The Acheron Welt subplot made me appreciate how Xenoblade 3 handles returning characters from previous games. Their screentime is short because they aren’t the main characters in that story and there’s some fanservice moments from older games. But the things they tell, do, and show are impactful and show how they’ve grown. So even people who didn’t play those games could appreciate it The Welt/Acheron stuff felt like it could only be appreciated by HI3 fans and everyone was left in the dust
I actually think the typical hoyo dialogue ONLY works on Acheron. She's seen the void and for most that just turns people into shells according to IX's profile. She kinda just seems like a character that is present in multiple plains at the same time. Her dialogue feels like the ranting of a lunatic and the revelations of a god at the same time. To me, I feel like they have captured the fact that she isn't a person anymore, but rather one step below a god.
The Honkai Impact stuff requires so much extra knowledge that it definitely makes me feel like Star Rail will never really delve into the Honkai aspects. Which feels a bit odd, considering this game's name. Lol
I like our crew, but I’m starting to realize while less annoying than paimon, they kinda have the same problem of just kinda being there even when it doesn’t feel like they add much. And unlike genshin where even if I’m not playing it for the foreseeable future, Paimon’s contributions are becoming easier to appreciate than the astral express crew’s. I feel like it would have been nice to cut the crew in half, make them easier to manage in the story.
@@gameb9oy I foresee at some point, once the Astral Crew's stories are told, we'll jump ship to Stellaron Hunter team and then after that, a reunion with the Astral Crew happens
Yeah but unlike tingyun, firefly, aventurina etc, those are real death with impact on the storyline and the protagonist ( well aside signora), but they are at least meaningful compared to tingyun, firefly, robin, aventurine...
@@larsthememelord3383 well...yes and no in Focalors cass cuz she is another half of Furina, so you could say that half a character died there while another half(Furina) survived
I was really excited to hear your thoughts on this story, I love how you structured your videos. I loved everything about what they did about Aventurine and I'm sucker for story about luck so , but I do wish we knew him at least 2 update before that. I find Acheron very likable but I do agree her way of speaking is a bit confusing . I agree so much about the firefly stuff , I saw people being disappointed that Firefly is Sam but Sam was really a nothing character so it's not a character assassination. However I'm starting to think that the express crew mostly Himeko is just there, I love Himeko because of Honkai 3rd but sometimes I really have to wonder if she just take tranquilizer at the beginning of each quests and just chill there.
Thank you so much! And yeah, I feel like the writers will have really great ideas sometimes (like Firefly being Sam) but then rush the idea out there without the proper setup. There's a lot of great stuff in Star Rail, but with a couple more rewrites, it could truly be really fantastic
So far, our stay on Penacony has included an awful lot of beating up police officers in a very short time, manipulating emotions in a way that the people in charge really ought to be able to sense happening, and sketchy stuff that we don't even know about because March 7th did it off-camera. Given the fact that we aren't actually all that officially welcome for the Charmony Festival to start with, I'm going to credit Himeko's continual off-camera diplomacy and attention-attracting for the fact nobody's tried to evict us by this point.
As a Honkai Impact player who’s really invested in that game. I have to say that I also wasn’t a big fan of how the conversation sequence with Acheron basically grinds the story to a halt. As a HI3 player while the conversation was emotional and good in the moment for me then I think back and say huh, that’d be a whole lot of gibberish for people who never played that game. Made worse by Acheron frankly being boring. Welt was hard carrying that conversation for me. Welt being exposition man is really awkward when the game may as well be softly winking at players with “he was so cool back in his heyday” “he’s really gonna pop off trust us”. “This guy was a hero of humanity who saved earth countless times, he’s gonna be important eventually!” Maybe I’m building a false conception of HSR welt in my head cause of what I’ve seen him do before, but I still don’t like it. Speaking on Gallagher though, yeah that was indefensible, I was battling the desire to mash the screen through the exposition which isn’t good at all, I wish that info was fed more organically. Overall good video though, love your content and how critical you are towards these games whether positively or negatively.
And with 2.2 that fanservice is strange(it was "strange" before, but not on that level). Don't know if you have finished it or not - but overall plot is too familiar. As if the game simply doesn't want any Honkai players. Or thinks that I like reading the same stories, which is worse, to be honest.
I think you really thoroughly described why 2.1 is both my favorite update and also one that irks me so badly. It gave us hands down the best written character in the entire game in Aventurine, but muddled his plot with genuine nonsense to the point where whenever the pov swapped away from Aventurine I genuinely considered speeding through dialogue until he came back again. Firefly’s death and reveal was so mishandled I genuinely felt nothing during it, I couldn’t follow anything Welt and Acheron spoke about because I’ve never touched HI3rd in my life, and Gallagher felt more like a lore lecture than any actual productive story content. The most powerful and engaging part of 2.1 was Aventurine’s arc, and even then the writers managed to proceed to completely shaft him by not introducing his character earlier in the story (perhaps somewhere between the release of Topaz and Ratio, after we hear his voice in the game for the first time) and then not giving us any true closure by ending him on a cliffhanger in the sea of Nihility. I’m gonna get into 2.2 a little bit now because 2.2 managed to make this issue worse for me, so if you’re reading this and aren’t up to date, you can dip right here. 2.2 felt like a complete disservice to everything Aventurine went through in 2.1. Having almost an entire patch dedicated to exploring his character and leaving his well-being on a cliffhanger only to reduce him to having less than 20 LINES in the 2.2 mission is genuinely insulting. Not to mention that none of those lines are incredibly productive to him or give us any resolution to the events of 2.1. It’s the bare minimum confirmation that he’s alive, and then the writers immediately throw him to the side like he means nothing. His conversation with Jade at the end infuriated me as well, because it feels like the devs confirming that they really are going to just shove him to the side, given how he mentions getting some ‘free time’ for himself and Jade saying it was her turn to take over. There were so many instances in 2.2 where I had hoped they’d bring Aventurine back in with the main group because he could have been genuinely valuable to the progression of the story, but they chose to do nothing with him. This obviously doesn’t change the fact that he’s my favorite character in this entire game, and I love everything he’s been part of so far in Penacony. It actually makes it worse for me that he was underutilized in 2.2, and the plot felt noticeably weaker for it- especially when you consider the continued involvement of other characters like Black Swan and Acheron throughout the entirety of the Penacony story. It almost came across to me as if they had to push him aside in order to make room to include the new characters releasing in 2.2 so that they could use the main story as a tool to build hype for their characters and banners. It felt like both Jade and Boothill were shoehorned into the story at points where they didn’t feel relevant just to coincide with the fact that they’re going to be playable very soon. (Jade I especially have issues with, considering we only learned of her character and her relationship to Aventurine for the first time in 2.1, but that’s a whole other essay.) I can only hope that he won’t be forgotten after Penacony concludes, and that eventually he will have another moment to be relevant in the story and put some proper respect back on his name as the greatest written character to come out of this game. Penacony’s story was largely good; I just hope that the devs learn from what they did wrong with the pacing and dialogue in order to make future worlds even better. And for the love of god they have GOT to stop using characters as solely exposition dumps. Fu Xuan and Gallagher didn’t deserve that.
I agree with most of this - especially them rushing showcasing a character, then explaining said character the next update, and then (possibly) dumping them, but I think your conclusion on Aventurine might be wrong: From what I surmised (I could be wrong on the details but yeah, if you're interested feel free to double check), the IPC division that handled Sigonia (and led to its downfall) was the one that Boothill asked him for while at gunpoint - the marketing division, this makes me thing that there'll be a subplot with Boothill and Aventurine dealing with them, since it seems to imply that they both have bad history with them - or at least I hope that'll happen, would be a nice way to explore Aventurine further as well as Boothill But I personally do wish that there was more of Aventurine, he grew on me through his character development as the conversation between his present, past and future were literally therapeutic in how they went, as was his conclusion I'd also argue that this is because 2.2 is a continuation of 2.1, it IS a lot of story time (took me about 8 hours to finish 2.2), but if you started penacony in 2.3, or 2.4, you'd definitely feel differently about the story, the luofu for example didn't feel as bad for me but I can only imagine how many people disliked it if they were playing AS the story was releasing
@@ale-hl8pg I totally did forget to mention Oswaldo and the Marketing Development Department! It seems like Oswaldo has been the person behind more than just one instance of ruining an entire planet’s well-being for the sake of more money, and that he did something to Boothill personally in the process. We’ll have to see once his banner releases and we can read his character stories to learn more about why he hates the IPC so much, but I really hope 2.3 follows through on that subplot. It would be great both for the beginning of Boothill’s development and the continuation of Aventurine’s. (Plus a possible additional setup for a future plot of the IPC’s destruction, though that might just be my wishful thinking that we might take down the space capitalists one day) I personally felt that the Xianzhou was actually more disjointed when I played through the whole thing at once, since I didn’t have the downtime of waiting for patches to release. The waiting kind of gives a false sense of pacing sometimes, and it made some parts of the story feel extra rushed when I could play the whole thing through without waiting weeks at a time for the next section. Penacony flows pretty well as a continuous story, I think, but has some similar issues. The issues of pacing in Penacony show up when you stop to think about it on an individual character level. Like with how the trailblazer in 2.1 was basically doing nothing while the Aventurine plot happened around them and they just got dragged along. The time between Firefly’s ‘death’ and her reveal as being alive feels longer and more reasonable to the audience because we had to wait weeks and then sit through 6 hours of the quest to get that info revealed to us, but for the trailblazer in canon it was less than a day! Maybe even only a handful of hours! And if you were to play all of Penacony in one go, you’d have the same issue of seeing Firefly ‘die’ and then come back in a jarringly short amount of time.
