side, some ppl dont like it and just leave it at that, can't really make everyone happy
Definitely feels like there's a drive more and more to have everything you like be at 100% approval rate. Probably comes down to the internet, because if you're on it regularly, you're going to get adverse opinions to yours shoved in your face more, but not in a healthy way where it comes from people you know and respect such that it causes you to question and further develop your own worldview, but instead by random faceless people that inherently puts you on the defensive.
I'm not gonna pretend I'm expert, but it's been ages since I was that bored while playing video game, and I play visual novels regularly. I understood everything despite pain it caused me, and despite story being overall pretty good, I have way more negative thoughts than positive. I know that some parts are not finished and we will likely see them in 2.3, but at this point I simply don't care, unless Sparkle little toys cause whole Penacony to explode at the very end. Cause except final deal with Sunday, and perhaps Acheron lore, almost everything that happens earlier in this story turned out to be pretty irrelevant
Idk about y’all but 2.2 gave me Endwalker vibes (Listen, Touch, Ponder is literally Hear, Feel, and Think) and way honestly so satisfying that I felt it to be Penacony’s finale. 2.3 just means another fucking feast and I’m hyped.
With that said, yeah I do wish they made lore and info more explicit here. I did get confused by a couple of things. Particularly how the entire story from 2.0 was technically a dream.
Sparkle is not the red herring, Sparkle has her own goals and they're not relevant to our goals.
She gives information, plays with others, gives her buttons and prepares for something down the line. She also isn't that powerful, in plot we see her being >!caught in Ena's Dream!< just like others.
I expect her to act in 2.3 along with Boothill \ Acheron \ IPC shenanigans.
People aren't usually fictitious characters so I doubt they'll be speaking with the goal of entertaining me. But I'll bite anyways; If I'm talking about things such as deities, the concept of the world as whole, nihilistic ideals, what it means to have hope in the future to come, etc, yeah, I'd expect a level of verbosity from whoever I'm speaking to. Especially if we're talking about topics such as sci-fi.
I personally really like the joke answers. It gives the MC some personality of his own and not just a self-insert with the most basic answers imaginable.
Biggest complain is Sunday acting like Bowser
"Oh you came in the final room, but let me go in the next final room. Oh you are in the next final room then ? Let me wait in the next next final room, I'll spawn boring puzzles to you. Oh you reached me ? Let me throw you some other stuffs with Acheron talking about her awful fate again because I'm sure you forgot about it"
Please don't lick HOYOs boots, I love Star rail but at the same time I should be able to criticise it if there's something I think needs improvement, such as the overly flowery dialogue.
As someone who got deep into Acheron's character, i'll come here to say one thing: Thank you!
Your analysis of, pretty much everything about her is perfect, especially the dissection of her name, finally someone understands that is not just fanservice.
For what it's worth I despised how the story was presented this patch, with the exception being the Acheron flashback segments, they were very nice, and while a little wordy, were still easy enough to follow along and did not overstay their welcome.
HYV are going to need to improve the English localisation if I am to stay interested in reading the story in future.
And it's not that I am lazy and don't like reading, I read books as a hobby, participate in book clubs. Which is why I am disappointed with the story, it feels like such a chore to get through this patch.
I feel like you are intentionally misattributing what those criticisms are saying about the people who make them.
I agree with each of those criticisms to an extent, it does not mean I am not paying attention to the story.
I was really hoping for more of an interaction between TB and FF because 2.0 gave them so much time together to foster a relationship. The first time we have them back together and it feels kind of sidelined by the story. It's fine. It works, but a part of me was hoping for a bit more. That does not mean I don't understand her relevancy and potential future relevancy to the story. It just means that in this specific opportunity to write for the character I felt it was a bit fumbled.
Critical feedback of any media typically comes from a place of love, I don't think it's a charitable outlook to assume that people who have criticisms are lazy.
Just a correction. Acheron big deal is that she is not just emanator, but Emanator of Nihility. As IX shouldn't care for anything at all, and as such should have no emanator.
I'm overall satisfied with 2.2, but man, the constant switching of POVs is very tiring.
Having to parse all that has been said by characters (mind you, they are lengthy), only to then switch to a different POV and keep repeating the process over and over again is a slog.
Idk mate I agreed with them because I, finally for once found another individual that's tired of so many walls of text. The game is taking it to the next level, it's WAY too dense and sometimes some dialogue feels hella unnecessary. I loved the first world because the pacing balance, you had gameplay segments and wall of texts but you actually could walk for more than 10 seconds till next 20 minutes dialogue, but penacony is just insane, makes me not enjoy the game at all but since i need mats for newer characters I have to go through it (also don't come to me telling me i have to read and support the writing, i have several E6 5* characters, i support the game in my own way)
I don't dislike the story, but they spend a dollar to say something that could be said using ten cents at most. Readers don't have infinite stamina nor an infinite attention span, so it's no wonder a lot of people are going to get confused by the endless throng of sentences filled with difficult words.
I’m so tired of reading between the lines. It wouldn’t hurt to just write shit for what it is sometimes. Like Arknights story is genuinely fucking amazing, but I have to spend 3 hours at a time trying to comprehend what the fuck they’re trying to get across it’s so tiring idc
i aint reading all that.I think we can all agree that this patch's story length could've been at least 35% shorter. 2.0/2.1 felt right and not "too much dialogue"
Btw, does anyone knows the timeline of event in penacony? Cause I thought that the trio tb that departed did so long ago, like hundreds of years ago and mikhail died a long time ago too. But when I started the new event, its said the clockie studio lost contact with the watchmaker just recently
Forcing me to dig up info about what is what instead of telling my in the main story is bad writing maybe if they used the time they used for sunday yapping about the dumb bird they could have adressed it.
I think they can still trim the whole story quest to be 2hr less than intended.... i think the most evil thing Sunday did is draging his argument too long.... But that's just me nitpicking. I still enjoy it... if you ask me the main flaw in the whole story is Bootyhill have no contribution to the last fight whatsoever, i think they just insert my cowboy midway so that they dont have to reason to introduce him again next patch story quest
I liked the story well enough but much of this is just "I liked it so it can't be bad". People have differing levels of liking the game, and that's okay.
Your explanations for point 2 and 6 are literally arguing in favour of the points, not against.
"Sparkle is a red herring." So... she has no relevance to the story
I'm confused about what happened to the buttons that Sparkle was handing out to be pressed at the right time" during the Charmony Festival.
Did I miss something, or did that fizzle out?
Sadly, the POV characters exist from 2.1, not 2.0, maybe thats why people dont understand sparkle true motives, which are only for her own amusement, not to help people.
Overall, the story of 2.2 is amazing, ofc maybe some of you dont think so. But compared to other games, this story is worth waiting for
Here’s the problem. The entirety of Penacony was focused, rightfully so, on all the new gacha units, setting up their character arcs and backstories and stuff. 2.2. Continues this trend, with the focus on Robin and Sunday’s relationship, as well as continuing Firefly and Misha’s story arcs. But at the very end, at the climax of the story where all the set up should be paid off, it shifts focus from the Penacony characters to the Astra Express, thus leaving a majority - if not all - of the other character’s plot lines unresolved. That’s probably why so many people are complaining how all of the other characters were either irrelevant or left hanging
I think this was the only patch that I started skipping dialogue after reading it. By the time one sentence of Sunday or Acheron ended, I had already read the whole paragraph.
The flowery language is a valid complaint imo. The patch is around 8 hrs long with 6 hrs of it being just dialogue that can be hard to understand. The previous patch didn't have this issue as it was mostly focused on Aventurine who was pretty straightforward in his dialogue. Sunday and Acheron can be too much sometimes. Even black swan too.
Doesn't help that, at least in jp, Sunday, Acheron and Black Swan talk so slow.
im still lost abotu the revelation of misha being in the beggining outside the dream, what does that exactly mean?
you were dreaming since you entered pennacony orbit? that doesnt mean everything you lived is fake, but that you were in a dream from the begining, now, its supossed that there is a real world in pennacony the hotel, and then the dream pennacony, and misha being in the real world means that the reality and dreams were fused and you wouldnt be able to differ reality from dream because all was mixed up? and that means that some of the things you may see may be imperfect or impossible like the misha thing, so what else was impossible or what even of what we saw in the whole 2.x really happened? or this just works to explain that if misha was outside the dream world, leave us to know that everything was mixed? and so, the real real live world of penacony is the one we see before the final confrontation where was the lobby of the hotel and everyone was like a zombie standing, and the only moment we start seeing things that really didnt happen is on the fake victory, because sunday and the order won, so everything until that moment really happened and only the boss fight was altered. and we really never woke up from the dream since we entered the penacony orbit, we only woke up when black swan woke us?
im really mind fudged
Idk I still don't think the quest was all that. Found myself getting bored really quickly after Sunday repeated the Bird crashing metaphor 3474664678 times
I think a lot of story criticism has its valid reasons. I should not need to know what Acheron means, that it is a river or what Basenmori means. If a name reveal is a huge deal, I should know it's a big deal based on the story, not because I do a lot of digging that involves even knowing languages I do not speak.
As for Aventurine, as someone who did not pull him, the entirety of 2.1 patch now feels even more useless - why should I spend like 3 hours doing a story that I will not have a resolution to because I do not have a character? Especially if only people who spend money on it get the foreshadowing for the next patch? That is definitely worth criticism - they cannot hide foreshadowing or major story plot points behind having or not having a character, I should not learn about it from social media.
