This is what I noticed too. It felt like the first half of Penacony was a murder mystery horror story and then with 2.2, there was a complete tonal switch and it became a very philosophical discussion instead
2.1 Livestream said that they had to rewrite the story fully in the middle. One of the reason because the story leaks in the community long before 2.0 got released. Based on the leaks the only important characters are Acheron, Boothill, SAM, Sunday and surprisingly Misha (there are no Gallagher, no Aventurine, no Ratio, no Robin, nor Sparkle). Now looking back, you can see that Acheron's story from beginning to end has a smooth landing to Boothill's story & Sunday's story. Firefly/SAM got it pretty interesting at the beginning but their part got cut in the middle and never come back (I bet that's where the rewrite start to coming in). This is also because the gacha genre that always make new characters per patch. If you expect a good writing with THAT many characters, then I suggest to lower your expectation.
@@jerryeljeremy7790 The problem is that there are actually just a few characters in a story's version. Rarely does HSR do cameos or reappearance of previous world characters in a main story except for the Express. There's literally several novels that have more characters compared to hsr's story per world, and they still manage to make a good story without it being too convoluted. Now you can say "well this isn't a novel" or "they don't have the authors of those novels, duh" all you want, but hsr makes more money than genshin and zzz. They have no excuse not to hire actually decent writers than them being greedy and lazy pieces of shits. I don't care that they have to rewrite it becayse it got leaked, their rewrite was shit. I'd rather they just continued with their originally intended story even if it got leaked, because literally a majority of people didn't even know or look at story leaks. It was more likely that they just used the leak as an excuse for their shitty writing, or that the original story was so bad that the rewrite was actually better, and again they just used the leak as an excuse.
@@jerryeljeremy7790 Leaks. I was there for it all. Sparkle kit was leaked in May 2023. Aventurine kit was leaked in June 2023. His model was all over the place, and his dice model was leaked since Day 1 and he is in a lightcone. Dr.Ratio model was leaked around May 2023. Gallagher, Jade, Sunday, Diva(Robin), Jiaoqiu names was leaked by Dim in July. Concept art for Sunday, Robin and Sam was leaked in September 2023, whilst Sam already have a unique ID sometime around May 2023. That's all the receipt I can remember. If you don't trust me you can google them. All of them had major roles in the story. There are story leaks in November 2023. That was for Firefly real identity. That's all. Like damn, that isn't an obstacle for them to write a good story. They just shoot themselves in the foot, include bird fanaticism, lectures you with philosophical identity issue, then spray you with "it is what it is" when caught in the plots corner. They did this with Hi3 moon finality chapter. Tell everyone the bad guy's motives, use bird analogy, deus ex machina the ending by defeating god. It was and still is ASS.
Firefly reveal was supposed to be more epic and she was laughing and unhinged about the reveal but since she was well loved by the community they couldn't risk it
@@zrfiv496 Yes those were what they were referring but the problem didn't start from those leaks you mentioned. There was already a leak around 1.2 or 1.3 about Penacony storyline where Boothill was supposed to be the Gallagher of the story and part of the rebel, Acheron was the kryptonite for the main villain, SAM supporting from behind the scenes, Misha & Sunday play more major role and the main villain was Watchmaker. Someone post all those leaks and dip like what happened to Sumeru leaks in Genshin. The Acheron part is still consistent but I bet Hoyo hold a grudge against these nuke leakers and decided to rewrute the story only for it to get leaked again lmao. Maybe they got frustated and decided to just copy the HI3 moon finality core story lol.
One thing that wasn't directly mentioned (which is understandable given how much stuff there is to talk about) that irks me to no end is how "Something Onto Death" was handled. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who thought its design, mannerisms, creepy noises, and the music that plays when fighting it were all 11/10, such an unnatural yet imposing presence. The way it was used as a boogeyman monster in the Child's Dream right after Sparkle forcibly sent you and Firefly there was simple yet excellent, I loved both the scene with the unending doors + TVs and later the scene where it acts like the Grim Reaper, charging straight towards Firefly and enacting what felt like her unavoidable fate in that moment, only for it to then creepily retreat back into the unknown parts of the dream after it executed its target. I cannot emphasize in mere words just how awesome and scary this thing felt, love the name too... that is until its real nickname was revealed, its subservient nature to Gallagher revealed, and its true purpose as merely a method of transport revealed. All of that absolutely dogshit info dumped on the player off-handedly makes it sting that much more, and retroactively makes 2.0 that much less compelling of a story (and I really enjoyed the 2.0 story just by itself). Shit fuckin sucks, you had something great and you fuckin ruined it man
Yeah I know what you mean, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for it to be revealed that stuff was a lie because they can't really have built this thing up as death itself so much only to never see it again and it to only casually get explained away as a sentient bus capable of taking the wrong passengers that nobody outside of Dreamscape Reef is aware of It didn't happen BUT I've seen some good points made by people that the story of Penacony has so many loose threads left, especially around Gallagher, that it may yet happen Hopefully
cant help but agree. this feels like a hot take but not everything in a story *has* to be explained at all actually, or at least not so explicitly. but this is Hoyo we're talking about...
I am so glad someone else also felt the same way with Sunday and Robin's conversation with the dream chasers in Penacony. The moment Robin just dismissed that old man dying of something terminal and unavoidable, I grew from liking her, to siding with Sunday. She became more of a mouth piece of the writers trying to tell me Escapism is BAD, and less like a character to me. Anyone else see the irony in them saying 'escapism is bad' when we are playing a gatcha mobile game that lends itself to long wordy cutscenes for the sake of retention?
That's why if I became one of Sunday's victim, I wouldn't be mad. Many people go to Penacony to escape from their real life. Sunday's mistake is he didn't ask their consent. But if everyone is fine with it, so what?
OMG, YES!!! I was so pissed off at Robin in that moment. I still think if there are people who want to escape and someone wants to provide them space to do it (like Sunday) then why they can't do it? I love how Himeko and co were like "excuse youuuuu, people have a right to choose their own destiny" but yet they disagree with people who choose to come to Penacony to escape their problems. So..... can people really decide for themselves or do they have to decide what great Himeko and Robin think is okay? Also, the irony of TB fulfilling Misha's plans while talking about how everyone should follow their own path.