@@valhalla5614 yeah I get the argument for downtime, but in regards to the luofu - I think it made people realize how bad some parts of the story truly were, my main argument for it was that it was purely exposition and like 0 character development for anyone the reason I liked it was cause of additional events and character quests, idk when yukong's quest, bailu's quest, aurum alley, the cloud quintet or fyxestrall released, but the luofu would've fairly forgettable to me without those Nearly forgot to mention Luocha's quest - I didn't like how it ended but that was peak HSR alongside huo huo screaming Honestly the best argument I found for 2.2 was that it felt more like a visual novel than a gacha RPG, I think (though I'm not 100% sure on this one) that whenever you got robin as a trial you had a super limited amount of possible combat encounters if any, both were at the golden hour (I forgot if there's more) which is......weird, to say the least, you got a trial character just to watch them walk around the overworld, they handled this MUCH MUCH better with aventurine and yeah I honestly agree on the firefly thing, but I doubt someone's gonna sink in that much time to finish penacony in one sitting (then again I can't say much since I literally did Belobog and Luofu in like 3 sittings max because I got addicted)
Weird, I felt differently. I wish Avent got less screentime in 2.1 and got more through patches instead. Avent & boot confrontation will also be explained upon so he won't get a real break.
This quest was good but chunks of it ended up being “ok cool but when can I get back to the aventurine story” Bro’s writing was so good that I overlooked all of the weaker parts you pointed out. I’m not done with 2.2 story but the beginning scene where Acheron talks to another character after a Dan Heng moment is. Yeah it really annoyed me. Acheron please just say something straight for once. Tbh I think a part of it might be a translation thing. I know in Chinese it’s common to like…use 4 character poems or analogies in everyday speech and whatnot (my Chinese isn’t good so I don’t have a good grasp on that lol) that prob don’t translate well into English. And the result is a robot poet thing as you’ve said. I have hopes that 2.2 will actually make me care about Acheron outside of the lore implications present; AND THOSE BANGER ANIMATIONS
regarding the chinese thing... i'm fluent in chinese and i play with chinese audio and english subtitles. i can vouch for the fact that the chinese flows better than the english. don't get me wrong, i think the translators did a good job with what they had (much better than genshin imo) but acheron's (not just her but a lot of other penacony characters') speech is already cryptic enough in the original chinese, and translating it was a tall order.
On the topic of Gallagher, He is a "minion of Enigmata," the faction of misinformation, so he is probably lying the entire time. But yeah that bit came outta nowhere.
he's a fictionologist. he doesn't lie outright. he just creates fictionalized scenario's that doesn't exist but you need to realize they are fiction to discover the truth.
I feel you, Acheron has some cool moments but they got extremely wordy with her cryptic, philosophical speeches, like I get what they were going for but they could have cut half of the long monologues and achieved it. Happens in 2.2 as well, if she wasn't such a badass I would not like her. I also agree about the crossovers, I want to be excited but they don't do anything with it with literal characters from HI3rd and the story and world design being basically just a slight remix of the same things in Genshin in Fontaine with the last patch just flat out being a mirror image of 2.2 but they don't just connect the games. Like decide if there will actually be a meaningful connection if you're gonna tease it constantly in all the games.
I love how this video is made and explained! I know these videos take time, but I Personally want a 2.2 summary + a Firefly character analysis, I feel she felt both rushed and inconsistent with things we already knew about Sam from before. But I love the idea of meeting Sam better before. Edit: Plus I want to hear about the "ending" of 2.2 with Black Swan.
Aventurine arc is rushed as good as it was fot hsr standards. Their approach for him finding a different answers to why he still wished for a future was good should have been extended and have more context clues.
That's what I wanted man, both him and FF was did so dirty in 2.1. I understand FF to a degree but not really Avent, I love him so much so it felt like Avent himself was butchered for me as I couldn't be interested with it as much
I find it interesting to see all the criticisms about the dialogue I personally felt no issues towards it and personally felt engaged, maybe it just scratched my brain in a certain way I liked but I guess it’s not for everyone. I wish I could see an example of good dialogue then, can someone send me a video?
Definitely agree with your overall takes. The sad part for me is that i just didn't care about Aventurine as a character, even though i think objectively he is very well done. But the inherent structure of HSR's plot not having a strong narrative throughline between worlds, makes me not really care about characters that are going to be relevant *only* for this a single planet/arc. I have hope for Firefly only because she's a Stellaron hunter. So even if her Penacony arc is crap, she has a better chance of being redeemed in later arcs. If i was sure the IPC was going to be a consistent and relevant entity, i would've readied myself to be more invested in Aventurine once his plot started. But seeing as how he's already yeeted himself(pending) in basically 1 chapter, IPC members are also looking like one-offs. Topaz is just a cameo girl now.
I so agree with you with the gotcha moments and flowery dialogue for no real reason. One of the things that bug the hell out of me with the Star Rail writing is the refusal to provide pivotal lore information before its relevant reveal just because they're intent on keeping the player in the dark and can't even let the player get enough clues by paying enough attention to the plot to figure out the story before it is actually revealed. SPOILERS Case in point is the reveal of death and so on in 2.2, which creates a lore inconsistency because now it turns out that this place even has a name and people LIVE THERE and frequently TRAVEL between the different versions of the dreamscape whereas previously, it was set up as this otherworld dimension where all the baddies come from typical to your horror mystery plot such as Silent Hill or Stranger Things. It completely undermines previous story points where they set up the memory zone meme to be a dangerous enemy but it also begs the question how important people such as Sunday DO NOT KNOW ABOUT THE EXISTENCE OF THIS PLACE, especially as subplots reveal that dreamweavers i.e. the people who work for the Family to create the various dreamscapes, know about this stuff because they were responsible for creating it and it's not treated as this hush hush secret you'd think it would be. It's just ??????. You'd think that it would be the most heralded secret within the Family, the one thing no one is allowed to speak about or mention and is actively erased from all documents and records. That Sunday doesn't know is because of his outsider status within the Family, being adopted into the family by Gopher Wood. Robin and Boothill were also completely underutilized. Boothill did one thing in the entire story but at least he speaks somewhat like a person compared to Acheron and Black Swan so there's that. I will be honest and say I have a massive bias against Robin because her archetype in storytelling makes me just want to punch her, there's just something about typical goodie two shoes pious girls who devote themselves to some existential rule that grinds my gears like nothing else, but at least she did prove to have some agency in the story but there's something to be said about gender when she a) was "killed" for drama and b) was kidnapped by no other than her own brother for drama. Sparkle was also underutilized who I felt was there mostly because she had to be there, similar to Boothill. And I want to be honest here and say I think 2.2 was overall very good, especially thematically. The discussions about individual freedom vs. societal demands for order, sort of trying to criticize capitalism/consumerism but again it didn't quite dare to go there (this was also a big gripe I had with the Topaz subplot) even though it implicitly tried to imply that hypercapitalism when married with religious zealotry leads to fascism, escapism and in general having a nuanced discussion about the meaning of life in relation to reality and fantasy were all great, they were all incredible strengths that were executed very well, and I like that they made Sunday a tragic villain who compared to Cocolia who was literally brainwashed, became misguided by his own accord, but MY GOD is it frustrating when Welt suddenly cracks out that this place is actually known as the Dreamflux Reef as if it's a well-established and known thing when we spent two entire patches wondering wtf this place is and why it exists. I feel there were so many other ways they could have taken this aspect of the story rather than make it into an actual undercity version where people live and work. It would have been much more interesting to make it related to the past similar to what is done in Denno Coil where it's still an older and abandoned version of the dreamscape but where people become lost and then can't leave or whatever, because their escapism prevents them. So more of a purgatory if you will. They could still have worked in the escapist theme and how mindless consumerism doesn't lead to happiness and demonstrate exactly what happens when it's taken too far. That would also better connect with Sunday's desire to provide people purpose for them, since he doesn't trust in that people know what's best for them and others, because he's seen this world and known about it but didn't tell anyone. Since it's an inherent part of the dreamscape and a natural result of human suffering he can't get rid of it, but he can prevent people from ending up there. Also, Argenti saved Aventurine, like wtf? I know they felt done with Aventurine's story but the fact that the cast only asked whether he was alive or not after the fact when Welt again suddenly cracks out that the chip he gave us was a tracking device is just lame as hell, especially since we wanted to know what happened to him after 2.1. It's quite insulting when they give us the best fucking and well written character (not that he has much competition though) and dedicate an entire patch to him and then pretend he doesn't exist for the patch after it. I understand that episodic writing does rely more on hooks in order to keep up suspension, but the gotcha moments become predictable when they're overused, and it's frustrating when they on the one hand completely lore dump on you but because you have no context you can't make sense out of half of it and then obtusely try to keep the player in the dark so you can't make sense of it while a moment later go, that's just this thing that everyone knew about but you didn't because you're the player so we can't tell you about it until we decide it's the right place to inform you. I'm still not entirely sure wtf is meant with the Family betraying Mikhail.
bro robin wasn't kidnapped by Sunday. In fact the only reason Sunday took up the harmonious chior is literally because of her sister refusing to participate in the choir as the singer that's why Sunday who turned out to be one of the "twins of order" was able to utilize the dominicus, Sunday himself already shown as that he also wanted answers so it's just he's forced to fight them but he decided to fight them as equals to fight for their philosophies.