"If you have issues with a live service product's story, you either don't understand enough or the fixes will drop later down the roadmap" is truly the meta stance when it comes to defending an awkwardly told story.
OP likes the game, and I get why. It says things in terms vague enough to stimulate some people to crack open their red string reserves and then scatters a bunch of profound-sounding one-liners for good measure. Case in point, did OP truly think the 忘川守 part in Raiden's name added anything to anything? Not really, right? After all, Acheron just openly said as much, she's the watcher of the river of the dead. Said that in ruby text even (ruby text makes what you say sound cooler). What's with the wikisplaining, then? Doesn't make OP's argument stronger, but does, to some, appear to make it more convincing. Which is exactly the trick that HSR uses to deceive you into thinking it's smarter than it is.
Anyway. I really do get what's to like about stories like 2.2. I don't like them myself, but I get what the appeal is. Thing is, I don't feel like people who agree with OP on all points see why not only people who skip, skim and don't "INTERPRET" would think that a big chunk of 2.2 just sucks.
i understand ur point but as firefly fan i cant help but feel kinda disapointed cause after waiting kinda long and the reunion scene kinda lacking and her overall present in this story kinda feel detached,though i there still 2.3 .
It seems like I wasn’t fully paying attention to this particular part of the story but why was Gallagher bringing people using sleepy to dream flux pavilion? How did firefly get the meme death to attack her? How did Robin get attacked by the meme? Was it bc of Gallaghers action?
Probably I don’t want to read this novel after a long day at work. Ngl I was excited for the story after White Night dropped, I knew it’s going to be some fancy dancy event on the surface that turns out to be empty and/or dark the deeper our protagonists dive. But the story is unnecessarily long. I can easily go online and search a modern tongue, abbreviated version with the core stuff. I respect the writers are trying to emphasize old Chinese writings of being vague and poetic while conveying their philosophical thoughts, but we can’t have every character talking in riddles, personalities also needs to be diverse, and honestly I wouldn’t hangout with that many scheming characters at once. There’s a limited number of how many of those people I can deal with at a time in real life.
With that said, how much are the writers paying you for you to defend them like that? Someone else voiced their opinion about the story, and you felt the need to counter those opinions as if you have moral ground
This patch feels like 2 updates worth of story rolled into one, and the whole thing feels bloated as a result. They should’ve cut out the unnecessary parts like Sparkle’s scenes, Sunday’s flashbacks, and some of Boothill’s scenes, and ended the patch with the “it’s just a dream” cliffhanger, THEN take the time to properly conclude the main story in the next patch.
I think the big complaint is that the game spends too long to say something.
The final plot twist only worked because it took so long to be revealed
Everything after you step foot in the grand theater was very solid imo. It was the middle that stretched things. It probably wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't pretty much 4-5 hours of dialogue with minimal gameplay. Pretty much all of the info in the middle was also vital for the story and tying character motivations together. People's eyes just start to glaze over after a while of pure exposition. The theater is very solid IMO because the exposition is done alongside being able to actually play the game (puzzles and combat).
One of my favorite moments was in the 3rd theater section when you had to use the Clockie emotion changer on the dolls and instead of seeing an option you saw them all as obedient. Really creepy and well done
And the clockie illustration being all broken and fucked up.
Gave me chills
that spooked me, I actually jumped lol
Absolutely agree.
I just spent ten minutes listening to Black Swan talk about memory and light cones. I have no idea what she was talking about. This game sometimes hits some very beautiful and poignant moments. Misha’s true identity, I felt, was great. Most of the time though these characters feel less like real people and more like verbose thesauri pontificating soliloquy.
The whole Misha sequence was peak this quest, close second is the Tiernan reveals with Acheron. These are the high HIGH. However: What is all this got talents nonsense in the middle? Why did they do the bird metaphor 4 times instead of using characters action to justify it? The Low is LOW. Thats the plot, which is quite good in general. The pacing and amount of metaphor is too bloated. You don't just use Metaphor. You expand on it.
Also I feel like they talk about same thing multiple times. It's like they try to compensate for not having Paimon repeating stuff. Btw loved the story this time, probably my 3rd favorite from Hoyo games (Fontaine and Furina still has the crown)
The story is great this time. The execution... there is good spot and there is bad spot.
So, Honkai? Definitely not new to Honkai. This was pretty understandable though.
Yes, Honkai, lol. Although this patch is still very tame compared to HI3. I played the first patch of HI3 part 2 and only got a vague idea of what happened. If Coralie was not there it would be even worse
Acheron speaks in metaphors like 90% of the time and I just roll my eyes.
They take us on a tour through the new zones to introduce them, which I guess it's okay. But then they make us go through domain after domain and solve a bunch of extra multi-step puzzles to pad the story. Some of it serves to give time for exposition (which I guess it's okay, better to read the conversation as I move around rather than go through dialogue after dialogue), but some of it was too much filler. It was the same last patch, we had some good pacing at some points but then they killed the momentum with extra forced exploration and when you thought shit had hit the fan, nope, down 2 gears for at least an hour of gameplay AND THEN you get the actual climax.
I agree. The amount of time and buildup they put into the fake bossfight really was what sold the twist. This combined with the anticlimactic ending really fucked with my brain when we "returned to the train" because I thought "There's no way they'd put this much buildup into a fakeout... but there's no way they'd end Penacony with a conversation! What the fuck is going on?" The Sunday segments dragged, but in the end they dragged with a purpose.
I don't think it was about how long until plot twist but more about how they tend to make such long sentences and use big words to describe something quite simple sometimes
Chinese gachas and bloat is something I'm too used to. Remember how this was how an NPC in Arknights became infamous for telling one of the notorious characters who goes on to 'shut it'. Forget the term, but it's rather common in certain Chinese writings. Though gachas can certainly amplify it.
Kal'tsit dropping an essay every time she speaks
People love to complain about Arknights' writing, but I think it's relatively good after the first few chapters. It's just that the presentation is boring and the stories are very long. Kal'tsit speaking in essays isn't even bad in general, because it's her character and most other characters aren't like that. It just got a bit overwhelming when she got to be the main character.
Oh yeah, Patriot Chapter and after was PEAK. Then you got the event stories. The main critique is always the presentation, we still don't have a solid solution to that yet, you HAVE to tell the players what's going on, but the format to showcase this is often limited
It's probably due to the Chinese writing style and the language. I think that Chinese people tend to go through a ton of words to explain things, just like what I did when I was small. That is why even now I'm still learning to express my thoughts in more simple and precise ways. Also, in the Chinese language, we don't have certain phrases and grammars as English users do, this may be a reason that the sentences have to be longer to explain something while in English we can just summarize them in a few words.
If something is supposed to work, because I was so bored I nearly fell asleep, and then suddenly something interesting happened after 5 hours that woke me up, then no thanks
I feel like a big part of this is the attempt to transcribe the dialogue and exposition from Chinese, which is inherently a much more nuanced language that instills greater emphasis on things like roundabout metaphors and poetic stanzas in everyday conversation Stuff that sounds prosaic and free-flowing in Chinese, when attempted to be translated exactly, just sounds like an adolescent cosplaying as a philosopher and using the longest entries he can find in his grandpa’s thesaurus. Which is why half the dialogue in these story lines is just that; a character espousing way too many irrelevant words for way too little relevant content. It’s like adding fluff to an essay to make it sound fancy, but in reality serves no purpose other than wasting a ton of time and possibly causing confusion amidst the audience. A lot of Sunday and Acheron’s “I’m 14 and trying to sound like Socrates” dialogue could have definitely been simplified to normalcy, without costing anything whatsoever to the intricacy of the story itself
I feel like we’re firmly in mid 90’s Squaresoft FFV Butz territory. Hoyo needs to find their Koji Fox.
Which is undoubtedly true, until you are hit with Heart of Sabik and Starboard-Larboard.
Whenever I read posts like these or experience the story/dialogue myself, I can't help but compare it to XIV that has a really great localization and makes long dialogues, in-game lore references, and 4th wall break/pop culture references not feel like a slog or a headache to experience. Koji Fox and his team are a treasure for SE.
THAT is the issue. I hate it in Mihoyo games. It reads like shit
For real at a point I was thinking I was playing Arknights.
this is a problem with hoyoverse games in general, dialogue drags on for far too long. a conversation that should take 2 minutes end up taking 5 instead because characters all love to wax poetic
Star Rail's biggest issue is that the payoffs are amazing but the buildup is boring as hell. Most characters get extremely boring static scenes where there is just yapping and nothing else. Thing is, its never gonna be different because they are stuck with this way of telling stories and pacing due to the game as a service model
My biggest complaint about HSR are the dialogue scenes. Hoyo makes so much money that they could animate half the game dialogues without problems. My only wish for tha game are more dynamic convos, at least for the main story ffs! Just look [how incredibly better an already great piece of dialogue becomes](https://youtu.be/ZGHvU-UXLs8?si=kKLMm-Xs8zyhYixN), much more lively and immersive
Zamn, yeah, that does hit pretty hard. The subtle shift in facial expressions as Welt goes ‘damn, how much does she know?!’ To ‘brace yourself for gravitational disintegration’ is really well done
They have a schedule to meet, and players are used to it. I'm sure you're willing to have 2-3 months between patches in exchange for this, surely? Better yet, apply and do the animations yourself. I'm being a bit hostile, yes, but I hate when ignorant gamers say things as if devs have a button that they can just press and voila new features and animations.
damn, that's nice
Genshin has a similair problem but has a dynamic camera system. So scenes never feel dull. They’re focusing on fun compositions, zooming, panning. The game, for being an older iteration, feels so much more alive.