@n.s.3609 Agree. Sunday's mistake is he didn't ask for consent. But if people agreed with him, so what? One thing to ask for consent, but it's different thing to "force" people to keep struggling in reality.
the point that really got to me was what was the point of having that huge dramatic moment of seeing a spike get shoved through Firefly's chest. We got this emotional cutscene of MC rushing forward to catch her only for her to fade away. Sad shit. Then we see her again and it was like "oh yeah, that's how they teleport us to this hidden area, LOL"
It's almost like when u focus on 6 specific chars, and not do this weird give main char status the new banner char, and make them irrelevant when there banner ends that penacony did Ur story is better🤯
It feels like a case of there being too many cooks in the kitchen. Its difficult to comprehend how they go about the process of storyboarding for a live service game and how that ties in to all the other departments at play, it must be an unholy complicated operation for Mihoyo to keep production running at an acceptable pace. They must have an army of different teams working separately from one another because the story quality certainly reflects that, and it’s an issue that feels prevalent across all their games. Unless they overhaul their workflow, I doubt there will be any meaningful change. They simply lack direction as a company
Man you really hit all the points that i also thought especially the part about writers getting dementia. Like unironically it feels like all 3 patches are written by 3 different writers and all of them have given only surface level information of what other writers wrote
Penacony story was weak. I myself think it was worse than Xianzhou (Xianzhou has actually great characters), but I disagree that Aventurine did nothing for plot. I would argue IPC trying to take over Penacony is as much of plot as Sundays attempt to do same with power of the Order. Maybe even more as while Sunday got his ass kicked, Aventurine succeeded and every single arc there from now will be influenced by his actions. I would also say theme of his arc is not "safety" vs "free will", but "Nihility" vs "hope", with Acheron the agent of Nihility actually standing in oposition of Aventurines nihilism. My problem with Penacony is that it DOESN'T actually have own identity. Sure you can walk on walls, which is quirky, but it's empty world. There were exactly 4 Penacony characters. 2 of them wasn't real and one of remaining two left planet, probably forever. Whole story was carried on shoulders of outsiders.
Indeed! Despite having Oak, Alfafa, Iris, Bloodhound and Nightingale branches... I'm hoping the other hours of Penacony bring them forth, but the many factions being present together for the Harmony story didn't really need to ditch any proper Penacony characters. Even if we get them showed off but not yet released, it makes Penacony feel very liminal.
Thank you for this video, it really shows your observation skill and I love how you voice it. I've been waiting for this review for a while now, lol. I really wish they really took their time with Penacony, because I really liked the start, before it started faltering
Capitalism DOES save the day! IPC stocks for life! Jade did nothing wrong! More seriously the entire last patch of the story sucked. Robin, Sunday, and Misha needed way more screen time. Did the Belobog writer start the plot and hand it off the Luofu writer?
The characters being static is because of marketability I think. Aventurine will always be the guy who bets his life on anything no matter what he does in the story to grow, because he's the funny gamblin man who gamble gamble gamble. Buy banner please.
Gamble this character for future character that is a must pull, gamble your time in this game to see if we are gonna see this story happen (example Sampo in belobog), gamble artifacts, gamble everything
Great analysis, I found myself really confused at the end of 2.2 when everybody was saying this was a great conclusion to the arc. I was just waiting the whole time for Firefly or Aventurine to do anything of import. Then we get woke from the dream within the dream and start talking about needing to wake up powerful wills against order and I thought 'Oh, this is the setup for 2.3 where we have to do start some dream insurgency with Acheron, Robin, presumably Aventurine and Firefly, and Boothill's ranger buddies'. That sounds fun! Then we were suddenly fighting the final boss and I had crazy whiplash.
I thought in 2.3 we wil get answer for everything. Until now I'm still curious, when Sunday asked Dreammaster who controlled stellaron, he said it's not him. I thought "Wow we will have other villain!" but no! It was never answered even in 2.7. We were just told the Dreammaster and Oak Family are the culprit. Sunday might have suspicion other The Family from other branch was involved somehow or on the move, but it's not about the stellaron. I don't even remember what happened with the stellaron.
I think biggest problem with Penacony was that I had to learn WTF actually happened from UA-cam CCs. Hoyo told the story extremely poorly overall. It's a good story, but it's a poorly told story. Too many fake outs, too many "it's just a dream" moments, and too many pieces that don't fit - like Sparkle, Rappa and Boothill, who don't belong in this arc at all. Belobog - was way more straight forward, but it also worked. I really love going back there to see what Bronya is up to now.
Yeah that pretty much sums up all my issues with Penacony and it's nice to know that more people are starting to see what a mess this arc was now that the honeymoon period is over. Seriously, I feel like HSR's need to cram as many characters into an arc as possible to sell banners is becoming a huge detriment to the story, and I don't doubt that this is one of the reasons they're making Amphorius 7 patches long instead of just 3-4 patches.
A lot of of people still like it, the thing is, we can't replay chapters, so people just stays with perception they had of the arc, and can't see for what it is. I think most of us that realized, it was during the release of these chapters.
Fingers crossed that Amphoreus being given more time will be worth it, that they'll stop racing to market the characters and just...write characters in a well made story and let that speak for itself!
introducing a follower of enigmata as a narrative mouthpiece that constantly spouts the correct information makes me want to rip my hair straight out of my head. they handled him and misha so horrifically it’s upsetting on a deeply personal level
@@akarifuyuki9763 yes but "Ghallagher" wont show up never again, He wasnt a real person, just a mask or Fictional character. Enigmata...well is a enigma (duh) and even they were supposed to be just a rumor/myth, people didnt think they were actually real and his paht make them take ficional rols on history or make just plain lies about something unless someone reveal the truth, then they disappear/died and then repeat the cycle (all this taking that the information that the game is give us about them its not compromise by Enigmata themselfs)
1:06 Pretty sure he only used the bird thing as a way to get others to understand his point of view, but his philosophy likely came from...well, life. He's an overprotective brother trying to protect and shelter his sister from the evils of the world, without understanding that she's already aware of it and trying to do her part to help.
It's not just the bird either. His time from being at the confessional and from being groomed BG Gopher Wood's teachings also shaped him to want to do all this
Let's not forget that his planet was razed to the ground and he and Robin watched as their mother died in front of them, only to them be adopted and groomed by Gopher Wood.
2.2's story feels like the worst gut punch I have ever felt Unreasonable amount of time, 9 hours just for 2.2, and by the time they are done, it feels like not much happened Since the idea of consequences is pretty much out of the window. Death fake-outs left and right. Duke Inferno's gang getting sidelined, OFF-SCREEN Sparkle being the text book definition of a red herring 30 minute still shots where something important should be happening, but due to the delivery it feels all so jarring Sunday is like the typical 3rd act villan, where it feels they should be important, yet there wasn't enough time devoted to doing so. And the dialog is all so long and unnecessarily convoluted Honestly, to the writers of Penacony, banished from the kitchen. Never cook again
I can agree with all of this except sparkle’s character being a bad thing. The whole point of sparkle is to be a red herring. Hell, she even fights with red herrings.