So, I I disagree with some of this. To just start with some of the stuff I agree with, I think its very strange to just have Argenti turn up and have found Aventurine. Like, we knew he wasn't dead by the end of last patch but this is still a non-ideal way to resolve this situation. I don't think meme's are treated at all how you see them by the story. The walking bill-boards, the guard dogs of the hound family, The Origami birds, They're all memes and they're all treated as a different type of sentient creature. The Dreamjolt Troupe enemies are all meant to serve some function in the dreamscape, but its stated that nightmares and negative emotions, as well as the disruption of the dreamscape is causing them to lose control recently. If by "The meme" you mean Directly the "Death/Dormancy" Meme then yes. Its actions are recontexualised with new information in this patch. I also dont believe the dreamweavers know about the Dreamflux Reef. I thought it was pretty explicitly stated that it was created by the Watchmaker, before the Golden Hour in penacony even existed, its "the Original" that they're paving over above, so to speak. I also believe that Sunday did not know about the Reef due to the Schism between the Watchmaker and the rest of the Family. Its pretty clearly stated that after the two other nameless die and The Watchmaker leaves Penacony to protect it on the frontlines, The Family use the Stellaron behind his back to create the Golden hour, and when he returns while hes intially supritve of this, when he learns how this has happened and why, his disagreements cause the schism in the family. By the time Sunday is adopted by Gropher(The Dreammaster) The watchmaker is dead in the dreamflux reef, and the entire place is slowly sinking back into the Primordial dreamscape. It does feel peculiar that so many people are still considered missing, Its stated that they're often taken by the "Death" Meme as an accident, according to Gallagher, as such these people who have gone missing should have shown back up already. Welt is stated to have woken up a few hours before you. Its not like he knows anything about it, but he is trying to help you adjust after having gone through the same thing, its why everyone is spread around talking to different people, they're getting to know the place. I actually quite liked Robin, While she spends possibly too much time being the "typical goodie two shoes pious girls" She has extensive conversations in both flashbacks and current times with Sunday about his Phillosophy, in which she understands the risks associated with her beliefs. I left the storying feeling that she was a lot less naive Than I was initally expecting. I wish she had more screentime to really discuss this. Overall I don't know how much attention you were actually paying to what was playing out infront of you, But I understand I could be wrong there. This was all just off my memory so there are also possibly some flaws in my recounting of events and facts we're given, so please feel free to fact check me and question me on anything you disagree with!
@@lukepower117 1. Memes I completely understand how memes work in the story, and yes, I am explicitly talking about Death/Dormancy. In the context of memes the presence of the Stellaron is overall underexplored and underutilized just to keep the player in the dark from there being a Stellaron on Penacony, despite it being very obvious that there *is* a Stellaron on Penacony, because every new planet/major story beat is going to involve the presence of a Stellaron. That's the overall structure of Star Rail so far and there's no reason for the story to deviate from that, though it would be welcome if it did. 2. There are subplots after you finish the main 2.3 story that indicate that yes, some dreamweavers were a part of building or maintaining Dreamflux Reef. 3. As for the Family and the Watchmaker, my impression is that he never left Penacony though? As it was Tiernan who left Penacony and tried to return. You're right that there was a disagreement about the powers of the Stellaron between the Family and the Watchmaker. I don't fully remember all the details of the plot because a big problem I have which I mentioned earlier, is that when they lore dump not only do characters speak very cryptically about it, but that there's so much information it's difficult to process everything while listening to the story.
@@Kamishi845 Its after Tiernan dies, Mikhail feels compelled to go to the frontlines of the defense of penacony. Its stated both by gallagher and shown again when it goes over his life story. I'd love the name of the sidequests that talk aboute dreamweavers if you can find or remember it, As honestly if there ARE family affiliated Dreamweavers keeping the place going then that is the stupid thing I've heard in a while and I'd love to hear any justification for the game for saying that.
@@lukepower117 It was in the story related to Dr. Blues if I recall correctly. There are also dreamweavers IN Dreamflux Reef. There's an intellitron dreamweaver there.
Nah, that would be both Kiana and Captain of Hyperion if we're talking about the best of Mihoyo/Hoyoverse gacha game characters (although you really need to track down Captain of Hyperion lore as he's a very omnipresent character in comparison to the abundance of Kiana's animated CGs dedicated to her story in Honkai Impact at least) If Kiana is compared to the Space Marine poster boys of Warhammer 40K for her iterations' recurring appearance, then Captain of Hyperion lore is like the obscure and enigmatic "Star Child" of Warhammer 40K Which ironically enough, the latest events ties to him which spans several months after Kiana's last animated Da Capo CG that ended Part 1, the last Warhammer Horus Heresy & Siege of Terra novel series "The End and The Death released in same span of months between August to October of 2023) Oh also Captain's separated body as Ferryman (which was dead at his confrontation to the guy) is similar to "Slave of Destiny" Elio (and the similarities of Ferryman to the rotting husk of Emperor of Man that bound to the Golden Throne of Earth/Terra, alongside Ferryman's crews similarities with Elio's Stellaron Hunters are so uncannily 11:12 too, especially with Bronie directly referenced in Silverwolf trailer to Kafka similarities with Yae Kasumi: - using same katana weapon type - lightning type - animal-motifs of Kafka's Spider and Kasumi's fox or fish - similar black, white & violet-like colour palette on their attires and costumes - espionage & sabotage abilities - very fatalistic worldview from their trust to respective Elio & Ferryman on foreseeing omens through usually morally questionable actions - very ruthless and bloody at accomplishing their tasks to the point of often disregarding their enemies' lives - etc Even Captain himself recently got referenced in latest HSR Robin trailer (by borrowing Ai Chan account in Hyperion lol) alongside peculiarly Genshin Impact's Traveller (on top of anonymous lapdogs comments) which are hilarious and could span wild stupid theories on how Traveller manage to get a very advanced tech that allows him to communicate beyond continent of Teyvat and Genshin Impact's world, which also happens to be referenced in Honkai Impact since 2020 in Chapter 17 prior to Genshin Impact's release with the shot of Dvalin and Rita's Rosemary battlesuit release) I told you Captain's lore is kinda wild yet overlooked from the radars of even majority of "Captainverse" lore buffs (as I play Honkai Impact since January 2018 lol) though I do understand that people would get turned off with even more VN-style dialogues and narrative delivery methods that would take a lot of attention span (though it's not as bad bloated dialogues & gameplay padding of the main story since probably Kolostein arc, Elysian Realm arc, Moon Shadow arc then somewhat gets better in Part 1.5 but still a bit snorebait, then Part 2 is kinda interesting but the performance oh my God it's infuriating to those with still bad hardware, even those with rtx 3060 get a lot of GPU full-load for no good reason, even RDR2, FFVII Remake & Doom Eternal are way more optimised), oh also [Rita & Kiana > Luna] and that's objective fact, no offense to Luna fans btw
What are you talking about?🤨😮💨 Sorry but I didn't even get half of the references you just made. Not to be rude but it's not everyone who plays HSR that comes from HI3, in fact too much connections to the original HI3 will just confuse most star rail players.
6:17 well the express's plans for penacony were to chill out not save that place so if course we wouldn't be staying in the same place with the same person for long/my opinion
So basically the problem is that they made a big deal about character reveals without the player actually knowing much about them, making the Penacony story seem as being too rushed and wasting the potential it could have had
The way Penacony is handled is similiar to Luofu even if it's not the same. Unlike Jarilo-VI, that story has always been it's own little bubble, which contrasts with the complex multi storyline missions of Luofu and Penacony. There's just too many moving parts happening and it's just overwhelming to take in everything. The fact that some parts were written so well is impressive because most would suffer due to constant expository dialogue. Aventurine was a perfect mix of exposition and story, and I liked that showcased him (which incentivises pulling) before his "death". Pretty much it's just too much storylines to take in, Hoyo doesn't always simplify, paired with yap sessions, then the missions become boring until the good parts.