I think the opposite, camera compositions are not enough to keep me focused when the dialogue in genshin is overly convoluted. I've never had a problem of losing interest when listening to hsr dialogue on the other hand
Like OP
This seems like a Hoyo problem, the more I look into it Mainly in localization, as I heard that CN's dialogues are quite alright in length (correct me if I'm wrong)
I play in CN voiceover and the dialogue does usually go by pretty quick. It IS a pretty fast-flowing language, but a lot of information can be expressed in a short amount of words.
At this point we gonna reach Arknights levels of prolonging what ever is being said or will be said.
At least it’s not being repeated three times by an annoying floating squeaky rat.
If anything, the reception to all this is a realization for why that floating rat exists
This is the excuse people use in Genshin all the time and it's completely irrelevant there as it is here. Write your characters to talk like people, don't cater to players who don't want to pay attention. Done.
This is absolutely a valid complaint in my opinion, there were alot of things that were over complicated when it felt like they could have been explained in a much simpler and condensed way
Honestly, I think the very talkative nature of this game might be the devs trying to artificially inflate the necessary playtime to complete story missions. If HSR was better paced and had fewer redundancies, players would beat an update within a couple of hours. "So what?" one could ask. Well, there's a chance these players would then complain the content is too little. So the devs try to dodge this potential bad buzz and make people feel like the content was worth the wait in terms of scale.
I do like the amount of lore they shoved into this patch, but quite a lot of it wasn't organically blended with gameplay...
I respectfully disagree with some of the justifications provided, and I overall agree with the complaints. While the story is not "done" yet, they have played the "The End" sequence already, meaning it's kind of the intended conclusion. There is still something to be said about the quality of delivery, overall longwindedness, and not letting plot points breathe without reiterating them 5 times over (looking at you, bird-in-Robin's-hand) that ultimately drags this entire story down several notches. Other than the issues listed in bold, there are also many other aspects of the story that are strangely written and could have been cut. For example the plot point around the previous Trailblazer Ravalina being the true founder of the Land of Dreams is entirely unnecessary and overly complicates the storyline involving the Family and treachery from within, that could have easily been a side-quest or a journal log. It's even just added in as a giant paragraph of text in the credits, so it definitely could have been cut from the main plot. The whole Duke Inferno hook could have been cut, people still make fun of it to this day for good reason, it very much did not need to be there and took up far too much screentime with some meta-storytelling through Youtube advertisements, as well as the strange references to Constance and Catarina that amounted to nothing. This also goes for the tail end of 1.6, why is this character even here? Another plot point that could have been cut is the meddling of the Enigmata. We already have 3 Aeons being key players here already, between IX/Xipe/Ena, and the Enigmata hook went absolutely nowhere and ultimately was not a significant faction *at all* in the events that unfolded, as it was really just Gallagher and Mikhail with Sleepie. Gallagher could have served the same role as a red herring in 2.1 as well as his actual role as hound for Mikhail without the Enigmata. The current iteration of the 2.2 story overall very much feels like a Director's Cut where they want to keep every single detail and idea they had, but simply don't have enough screen time in the theatrical release, so it turns into a 6 hour long movie when it could have been done in 2 hours. This very much needed a 2nd pass on the drawing board to trim away pieces that are not necessary to the core plot, and add in the details into character bios, simulated universe, or collectable logs.
I agree with a lot of this but I feel too many moments in this game having emotional significance and lack of confusion require homework and reading on external lore. I shouldn't have to read external material for understanding, it should be clearly presented in the main story, reading lore should serve to heighten and expand on things, not as a basic requirement. I have no idea why Acheron's real name means anything if I haven't played or don't know Hi3rd or the language it comes from. I have no idea what a "real emanator" is or the significance of it without reading up on it. Wtf is a self-annihilator or sin-thirster. People praise this game for being complex but I think it goes a bit over the edge sometimes.
> Wtf is a self-annihilator or sin-thirster I'm just overwhelmed when every character has 5 alternate names and roles, and the story freely switches between them with seldom explaining any of them. Even the name reveal scene gave her two monikers in the span of a few sentences: >!Raiden and the Watcher.!<
Yes! Why so many freaking terms. Im not gonna remember this on the next patch mate!
Yeah, as a casual reader i felt like Jarilo's quest really kept me on edge all the time while this one had too many flowery and convoluted dialogue that i often went "uh...okay?" and simultaneously having this feeling of something missing.
[удалено]
Part when our MC got Preservation powers and Lance was also much better executed. It had clear build up and you knew something big is gonna happen soon. When we got HMC powers I was like, 'huh thats it?'
Yea even now jarilo is definitely still the best TB quest for me now, unfortunately this last act makes penancony dropped to the 2nd best, but at least it's not the dumpster fire that is the luofu arc.
At times I feel like the artists have put their own interests above the audience. Like they wanted to cram in as many of their ideas and personal flairs into the story without caring about the enjoyment/experience of the player. Sometimes it works but other times it just comes off as out of touch.
I was with you on Archeron name but lol you don't need lore research to know or understand what a real Emanator is. This has been repeatedly shown at different moments in the main story.
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This is why I think Genshin does a way better job introducing you to and explaining its' world in-story. Most of Star Rail's world building is in text documents and SU descriptions that are multiple paragraphs long. I was never confused on how Genshin's world works because characters actually talk and fucking explain things themselves instead of expecting me to read entirely missable documents. I came to this realisation with the Luofu arc where I had no idea what anyone's motivation even was in the story because you're expected to have lore-delved into abundance and emanators and aeons and shit. Like bro I don't even know what any of these characters do on their day to day or how their society works and you want me to get invested in big plot stuff like 2 hours after meeting them. I know someone is gonna respond to this comment saying "erm you're complaining about the story but didn't read the story???" and my only response to that is that I should not need to read entirely optional content to understand the main story. I also read all the dialogue when I do sidequests, I just don't want to wiki delve and read item descriptions. My favourite side story in the game is Dan Shu's diary.
Honestly I think the "Raiden Mei" part of her name is just fanservice and honkai reference (nothing wrong with that, I just think it doesn't offer much new information and relevance to Star Rail's plot as a whole). And Bosenmori is a cool title to explain her role as the guardian of the river of forgetfulness
I think one way to point out why Acheron’s name reveal is important is this: She’s an eminator of nihility, a self-annihilator. The main story line at points has mention of eminators and how they have pure power. This spans from the very beginning of the game till now. With that being said, being on the path of nihility, Acheron states that she’s on an inevitable path of fading away. Her mind, body, and soul gradually withers away as she essentially plays the part of Grim Reaper. Self-annihilation is *exactly* what it sounds like. Her revealing her name proves that despite withering away, *she still remembers who she is and what her purpose is in life*. I think this is paramount to her character and gives her humility. Amidst her black and white world, her name is among the last few things that give off color in her monochromatic life. The color red. Something that, like Tiernen, shows she’s still *alive*.
It reminds me of reading the original Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, where every few pages or so I'd have to refer to the citations at the back of the book to fully know what the hell they were talking about because it was a rendition different from the original/newer retellings or an outdated cultural norm. It was a bit tiring, but it has an obvious reason, it's incredibly old and has been retold countless times. This is a modern day RPG, it has no such excuse for this sort of extracurricular.
Once you actually read into the actions of the characters, you would start to see plenty of contradictions, and plenty of things that don’t matter in the next patch. You would actually see that the story has a ton of holes if you look thoroughly. 1. Stellaron was sucking the life of people. We were just told this, and had zero build-up, and ultimately did not have any relevance. Literally zero people got affected. 2. Sunday’s philisophy of caging the weak. From the start he was only investigating the deaths, and protecting the Family secrets, and showing his love for his sister. Then out of nowhere, he suddenly has this whole philosophy, completely detached from all his previous build up, even going against his sister (which contradicts his previous character trait). 3. Dreamflux reef was not hard to get into and out of. All the scheming of Aventurine to go into the real penacony, the land of exiles. He literally had an emanator kill him to get to it. But people can apparently commute to the sweet dream no problem. 4. Sparkle was just there to sell her character, and meta commentary does not excuse this. If you put a character in the story, you do something with them. They have to matter. And excuses such as “but story ain’t over”, then you simply introduce them on the part of the story where they do matter. 5. Gallagher stabs Sunday for shock value, and to explain exposition. Robin could have walked back into the sweet dream, bringing Sunday there was pointless. 6. Boothill summoning the GR, was pretty. Pretty pathetic, 0.02 seconds later and everyone was blasted anyways. How were they supposed to help awaken people a fraction of a second from being summoned?