@andrewfang2399 I still don't like it. It feels like her whole deal was to hype you up for something that was never going to happen. She was that Stewie meme
I heard they rewrote the story a few times.. first the annilation gang was going to be the main villian and sunday was supposed to join the stelleron hunters? It felt more like just them selling banners than actually writing a cohesive story
thank you for articulating things ive been feeling about penacony!! i really did love the characters, but it really felt the plot meant nothing in the end. like. there was no trust put in the players to figure out what was being said- they didn't even try to let us figure things out by giving us the information we needed
I'm going to be honest Hoyo storytelling is so ass to me because the characters take like 3 paragraphs to say the equivalent of 1 sentence and when your mc talks its especially bad because you're forced to respond with 3 different reddit thread meme replies like that's so peak aura and nah i'd win or take the L
Stray coming back with another divisive take! Coin flip says I agree this time. Penacony got a ton of praise, but I just remember being kinda eh. Aventurine’s story was fantastic but it’s basically entirely unrelated to anything happening there. You could pretty much just say Sunday and the Order failing gave the IPC an opening to get involved, and basically nothing else would change. Also Sparkle literally travelled across the universe to ship two people she’d never met and knew nothing about and then dipped because wow the developers need you to ship Trailblazer with space-cancer patient who’s gonna die (never, really) and you knew for an hour. And hi, Honkai Impact III. Wonder what Stray is gonna drop about the Rinascita and Natlan discourse. More fire, perhaps.
When you brought up Aventurine's first appearance after his "death" I IMMEDIATELY cringed.. I've been ignoring that god awful scene for a while because it goes against everything version 2.1's conclusion, it felt like the writers were doing it purposely or they didn't even read their own writing. I saw someone on twitter coping and saying he was just pretending to throw Jade off and I've just been running with that headcanon honestly (it's much better than whatever that that scene is).
21:15 this is how I felt about Boothill. Before his release, he never got any screen time and the one thing he did do was accidentally call up Black Swan in 2.1. 2.2 was his patch and the only time he ever got the main spotlight, but only because it was his banner. I’m the Penacony previews leading up to its release, he didn’t exist. So when he drop marketed, it felt very random. His part was good in the story, but like most of the Penacony cost, it felt like he was there to discuss philosophy. We didn’t learn anything about his character and you wouldn’t know unless you pulled for him and read his story. 2.6, as much as a drag it was with the banana brain rot, did give us good insight in boothill’s character and past
Good video! Analysis on things that I honestly really like is fun, and I like how well you trod the line between the good and the bad about it! I like how you go about your arguments for what you think isn’t good, even with exaggeration it’s clear that it’s coming from a good place
Ryuuku already did that months ago. I also felt like Maverick came back to Penacony and made another video about it because Ryuuku opened many delulu HSR fans eyes.
Not to sound mean, but I don't know who Ryuuku even is lol. Made this video because it's been on the back burner for me for awhile and I really wanted to discuss it.
@@StrayMaverick Oh; okay. My bad if I sounded condescending. Ryuuku Sensei is a gacha CC that's infamously known for making one of the first in-depth criticism videos of Penacony and called HSR the worst game because of this arc had way too much yapping and not enough gameplay. He's also the reason why many people are calling HSR storytelling bad now.
I hate how no-one from the Family pointed out Aventurine acted like a terrorist and told IPC goons to go f*** themselves. I was so sure we were still in the dream, there were so many signs pointing to it... and then we went to Luofu. It was when I realised Penacony really was over, that Wood was killed off screen, IPC and AE have now power over Penacony, so cool (sarcasm). I really can't forgive how the murder mystery didn't contain any murder at all.
>Firefly's 3 deaths Imagine if all 3 deaths were meant to be genuine deaths. Imagine if the first two times she died, we see how her heart stops and something or someone (maybe the SAM suit or another Stellaron Hunter) manages to revive her, but that's just the player’s knowledge and the Express Crew don't know this. Then you get the Sparkle 'bombs' event, and everyone thinks that's that. Or imagine Firefly dies the third time, but this time, the previous revival method isn't working, and the TB gets a panicked call looking for help. *OOOOORRRR* we could use the 3 deaths in your Firefly as the final boss thing where Firefly does die 2 times and each death adds a bigger crack in her heart for The Order to sneak in and make her more fearful of the Sweet Dream ending until she becomes The Order's puppet against the crew and the third death can be the boss fight
As for the theming and how they played it out, I would have flipped the order of Sunday and the IRS. Have the Express Crew sort out the philosophy of the Sweet Dream first, and as a result, the IRS comes to reclaim the planet, _and then_ in the process of the IRS takeover, they discover the Stellaron and have a showdown over that, where you get Adventurine as the IRS vanguard and Jade revealing herself in the peace talks afterwards.
>It was all just a dream Imagine if when Black Swan wakes us up, we arrive at Penacony for real and find that The Order has already won and the rest of the patch is about regaining everyone's freedom.
It's been wonweek since you looked at me Cocked your head to the side and said, "I'm angry" Five days since you laughed at me Saying, "Get that together, come back and see me" Three days since the living room I realized it's all my fault, but couldn't tell you Yesterday, you'd forgiven me But it'll still be two days 'til I say I'm sorry
Im might update this message with more of my thoughts but... 8:08 HIMEKO!!!!! MISHA LITERALLY HAS A BADGE THAT LOOKS LIKE THE NAMELESS BADGE!!!! You dont need to say it was a hunch! 11:30 knew something felt off still about the express, like they didnt matter 16:08 pain yea aventurine focus in hindsight felt wasted same for boothill, also never caught onto the fact of he said he'd value his life but then immediately bets it again. 21:00 yup yea acheron is done really well, while I still don’t really care for her character I can tell she was well written and same for aventurine in act 2 22:16 I really dislike how firefly was handled, she felt all over the place and I also really wish we got to see her Sam side struggle more and even be given her backstory like the one short they gave. But instead she kinda tells us in the reef what was up and that is kinda it. 25:09 I think I was kinda fine with a Sunday treatment since a lot was also foreshadowed except maybe more context to his past and the dreammaster was needed but… I really hate how Robin was handled she was barely in the story at all because she appeared at the start, then we saw her dead after act 1 so she stayed dead until act 3 where she starts doing things but it really feels too late. 34:14 man didn’t realize this either but also a bit annoying it’s whole message of why life slumbers is kinda whatever 43:51 firefly as the antagonist?? Hmm I guess it could work? We’d constantly be seeing 2 different sides of the same character but I can’t see something like Sundays big fight with her that I liked. I do like Robin replacing firefly would be good but what to do with Sam? 48:11 you aren’t prepared for what amorphous is length wise. It’s 10 hrs…. And supposed to span 8 patches 50:56 good point, I did like the twist just so I could have more Sunday villian but more probably could’ve been done more here I see with your point. This reveal has also become important for other honkaiverse games it seems (hi3 and genshin). Feel like there could’ve been more you talked about like more in-depth on firefly but then all the other characters like sparkle, boothill, jade and the everflame mansion. Also not to mention the finale is such a mess with like even more unresolved issues and questions. Overall good video but think it needed to talk about afew more aspects of the story.