Watching this video was tough cause the only part I remember about 2.1's story is Aventurine's part😂 Like I don't think my brain even registered what happened inbetween Aventurine's story bits, I was remembering as I watched
hey! grat video! i agree with so many of your points and it was nice to hear sone new points as well i do have one thing to say about the aventurine know everything stuff. its just a theory but thats what i felt from aventurine in the quest. he knew everything, exapt for sunday's powers, so the way i see it he planned for a plan that maybe will take a couple of days he can gain the trust in a better way of his companions and gain infomation, get the money bag with the stone and investigate the death of robin for sunday and then when everything is ready he is going to do the show. but then sunday gave him a deadline of 17 hours and now he needs to understand how he does everything that he planned befor he dies for real and that ehen the gamble became higer because he didnt exapt such a short dead line and now in kess then a day he needs to find a way to both die in the drean and severe the connection with the harmony and figure out whats going on in penecony. that at least how i saw it from the start but it was still intresting hearing your interpretion!
Yes and no, because even if it was furina story, the traveler was sitting at the audience, and as such we had his whole pov as the traveler, and not as furina, so idk
@@djampoucheukap1742 ok fair, thoughts on Neuvilette and Focalors? I think it's great scene without the presence of the traveler although you still don't play as either characters.
Yeah, what really hindered Aventurine’s story for me was the lack of a proper foundation. It is shown that he has this relationship with his luck where he kind of curses it because it is only to him and nobody else and that it never gave him what he truly wanted. However, his luckiness is not really shown anywhere in 2.0, only in the trailers it is shown he is supernaturally lucky (which was after 2.1 dropped). It’s repeatedly said that he is a gambler, but honestly I think it’s kind of weird that he never gambles at a casino or any game at all for all the screen time that he had and all the casino aesthetics surrounding him in his design and battle animations. I know he was executing a risky plan, but generally isn’t any plan about taking down an organization risky? I don’t know, I just feel like there needed to be something more beforehand. It would’ve great to see him actually gamble before the whole Sunday and sad backstory thing to show off his luck instead of only relying gambling aesthetics and metaphors to convince me that Aventurine is a hardcore gambler. Although Aventurine is probably the most fleshed out character in hsr, I just can't care about him. I thought Aventurine was boring in 2.0 and I can't care about a character's sad backstory if I didn't care about him before the reveal. Like you said it was like coming into the story 80% through it and rushing everything before it. And I also have to say that the mystery is another big disappointment. At the end of 2.0, there were 4 main potential suspects in Acheron, Aventurine, Black Swan, and Sam regarding the murders. Then in the first hour of 2.1, it shows that none of them were the culprits. Not through actually investigating but by cutting to scenes of them showing why they aren’t the culprit. Like Welt trusts Acheron due to vibes, Black Swan trying to investigate using memories, Aventurine asking Ratio to investigate the murders, and Acheron saying Sam didn’t have a motive for the murder. Although the mission was called “WhoDunnit” we don't really do any investigation on who has done the murder. As a result, the mystery is very underwhelming. So when Gallagher was shown to be the “culprit” behind Robin’s death I just didn’t care anymore because of how badly structured this mystery was.
The entire point was that, he actually never gambles, he is going for all in on the mask of i will bluff everyone and win it all with my luck, but he's constantly just making up plans on plans to come out, to not have to rely on his luck, cause he doesn't want it and doesn't see it as a true blessing
@@ДюсековИльясHe never gambles? He makes pretty risky plans all the time, which turn out in his favor. Like with Sunday not recognizing that the stone is actually a Jade stone not a Aventurine stone, counting on Jade not killing him back when he was about to be executed, and him not actually dying at the end of 2.1. He is relying on luck a lot when he plans whether he recognizes it or not. Anyways, my point was that him being "lucky" was not mentioned or shown anywhere in 2.0 despite being such an important character aspect. 2.1 feels rushed because we learn everything about him and had this whole character arc even though we barely knew him in 2.0.
@@treenature6450 That's a bit reasonable because there's no way we should know anything reliable about him. Topaz can't appear yet and she's the only person around who both could and might enlighten us as to his character. Adventurine himself is trying at every opportunity to aggravate us, and at least the basic elements that we see him play games with us but always as a trick in the guise of a game and that people who wouldn't call that gambling do call him at core a gambler are present from the start. I don't mind the cutaways because while it's nice to get to know him, so far he's not that important to his place in the plot and it's also nice to see how fast our remaining time in the main storyline is running out.
It's true that Aventurine carried this whole chapter and honestly that became even more obvious to me in 2.2. I was hyped for 2.2 and, to be fair, 2.2 isn't bad but it very obviously doesn't have Aventurine so the whole thing just felt overall more flat. Even the "big hype moments" of 2.2 just don't live up to 2.1 at all. And the POV switches that were pretty well implemented in 2.1 just felt very forced in 2.2. It's a really nice new feature but I hope they don't feel the need to have them in EVERY chapter now if they don't actually contribute to the overall story experience.
Side eyeing 2.2 on some of these points that you hope don't happen, not gonna specify which ones. I will say I am absolutely in love with 2.2 despite some of the minor story writing issues (some of which were touched on here)
Aventurine reminds me of Rey Palpatine. The perfect mary sue. Start from the bottom, but he is guaranteed to always come on top all his life tnx to a literal deus ex machina. Actually, he is worse: a shameless copy of Gilgamesh in everything but de VA, and his schemes are so full of plot holes and devices that the authors needed Aventurine to explain it to HIMSELF for like 2 hrs in order to try and fix it. A complete disaster.
The only think I disagree with here is that I like Acheron's character the most, mainly because there is an implied depth that I want to learn about (how/why did she get this way?) I don't think it makes sense to complain that one character arc is too rushed, but then also complain that another one is too slow. Of course, it may be that the other one never happens, but it's too early to be sure. What I hate most about Penacony is that the "perfect world" is basically a casino.
Acheron was ruined for me. She was soooo boring. It doesnt matter how strong you are,if you have a cardboard box personality with a robotic,poet voice then you simply uninteresting
Nice video. I kind of agree and disagree at the same time. On one hand, everything about Aventurine is incredible and deep. Like "we casually drop lines from T.S. Elliott in-between World Wars poem because we're investigating the relation between suffering and the meaning of life" level of deep. But at the same time, to get there, there's a need to structure the story in a particular way. And that's the other hand. It's a quest very light on plot, meaning there's very little in terms of event and everything is already predetermined. The Nameless are NPC in this quest, because there's just not enough time to give everyone a spot in the light. I don't mind because Aventurine is great but if the next quest goes the same way, we mind end up with an entire arc feeling like filler. Great filler is great but there's a point when the main plot needs to happen. Star Rail feels more and more like old TV show, where episode have self-contained plot and 5 minutes of information necessary to understand the main plot. Here's a cliffhanger, tune in next patch to see if it mattered. As for Acheron and Welt... yeah, I disagree on that one. Sure, Acheron's dialogue are not the easiest to get, and I think Star Rail have a problem at creating dialogue making sense in a first playthrough. My first time, I did enjoy the scene, mainly for the interaction where Welt tries to sus her out while she was trying to explain her whole thing. Both have interesting characterisation in the scene which were enough for me. But, after completing the quest and revisiting it, Acheron's dialogue is relevant... on a thematic level. The quest makes a point about how life's meaning is not about answer or the result, but about the search for meaning. Which is very relevant to her character, since she wants to find Nihility's end, what lies beyond IX and so, instead of adopting a nihilistic mindset of how nothing matters because of the end, she is searching for a way out which makes her existence meaningful. Which ties it to what she says to Aventurine at end (and also what the Duc Inferno said to her and why she respects him).
As someone who's neutral on Aventurine, i didn't like how much time was spent with him. We basically went through his entire life story from the moment of his birth. The entire main plot got put on hold so we can go through Aventurine's childhood. How much of that was really relevant to the overall story?
One thing about Acherons dialogue I hated is that I could not understand the hidden meanings behind it usually If I use my brain I can kinda understand what the story is hinting at but Acherons dialogue was way to hard to find symbolism in for me (but that might just be because my autism)
The best thong about penacony: Subday, Robin, Robin, Aventurine! The worst part about penacoy: Acheron. Acheron single handedly makes Penacony a DRAG! The fact hoyo LOVES Kiana and Raiden Mei is fking telling. Raiden in Genshin tries to murder you in every single way imaginable and at your weakest point... gets a dating sim.. Raiden Mei in HI3rd gets nonstop power ups and is one hell of a support unit without trying. Here? She's a boring mess who doesnt speak straight [which is fine to be cryptic but omg SHUT UP AND TALK PROPERLY! NO ONES GOT TIME FOR THE BS!] And is the most broken pos unit in the game that everyone is trying to compare new units to now which is... fyi... hoyo's favorite child. Expecting hoyo to make acheron's level of dmg on new units is never happening..