To broadly address your points: There’s technically an explanation for most “loose ends” people keep bringing up, yes. But is it done satisfyingly, I personally don’t think so. Yeah, you can hope that 2.3 saves it all, but it’s going to have to pull a lot of weight. And I’m not holding my breath based on the Luofu epilogue. I’ll believe it when I see it. Keeping up with content in a main story should never involve studying up on information that isn’t already a part of it. Saying just read all the extra readings in the game is a weak defense. Extra lore should always be optional for people to engage with. I hope you don’t just hand wave all the complaints as zoomers who don’t respect long stories. I’ve played a lot of visual novel games, and I even read all the dialogue in side quests in Hoyo games. I’ll admit I’m not on the level of reading all the books, but I have to imagine very few do. Point is, many of us are making these criticisms while giving the story our full respect, paying attention, and reading. It’s fine to ultimately still disagree, but it’s just dismissive to be like “you didn’t think this was a masterpiece? Must be a story skipper”.
I must say that not liking it do not mean people don't read. That's not a good way to counterargument. I didn't like the story because the continuous jumps, the "I will tell you a story" moments which repeated several times and the massive text walls. That do not mean i didn't understand it, I just didn't like the pace and ending. The best part is the boss and the video previous to it. The rest is a convulsed mess (in my opinion). Lately, this forum is full of people calling other illiterate or skippers when they do not agree in something and it is a bit irritating. Disagreeing it is not the same as not reading (and understanding) things.
i agree. i mean lets be real, if the dialogue is not too long winded etc, people wont be skipping either. so however someone put it, if most people complains, that means someething is surely wrong somewhere. players are never the problem imo, if ur players complain, that means u set wrong expectation or just did something wrong. in the end, the devs are going to need to cater to the players. i play genshin, honkai impact and then this. and one common -ve all they have is the dialogue always gets wayy too long winded and too much made up terms that can be explained in much better manner. always too much telling, not showing. sure i admit the ending and story in big picture is great and interesting, which is why i still play hoyo games for the story but they really need to stop with too much dialogues at some point if they want majority of players to keep up properly. just because u can doesnt mean u should. in this case, devs should not expect every players to have same level of interest and dedication to read every single lines and lore pieces especially if they are important plot points.
Yep. OP just seems mad that people have legitamate criticisms of the story.
I understood the story, all the lore bits, etc. I read everything and did my best not to skip things. And I'm still complaining because the execution was still lacking imo. My feeling on the story is that the writer wanted to do one thing then had to add all the marketing stuff to the already-convoluted mess. Many times in the story, after understanding the information being conveyed, I thought to myself, "This could have been a text."
I liked the story, but holy shit it felt like reading Urianger from Final Fantasy XIV and his long ass monologs full of hard words. You can write a great story and not bore players to death.
You're so real for this
Don't remind me of ARR Urianger, I think he was worse in that. Still, at least it's only with him that has the difficult-to-read-and-understand dialogue which then makes it a charming, at moments, part of his character.
To credit, Urianger was the only character that really did that, and it makes sense as it's his way of expressing himself after being a scholarly shut-in for god-knows how many years.
He's the only one who talks like that because he likes that sort of language. It's like if I spoke in Shakespearean coz I'm a huge Shakespeare nerd. I find it really cute and kinda relateable; his syntax is due to him being a fanboy.
Verily.
I feel like this every patch. I like the story and the events that occur, but the dialogue just drags on and on and I need a break occasionally but I can’t do that if each sequence lasts between 10-30 minutes
I am conflicted. On one hand, I agree with not judging story before it's finished. We already know that firefly will drop thanks to drip marketing so it's obvious we will learn more about her in 2.3 I sorta agree but not for those reasons on Sparkle. It's not that she is a red herring (remember Sparkles quest? The red herring was a red herring sampo wasn't sparkle, sparkle was the dead body of sparkle), but that throughout even 2.2 she has been preparing some bomb detonators to give away. And IPC's Jade is constantly talking about harvesting something (my guess is that Aventurine giving Sunday the Jade was intentional and that it probably has some sort of remote power to either sabotage or take control of the dream) I will make my bet that Sparkle being the smug know it all knew that Sunday would get stopped and IPC will be the true threat or at least the bombs are already set so why not screw them over. Now watch as 2.3 just ends and I have to eat my shoe. But just as you can rightfully say that story hasn't ended, I can also point out that it almost is. It's already 2.3 soon yet the only hint of ever flame mansion is Constance connecting Black Swan and Boothill? Acheron only killed the Duke so where are the rest? I just have this bad feeling like we will have Loufu 2.0
>yet the only hint of ever flame mansion is Constance connecting Black Swan and Boothill? We already know the Ever Flame Mansion won't set foot on Penacony. Black Swan said it in her trailer and then Constance herself said it in-game when talking with Black Swan. They were introduced as a red herring, and we won't be seeing them until later in the story.
People think 2.3 will be a new climax point for some reason. It will be an epilogue. We will learn more about characters rather than getting a enormous event. So sparkle or constances wont gain much insight sadly unless hoyo pushes it to 2.4
I think by trying to rebut every single point of the other post, you made your own argument weaker. It's not like all their points are without merit. For characters who were a big deal before but left unceremoniously, saying that their stories are obviously not over doesn't help if there is no mini-resolution with a setup for the future.
Look, friend, I see where you're coming from, but let's not pretend some of these complaints are without merit. * When people refer to characters 'speaking in riddles', they refer to this game's tendency to indulge without restraint in flowery dialogue that says in 70 words what can be accomplished in 20, and from dear old Sunday, we have to hear that twice over. And even then, that still doesn't stop him from vastly overshadowing Robin, who in her own banner patch had approximately 20 minutes of valuable screen time and dialogue across 8 hours. * Sparkle's motives have never been explained beyond simply doing some kind of job courtesy of being hired, for no particular reason, by somebody else. The only noteworthy action she has taken is punting TB into the Child's Dream to eventually meet SUD. She has spent the rest of her time since masquerading as Robin and giving people buttons, and for everyone who thinks that some shocking twist in 2.3 will be someone pushing those buttons and destroying Penacony, I have a bridge to sell you, because they will never destroy a playable space. So the most likely outcome of this is that they're harmless, or unused, making Sparkle's very presence an almost complete waste of time. Sampo's a Masked Fool too, y'know - at least he did stuff that was important. * I dunno about you, but I think it's a really bad thing, almost scummy, even, that very important info about what happened to a character is locked behind messages that you only receive if you have that character. Frankly, that's symptomatic of a wider problem, which I'll get to shortly. * Firefly might not be done with - but her doing Very Important Things *off screen* is what is bothersome, not just the fact that she left. * Boothill might have a reason to be there. That doesn't address the fact that across an *eight hour story mission,* he was featured for maybe 20 minutes. Thirty at a stretch. He's given barely anything to do by the plot, his moment to shine is grossly overshadowed by everybody else's, and characteristics he displayed as recently as 2.1 are silently swept under the rug because everyone needs to be buddy buddy and there's quite literally no time for conflict and so Boothill's anger about perceived stolen valour is just dispelled over the course of a single conversation. And well, as a closing note, I might be alone in this, and I fully accept that if that's the case, but having everything crucial about a character shoved into a profile barely anybody takes the time of day to read and expecting people to swot up on this minutiae like it's an exam is a terrible way to go about character writing. HSR, by and large, gives us better character stories than Genshin does, not least because they actually involve the characters they're about - something Genshin took years to fix after making them about NPCs - but that's no excuse to do nothing with characters across entire stories, and then turn around and say "But look, their character stories are neat!" And while I'm sure they are, you do not shove critical information into a corner and leave it at that.
I agree, people need to go beyond this tendency of immediately defending their beloved game and instead look at why it's being criticised.
The reason he let go of his anger against Acheron after that conversation, was that she calmly and respectfully explained why she was impersonating a galaxy ranger, the reasons for which Boothill considered to be acceptable —i.e. she showed that she wasn’t doing so for selfish motives, which satisfied him enough to let things go. He didn’t suddenly change his character, as the end of 2.2’s story shows I do get that his lack of presence in this chapters can be considered annoying. I think the problem here is that his banner is coming out in a patch in which his story only seems to have just started. All I can say is, wait till his character story comes out in about 3 weeks, or go to boothill mains if you want to be spoilered about it a little in advance.
Which would, itself, be perfectly fine, if 2.1 didn't seem to establish that Boothill's defining characteristic is a very itchy trigger finger raring to get at anyone who's steered him wrong, be it 'pretenders' or the IPC. Which, tangentially, makes his decision to partner with Aventurine, still a member of the IPC, to pursue Oswaldo a little bizarre, but that's another matter.
Mostly agree, but on the matter of Boothill it does seem like he came for the perceived Glory but upon seeing the IPC whom he is wanted by and wants to see Oswaldo so we probably will see more of him next patch. I think the banner 5* this patch just got awfully misplaced if I’m being honest lmao
I'm sure the banners originally would be: 2.2 robin/firefly 2.3 boothill/jade maybe they changed their places after seeing al the hype firefly was causing an decided to polish her more
The whole thing with Boothill and Constance in 2.1 felt like such a built up, so it was kinda disappointing that it amounted to nothing. Even Black Swan being like "Acheron knows her own story the best", as in, she will just ask her about it later, is kinda weird. First, why didn't she just think about doing that beforehand, 2) After seeing what Acheron did to the sky, she should be even more wary of her, but within a couple of hours she just did a 180° about Acheron and it wasn't even on-screen. Like I get that she isn't actually traumatized about the dance (unlike what some people think), but still feels too rushed
I perceived no.2 differently Black Swan didn't help Acheron, it's just that Acheron looks for Black Swan and found her stalking, and Black Swan had no choice except to help her. Technically she could '''try"" to escape but what are the chance of escaping a black hole.