Some stuff: Sunday explaining his plan is fitting for the character. He actually believes in honesty/human goodness, and Order seems to be more of a "good path". Also villains aren't antagonists, he isn't "villain", but I suppose author knows the difference and just slipped. Welt sensing something amiss isn't very strange. All of Aeons are Imaginary Constructs, all of their authorities(or most, nor sure about IX) is Imaginary. Welt has a great history with imaginary-related stuff so he can sense different Authority. Himeko repaired THE ONLY warp train in existence. Contemplate that for a moment. Her having "hunch" is stupid, but she did more genius things before. Whole Order plan is basically Evangelion, just want to say. Persona5 is also that, but Evangelion is much older and Hoyo absolutely loves this show. Not really important, though. HI3/HSR collab brought nothing. Because it will be disaster for HSR players otherwise. Welt also won't have any major role due to that. He is most likely there due to some legacy development. Good video overall.
While we have no evidence whatsoever, I have the nagging suspicion that Penacony's arc was rewritten pretty late into development, as response to the story leaks. It was mentioned during 2.0 Special Program that devs were rather distraught about the extreme leaks, going as far as to say "We're okay with gameplay leaks but we want the story to be a surprise" basically. I think this because the 2.0 Trailblaze mission is genuinely a good opening to the mystery, they gave enough clues so the player (not the characters) could piece a lot of things together. Perhaps then, as lore enthusiasts and leakers had both already revealed ALL of the major plot twists (The Order controlling Penacony, Firefly's and Robin's fake death, the Watchmaker's identity, etc), HoYo decided to just scrap and reorder events. Of course, such a sudden change in direction would leave its mark on the story and mostly on the pacing. Just my schizo theory here. Although, seeing how 3.0 was longer than any other Trailblaze mission so far, it wouldn't surprise me if the previous ones were cut short.
I've been saying since day 1 that Order and Harmony can coexist and I was deadass hoping we'd punt that Michael Rat ahh Clock into the sun (pun intended) by battling the capitalism taken over and Sunday still following his arc shown but with actually showcasing HOW and WHY he grows out of the naive POV he has developed and he and Robin together plus the Trailblaze defeating the Family _and_ IPC (at least within Penacony) and establishing a new form Order where Harmony is the new norm. A good example of those concepts coexisting is the justice system.. Laws exist to protect the people, and laws *can* and inevitably will be rewritten over time, but it doesn't equal keeping their life a rigid, robotic existence. It's supposed to sustain that Harmony. A good direction they took was the Sunday boss!!! A choir withour order cannot have harmonious resonance!! I say this as someone who resonated with Sunday the whole time too. 2.2 ending genuinely made me cry like a baby for HOURS but I genuinely agree Penacony left much to be desired
Order in HSR is hive mind you cant control yourself or think about the laws but your take is so good, I wishs eons arent black vs white but since the start its that. Jazz and blues are harmony without order btw
OH MY GODDD YES!!! I was soo frustrated on the narrative trying to pin all the wrongs on Sunday when I myself (and the npcs) do not see smth that's fundamentally wrong w penacony and what he tries to do w his home
Im so glad more people had the same issues I did. The story had such a massive tonal shift, if you played the 3 parts separately you probably wouldnt be able to tell they were three parts of a grander whole. It was particularly disappointing that the cause of Robin and Firefly' death, the great mystery of 2.0, ended up being a silly puppy monster who lived in american slums
I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought penecony felt like… a lot honestly so far the only arcs I’ve liked have been belabog and so far I’m enjoying amphoreous as well since it’s kinda genshin adjacent and I came from that game first
Agreed on being glad to finally hear this perspective; it's such a breathe of fresh air to hear someone else not scream that Penacony arc is PEAK-cony. I personally hated so much about this version's story.
The sad part is the 2 parts you like are the ones that is/is going to be a reliant and sort of retelling of stories already done in honkai impact and that sort of says something about the writers. It seems like they aren’t interested in writing completely new stories for star rail and will instead rely on references and meme fuel when not using honkai as a reference as a substitute for quality writing. Tbh imo belabog wasn’t even that good either it was just good enough to be enjoyable but forgettable.
This. @28:25 - This is the issue with Penacony and a lot of Hoyo storytelling in the last couple years. The Archon/Trailblaze Quests no longer exist to tell a story. They exist to sell characters first and foremost. Making a good cohesive story is secondary to selling characters and they don’t seem to care how much storytelling suffers because of this. This is why Robin/Sunday were crammed into the last act and why Aventurine only showed up in the one he did - because that is when their banners were featured. I don’t think it was always this bad but the last couple years hoyo has gotten so bad at gatcha centered design in terms of their story telling. Natlan is also suffering from this imo in Genshin. There needs to be game/story telling centered design or it just doesn’t work. Penacony was a train wreck for me in terms of story. I can agree with world design and world building. The underlying themes were of merit but the slop of a story just did no justice to any of it and left the overall experience terrible. It would be like trying to praise a baseball player for striking out. He may have had great form and wore a very nice uniform and practiced a lot. But all in he missed the ball and struck out. Sad but it is what it is. And from what I’ve heard the new 3.0 stuff is even worse. The first patch main quest is like 11 hours and Hoyo is supposedly spreading out the main quest over 7 patches or something this time. I can’t do it man. Penacony almost killed me. Alsooo unrelated- please please do a video on Natlan and WuWa 2.0 once it’s over. Your videos are so amazing and I’m so curious to hear your thoughts.
All of your criticisms make so much sense! I also think Penacony story was so confusing. I can't wait for you to talk about Amphoreus story, I have mixed feeling about it...
The way you describe the mystery being written in Penacony reminds me of Lyney's trial in Fontaine. Absolutely hated that it's 'solved' by Navia bringing in the ACTUALLY alive victim to reveal everything, leaving Traveler to just reiterate what the victim said rather than do any crime solving. It also shows how bad the Fontaine investigation system is if they couldn't figure the victim wasn't actually dead or who they assumed it to be (because the victim in this case was a pickpocket. She stole tickets from someone and went into the show assuming the original owner's identity. So when she 'died,' they all believed she was the ticket owner. Said ticket owner was alive and well, and the authorities should've figured it out if they had visited her home, or contacted her next of kin and friends who probably would've known she was still alive.)