Agreed, felt so bad watching them ruin Acheron. I think robin was pretty whatever tho. She's there to oppose Sunday and be a victim to his overprotection, but other than waking up on her own accord and being nice to children in the dreamflux, there isnt much to her. She exists so that hoyo can put out good songs imo. Wasn't firefly's role also to wake ppl up from the dream? I feel like theyre fighting for the same niche. If firefly didn't have her own stellaron hunter, mech knight lore, their characters could've been merged. A disguised robin could've been the one leading us around penacony and her getting "killed" by the meme would've been her wanting to uncover the truth about her brother. we rly didnt get to know her much
@@SandByour suggestion about robin at the end there is soooo much better! Couldve set up a good arc for her character and they could still dangle that waifu bait for the players.
Personal I didn't like aventurines part in the story. I didn't feel the need to care about him, especially considering that in 2.2 (spoilers I guess?) he doesn't show up again till the very ending when the problems are solved.
and assume NOT for game mechanics, but was thinkign end of penicony storyline would make the dream OPEN and not require IPC CBDC credits........ what a TERRABLE dream that makes you ALSO loose danm money when asleep!
acheron isn’t representing the end of all things, its nihility. Izumo’s fight against the kami was pointless because it ended up swallowed by IX anyways. also aventurine didn’t know anything beforehand its just that he was never able to lose to begin with because if he dies he gives the IPC a reason to take action against penacony, if he lives he gets to live. he has survivors guilt from the being the last of his people, he doesn’t care about his life its just another gambling chip to him. also like they straight up reveal that death doesn’t exist in the dreamscape merely dormancy which also has another meaning and makes a lot of things make more sense. 2.2 spoilers also the twist that you were in the dreamscape the whole time and the fake-out ending was really good with how everything just fell into place a bit too perfectly alongside the IPC actually dropping their pursuit of penacony makes it such a good reveal. also idc about firefly its obvious she wasn’t truly dead and I love how the dialogue at her secret base changes after every update.
I'm just slightly curious and I if anyone is still looking at this point, Was anything that that gallagher said in his "horrible exposition" actually anything you didn't already know? I find it weird to hear that its too much explaining and not enough of a natural reveal, when I felt like everything was stuff I'd put together last patch and this was just a quick (or perhaps quite slow) talk to just confirm everything was correct
Gallagher revealing that Mikhail was the Watchmaker was definitely a reveal at this point. Putting things together is great, but how the game then presents that information is just as important. Imagine a reveal in any other mystery story like this. It's weird, and the game continues to do these odd reveals in 2.2, but I don't wanna spoil anything if ya haven't played that yet. Lol
@@StrayMaverick I think I'm just a little more, "Terminally Online" than most players? It felt very natural to me that the characters in the cartoons were based on real people. In 2.1 Sparkle has us do the Hanu mini-game, which first talks about freeing Penacony from "Boss Stone" with him, which while very obviously represents the IPC it could still go over a few peopels heads. We also have the dreambubble event in 2.1, while they're mainly a bunch of minigames, their rough storyline is that Hanu is causing a prison break, which lines up with him being a freedom fighter, and it ends with Dr.Edwards asking us if we think these events really happened. A thing that isn't in game that I was very aware of was the Penacony animated stories on RU-vid. Every one begins with a title screen crediting a director, and they mention Mikhail as the director for Clockie. This isn't easily accessible as its both outside the game and something you'd have to translate the fake language that HSR uses to actually get to, But I remeber taking that as a super early confirmation that the voice talking about Mikhail was talking about the Watchmaker. I've finished 2.2 and I enjoyed it, I can probably think of some examples of these "weird reveals" you mean but, I am struggling to figure out why this hasn't bothered me as much as you, especially since I usually consider myself quite critical of media, clearly this game is a blindspot of mine. Even if I disagree I think its good that this stuff is being talked about, and I'll sub to see what else you have to say and perhaps occasionally throw these 2 cents into the comment haha!
Oh, no, I think it's definitely likely that a lot of people caught on to the fact that the mascots were based on real people. The issue I have with the conversation is the Mikhail reveal as well as the info dump nature of it. Whereas people could figure out the mascots were based on people, the Mikhail stuff wasn't something we could naturally come to the conclusion of, and because of that, the fact they chose to reveal this crucial information in a random conversation is what I'm talking about. And you might actually agree with me more on 2.2! I'm currently working on the video now, but I enjoyed 2.2 a lot more than 2.1. Lol
@StrayMaverick Gallagher is a follower of enigmata Aeon which is a history fictionologist. Aka misinformation spreader, though most part that he said was unironically true except him being accepted by the family. "Death" is a major part to enter the real penacony. it's so mindfully blowing how you can't grasp that concept 😂. It has been hinted many times throughout 2.1. If u have played 2.2 then you know the reason why they needed to get killed by death is to be transported to the real penacony and hidden from the dreammaster watchful eyes in the order "sweet dreams". Also Acheron convo with Welt is totally fine IMO. Welt is from hi3rd universe so he naturally had a sense of nostalgia but also wariness at the same time seeing Acheron aka mei Expy he once knew. It is also one way the story writer confirms both universe are parallel. The convo was like sharing and comparing their personal history in which led their character now to have better understanding since Acheron was painted in a bad light by Aventurine. I do agree however the firefly reveal was rushed (or maybe because I got spoiled that it just ain't it for me) and some parts of the dialogue were hard to understand.
Okay, so Gallagher's conversation with the Express is still terrible because it's all true. Lol. Also, where do I say that Death isn't a major part of the story?
Frankly I fel like you are being pretty unfair towards HI3 and GGZ with comments such as "the best written character in Hoyoverse history" you make this commet while openly admiting you never played HI3 or GGZ, if you just mean between genshin and starrail, thats fine. But then SAY that you only mean between those 2 instead of saying hoyoverse in general
I'll never understand the argument of "it was too quick". Most films are 1hr30m-3hrs long, and Adventurine has more screentime and dialogue in 2.0 and 2.1 than most film characters. When you watch the original Star Wars, do you go "wow Luke went from naive farmer boy to accepting the call and becoming the saviour of the galaxy in 2hrs, this is so rushed", or did you think Darth Vader was half baked until the prequels? You absolutely did NOT need to know the character beforehand, just as we don't need to know about how Han Solo became a smuggler. Sure, having more Adventurine before 2.0 CAN be good. But not having that does not mean he's half baked. He's clearly someone they wanted you to have an initial attitude towards "wow this guy is manipulative and flamboyant" before flipping that perspective and showing you why he's like that with 2.1. Having him be a character be around for longer would have made it harder to believe the relevations in 2.1, since we would have more scenes with him. Which would make the reveal of his good nature come across as either very obvious, or very OOC if the hypothetical pre2.0 made him seem like too much of a villian. Besides, it's not as if Adventurine can't have any character development past this point. There's still plenty you can do with him.
When I say "too quick" I'm not meaning literal time. I'm meaning that we didn't see who he was prior, to where he ends up. He's enigmatic before this, and then we get massive amounts of him, where he becomes introspective. I just think it's weird that we don't get anything personal with him before he becomes SO personal. Also, Idk if you've played 2.2, but Adventurine is kinda wasted, and shown to not have changed. So. Lol
@@StrayMaverick Again, why is it weird? You do understand that this just isn't analysis right? Hell, early parts of his perspective, outside of the flashbacks, aren't that personal. They're mostly him chatting and trying to annoy Dr Ratio, then having his back and forth with Sunday. It's not until after his discussion with Sparkle that it gets very introspective. I would like to ask how much time you need a character being neutral before you think it's fine for them to have their arc? We had a phone call between him and Topaz (i wanna say 1.6), clearly that's not enough then. I can understand it as an argument of wasted potential, after all, there's virtually always more things you can do with a character, but to say it's half baked based on not having more scenes previously is real shallow. And yes, I have beaten 2.2, and I was not referring to that patch. Adventurine's arc for Penacony was done after his talk with Kakavasha. When I was talking about future development, I mean stuff he can do in the future of this game that's probably going to be around for the next decade. There's absolutely more to explore with his character. The relationship between him and the 10 Stonehearts and the IPC as a whole, addressing Oswaldo; the guy responsible for what happened on his homeworld, maybe using him as a mentor figure for someone undergoing a similar situation. You can certainly argue 2.2's Adventurine resolution lacked finesse, but I don't think he needed to have more scenes for his character, just a better explanation for how he escaped mechanically, which is a different discussion.
I'm not sure you're understanding my point. It's not about time, or number of scenes, it's about what's IN the scenes. Aventurine gets nothing substantive until he gets his "arc." My point in the video is that the arc would have felt more impactful if we got to know Aventurine before his supposed change.