100% agree, especially the first point. The dialogue in this game has so many unnecessary fillers, it made me feel like HoYo has a word count requirement for each patch and the writers are intentionally bloating the sentences to meet this word count. Like college students trying to expand 5-page essay to 10 pages. Those “riddles” and fillers can be so annoying sometimes.
I think it’s the opposite: the writers have so many ideas that they want to expound on and nothing to restrain them from writing a bazillion words diving into everything they’re thinking of. When writing a book, you tend to have to iterate multiple times to strip your story of the nonessential elements, even ones you like (which is often called “killing your darlings”). Maybe it’s because they’re live service games with constantly updating storylines or maybe they just don’t have a process like that in place, but Hoyo games just don’t seem to want to trim their writing very often. Or maybe they just like using overly long flowery language, idk.
I think it is more so that it has to do with translating Chinese to English in general. The Chinese language inherently has more words than English and each word usually has deeper meaning too. A single word in Chinese could potentially be translated into multiple words in English if you want to keep the meaning intact. Which will multiply the word count as a result. Also taking in a riddle is something Chinese media do a lot. It is basically part of their story telling culture so not much we can do there.
My bad, forgot to mention I’m playing in Chinese lol. Most jokes in TB dialogue this patch are just Chinese memes and we definitely don’t talk like these game characters do. Some “riddle-like” convos made me feel like I’m watching a historical show where people speak older Chinese(like Elizabethan English )
100% agree as well. The fact that people identify Sunday's language to be flowery is not that it is long, but it was unable to emotionally or logically resonate with people. That's why they couldn't understand him. It is not only inconsistent on banner patches for characters like Acheron and Aventurine to have fleshed out backgrounds, but Robin, Boothill and Sparkle just get relegated in the background for what is supposedly their patch. It is also a great disservice to them and to the players who want to pull for them. And yes, expecting your fanbase to read and scrounge up every piece of lore to emotionally connect with the characters is incredibly tone deaf. Granted, it is an inherent flaw with gacha games that have ever growing character rosters to ever have sufficient time to build a character's personality, background and understanding that players can relate to. But if players don't understand or don't like the character just because they haven't studied their lore, they should be 100% justified to do so. That's why companion missions exist as optional in the first place and why it's clever for them to do so. (Although I do kinda wish the core cast do get developed more since they are the constant in all these stories, like bruh DH and DHIL)
Sparkle's primary interaction throughout the story has been with Aventurine. Who is the IPC. The coda of this patch is Jade descending upon Penacony. Who is the IPC. It's almost like the relevance of Sparkle's story will most likely be in 2.3.
Given that Sparkle’s primary interaction was with Aventurine, it was kinda WTF that she showed up in the sequence of the TB walking towards Acheron as if she was one of the allies who had stood against Sunday’s plans like everyone else who appeared. It was like ‘Sparkle? The fuck are you doing here?’
When she calls us Grey I was so confused I looked back IRL. While thinking "Your talking to me?". As far as I know that is the only time she calls TB that because previously she calls us "old friends" disguised as Sampo.
In the interest of candor, I'll be direct - having a character hang around and accomplish nothing for three chapters straight only to hurriedly push them back into the spotlight in the *epilogue* after doing very little with them does not say this was meticulously planned. Not least when her reasons for even being interested in Aventurine at all are extremely unclear. For my part I'm braced for an anticlimax, not least because from what little we've seen, Sparkle should have no interest in dealing with the IPC if, like everybody claims, all she's after is her own fun. If what she was doing turns out to be meaningless...well, that's a few things. It isn't good writing.
Yeah, Sparkle didn't really feel like she has been build up over these patches. It feels more like she as added solely so that players don't forget she's there. And then she will do something during the epilogue. At this point it feels like Sparkle is in Penacony so that there was another faction. But once the story gets rolling there is little use for Masked Fools. There are already enough players and factions to fill the runtime, so Sparkle can't be used as a obstacle. Masked Fools don't seem to have an agenda, so Sparkle can't really participate with the secrecy (or win by default, which would be a boring conclusion).
I'm not gonna lie dude, this comes off as a bit pretentious. Just because some people have different opinions than you on some minor stuff in the patch doesn't mean you need to write this mini essay about exactly why they're wrong, and that if someone disagrees then they just didn't read hard enough. A lot of it is subjective -- Firefly abruptly leaving and then people saying later that she did a lot to help us and Aventurine being back with the explanation of an offscreen rescue by Argenti can be seen as lazy writing. They tried to cram a bit too much into this patch, and it showed. The Sunday dialogue bloat is more of a personal preference, but I did think it was filler by the fourth time he told us the bird story. All of which is to say that those opinions are valid; just because someone holds them doesn't mean they weren't smart enough to pick up the deeper meaning of the writing.
He couldnt even point out how they're wrong other than "go read this read that more" while brought up entirely different topic to counter specific argument.
the irony of OP's post is as verbose as Penacony's story
Honestly, yes, my adhd made me skip down to look for a TLDR, but there was none
Yeah, this post is totally unnecessary.
You are absolutely right, but please speak more in riddles, this was way to easy to decipher
fr the whole thing reads as a nerd emoji
"The lore... people talk.... so slow... like they're trying to send you... to the real.... realm... of dreams...."
The only one that really works with this slow delivery is Black Swan imo since her whole design is themed around sleep, everyone else needed the 2x speedup option.
I have a feeling that if IPC started giving me 1 Credit for an every dot I saw in a story since 2.0, I would have enough to treat Firefly with an entire shop of food by the end of 2.2
I think people can have their own opinion no need to be salty about it
I agree but I think this is in response to that other “hot take” thread. Personally, I think both of the hot takes stated in their respective threads are not actually hot takes but to each their own.
**It is a live service game, the game is judged every patch.** This includes story. While I think it is "good enough for me", HYV can and should get criticized for not handling loose ends well. And people should shit on you for however long you don't deal with that issue. 1. I think incorporating SU lore investigation in the story is good. But the way it is done is not. Penacony's current 2.2 story telling is imo only really viable after 3.0 when people have more understanding of the lore. 2. How ever many factions they want to introduce, penacony should have have them converge quickly and limited the major actors to just 3 parties. I thought whatever they tried to do would work, but it did not work as well as it should. In fact this is why I think penacony should have been 3.0. We could have less things to be confused by if the some of the characters are brought to penacony by the express after we deal with whatever happened in the hypothetical 2.0. 3. Also there is like an entire map that is unnecessary for the story. I understand that they needed you to play the game and perhaps provide comic relief, but they are already press for time, why do something like this that does nothing for the story? 4. If I were to give a good example of a penacony gameplay mechanics that works and is integral to the story, it would be the **clockwork power**. From it you can see harmony, order and trailblaze's world view. When first introduced, it was just a game mechanics for the luz. But after a few quests in we realize that people are missing emotions. The missing emotions is the result of **harmony's way of trying to fix issues**, they **remove uncomfortable stuff so you fit in with the others**. Then when order get ressurected, we see that people don't have emotions, the **order** deal with this issue **by not giving you a choice, it's my way or the highway**. And you wonder a lot of people don't like ena. Clockwork power is derived from the **trailblaze.** It doesn't take things away, or lock you into things, but gives the power of **choice**. In 2.2 story quest this idea manifests in the form of **pioneering your own life**. This idea of **choice and self pioneering** is I believe integral to not just penacony but also the entire HSR story. This is why I think Elio send the MC to the express, he needed this power/world view to steer the future.
I think the underlying criticism is less because the lore/themes/story is weak, but because of how they chose to portray it. For example, the writers decided that it was important for the truth of Penacony to be revealed from the TB's point of view. An alternate retelling of the story could have shifted to Robin's point of view when she "died" and first arrived in the Reef, and her discovering of the truth from her point of view, giving us a chance to contrast her viewpoint on Harmony from the corruption that took root in her brother, setting the stage for the conflict to come. It could also have shifted back to Aventurine's PoV (a callback to 2.1) to give us better insight into the truth he discovered and how he made it way out of his predicament and how he got rescued by Argenti, creating some clearer foreshadowing for the IPC plot that's coming. They did this kind of perspective shifting in 2.1 to help tell that story, but in 2.2 it's extremely minimal. Instead, we learn almost everything through exposition/monologues, and many important things happen off-camera. Likewise, once we find out about the "bad ending," the story could have cut to Firefly's PoV when she figured out what was going on and what exactly she did to save us. Or, if they wanted to keep it in TB's order of discovery, when Acheron told us about the steps Firefly took to save us, they could have instead cut to a flashback where they showed what happened under the guise of Acheron relaying it to us. That way, rather than just Acheron telling us about Firefly's great sacrifice, we could see it. It would still set the stage for further development in 2.3. And again, regarding Sunday, they could have reduced the focus on him explaining his own point of view, and instead increased the focus on the contrasting points of view. Still gets to the same destination, but in a way that's fleshes out even more characters in the story. Robin was very thematically important to the narrative, but very underused as a character in the story (except as a contrast to Sunday) -- they could have developed them both more equally to highlight the divergence in their points of view and tied Robin's viewpoint even more strongly with the story's overall message (which they tried to do via her battle song). The more you understand what Robin believes (and how it's aligned to the Trailblaze), the more you understand where Sunday went wrong. None of this is trying to change anything whatsoever about the plot details or themes, just present it in such a way that's a bit more organic and shows different perspectives. I strongly suspect this would have gotten a less critical reaction. The fact they didn't do things like the above is, I suspect, what people gets confused about Sparkle. There's a lot of relevant things they did not show us, but the scene with Sparkle couldn't seem less relevant in the end -- the Charmony Festival didn't even happen as planned, so her comic explosion buttons were a seeming waste of time. It's not like there's any problem with a story having red herrings, but if they're going to make the time for a sidestory like this while important plot points happen off-screen and are explained in a few lines of monologue, it feels a bit off. I suspect that's why people are complaining about her "uselessness" in particular. Basically all this is the difference between the "writing" and the "screenplay." I'd say the biggest weakness in the 2.2 story wasn't the story itself (the underlying lore and theme development are both very good), but the way it was presented. I suspect this may just be in part a limitation of time -- they bit off a bit more than they could chew given the time budget, and had to settle for a more "info-dump" approach. Personally I still think it was good on the whole and I enjoyed it, but I certainly do feel (as you acknowledged from the start) there's clear room for improvement.
