Was I Right About The Penacony Story? (2.3 Updated Impressions) 

Ok you brought up lots of good point for discussion here. 1) the Curse of Char Collection game that ruin story: -playable character cannot die, if they die they will return (unless it's HI3rd Hemiko or Cocolia, watch, Tingyun will return) -playable character cannot be too evil, they are all misunderstood (aventurine & sparkle) Tbh I never expect Firefly to die cause they spent too much time building her up promoting her. 2) I feel like this Penacony story suffer multiple rewrites cause there are just too many red herring masterminds, it get ridiculous -1st the whole Duke Inferno Annihilation Gang trailers all for nothing, i expect them to show up in aftermath at least but didn't happen either -2nd Firefly killer beast and Gallagher, turn out they're friendly WHAT!! then wtf with all the fight and murdering people. Imagine a dude trying to stab you and claim he friendly -3rd Mustache twirling Aventurine wuhahaha, we spent entire patch with him talking to himself, got 1-shot by Acheron, just so he can find the Watch Maker, oh wait nvm, MC already found him. What a FKING JOKE! the mofo die, wandering around in the void for nothing. -4rd Sparkle pulling a Joker, turn out it's just firework prank, Dafud! waste of damn time. -5th Jade said she's coming, you expect her to come with an IPC army like Topaz last time, NOPE! she's just here to grant monkeypaw wishes. What a waste damn time I get it, sometime story need a few twists, curl balls, red herring, (i thought the ending twist of dream where we thought we woke but turn out we still in dream, that ending is great) but when we have this many red herring that going nowhere it becomes bad writing. Imaging in Avenger we waste all the time with Thanos then turn out Red Skull is real villain, who write this shit. People overhype with Penacony cause all the promotion claim it's the best HSR story but I'm 110% Disagree, writing over complicate itself. I still find Belobog was the best, it's simple straight to the point, just like LotR, good triumph evil, no twist and turn IT ALL BUT A DREAM bullshit and NO ONE REALLY DIE.

12:50 I want to add something that they never addressed with Firefly: she literally admits that she doesn't feel much when she kills ppl in a convo with Acheron. She doesn't really feel anything when she kills ppl, but she clearly does want to at least feel empathetic for them (at least that's what I figured). And also. This is. Never explored. At all.