@@StrayMaverick "nothing substantive until his arc" so him talking to you in the hotel check in, showing how he's flamboyant, willing to be confrontational, clearly is trying to use you for personal gain, these don't have meaning when you consider his circumstances? I've watched a lot of people do Adventurine's physical introduction and a lot of people come out of it really disliking him. He's clearly not "a nothing character" from the moment we meet him, he's actively suspicious and even antagonistic despite him helping us. If it's not more scenes, what on earth did you want his setup to accomplish that would make sense for his character?
I don't think he's a nothing character. But the only scene where we really get any in-depth look at him is the hotel scene with Ratio. Those are the kind of scenes I'm talking about. To go from one scene where we get a look at who he is to a full, in-depth confrontation with his past and future dream self about the meaning of life is a huge leap, to me. Again, I don't think it's bad tho. His stuff is one of the few things I really liked about 2.1. Lol
I hard disagree with you on the HI3rd point here, because it's relevant to the plot if you have context for it. Acheron doesn't really have the room to be a character in Star Rail, because she's a Self-Annihilator who is literally disappearing from existence. Her arc is fully explained in that conversation with Welt - she lived on a world that went in a similar direction to HI3rd's world, but which ended much worse. The two of them recognize each other (at least, to whatever extent Acheron's bad memory will allow her to do so) and they come to understand one another's circumstances. The plot development that results from this, of course, is that Acheron explicitly sides with the Nameless. But the conversation is actually doing two things at once. Not only is it establishing a baseline of shared experience between the two of them, but it also draws a parallel between Penacony's dreamscape and World Serpent's Project Stigma. Long story short, a guy named Kevin swaps humanity with something called Stigmata so they can live in a peaceful dream for what they will perceive as eternity before they are destroyed, all to prevent the Honkai from choosing Earth as a target. It's a bit like one of Mass Effect's endings, and the parallel is an apt one that generates questions in an informed player's mind about what experiences Acheron has had with a similar situation in the past. Now, none of this probably matters to you (and other HSR players) for two reasons: one, you haven't played HI3rd; two, the writing is cryptic and hard to follow. There is some overlap between these categories, but I'd argue that the former is both a perspective that is more common in the global community that also misses the fact that Star Rail is, fundamentally, a Honkai game. Hoyo plans out narratives across all of their games to coincide with one another; Genshin is currently exploring the idea of wills in relation to how they affect the world, and HI3rd is exploring something similar but opposite with fear. These games are, cohesively, telling one thematic story - HSR's setting is quite literally one step above HI3rd's setting in terms of its relevance to the Imaginary Tree, sort of like what Guardians of the Galaxy is to The Avengers (and I guess Genshin is Thor? lol). It's going to have references to HI3rd simply because of how the story is set up, so much so that it'd make less sense if they didn't point it out every once in a while. The conversation itself didn't take up that much time in the grand scheme of the plot, and I think that the time it does take up is well-spent, particularly because of that second reason: I don't think Acheron's lines are that hard to follow or overly philosophical. It's possible that I've spent too long overanalyzing HI3rd's moon arc which is pretty much incomprehensible at times without a master's degree in theoretical physics, logic, math and philosophy (or at minimum without several pages of notes, Wikipedia and Stack Exchange), but I think that the general issue you might have with her lines is that it's hard to distinguish between the times she is espousing her personal philosophy and the times that she is actually communicating something crucial to the worldbuilding and greater mystery/plotline. Can the writing get a bit too flowery? Sure, I don't think all of Hoyo's writing that delves into those topics is perfect, but I do think that Acheron's is mostly well-communicated and expressed. Here are some examples: Aventurine: Why are we born into this world if it's just to die? Acheron: I don't think this, and never have. Nor do you. Aventurine: But the Nihility envelops you and I... and everyone. Acheron: And because of that, it's pointless. Aventurine: - But it is still there. Aventurine: If the dice of fate are always weighted, then that is our destiny. Why then... do we struggle against it? Acheron: ...My answer might not be able to resolve your confusion, because it has been with you throughout your journey, and is already a part of your life. Acheron: But you said, "Sleep is the rehearsal of death," so why does life sleep? Because we are not ready to welcome death. Acheron: So you can definitely understand, why we want to be prepared. Acheron: Even if the ending has been predetermined, that's fine. There are countless things that humans cannot change. Acheron: But before the end, there are many things that humans can do while on their journey. Acheron: And because of this, the "end" will thus reveal a completely different meaning. This is a simple bit of philosophy from Acheron that just shows her perspective on Nihility. She is of the mind that everyone walks their own path and therefore should seek their own meaning and happiness in life. I'd elaborate on it more but I can't do so without going into 2.2 spoilers. Acheron: Someone once said to me: Penacony wasn't like this a long time ago, nor should it be. Acheron: I've traveled through the reality and Dreamscape of the Planet of Festivities, watched the tides of night rise and fall, when time stopped for people. Where the spirits of the rich and impoverished... remain forever fixed on their own scales. Acheron: This is why I think the collapse of the Beautiful Dream is inevitable. Acheron is talking about the idea that utopia is built on a rotten foundation; this is an idea that is prevalent throughout Penacony and especially in its side missions. Acheron: I like your analogy very much. Indeed, birds are born to fly, but in a distant past, their ancestors could only gaze at the sky in envy. Acheron: They saw that faraway ray of light from above the heavens, piercing through the clouds and blanketing the earth. And so, time and time again, generation after generation, the birds spread their wings and took to the sky, attempting to touch its ceiling - all because the sun was there. Acheron: Then, what if the last bird finally soars into the sky, only to realize that the end of the light is not the sun, but darkness... "Birds are born to fly" is a reference to a line from HI3rd, but this ties into that prior example I gave. It's setting up a contrast between optimism and pessimism, something that Acheron is, in part, intended to address. The answer to Nihility is hope, so even if that hope is futile, she still believes in it. Anyway, I've written enough for one comment lol. I think the main I agree with you on is that Firefly being Sam doesn't really mean anything for the story, at least not at the time of that reveal. I strongly disagree with your points about Gallagher, but I can't get into that without talking 2.2 spoilers.
@hanging_with_my_normies916 no, it's... Very connected with the Moon Arc. Kevin knew the guy who knew Icarus, and the guy was a philosopher who was thinking about human will and ideals. And most metaphors(especially with the birds) are also from Moon Arc. It's just strange that it is there - as HI3 player I don't find SR story that interesting, and fanservise isn't doing a favor.
Honestly I just let the Welt/Acheron conversation play on auto while I watched something else, it truly is a nothing burger if you haven't played HI3rd
@@slayeroffurries1115 As someone didn't play HI3rd, it, really wasn't that hard to follow personally. I will say that I have gone to the lengths of "knowing stuff about HI3rd" but not even that much. Welt is from HI3, and Archeron is a version of Raiden Mei, Like Raiden Shogun in Genshin Impact is. Welt talks to her about what he's experienced, then she states that things turned out much worse in her world. Welt says he was able to talk with the person and get them to see reason, and Archeron says she killed him. Alone. And then, when she got to what should have been the end, the moment when things turned out alright, like they seemingly have for Welt, IX destroyed her planet, rendering all of struggles into nothing. It feels like this DOES in fact show why her characters act like she does, and thats not even looking super deeply into what those plot points on 3rd actually are.
@@lukepower117pretty much. Also just because you might enjoy knowing, as a HI3 player I can also share that the “Alone” reference from Acheron held even more weight in the comparison. In HI3 Raiden Mei fought Kevin alongside her two best friends, one in particular whom she loves very much. Along with being backed up by a huge cast of characters. This saw them reuniting after each experienced severe hardships including fights against one another ultimately for the sake of protecting each other and the world. My point is that after dark times they came together and over came the stigma crisis together. Reconciling for past actions. Based on Acherons comment. She never got that chance.
Thank god I wasn't the only one who though that Welt and Acheron's dialogue was terrible. Like, english isn't my first language, but when Acheron speaks my head just starts hurting
Yeah, it feels unnecessary. I personally think that dialogue can be well written and overly philosophical, but the excess use of it and the impersonal aspect of it makes it feel pretentious with Acheron to me. Lol
Idk, haven’t watched the whole video yet. Their convo is kinda important to Penacony because of the parallels to NGE and the big amount of NGE references Penacony has. Penacony seems to be about escapism. I think looking at it as nothing but an HI3 ref alone will make it suck a lot. I think it just needs to be explained more in the upcoming patches like the Necrosis of dreams likely being linked to SoulGlad. Acherons backstory is also really important for Penacony but I’ll just keep it there.
I understand your point, but it’s basically one long “we love you HI3 players” scene where all they do is dance around the fact that they know each-other’s names and pasts.