Oh boy, this one has been long coming. TBH for everyone who's been playing HI3 before starting HSR the writing shift was unfortunately a looming shadow. For you see, the lead writers (yes there are 2 of them) of Penacony arc, started their writing shenanigans with Kolosten arc in HI3 and that was such a mess. When HSR launched they were still not on the HSR team of writers but got roped over from HI3 to write Luofu. This is why Jarilo-6 went so well, and why Luofu onwards the story got down into the deep end of philosophy. Lots of concepts, lots of ideas, too many in fact, and thus the writers have no idea how to tie them together at reasonable pace (though this is partly due to Hoyo games' format of being gatchas, aka certain expectations from CN gatcha conventions).
@@Taxiozaurus but Shaoji wrote Penacony. While Fanchuan wrote Kolosten. It's another person. And Fanchuan arcs are actually consistent inside even if you dislike physics exposition. Also, team of writers are absolutely same between games judging by their interview to JP magazine around HI3 collab.
HSR I feel is a game without any character development from anyone like any other open world gacha, there is NO focused characters so far I think(or I'm just bad at detecting change) maybe Amphoreus will do it better with the focus on Flame Chasers Especially since they have HI3 story writers which can make characters change(although they are very hyperfocusd on the protagonist and takes place in one planet)
There are character development but in much slower rate compared to HI3, because HI3 character groups aren't that many and keep appearing almost every arc. The HSR chars that got developed mostly came from trailblaze continuance rather than the main story. Like Bronya that has to deal with debt in Jarilo-VI part 2, or Yanqing that has to be more patience with everything and strike when it needed in Xianzhou part 2. HSR story is more like chess, move slowly until it reach the goal because of the wide world setting.
The funny thing about the end of 2.2 is how Sunday says the poor, weak doesn’t have a say in their fate they can barely escape it and then Himeko saying during the bossfight that witness the will of the weak but they didn’t fcking asked any of the penacony people who lives in the dream so like is it the will of the weak or again the strong explointing the weak🤨 actually that’s why I didn’t want Sunday to join the AE but thanks it seems like to be just temporary so I still have hope. Anyway another plothole is penacony should have vanished the moment they sealed the stellaron but nothing happened😭 Also we had a side quest where Robin says she will be go and see more worlds and such but since 2.2 she always in penacony😭
There's so much you didn't even get to but if you did this would be a 2 HR video. I actually liked the loufu arc I only had 2 major issues. The tingyun being sus the whole time and nobody calling her out on it. And personally I agree more with Dan Shu's perspective than with Lan the god of friendly fire.
I started playing around the Wardance, and took few months break until recently. I managed to get through Belebog, Xianzhou and Penacony within last couple months, and honestly? Penacony was by far the worst, least interesting, most tedious to get through of them all. Every time i saw Acheron, Adventurine or Gallagher on the screen, i was wishing to have skip button. Which is an issue since all of them revolve plot around themselves. And honestly? Adventurine's plot was great, but could have been cut and nothing would change much. Initial plot was to visit Penacony, meet old express passengers and discover secrets of the family. We would get in Sunday's way regardless of IPC's involvement, we would try to find Mikhail regardless of the murder mysteries, and IPC would have entered Penacony anyways. Arguably their hand would be much stronger without Adventurine pretty much becoming a terrorist and indiscriminately attacking everyone. If anything, that should be detrimental for IPC, but fuck if I care about things making sense in that plot.
One day after dinner ahh story telling, also i had a feeling Misha is a important part of the story too, because aside from us, i don't think any other character has directly interacted with misha before the other Asstral express crew showed up, my initial guess is that only TB can see Misha for some reason.
Thank you omg aventurines story was so good only for them to completely butcher it in 2.2 and I felt like I was the only one who had that complaint. thank god someone else sees this shit for what it is.
The first arc was conditioning us to like Firefly (obv. to condition us in pulling for Firefly/Sam in the next patches). They even introduced her incurable disease and "killed" her for shock factor for us to root for her when her banner comes. Good thing I wasnt affected by it at all. She wasnt really in the main story after that and weirdly somehow left after the final battle? like wtf?? Then she comes back as your date in the ship and exploded into fireworks and is alive again?
I think a lot of people grew to hate Firefly because of how in-your-face she was. Designed as a meek waifubait character, who you went on a forced date with and of course, needed other characters to talk about good the two of you look together just to kill her off for shock value. The Firefly gfbaiting was so ridiculous that when I first read 2.0, I genuinely thought Firefly had ulterior or sinister motives for acting so coy around the TB and faked her death.
@ the date was fine and it was actually revealed in the recent story that she told us before when we were stellaron hunters before our memories were wiped out that she would pretend not to know us to create a new relationship with our nameless persona. The thing I didnt like was she wasnt full fleshed out and didnt do anything in the penacony quest other than die and everyone was glazing lol
The problem with Firefly is all her great actions are off screen. Her past, her tragic three death, her supposed to be menacing appearance as SAM, all were told. All Hoyo showed us was a little waifu, while in fact, she is more than that.
@@akarifuyuki9763 compared to aventurine and acheron's full-fleshed characterization, FF in the quest rly came off as only a 'sad waifu' Like, why not tell us stuff abt firefly directly in the quest instead of dumping it in the trailer
@@bubblesparks This. At first I was neutral about her until Hoyo forced us to date her. When I watched her trailer, I thought " Wow so cool!" then I realized, why we don't see something like this in the game? I really liked Sam (until it was revealed he was Firefly), I wanted to see her in action!
Acheron's slash in 2.1 didn't even send everyone to the deeper dreamworld, Firefly and Sleepy did that. Aventurine's story though it had good bits in it was filler that could have been removed and you wouldn't have noticed. Firefly has to die to exit the dream world or go deeper into it. Her second death was when she flew off, she killed herself in order to wake up and then she woke up Acheron. The third death was her leaving Penacony. It was only explained in the readable which doesn't make it any better.
30:49 That can be explain so easy with the guy saying that he just went to Penacony when he started to feel pain, because the game tells you how much money cost to go and live there, he was rich
I'm glad your back and with a 1h long banger as well. I really love your analysis. Here are my thoughts: I genuinely liked the mystery and the themes of penacony but the way they told the story and how it went made my head hurt. I still do not know why the tournament happend and the answer to why life slumbers was so unsatisfying that I had to sit back and let that sink in for a moment. I still think the loufu is the worst but penacony is second. Though, I can't bring myself to hate it. I still like it in some wierd way. I am really excited for Amphorious though. Maybe in part cause I am huge sucker for myths and the overall aesthetic but I also think that the first chapter wasn't bad. Though I'm scared how they handle the mystery portion. That said I think I read somewhere that they changed the script mid story. Sunday wasn't gonna be the big bad and robin had a bigger role. This would explain why penacony was such a mess.