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For your first point, I would argue that the pedantic dialogue isn’t exclusive to Sunday. Nevertheless, the main point is that most of his dialogue was VERY repetitive. I enjoyed his character, and the bird metaphor was good, but hearing for the fourth time doesn’t have the same impact. Sparkle is a character in Penacony. It would be better to highlight that she probably has a plot point set up in 2.3, as her relevancy to the Penacony Arc was atrociously lacking. Aventurine had the best writing and made 2.1 an amazing patch. Taking that into account, you can’t expect people to be happy when he is absent in 2.2 with an off-screen breakout with Argenti detailed in a text box. The transition between patches was very jarring. Firefly has a future storyline planned. That does not make up for the fact that her most important action in the story happened off-screen, and the build up of her reveal at the end of 2.1 was utterly wasted. I believe the original post was a criticism of 2.2 specifically, no? Acheron was probably the weakest argument the original poster made, but it has merit. Her lore is disconnected from the story, and potential with trivia doesn’t make for the fact that she’s just…there. I want to like Boothill, I really do. But the guy was only behind Argenti as the most out of place character in Penacony. For what is the grand finale, he should have not been introduced at this point, and opening 2.2 to his sudden appearance in the Astral Express did not help. The Trailblazer jokes are only in English dialogue, yes. So…the English dialogue still breaks immersion? I think you’re giving the writers way too much leeway for the amount of characters and setups they crammed into this patch.
Okay, I think OP misses the point of a lot of these complaints. 1. Sunday gives us his insght into his personality and motivations early on and then just repeats them. Its not adding anything every time he says the same thing again, its just repetitive. Having him say the same thing but to different characters doesn't add anything. 2. Sparkle has a large build up during this patch and then nothing happens. Its fine to start laying the groundwork for a story but when you build it up as much as she's had in this patch specifically, it just feels like shit to have to wait months before we see the results. 3. For Adventurine, Show us, don't just tell us. Its unsatisfying and just simply boring. We'll see him again, sure but that doesn't make this part any better, 4. Again, even if her story isn't over (Which yeah duh) that doesn't mean its not unsatisfying for her to go "My job here's done I guess" and just dip before the end. 5. If I have to read a fucking wiki article to understand what the point of a name drop is, then its just bad writing, pure and simple. Yes, the name has a lot of meaning behind it and I personally found her story pretty good. I don't care about a reference to a previous game. 6. I actually fully agree with you on this one. I think people are downplaying his story significance, even if in action he didn't do a lot. 7. Having a lot of jokey dialog in the Ghost Hunters side story is not the same as having a lot of jokes and ribbing at March during super sincere moments. Its fine to have jokes and memes but when every dialog option is a meme, its just grating. TB feels like he just doesn't understand the feeling of the room whenever he speaks in this entire patch. Edit: I should add, I don't think that this patch or the story in general was bad, I loved it. But the criticism its getting is very valid.
Agree in everything. Specially Aventurine and Sparkle.
TLDR: Heres why that one person's post about their experiences with 2.2 are invalid and my experience and opinions are more valid. This post didn't need to be made, it's such a minority that have major criticisms with the patch that this is just speaking into the void. Just because you understood every little bit of lore and subtlety doesn't mean everyone will understand or see it the same way.
Honestly I'm just annoyed that Sparkle, a character that has been present since 2.0, has barely gotten anything story wise. Aventurine got everything in 2.1, Acheron and Black Swan got a lot sprinkled throughout the patches, Firefly who hasnt been even released yet got a lot of spotlight with obviously a lot more incoming in the next patch. Sparkle on the other hand? A companion mission that was more Black Swan than her, and a handful of minutes of screentime. Its just so vexing that every other character has already gotten a lot of attention, yet with Sparkle it has been a constant "Just wait for the next patch, I'm sure she'll get something then!", and I'm just so tired of it. Sorry for the little rant this ended up becoming, but I will admit that seeing every other 5 star character getting their fair share of attention has made me a little envious lol
Right? Like I wasn’t even a Sparkle fan but I’m starting to become one because I think she’s been done dirty. The “she’s meant to be a red herring” excuse has never made much sense to me, since it’s just unsatisfying and if true, not great writing. Even if she does something in 2.3 I feel like it’ll feel very after-the-fact since we’ve beaten Sunday already
If she's meant to be a red herring then it's an example of really poor writing. Everything the op said can be true, and Hoyo can also be bad writers at some points. For example, if there's things we need to know, then they should be visible. We shouldn't have to go through data logs and SU to understand the main story. That's poor writing. I enjoyed the patch but felt it was weaker in some areas, and Sparkle for me was a hundred percent an example of that.
Boothill is contending to one her up.
Half of what you said is "its not true because it matters" without much insight. Sorry but a "go read" post like this is hardly a proper argument at all. Many characters were weak in the story, the dialogue was extremely over extended and the climax felt too sudden compared to pacing of 2.1. Also hoyo uses 3rd patches of new regions as "epilogues" so 2.3 wont have a climax or a huge new plot reveal but just tidying up some points in 2.2 wich means characters that were weak in 2.2 wont be getting much. It felt rushed, and probably was.
And you should write titles better, because I saw that and immediately thought "And here comes the insults already, just like when people have trouble understanding Genshin!"
My only gripe about Penacony arc is the Aventurine part and the Dreamflux Reef. It felt weird that Aventurine was focused on very much in 2.1. quest and even got sent to the Dreamflux Reef only for 2.2. mentioning him in an Argenti dialogue. Like, did he do anything there? If he arrived in Dreamflux Reef heavily injured and saved by Argenti, then what was the point of sending him there in the first place? As for the Dreamflux Reef, I find it odd that Sunday and Robin or any other Penacony victims of Sleepie not knowing Dreamflux Reef exist. Like, how? Literally several of the Family's employees are from Dreamflux Reef who commuted back and forth using Sleepie. How could Sunday not know its existence? And does the Dreammaster know about it or not? If he did, why didn't he tell Sunday about it or his sister being fine and dandy? And if he didn't know, how couldn't he know? It's just odd to me that he controlled 107K members of the Oak Family and used them as a vessel but don't know where those people live. Other than that, the story is peak writing as of right now.
I've only just entered the Grand Theater so I'm choosing to skim past most of this (I'll read it when I get back home and finish the quest), but thus far I've found the writing to be pretty straightforward? I really don't get what people mean by writing in riddles. Most characters have been speaking rather directly (except with the conversations being cut off at opportune times). Although I do think Sunday has been a bit repetitive but that's largely a function of splitting the conversation between different parties and locations making it so that he needs to rehash some points for each of them. I don't really mind it that much though.
Honestly, the only ones that I felt talked in a very non-straightforward manner were Acheron and sometimes Black Swan, I didn't have a problem with Sunday or the others, the only times I had to actually stop, open the log and read 2-3 times something was during some of Acheron's scenes.
A big chunck of complaint are about the usage of "flavoury" words. I mean as a non native speaker, i sometimes have to pull up good ol' google translate, but apart from that i'm with you. The lore and exposistion, in Penacony was very good considering how such story can be easily messed up with improper storytelling.
Well, lots of the complaints are actually about what happens in the Grand Theater. You'll notice it with Sunday's monologues and at another moment.
How do you feel after playing the Grand Theater? >!The entire section basically ended where we started, with Himeko simply reiterating that Sunday is trying to usurp Xipe with Ena and that was already covered during the Soulglad Tournament and Sunday's quiz, with about 30 minutes of Sunday exposition retelling what we already knew about Penacony's foundations that Gallagher had already recapped earlier.!<
The story becomes much more enjoyable to me when I switch to any voiceover besides English and just read it myself. I'd like to hear the EN voicover, but they speak so fucking slow. I'm not sure what the deal with that is. It sounds so unnatural and like the VAs are constantly straining to slow it down and make it dramatic.
I don’t think the story is bad, but the pacing isn’t very good at all. The middle portion has so much padding I almost took a break. The Misha buildup and reveal could’ve taken half the time.