@@emberthecatgirl8796 I mean why not go either direction, just say nah, they different, or Welt is the same so it's tough for him. Or just acknowledge the situation instead of doing a weird dance around
Damn i didnt think you'd dislike the Acheron/Welt conversation that much. I dont know shit about Honkai Impact but i was engaged. Though i dont remember shit except that Welts home planet was destroyed? Acherons too? I liked Acherons way of speaking. I liked the way the sentences are structured and that they are complicated. The sentences i felt moved beautiful. I always felt that i understood what she meant or at least what she feels when she talks about her past. Which now that im thinking about is kinda the point of her character. Not memory, but emotions are her way of staying connected to herself. And i actually shed a tear during her talk with Aventurine at the end. Its philosophical but thats the language i feel is necessary when talking about the meaning of life and nihilism. I had to think of what Paul Auster says about words and writing between 2:26 and 3:09 : ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-pLhVjsczcb8.html This was probably not a very cohesive text but these are my thoughts :)
i wrote this after the 9min mark and i have so much more to say. I normally love your way of talking about characters/structure/plot beyond the usual surface level takes we get when talking about any stories related to Hoyoverse. You make a lot of fair criticisms here. I was bored by the Express D-Plot. Fair. Aventurine should have failed with a bluff to get his resolution on what makes life worth living. Good Idea! The Sam Firefly reveal had no emotional impact because we didnt know Sam before. YES! IF it doesnt get revealed that Gallagher lied to us during that bit, it is horrific writing and one of the worst exposition dumps we have ever had. AGREED! But there is rhyme and reason to a lot of what youre criticizing: Gallagher is maybe a follower of the Enigmata. They love spreading misinformation. Which is a surface level explanation of the aeon ideology. Aventurine did that anime triple bluff thing, because he knew how mistrusting Sunday is and tricked him by letting Sunday call one bluff. Then Sunday let him go because he felt he won. Then your points about pointless deaths. If you die in the dreamworld you go to the outside dreamworld and you can find out what the big secret is. This is explained multiple times. Firefly let herself get killed to go there. Aventurines whole plot was to get Acheron to strike him because her sword and the Death Meme are the only things that can actually kill you in the dreamworld. This all being said, i still love your videos because we can engage with the art more. I feel you care about good stories!
I need to see your review of 2.2. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills for how much I've disliked Penacony compared to everyone else and you point out so many of the same flaws I've found with the story.
as someone who played the entirety of the penacony quest in like 2 days, i agree with this and more😭. in general its incredibly, INCREDIBLY drawn out (maybe because i was playing it all at once it was so terrible), and the exposition dumps were a snoozefest. towards the end of the quest i just accepted that i had no idea what was going on and that just made it worse- largely due to the cryptic exposition and acheron’s flashbacks. but i feel like a huge drawback was just how the creators try to show and not tell by having you talk to all these npcs and do pointless stuff but then just exposition dump at the end anyway bc they don’t know how to write it😭
Your content is great. I love hearing your perspective on the story and you're funny. You help put into words some feelings I have. And you sometimes share a viewpoint that I hadn't considered before. I always come away from your videos with more. So thank you!
Оn the subject of the bloated dialog, a bit of a spoiler for 2.2, but not really, IT IS STILL THERE. Ii feels like every time they want to explain something, it just has to be in the most uninteresting and word heavy way possible. Also, the way a certain character speaks, who shall not be named for obvious reasons, weirdly has ro take a 2.5 second break after each sentence they speak. Which isn't even as to convey that they are sick for example, they just say a sentence, stop for a good while and then continue to repeat the same process, as if they want to artificially extend the run time.
Lmao! Yeah, I'm working my way through the story now and I'm noticing this as well. I'll probably have to talk about it in my next video but man, I might just have to make a dedicated dialogue video at this point. 🤣 lol
Generally the dialogues and cutscenes are just too long. The constant jumping between characters during the story is too much, brakes the flow and makes the story disjointed. The new characters's backstories are rushed and not well made, feels like they just there to justify the addition of new characters, whom main purpose is generating gacha revenue. And the old characters are forgotten, or just there, no 5 star variant for 4stars, no new skins, no new gear to combat power creep.
15:54 i get what youre saying but i think what they were actually trying to do was show how ready he was to die. If he had lost against Sunday (which arguably he sort of did as much as he could without losing the entire mission at once anyway, he clearly wasnt ready for the harmony poisoning and stressed about it) and then struggled back up to a victory and THEN 'died' it would have felt super awkward when he spoke with Acheron and they discussed how this was what hed been after all along, not to mention there wouldnt have been nearly as much substance to the benefit of this plan without the trick with the cornerstones planting Jade's behind enemy lines and allowing her introduction, you know? Instead we got the dawning realisation that the entire time weve known him, even when contacting Topaz several patches ago, he was planning this. Thats what gave his arc weight for me, we didnt just see his horrific backstory, we saw the actual effect that it had had on his mental state in action and how he changed his mind about fighting to survive. Like, you said, we came into his story quite a lot of the way through, but it would have been very easy to make it feel like between the flashbacks and now had been nothing substantial when most of what we witnessed was the change. I'd say that doing it this way avoided that pitfall pretty well, you know? We really get that hes messed up and has long reached the end of his rope without needing to see much of that actually happening, just retroactively understanding it to leave room for the growth
Nah bro I'm playing HI3 for years and I understood no shit she said, I'm just glad to hear Welt being badass saying "or prepare for gravitational disintigration" and just waiting through all her yap until she'll say "Yes my real name is Raiden Mei"
The funny thing is I find myself disagreeing with this video. As ironically enough Acheron's dialogue with Welt wound up being important while Aventurine's story wound up mostly being filler. In fact, if anything the issues in 2.2 arise from the plot not having enough time to tell its story in which case we have to point to Aventurine's plot as the thing that wasted time as it was by and large divorced from the Penacony plot and what little it did that was an afterthought.
I'm slightly mad that you are so right, because Aventurine's part was so good and what drove me into playing HSR. But you're so right, I'm not mad at you, just at Hoyoverse
@m.l.7558 The really sad thing is that Aventurine's story plot could have been integrated into the story had they actually followed through with 2.0's set up and let Aventurine work with the AE crew. His meeting with Sunday could have been kept as a flashback but remove the pov with Ratio as it doesn't serve any purpose plus the fact that people have died in Penacony in the past makes it obvious that death is very much possible in Penacony so the whole quandary on death was just pointless. Would have been better if they dropped that plot all together. Instead they could make Penacony's history resonate with Aventurine and that plus the timer Sunday put on his life is what makes him reminisce. Cumulating in to everyone agreeing to put on a show in Penacony.
Actually at this point I'm pretty sure the reason we got his backstory is because this would setup his partnership with Boothill as both of them had their families killed by Oswaldo's Department. We needed this part to understand why he works with Boothill from here on out.
2.2 Had no time?! That's honestly bs, they had all the time, but they were wasting, and stretching it, do you really think that everything that happend during 2.2 9 hour quest, was neccesary?!
Completed 2.2 and honestly it was so disappointing after a good 2.1 impression of mine. None of the mysteries had a satisfactory ending to me abd I cant believe they skipped 2/3rd of the final plan with a short 1 minute cutscene.
It really feels like they shouldn't have had Welt and Acheron's sections at all except the very first private convo that was really the only one where they talked about the parallel worlds thing. Then thered have been more time to...actually have the whodunnit investigation be an investigation? To see the Trailblazer as a proper part of the story, to see some more of Gallagher maybe, all things that we needed way more than that many pointless cutaways to these two proselytising 😅
Regardless of my thoughts - both on your video and the 2.1 Trailblaze Mission itself, "Off the Rails" is an apt description for it because shit got crazy real fast near the end, man. Maybe even too fast. On that note, you do raise a lot of good points - namely, Aventurine easily being the best part of this entire part of the Penacony arc, the Express crew being sorely underused (again), the Acheron and Welt portion - while neat for the HI3 fans - ultimately being unnecessary, the excess of "gotcha!" moments and fakeouts, and the whole thing about Firefly/Sam. Those are the points that stuck out to me the most, at any rate. Still looking forward to the 2.2 Trailblaze Mission tho, which I'll get a start on tomorrow. Here's hoping it lives up to the hype around it I've been hearing all day.
The part about acheron and welt's dialogue has always been something that drags honkai 3rd story telling imo. It was incredibly hard for me to follow HI3 as a new player even tho in hindsight the characters, world building and lore of HI3 is pretty neat. Coming from the continuation of the story from 2.1, i cant wait to see what you think about the story and the plot twists/sudden reveals now
There hasn't been any other game that made me ask "why are you talking like that" more than star rail has, while the game is good the dialog is always a mixed bag, penacony in general has had so many plot twists that contradict what we thought was real so many times that I had a tough time following the story, which is a shame, I want to be invested, but sometimes it's hard
the fun part is that evrething that welt and acher talks about is what mister sunday was tring to do on 2.2 . also the part about the watchmaker is important for the plot of 2.2 . yes evrething could be better presented but evrething end up beeing important to the histori
Galagar's stuff could have been way better/shorter. Acheron is an acting proxy of something abstract, speaking in obscure platitudes is kind of expected, but Welt could have been more relatable and acted as a buffer. Adenturine not 'losing' does makes sense considering how much backing he has from the IPC....his gamble is even only possible due to the backing he has, and in the end was still susceptible to RNG ( like Acheron even being there, let alone 'matching his wager'....that was a bit of plot armor for sure.)