I agree with a lot of things, the real theme here is "back to square one". But I'd also argue that the first half was just as bad as the second. The unnecessarily dating sim instead of investigating what's going on or findig the crew was jarring. And unlike OP I don't think every character being a dick like that somehow makes them clever is interesting. A truly clever character would have been nice to manipulate the MC instead of behaving all kind of suspicious, slimy or outright hostile. Edit: correcting autocorrect
@AfterAFashionASMR I generally like the puzzles in HSR but this part with Firefly constantly buzzing around with her useless smalltalk bored me to tears. At first I didn't have a problem with her but after realising she wasn't just an intermezzo, a random npc popping up and going away but meant as this greal life altering bond I was disgusted. Her existence wasted my time and robbed me from the mistery and investigation I was promised. By the time of her dramatic death I was in the mood to high five the monster that killed her.
I think that their experience with Penacony is the reason why they decided to make future stories starting with Amphoreus last from X.0 to X.7. They now have so many much time to address many more things. Despite all my love for 2.X, I feel like the main story had to be trimmed to fit in a limited number of patches
I'm not gonna lie, a lot of the reason I like certain characters in HSR is because of how likeable the voice actors are and how strong a lot of their performances are. So yeah, i did like Acheron, but that's almost 100% due to how much I loved Allegra Clark's acting. Without that, she would have been incredibly boring to me. Same goes for other characters like Himeko. They are leaning hard on the much better writing that they did in Honkai Impact to carry over into their newer games, and it just feels lazy. There's no reason for me to like these characters other than them being hot and well-acted. In Amphoreus it was fascinating to see just how heavily impacted characters are when you take away their voice, like with Dan Heng who feels like such a nothing, pointless character to the point where he could have just stayed on the express and it wouldn't matter at all.
I never really realzied the problems with penacony while playing through it, but one of the most striking things I realized was, like, how you don't even MENTION boothill or sparkle in this video. why? BECAUSE THERE'RE TOO MANY DAMN CHARACTERS?? like, I love each and every character in this game (uh, well, most.) but my gosh you lost track of them sometimes, don't you? I really really REALLY hope and pray that amphoreus can be better. I love penacony to bits for what it tried to do but GOSHHH pleaseee>??
Aventurine's story mainly felt like a diff side of the greater theme of penacony which is as you said freedom and dreams much like for ff and acheron. He is the character that came into penacony not believing in what penacony is trying to sell but ends up doing a turn on it and comes out, seemingly with a better understanding of what he trully wants after he was forced to face his own self and past. Acheron comes into penacony unable to experience what penacony is, shes an antithetical force to what penacony and the order stand for and ultimately plays a pivotal role in their undoing, in the process she also manages to return a soul to its home fulfilling *his* dream for him. Firefly is the character that came into penacony hoping to buy what they want to sell her, her moment on the rooftop is not who is she outside the dream but is who she wants to be, she knows that this is all fake yet wishes it wasnt. Shes the type of person sunday made this plan for yet at the confrontation Firefly understands that she would be living in a dream leading a fake hollow happy life (sidequests also tackle this speciric concept). She gets one last bout with this dilemma in 2.3 when Jade tells her she can have the life she wants by sacrificing the stellaron hunters. The way I see it Ff is serves the inverse purpose from Aventurine in penacony. Neither make a total transformation of character but they both leave penacony with a hopeful, and clearer mind. The takeaway from penacony tho imo seems clear, the story wasnt paced appropriately, each character would benefit more from extra screentime. That's prob why amphoreus is 10 hours long and this will likely go on for 8 more patches. You brought up persona 5 and hey, maybe having the runtime of a persona game is what hoyo stories need.
thank you for these videos! I often feel like I'm the crazy one when I see everyone satisfied with how they handle story right after updates when I'm left feeling very questionable about it all and have criticism for what happens 😭
I find Penacony works a lot better when its viewed less as one larger arc and more like a series of smaller arcs with loose connections. Almost episodic even. Also, i would describe the arc as a beautiful mess
My biggest fault with Penacony is Firefly and my absolute hatred for her like when she was introduced I saw EXACTLY what she stood for from a real world standpoint she was entirely made to emotionally manipulate the player. When I say this I mean you and me not the Trailblazer the actual player as she's a cute sick girl with a poorly defined backstory with the MC to dig her claws into you with "she's such a wubby she's gonna die player keep her safe :). SHE DIED PLAYER HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?!?!?! Oh wait she's fine and she loves you don't you want to pull for her?" And after that I despised her with every fiber of my being and it just ruined the entire story for me and she is directly related to the tonal shift from murder mystery to "lol jk Sunday bad guy"
43:45 - I thought the absolutely same when i played through Penacony. If this arc was about Firefly/SAM and her struggles, while also giving us the opportunity to explore Trailblazer's past with the stellaron hunters and keeping the Trailblazing message with the whole Misha scene and passing the legacy forward. I think it would be great. That was precisely my greatest disappointment with Penacony. I saw this as the GREATEST opportunity to explore the TB's past and create a dilemma about going back to who they were and the path of Trailblazing they walk now. I think it all could be PEAK CINEMA! But no... we got this gigantic mess of entangled interests. ///// 3.0 SPOILER BELOW ///// instead... we got a glimpse of TB's past in Amphoreus... like... what? Okay i guess... and the execution was kinda mid, but still, my desire to see this conflict about TB's past and present was so strong that it ended up being my favorite moment from 3.0
@@AfterAFashionASMR Worse or better, it depends on your preference. The yapping is the same for me. Because I don't mind it so I'm fine. For some people it's too much. The puzzle is a bit tiring. There were scenes I wanted to watch the cutscene, but instead I got black screen with text. For the plot and characters, overall it's good. It's around 7-10 hours.
@@AfterAFashionASMR compared to penacony's start in 2.0, amphoreus felt more serious and not as light hearted. It also has much slower pacing, with lots of time-wasting irrelevant puzzles too The presentation was mid, lacking illuatrations and cutscenes so to me it felt like a wasted potential of an epic introductory arc
@@AfterAFashionASMR Yeah, at least in Penacony i was interested and invested. In Amphoreus there is nothing that makes me give a damn so... at least up until now it feels like torture without a skip buttom. But hey... it has a few memorable and really cool moments to me. Maybe it'll get better. Honestly? It has more potential than Penacony tbf
I'll say this outright: If it wasn't for the Gacha Game structure of H:SR, Penacony COULD'VE been so much better. In fact, 2.6 is evidence of this. 2.6 only had one new character, Rappa, and I adore this update. It's the reason why Rappa is my second favorite. (Well, kind of? She's my first favorite for actually rational reasons, but my second favorite of all characters because Misha is cute and I adore that little guy.) It went into the backstory of this character and while we, most likely, will never see her again like we've seen mentions of Ratio in Divergent Universe (or, y'know Penacony.) or Luka in the Wardance, I'd say 2.6 gave us enough about Rappa to care about her as a character. If it wasn't for the fact that they needed us to care about Boothill suddenly, I doubt he would have gotten that much attention at 2.2, if *any at all* . This isn't to say Boothill is a completely badly written character, hardly, he got justice in 2.6 as well, but part of the reason I never pulled for him is because 2.2 did such a terrible job at telling me about him, that I just didn't care. I didn't see the reason why I *should* care about Boothill, because he felt like a footnote in the Penacony story, only there to just BE a character I 'should' care about, so that I 'should' pull for him. (major edit: changed 2.7 to 2.6. I thought 2.7 was the nonexistant 2.8)
2.0 and 2.1 were absolutely amazing and set up a really good story, and then 2.2 dropped the ball bad. Aventurine and his cliffhanger were amazingly done, only for it to be handled offscreen, great.