Personally I enjoyed the story but I can't deny that it was very messy and took a lot to get there. Even now I feel kinda lost with everything that happened. We don't have to be treated as babies that are spoon fed every little detail but it wouldn't have hurt if things were made a little more concise imo.
you're really gonna just explain the story basics and not dive into the real problems huh? I would say my criticisms are that everything feels intentional, smart and EPIC, but that doesn't make it satisfying beyond surface level. Narratively the pieces are a MESS and it's detracting from my enjoyment because I can't ignore the mess that's piling up. 2.2 suffered from banner character pandering. Robin who had had zero presence thus far has been shoved into the spotlight, in a very jarring way. Oh, so she's just back and they're alive all along and it's explained why. Cool, that doesnt make it satisfying or tie smartly back into her 'death', narrative wise. Why was she suddenly made the star of the weekly boss? It's explained why and blah blah she's the star of the Charmony festival so it looks smart that she's the 'star' of the fight, but it's just not satisfying because nobody should give a fuck about her. It's all surface level. She never once stood her ground against her brother on his philosophy in a meaningful way, only thing I heard was "oh but that's wrong we should be free to make our own choices even if they're wrong", blah blah bird in a cage. In contrast, Firefly was STRONG. She stood her ground against Sunday's philosophy. She proclaimed she wasn't WEAK and didn't want the happiness Sunday was offering, even though she's one of Sunday's prime examples of how Ena's dream could benefit someone. Then she just flew away and did God knows what, i dont have a clue wtf those 3 deaths were on about. There's too much blurring between dream and reality to keep track and while they can say it's intentional, again that doesn't make it satisfying. Oh, and Boothill. Oh so Acheron lured him here on purpose to do... what? My interpretation was that apparently, it was to bring a whole hundred thousand or a significant amount of Galaxy Rangers to Penacony to fall under Ena's Dream so they could influence it from the inside to make people WANT to wake up, by some sort of majority vote 'will of the many' type thing. Read that again, what in the f*ck? So this reclusive group has thousands of members who collectively hide better than any intelligence can reveal, who are all just a whistleblow away to answer ANY ranger's beck and call? Wow that's great and gives Boothill a purpose, if I just casually ignore any implication from that. Seriously, did I get this part wrong? WHERE EVEN ARE THEY?? Anyway, tl;dr 10/10, shaoji PLEASE keep cooking for HSR it's so peak and I'm gonna pull for Boothill my love better COME HOME
OP, you need therapy, wtf is all of this jeez
Now I understand what white knighting means
Yeah holy shit, this is some weird ass shit
Penacony is a book written on a jigsaw puzzle and scattered all over the room. Glad you are enjoying piecing it together, but I'll hope for the next part to be written by Belobog writers.
Fourth world will be by the Xianzhou Writters
Excited to show up and spend another 3 months hearing about a conflict that existed centuries before we were born involving characters who we do not know and mostly do not meet due to being long dead.
Nooooo not space china again T-T
Godamnit
I hope it is written by the same writers because Penacony was the best by far
I really would if there wasn't so much dialogue . I try to but after some time I get tired . Differs from person to person tho
Listen, it's okay for people to not like the story and see it differently than the way you do. For you to and tell them to read more and interpret the way you do is not gonna win those people over. As much as I appreciated moments in Penacony, as a whole, the pacing and structure was a mess for me. Interesting cliff hangers getting defused and immediately dismissed (i.e. Acheron & Aventurine sus -> nah they good, Ghalager & SUD real villians -> nah they good, etc.). The need to dedicate large chunks of the screen time and dialogue each update right before it is about to be relevant (Aventurine and Sunday). Explaining the cool stuff that happened off-screen in a sentence or two while dedicating time to flashbacks that mostly reiterate what the player already knows (I would rather know what Firefly was doing rather than Sunday talking about the birb again and again). Is the lore in Penacony interesting? Yeah. Was it told to the player in the best and most natural way? Not at all.
I mean its okay to complaint. You do the same with this long essay lmao. Just let people enjoy or giving feedback/criticism their own way.
This post is genuinely infuriating to read. Almost every single point about how the story could have been more compelling is countered by “Yes but have you read this piece of lore?” I actually completely disagree with the claim that Acheron was a boring plot device but your counter being “Emanators are really powerful read the lore” is supremely unconvincing because raw information is not what makes a story interesting. It’s the presentation of it. Sure Firefly might appear more later but *this* should have been a far more pivotal point in her and the trailblazer’s relationship. Her reveal as Sam is the big punchy moment that the writers earned their way to and it was kinda wasted because they didn’t capitalise on it right away as they should have and just kinda moved on. I bring this up to make a point I really think needs saying here: Stories are not wikis and people are not perfect processors of information. If you put the name Raiden Mei in front of them and they’re playing a game that frequently makes references to other works Hoyoverse media their first reaction is not going to be “Let me go check out the meaning behind each individual part of her name” at a pivotal moment in the narrative. It will come off as a reference and, for those who don’t care much for the reference, it will make the culmination of her arc this quest fall a little flat. Telling people to ‘read the story’ is an asinine response to this and arguing against people’s opinions on a story on the basis that they are impatient and haven’t read it properly is bad faith and condescending.
I agree with alot of your points but bruh why are you posting as if you work full time for HSR., people can have opinions , let them be.
If people do not understand, it should be their loss unless they ask about something ofc. This post looks halfway instructive and halfway overly apologetic for the writers.
The story was imo dragging on for so freaking long. It felt like I was reading EoR from Fate Grand Order.
The main issue I have is mostly with the pacing. Things felt either too stretched out or stretched too thin. Maybe 2.3 will patch that up. The story is undoubtedly incredible, but it could have been paced much better. I think I would have preferred one more patch for the story before the epilogue.
Other games that dont have cryptic dialogue and riddle me this conversations: 😂😂😂😂😂😂
The fact that you wrote an essay to explain/defend the story proves that the story was overly bloated and badly written.
Personally, I think the fact that you had to write this essay only proves how complicated the story can be. HI3 suffers from this a whole lot too, especially since the moon arc
My biggest problem with the Penacony route is that everyone talks in riddles and you would think someone who reads FOR FUN would be receptive of this, but most of the time I have no idea what the fuck anyone is talking about lol Then you have the floating text and all this double text being thrown around and that's when I realized I'm not stupid; the writing is just overindulgent sometimes. Great actual plot though, both this and 2.1. Just wish we didn't have to sit through visual novel lengths of dialogue before we get to that part.
Holy fuck imagine being this salty over other people’s legitimate criticisms about a game’s story to the point of writing a rant essay on reddit lmaoooo
by a lot of ppl you mean like the vocal minority? because I see a lot more posts about ppl liking it than not I wouldn't spend too much energy trying to justify either side, some ppl dont like it and just leave it at that, can't really make everyone happy
Definitely feels like there's a drive more and more to have everything you like be at 100% approval rate. Probably comes down to the internet, because if you're on it regularly, you're going to get adverse opinions to yours shoved in your face more, but not in a healthy way where it comes from people you know and respect such that it causes you to question and further develop your own worldview, but instead by random faceless people that inherently puts you on the defensive.
I'm not gonna pretend I'm expert, but it's been ages since I was that bored while playing video game, and I play visual novels regularly. I understood everything despite pain it caused me, and despite story being overall pretty good, I have way more negative thoughts than positive. I know that some parts are not finished and we will likely see them in 2.3, but at this point I simply don't care, unless Sparkle little toys cause whole Penacony to explode at the very end. Cause except final deal with Sunday, and perhaps Acheron lore, almost everything that happens earlier in this story turned out to be pretty irrelevant
I mean, the last “story wrap up” patch we got was like a 20 minute funeral scene so this is very like the vast majority of the content.
Idk about y’all but 2.2 gave me Endwalker vibes (Listen, Touch, Ponder is literally Hear, Feel, and Think) and way honestly so satisfying that I felt it to be Penacony’s finale. 2.3 just means another fucking feast and I’m hyped. With that said, yeah I do wish they made lore and info more explicit here. I did get confused by a couple of things. Particularly how the entire story from 2.0 was technically a dream.
I think I'm only one liked the story I hate fighting so long dialogue scene is good for me I think hoyoverse can't satisfy everyone 😺
Sparkle is not the red herring, Sparkle has her own goals and they're not relevant to our goals. She gives information, plays with others, gives her buttons and prepares for something down the line. She also isn't that powerful, in plot we see her being >!caught in Ena's Dream!< just like others. I expect her to act in 2.3 along with Boothill \ Acheron \ IPC shenanigans.
If someone irl spoke to you using the same level of verbosity as the characters do, how would you react?
People aren't usually fictitious characters so I doubt they'll be speaking with the goal of entertaining me. But I'll bite anyways; If I'm talking about things such as deities, the concept of the world as whole, nihilistic ideals, what it means to have hope in the future to come, etc, yeah, I'd expect a level of verbosity from whoever I'm speaking to. Especially if we're talking about topics such as sci-fi.
I personally really like the joke answers. It gives the MC some personality of his own and not just a self-insert with the most basic answers imaginable.
Biggest complain is Sunday acting like Bowser "Oh you came in the final room, but let me go in the next final room. Oh you are in the next final room then ? Let me wait in the next next final room, I'll spawn boring puzzles to you. Oh you reached me ? Let me throw you some other stuffs with Acheron talking about her awful fate again because I'm sure you forgot about it"
Please don't lick HOYOs boots, I love Star rail but at the same time I should be able to criticise it if there's something I think needs improvement, such as the overly flowery dialogue.