Curious how you’re going to find 2.2’s story. I’ve only just started, but there’s a definite lull in the story at the start with how lame some of the answers to mysteries have been handled
@hanging_with_my_normies916honestly this just feels subjective. The overall run of penacony was a 10/10. Matching what penacony is and how alluring dreams can be compared to reality
I feel like tbh, the reason belobog was my favorite planet was the dynamic between bronya, seele, serval, natasha, gepard and cocolia. Those people were basically all well written characters with lot of personality to unpack or protect
Likely due to the fact that Belobog remained very self contained, there wasn't multiple story lines from different characters that Luofu and Penacony had where so many characters came from different backgrounds. The story feels cohesive and doesn't go anywhere, it's also simple enough that there isn't a large amount of yapping necessary for it to be enjoyable, and plus Wildfire is still peak asf 🗣️🔥🔥
Because it followed the hero’s journey so well and you feel like the preservation path TB was well earned (my only gripes is how both dialogue TB uses to convince the guardians to lend them their power is either dumb or too simple)
Seriously though, everyone felt relevant to the plot and the pacing was just right. Even the interlude quest with Topaz was better than the entirety of the Luofu arc. Penacony was visually mesmerizing but it tackled too many things at once and couldn't even cut down the unnecessary exposition dumps and dialogue. Also IMO HYV tried too hard to make us love Firefly. That girl absolutely made me feel nothing with the rooftop scene and her death that turned out to be fake. We literally just met her 😂
Now that I’ve finished Penacony…I was so disappointed with it. Maybe I’ve just been spoilt by Genshin writing but the Mary Sue Firefly got zero arc, Sparkle was disappointing, the story was meh…but it did have some great visuals. The watchmaker part was probably the closest it got to making my feel sad. Everything else just feels like trauma dumping. Really wish they build their characters stories up better. Jing Yuan is probably the best written character because not everything is thrown on the table. We literally know everything about Aventurine now…which sucks as it would have been cool to learn more about him in the future. But I suppose in the future, he’ll no longer be a meta character and will be shelved for the next new thing.
Nah you don't understand how Star Rail writing works. They are not Genshin where everything must be cleared in one region, this is a planet we're talking about. In Penacony, there are 12 moments of dreams and we haven't even traveled through half of them, it is telling you that in the future there will be story continuances and more character developments, same with Xianzhou and Jarilo VI. If you noticed, there are a lot of set up for future stories to be unfold in Penacony. Sparkle was there to be a literal red herring, but she will play a more important role later, just like Sampo. Yes we knew about Aventurine's backstory, but do you know what happened to him now after Penacony arc? What's up with the Oswaldo and Boothill thingy then? Don't forget Constance from the cremator/anihilation gang still lurking and Black Swan is still hiding something. And what about Sunday? Jade freed him, but we know Jade won't do that without asking for something in return. Firefly too, she still haven't found what she wished for, to cure the Entrophy disease. And she is a stellaron hunter, the faction that are tied with the Nameless, so expect for her to appear again in the future. You can be skeptical for now, I understand. But wait until Xianzhou part 2 arc in 2.4 - 2.6, and you'll see what I'm talking about.
@@jerryeljeremy7790 I never said they had to be Genshin. But Firefly served little to no purpose in the storyline and had no character development. She had no flaws. That is the definition of a Mary Sue. There are trickles of interesting story, sure, but we’re talking about the story we were given. The only part that I thought was really well written was Gallaghers story and the Watchmaker/Trailblazers. Everyone else was just kinda eh. Sparkle was the biggest disappointment for me. The ending with the fireworks and are continuously forced romance with Firefly was so eye rolling. I like character development or things being left to be answered in the future. Which I admit for SOME they did. But the characters that took up most of the screen time were so lacklustre for me. My hubby who prefers Honkai over Genshin much prefers the story writing of Genshin. But Honkai battle style and end game content is superior. No one is saying it has to be Genshin but people will make comparisons because they’re from the same developers. Everyone talks about how ‘genshin could never’ but Genshin feels a lot more natural in how it makes us the player connect with characters and the story. I want to care more about Honkai characters but there’s only a select few I can maybe feel a connection to. And it’s characters who have t had too much revealed about them, letting things develop rather than pushing a narrative onto us like they did for Firefly. And Sparkle was just…so disappointing for me.
@@jerryeljeremy7790 Here's a thing tho, Penacony is special in the way that large majority of the characters introduced during it, don't actually originate from it. Making it not really make sense for us to meet with other characters specifically there.
Yeah, I don’t know, I really appreciate your more objective criticism of the story telling mechanics that Hoyo uses (curious to hear what you think of the newest chapter, which was great but very exposition heavy..), but your take on Acheron vs Aventurine shows how subjective these things are. I could appreciate Aventurine’s story, but also found it quite cliched (how many dead moms and siblings does Hoyo make us suffer through, both in HSR and Genshin..), but I thoroughly loved the mystery and nihilistic pseudo-philosophical riddles that Acheron threw at us. I thought Acheron’s presentation in the story was as so good that it made me pull her, where I wasn’t planning to at all, and her now being my favorite character in the game.
Definitely true! I think the characters that we enjoy is definitely subjective, but as much as Acheron doesn't gel with me, I also think that her usage in this chapter didn't really accomplish much. Especially her moments with Welt. It felt like an unnecessary side plot that likely shouldn't have existed in the main plot, at least to me. I do think her design is super sick tho! Lol
@@StrayMaverickspeaking of unnecessary side plots it can be said adventurines could’ve been done on it own separate from the main story line. An IPC ambassador in penacony then suddenly a lore drop on him for…? The same can be said for a few other characters but I. Terms of relevancy adventuring should’ve been its own thing
@@mariachi3217i disagree 2.2 spoilers the core theme of Penacony was birds being able to freely fly in the sky(people having the right to make their own choices and bear consequences and face the future) vs putting bird in a cage - preventing people from going through natural process of life(experiencing failures and hardships e.t.c) and letting them live in eternal stagnation of bliss. while of course the latter isn't wrong, Sunday's approach is extreme to it which makes him antag. Penacony characters illustrate the opposite: Firefly knowing the fate but despite that making her own choices and even struggling against it if necessary, she is searching meaning of life despite that and struggles against harshness of reality, she is not caged by it and is constantly trying to soar into sky. Same goes for Robin who believes that birds should be free despite the consequences, she is pushing forward with her ideals of harmony despite getting shot, being in a scandal or even feeling trapped, never giving up and going towards the future with freedom of her choice and taking responsibility of following consequences. Acheron despite being filled with Nihility, still having remaining color left and pushing througu her journey to see Nihility's end, not fully succumbing to it. so what is Aventurine if not ultimate illustration of this? his continued fighting for survival, gamble of life, despite having weakness in his heart that he hides with his facade and despite not comprehending what meaning his life has, he is still preserving his life and pushing forward. he is basically a personification of this idea of bird freely flying in the sky, being constantly put into harsh situations of reality, fighting of survival - this is the natural way of life and it is what Sunday wants to take from everyone, as he himself says: Order is antithesis of this. i think Aventurine's story, jusr as Firefly's, Acheron's and Robin's is very very on topic of the core themes of the Penacony arc. i think that's why so much time was dedicated to him, it's because he is perfect illustration of this.
felt like Welt and Acherons convo was just meant to advertise HI3. when I wanna know about HI3 I play it or watch videos of the lore. don't push it onto me in another game god damn! For Sam I really was like oh so that's Sam and hey Firefly is alive yay!
I'm always looking forward to your videos because I often find myself in agreement with your opinions. After finishing 2.1 story and feeling pretty underwhelmed (except for Aventurine, he quickly became one of my favs), I go on youtube and hear everywhere that this story is the best story of all hoyo games (or at least hsr). It felt like I was being gaslight. I love Penacony's vibes and characters, and the story got a lot of potential. But so many plot points feel cheap. I never felt so blatantly manipulated when reading genshin's quests, for example. Firefly's "death" with sad music. Sudden reveal of Robin's and Sunday's deaths. I know exactly how they want me to feel and I don't like it. It doesn't feel earned. Maybe it would, if I have never seen this kind of moves in plot before, but I have seen it too much. Still, I don't hate it. And it's not boring to read, which is the main sin of Luofu (in my opinion). Except Welt and Acheron dialogue. That was awful. And kinda insulting of how pseudo philosophical it was. It lacked substance that good philosophical dialogues have.
Do you think you’ll do a video on arlecchino’s story quest? I was very excited for it but ended up finding it quite disappointing. I’d love to hear your thoughts!