• *Jarilo-VI part 1:* Simple lore, great dialogues & pacing, interesting characters but pretty mid design, satisfying ending • *Xianzhou part 1:* Too many lore, too many namedrops in dialogues without explanation, Rushed pacing, Characters have no personality other than the lore but cool design, confusing ending • *Penacony part 1:* Decent amount of lore, overly non-direct & philosophical dialogues, Choppy Pacing, Layered characters (with the help of POV switches & their interaction) & PEAK good designs, satisfying ending • *Amphoreus 3.0:* BIG amount of lore but thankfully they are explained well, good dialogues (similar to belobog), Decent pacing (too many map puzzles tho), Decent characters (not that deep but their interaction & POV are pretty interesting) & good designs, ending is ???
@@jerryeljeremy7790 to me they failed to setup the importance of these titans when they don't even give us Nikador and Mydei's fight and instead off-screened them Amphoreus definitely is a step up from previous worlds, but not by huge difference. The part when Black Swan checked on March in the beginning could've been told by illustration or even legit 3d model that touched foreheads but instead they still opted for black screen. Exact same method since the release There is no excuse for the lazy cam angles or static char model animation bc another game w similar genre managed to provide more creativity in its story presentation
@@jerryeljeremy7790 I agree, I just started the game 2 weeks ago and caught up to the story and I fight it odd to see so many people prasing Jarilo -VI when it was honestly mid for the most part imo. It really just seems to me that people are looking at early HSR with rose tinted lenses.
Thank God Ryuuku made that criticism video about Penacony. People are starting to see the light now🙏🏿 However; the only thing I disagree with Ryuuku about Penacony is that he said the storytelling is bad, but the story itself is good. I feel like the storytelling AND story are bad, but the storytelling is so bad that it covers up the bad writing of the story and characters. Penacony has hella potential, but it felt like they tried to stuff too many themes and subplots into it and forgot about how they're gonna execute all of it... And people wanna tell me that Wuwa story is trash, but plot that as convoluted and condensing as Penacony is peak?? Make it make sense🤣
Even though I still did enjoy Penacony, one thing I will add about hsr's story (genshin suffers from this too but a little less) is that a lot of what happens in the plot feels very much "this could've been an email". A lot of the story is so heavily drawn out in an uncompelling way and I feel like Amphoreus has not necessarily improved on it by a lot.
All the persona 5 royal references in the video take me back because that's exactly what i have thought of the whole time while playing the story on release. When welt and acheron's conversation was playing i thought to myself "this feels..... oddly similiar to persona". Then as the story progress I was just so confused because it went so fast from being a whodunnit to p5 royal 3rd sem on sae's palace real quick. It's so unfortunate because penacony really started as "peakacony" with how they nailed the world, the theme, the philosophies, the characters backstory, and the story. But as the patches went on they nailed everything but the story (don't get me wrong, it's still alright but there were so many missed potentials and questionable decisions, most of which is stated in the video and in others' comments).
god the tournament part of that quest drove me up the wall, i was already tired and frustrated with how long the story was and here comes a scene that is such an obvious waste of time all i could do was laugh. i mentally checked out after that and a patch later uninstalled the game, legitimately my last straw lol great video as always! definitely worth the wait and i'll for sure be tuning into ur streams a small question, are you planning on reviewing zenless zone zeros story? especially now that the first "season" has concluded i'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about it, totally fine if not
It's all about put a character in to the Story to promote the Banner no matter it's better for the storyplot. Sadly the Charakters feels so Off. They Put 1,000 characters Questlines into the Mainstory. I don't like that. characterquests should be optional and Hit the Mainstory that hard. 😢
@@StrayMaverick kinda worried that you're gone from all the hate from shitty people. Glad you're back! Really like the commentary, I can't put words on why I don't like penacony, but your vids explain everything! Also erasing the whole astral express and maybe firefly/boothill and the story can run is crazy. I think the writer wrote the story too long that even the game coder also gave up, this can explains the dementia part.
It was so interesting in the beginning, I loved it so much, the second arc felt boring and then it was just okay, I guess. I really liked what they did to Mikhail's/Misha story, Aventurine was great, and a whole Sunday plot felt like Persona 5 DLC. It's okay, but I expected more and better, considering how good the beginning was. I love visual design of all locations though. Very atmospheric.
12:28 Because that's the point. The trailblazers arent the one name these people go by. Another prominent one is The Nameless. Their goal isnt to be heroes, its to inspire change, then to have their names forgotten by time. What would remain of the pathstriders would be their actions and impact on the world, opening the doors no one else thought of.
Isn't the whole story of Penacony about the Watchmaker? A Nameless? Also I'm not entirely sure saying that they're supposed to be characters who aren't given anything to do makes it any better. It also doesn't defeat the point of why there are so many. This world could have had just our main Trailblazer and your point would still stand.
@@StrayMaverickI think you are just downplaying Himeko, Welt, Dan Heng part in the story too much (March is still useless but why not lmao, it's like Paimon in genshin). Yes the execution can be better but that doesn't mean you can just put all of them on MC's shoulders. • The "hunch" is just a short way to tell that Himeko has been piecing together the hints like how Misha keep appearing with Clockie, why no one bet an eye to Misha other than the Nameless, and the fact this "legacy" a.k.a the dream bubble is just for the Nameless. Our MC is not that smart to crack the code, heck she's the first person that read the code from invitation letter in the Nameless. • Welt's sudden reveal with the Order stuff is bad presentation but if you at least have read the data bank or SimUni once, you will already know these stuff very well, our MC however does not know that. Welt is a historian type of guy similar to Dan Heng so that part fits him the most. • Dan Heng may not play a major role in Penacony itself but that's okay since he is in the train from the start anyway. If not because of him, Boothill cannot enter the dream, even someone as strong as Acheron needed the invitation letter from duke.