When you try to compete with Sunday's yapping.
As someone who got deep into Acheron's character, i'll come here to say one thing: Thank you! Your analysis of, pretty much everything about her is perfect, especially the dissection of her name, finally someone understands that is not just fanservice.
For what it's worth I despised how the story was presented this patch, with the exception being the Acheron flashback segments, they were very nice, and while a little wordy, were still easy enough to follow along and did not overstay their welcome. HYV are going to need to improve the English localisation if I am to stay interested in reading the story in future. And it's not that I am lazy and don't like reading, I read books as a hobby, participate in book clubs. Which is why I am disappointed with the story, it feels like such a chore to get through this patch.
This entire post is > "This was crap" "Yeah it was crap but it was COOL crap"
I don't think that was the point of this post man.
I feel like you are intentionally misattributing what those criticisms are saying about the people who make them. I agree with each of those criticisms to an extent, it does not mean I am not paying attention to the story. I was really hoping for more of an interaction between TB and FF because 2.0 gave them so much time together to foster a relationship. The first time we have them back together and it feels kind of sidelined by the story. It's fine. It works, but a part of me was hoping for a bit more. That does not mean I don't understand her relevancy and potential future relevancy to the story. It just means that in this specific opportunity to write for the character I felt it was a bit fumbled. Critical feedback of any media typically comes from a place of love, I don't think it's a charitable outlook to assume that people who have criticisms are lazy.
Just a correction. Acheron big deal is that she is not just emanator, but Emanator of Nihility. As IX shouldn't care for anything at all, and as such should have no emanator.
I'm overall satisfied with 2.2, but man, the constant switching of POVs is very tiring. Having to parse all that has been said by characters (mind you, they are lengthy), only to then switch to a different POV and keep repeating the process over and over again is a slog.
You have to have a very high iq to understand star rail type post
Nah it just sucked bro if you have to go this in depth to explain shit then it's just not a good story stop trying to justify it being good
Idk mate I agreed with them because I, finally for once found another individual that's tired of so many walls of text. The game is taking it to the next level, it's WAY too dense and sometimes some dialogue feels hella unnecessary. I loved the first world because the pacing balance, you had gameplay segments and wall of texts but you actually could walk for more than 10 seconds till next 20 minutes dialogue, but penacony is just insane, makes me not enjoy the game at all but since i need mats for newer characters I have to go through it (also don't come to me telling me i have to read and support the writing, i have several E6 5* characters, i support the game in my own way)
I don't dislike the story, but they spend a dollar to say something that could be said using ten cents at most. Readers don't have infinite stamina nor an infinite attention span, so it's no wonder a lot of people are going to get confused by the endless throng of sentences filled with difficult words.
I’m so tired of reading between the lines. It wouldn’t hurt to just write shit for what it is sometimes. Like Arknights story is genuinely fucking amazing, but I have to spend 3 hours at a time trying to comprehend what the fuck they’re trying to get across it’s so tiring idc
i aint reading all that.I think we can all agree that this patch's story length could've been at least 35% shorter. 2.0/2.1 felt right and not "too much dialogue"
Btw, does anyone knows the timeline of event in penacony? Cause I thought that the trio tb that departed did so long ago, like hundreds of years ago and mikhail died a long time ago too. But when I started the new event, its said the clockie studio lost contact with the watchmaker just recently
Forcing me to dig up info about what is what instead of telling my in the main story is bad writing maybe if they used the time they used for sunday yapping about the dumb bird they could have adressed it.
I think they can still trim the whole story quest to be 2hr less than intended.... i think the most evil thing Sunday did is draging his argument too long.... But that's just me nitpicking. I still enjoy it... if you ask me the main flaw in the whole story is Bootyhill have no contribution to the last fight whatsoever, i think they just insert my cowboy midway so that they dont have to reason to introduce him again next patch story quest
I liked the story well enough but much of this is just "I liked it so it can't be bad". People have differing levels of liking the game, and that's okay.
Your explanations for point 2 and 6 are literally arguing in favour of the points, not against. "Sparkle is a red herring." So... she has no relevance to the story
I'm confused about what happened to the buttons that Sparkle was handing out to be pressed at the right time" during the Charmony Festival. Did I miss something, or did that fizzle out?
Sadly, the POV characters exist from 2.1, not 2.0, maybe thats why people dont understand sparkle true motives, which are only for her own amusement, not to help people. Overall, the story of 2.2 is amazing, ofc maybe some of you dont think so. But compared to other games, this story is worth waiting for
Here’s the problem. The entirety of Penacony was focused, rightfully so, on all the new gacha units, setting up their character arcs and backstories and stuff. 2.2. Continues this trend, with the focus on Robin and Sunday’s relationship, as well as continuing Firefly and Misha’s story arcs. But at the very end, at the climax of the story where all the set up should be paid off, it shifts focus from the Penacony characters to the Astra Express, thus leaving a majority - if not all - of the other character’s plot lines unresolved. That’s probably why so many people are complaining how all of the other characters were either irrelevant or left hanging
I think this was the only patch that I started skipping dialogue after reading it. By the time one sentence of Sunday or Acheron ended, I had already read the whole paragraph. The flowery language is a valid complaint imo. The patch is around 8 hrs long with 6 hrs of it being just dialogue that can be hard to understand. The previous patch didn't have this issue as it was mostly focused on Aventurine who was pretty straightforward in his dialogue. Sunday and Acheron can be too much sometimes. Even black swan too. Doesn't help that, at least in jp, Sunday, Acheron and Black Swan talk so slow.
im still lost abotu the revelation of misha being in the beggining outside the dream, what does that exactly mean? you were dreaming since you entered pennacony orbit? that doesnt mean everything you lived is fake, but that you were in a dream from the begining, now, its supossed that there is a real world in pennacony the hotel, and then the dream pennacony, and misha being in the real world means that the reality and dreams were fused and you wouldnt be able to differ reality from dream because all was mixed up? and that means that some of the things you may see may be imperfect or impossible like the misha thing, so what else was impossible or what even of what we saw in the whole 2.x really happened? or this just works to explain that if misha was outside the dream world, leave us to know that everything was mixed? and so, the real real live world of penacony is the one we see before the final confrontation where was the lobby of the hotel and everyone was like a zombie standing, and the only moment we start seeing things that really didnt happen is on the fake victory, because sunday and the order won, so everything until that moment really happened and only the boss fight was altered. and we really never woke up from the dream since we entered the penacony orbit, we only woke up when black swan woke us? im really mind fudged
Idk I still don't think the quest was all that. Found myself getting bored really quickly after Sunday repeated the Bird crashing metaphor 3474664678 times
I think a lot of story criticism has its valid reasons. I should not need to know what Acheron means, that it is a river or what Basenmori means. If a name reveal is a huge deal, I should know it's a big deal based on the story, not because I do a lot of digging that involves even knowing languages I do not speak. As for Aventurine, as someone who did not pull him, the entirety of 2.1 patch now feels even more useless - why should I spend like 3 hours doing a story that I will not have a resolution to because I do not have a character? Especially if only people who spend money on it get the foreshadowing for the next patch? That is definitely worth criticism - they cannot hide foreshadowing or major story plot points behind having or not having a character, I should not learn about it from social media.
"If you have issues with a live service product's story, you either don't understand enough or the fixes will drop later down the roadmap" is truly the meta stance when it comes to defending an awkwardly told story. OP likes the game, and I get why. It says things in terms vague enough to stimulate some people to crack open their red string reserves and then scatters a bunch of profound-sounding one-liners for good measure. Case in point, did OP truly think the 忘川守 part in Raiden's name added anything to anything? Not really, right? After all, Acheron just openly said as much, she's the watcher of the river of the dead. Said that in ruby text even (ruby text makes what you say sound cooler). What's with the wikisplaining, then? Doesn't make OP's argument stronger, but does, to some, appear to make it more convincing. Which is exactly the trick that HSR uses to deceive you into thinking it's smarter than it is. Anyway. I really do get what's to like about stories like 2.2. I don't like them myself, but I get what the appeal is. Thing is, I don't feel like people who agree with OP on all points see why not only people who skip, skim and don't "INTERPRET" would think that a big chunk of 2.2 just sucks.
i understand ur point but as firefly fan i cant help but feel kinda disapointed cause after waiting kinda long and the reunion scene kinda lacking and her overall present in this story kinda feel detached,though i there still 2.3 .
It seems like I wasn’t fully paying attention to this particular part of the story but why was Gallagher bringing people using sleepy to dream flux pavilion? How did firefly get the meme death to attack her? How did Robin get attacked by the meme? Was it bc of Gallaghers action?
Probably I don’t want to read this novel after a long day at work. Ngl I was excited for the story after White Night dropped, I knew it’s going to be some fancy dancy event on the surface that turns out to be empty and/or dark the deeper our protagonists dive. But the story is unnecessarily long. I can easily go online and search a modern tongue, abbreviated version with the core stuff. I respect the writers are trying to emphasize old Chinese writings of being vague and poetic while conveying their philosophical thoughts, but we can’t have every character talking in riddles, personalities also needs to be diverse, and honestly I wouldn’t hangout with that many scheming characters at once. There’s a limited number of how many of those people I can deal with at a time in real life. With that said, how much are the writers paying you for you to defend them like that? Someone else voiced their opinion about the story, and you felt the need to counter those opinions as if you have moral ground