currently watching thru the vid (7 minutes into it, so might leave another comment), but wanted to bring up something, partially regarding aven: in general, I think one of penacony's biggest issues was that it just wanted to do too much and with a lot of characters at that. it allowed for what I thought was some excellent setup, however, now that 2.3 is out, the payoff was...yeah. aside from the payoffs made within its own story, penacony as a whole just feels like setup for future plot points: black swan, aven & boothill going against the IPC (tho you have to read Boothill's character stories to come to that conclusion), sunday, robin & jade's deal, etc. even with its own payoffs, I found them to be overall kind of underwhelming for how much it was setup: 1. Firefly. I think she has some great thematic elements, but her overall execution just...left a lot to be desired from me. Most of her lore stuff doesn't even come from in game, it comes from supplemental material like the myriad celestia trailer and the animation. she was used how I expected her to be used, but the execution of all of it left me with the feeling that I saw a great character go through the motions, without actually leaving the kind of impact she was supposed to. 2. Sparkle. Yep. I agree with you; she's just *mysterious* and *sus* but doesn't contribute a ton. Her whole point is being a red herring character---i mean, literally, look at her design---and that's fine. But they don't do anything super interesting with that beyond bringing up the *idea* of the of that. 3. The Watchmaker's Legacy. I liked it. But with the way it was handled, it ironically suffers from not having a ton of setup to where the payoff makes sense; Misha was always theorized to be involved in some way given his LC and lore, but the fact is is that he was brought up in a lore relevant way very late and underwhelmingly. It felt like they introduced the setup, and then catapulted to the payoff in less than an hour. All of the Nameless stuff to me, while I liked it and enjoyed it (as I do with Penacony), just didn't feel as impactful as it could've been simply because they were juggling so many other things. I think that's how'd I'd describe Penacony in a sentence: I'm looking at an impactful story, but its execution didn't leave the impact it was supposed to. 4. Acheron. Eh. She did her part, but I still have no clue what that red text was about. 5. Aventurine (& the IPC by extension). I'm a little biased since he's my favorite character, but his part in 2.1 was honestly the best thing about Penacony IMO. The convo with Sunday was tense and left you with an "oh shit how is he gonna get outta this" (which is kind of dampened when you later learn that it was actually all part of the plan, but I also did find it enjoyable to unravel the full extent of Aven's plan to see just how complicated it was, and I consider it to mostly be a way to show the levels of 6D chess this man plays on. Which. Well. Yeah I did say I was biased ROFL---). The section from his POV at Clock Studios theme park and the little tidbits of his backstory scattered throughout it all was IMPACTFUL. Geniunely great character writing IMO, and I think it succeeded in making ppl understand him better (even tho it kinda does fall into the "giving villain tragic backstory last minute" kind of vibes, I didn't think it was as bad since there was setup for that kind of thing in 2.0's story with ratio calling him an IPC thrall waiting for execution; the tragic backstory stuff was not surprising. the only thing about it is that, as you pointed out and as I'll cover a bit later, there isn't a lot Aven has done after all that stuff was revealed. So it remains to be seen if the writers will make Aven more of a 'good boi' or a 'no he's misguided' or something later on, or if he'll still be written to act as that conniving merchant we interacted with in pre-backstory reveal in the story---fitting into the 'not a bad guy, but definitely not a saint' he was described as in the 2.1 live stream. So that his backstory simply gives added context to him, rather than becoming his entire defining trait). In short: Aven's backstory and POV was geninunely excellent writing IMO, and that is a win to the writers. However. Once again, Penacony's issue of simply having too many things to juggle comes to bite at it. As you pointed out: his POV and backstory and all of the setup included there simply wasn't acted on---we get a handwave for how he escaped Nihility, what he foundout in Dreamflux Reef, etc. And the payoff for what he did for the IPC in 2.3 was also really underwhelming IMO; Topaz & Jade's business convos were the best part of the 2.3 epilogue IMO, so there's a point there ig, but it was just....yeah, idk. It just wasn't the kind of booming or impactful payoff it was showing itself to be; I mean, THEY LITERALLY WERE TALKING ABOUT IPC SHIPS BEING ABLE TO COME AND SURROUND PENACONY---you'd think they'd be able to drum up more tension between Topaz & Jade and Old Oti's convos like that. I'll get to 2.3's story in a bit, but like. It's definitely disappointing. With how much they focus on Aven and how they're building the IPC Strategtic Investment Department, you'd think they were planning on having some great setup, or intending to focus more an Aven (ex. Like a short section on how he escaped Nihility w/ Argenti's help, that kind of stuff) but no. They just don't. Though, bc Aven got so much focus, he was able to escape the "ik you're supposed to be impactful, but you just aren't" trap that I Firefly and Acehron fall into for me. Still. Aven's whole thing just felt like his companion quest that needed to be there since it wouldn't make sense to place outside of the Penacony SQ. Again, it's probably my bias speaking here, but if you're going to focus on a character's personal strife, backstory, and personal demons so much with an hour's long playable section solely dedicated to that, I think you would act more on the setup introduced in it (which pains me to say, bc he is my fav character, but bc he's used so poorly in Penacony plotwise, I honestly would've preferred the time spent on him to have gone to FIrefly or Acheron). That's also putting aside the whole 'death' thing with him, which...again. Underwhelming. It's meant to be an opening for the IPC, and it is used as such, but I still found the 2.3's use of that to be underwhelming. You're literally using the "DEATH" of a senior manager as an opening to incorporate Penacony back into IPC shares; I would think Topaz & Jade would put wayyyyyyyyy more pressure on Old Oti than what they did in 2.3 I don't have that many complaints abt Aven not really being "dead", because it was clear to me after 2.1 that he wouldn't be dead, and frankly, given the character arc he goes thru in 2.1, I don't think death is a fitting end to his character thematically at all at that point in the story. If they're going to kill him, I think they need to have Aven actually "live" the way he's built up to do, bc otherwise, his death will feel pretty empty, at least to me; he needs to live his life before the time of his death finally comes to him. Still, character deaths so far h ave all been like this; baited, but then 'no they're alive.' Tingyun is all but confirmed to be alive, at least in some capacity to me, since the devs alluded that it would be explored more in coming patches, as well as a leak showed a ton of chara models that had a new Tingyun there. It will remain to be seen in the future, tho; I think that they're going to want to milk characters as much as possible before killing them, but also bc I feel like there needs to be a good amount of time to get properly attached to a character before killing them off. At least Misha and Gallagher are dead, lol (well. if we ignore that majorly sus letter Gallgher left us, YOU BETTER BE DEAD YOU F---) oh. that's. a big chunk of text. anyway, 2.3. Really underwhelming IMO. I liked the Topaz & Jade stuff, but other than that there just....meh. It wasn't great IMO. You're telling me THAT was the Charmony festival? The ending cutscene was good ig, and the Sparkle dolls were funny, but that's just a testament to how funny HSR's writing is when focused on the smaller details like that. it was an ending. I don't think I need to go in-depth as to why it just wasn't as good as it could've---should've---been. and also my fingers are kinda tired. anyways, great vid so far, I think I've spent more time writing this than I have watching the vid, I'm getting back to it now rofl

it was said that argenti saved aventurine from the black hole in the 2.2 quest, how? well, that is a good question

sparkle’s concept is she is a red herring character. also silver wolf hired her to make firefly’s third death

Hi what do you think about the theory of TB still being in a dream and like the 2.3 quest is basically dreamed up by TB and that's why everyone is a little bit ooc in the quest👀