Something is definitely off with the writing. It has happened to HI3 (part 2 os just rubbish compared to part 1. And really it's the first half of part 1 that's the best) Genshin is getting worse And I can already see it happening in ZZZ. It's no surprise HSR has some really bad writing and I don't see it getting better. I say this as someone who loves HSR. Sad to see
i'll be really sad if Zenless falls down to a similar level of storytelling that Genshin and HSR have in their recent patches because it's currently my fav hoyo game. though, even i had to leave Honkai Impact due to how awfully long its story arcs started becoming and that was my first gacha game.
i think you miss under stand the stellaron part because even at the end we don't even destroy it. the point is more on who control it like a macguffin so I don't think it a cop out. so it a fight between controls and freedom for the macguffin power sure himeko canbe replace by other character but she here because she is connected to the trailblazer so she still have a role to be there I don't thing Aventurine character is reset I think he sound like a joke more then actually gamble There more I disagree but that some point I disagree and yes I agree the storytelling is terrible make it confusing , hard to understand some time, some character do get the rush concussion and development
I agree with most you said in the video. In fact I finally feel validated in regards to Welt pulling that part about remnants of the Order remaining in the Harmony out of his butt. But I still have to disagree on the start of the story being good. The "relationship" between the TB and Firefly is rushed as hell. They spent at best like 6 hours together. Another part is (and I guess this is more personal) that Patch 2.0 (and specifically just 2.0) is WAY too similar to a story one of Hoyo's competitors did roughly 2 years prior. The Arknights event "Lingering Echoes" has basically the same story structure. What makes it worse is that Firefly herself as a character is way too similar to Kreide who is a central character of that event. Both have a connection to the PoV character, both were experimented on as children to be turned into weapons, both even transform into said weaponized form for a boss fight at the end of the patch/event. Where this is the most obvious tho is with both having a terminal disease. Kreide suffers from Oripathy and Oripathy is barely explained in "Lingering Echoes". Meanwhile Firefly suffers from Entropy Loss Syndrom which also gets barely explained. There is one massive difference here tho: Oripathy is a massive lore factor in Arknights and basically common knowledge what it does so Lingering Echoes never had to explain what the disease is. And I think that is what irks me the most about 2.0. Firefly's disease being so handwaved and barely explained but still made an important aspect feels like whoever wrote 2.0 (Shaoji was his name iirc) went "well the thing I'm imitating put that in so I have to as well". This is something I just have to get of my chest. I get it's barely discussed in english circles since Arknights is far more niche compared to anything Hoyo related on the global stage.
the best thing about penacony was the annihilation gang trailer before it started. and HSR decided to throw that in the trash, so now we have a pointless waste of time world with garbage character stories and a stupid hat.
see i think sometimes the characters you fight are too challenging like beyond a reasonable challenge level. i was at eq level 2 maxed out (which was recommended) but THE FUCKING TRASHCAN VILLIAN FIGHT took me way longer than it should've 😭
Not to be that guy but the stories in my dreams rarely make a lot of sense, stick to a single genre or pay off everything they set up to begin with because. they're dreams. That's how you could tell it wasn't real.
I was really waiting a long time for your review. You just disappeared and stop posting content i thought you already moved on which was a bummer because i really like how you explain stuff. Its a lot more insightful compared to wanna be critics in this space. Good to know you were simply stuck on penacony.
This is what I noticed too. It felt like the first half of Penacony was a murder mystery horror story and then with 2.2, there was a complete tonal switch and it became a very philosophical discussion instead
2.1 Livestream said that they had to rewrite the story fully in the middle. One of the reason because the story leaks in the community long before 2.0 got released. Based on the leaks the only important characters are Acheron, Boothill, SAM, Sunday and surprisingly Misha (there are no Gallagher, no Aventurine, no Ratio, no Robin, nor Sparkle).
Now looking back, you can see that Acheron's story from beginning to end has a smooth landing to Boothill's story & Sunday's story. Firefly/SAM got it pretty interesting at the beginning but their part got cut in the middle and never come back (I bet that's where the rewrite start to coming in).
This is also because the gacha genre that always make new characters per patch. If you expect a good writing with THAT many characters, then I suggest to lower your expectation.
@@jerryeljeremy7790 The problem is that there are actually just a few characters in a story's version. Rarely does HSR do cameos or reappearance of previous world characters in a main story except for the Express. There's literally several novels that have more characters compared to hsr's story per world, and they still manage to make a good story without it being too convoluted. Now you can say "well this isn't a novel" or "they don't have the authors of those novels, duh" all you want, but hsr makes more money than genshin and zzz. They have no excuse not to hire actually decent writers than them being greedy and lazy pieces of shits. I don't care that they have to rewrite it becayse it got leaked, their rewrite was shit. I'd rather they just continued with their originally intended story even if it got leaked, because literally a majority of people didn't even know or look at story leaks. It was more likely that they just used the leak as an excuse for their shitty writing, or that the original story was so bad that the rewrite was actually better, and again they just used the leak as an excuse.
@@jerryeljeremy7790 Leaks. I was there for it all. Sparkle kit was leaked in May 2023. Aventurine kit was leaked in June 2023. His model was all over the place, and his dice model was leaked since Day 1 and he is in a lightcone. Dr.Ratio model was leaked around May 2023. Gallagher, Jade, Sunday, Diva(Robin), Jiaoqiu names was leaked by Dim in July. Concept art for Sunday, Robin and Sam was leaked in September 2023, whilst Sam already have a unique ID sometime around May 2023. That's all the receipt I can remember. If you don't trust me you can google them. All of them had major roles in the story.
There are story leaks in November 2023. That was for Firefly real identity. That's all. Like damn, that isn't an obstacle for them to write a good story. They just shoot themselves in the foot, include bird fanaticism, lectures you with philosophical identity issue, then spray you with "it is what it is" when caught in the plots corner. They did this with Hi3 moon finality chapter. Tell everyone the bad guy's motives, use bird analogy, deus ex machina the ending by defeating god. It was and still is ASS.
Firefly reveal was supposed to be more epic and she was laughing and unhinged about the reveal but since she was well loved by the community they couldn't risk it
@@zrfiv496 Yes those were what they were referring but the problem didn't start from those leaks you mentioned. There was already a leak around 1.2 or 1.3 about Penacony storyline where Boothill was supposed to be the Gallagher of the story and part of the rebel, Acheron was the kryptonite for the main villain, SAM supporting from behind the scenes, Misha & Sunday play more major role and the main villain was Watchmaker. Someone post all those leaks and dip like what happened to Sumeru leaks in Genshin.
The Acheron part is still consistent but I bet Hoyo hold a grudge against these nuke leakers and decided to rewrute the story only for it to get leaked again lmao. Maybe they got frustated and decided to just copy the HI3 moon finality core story lol.
One thing that wasn't directly mentioned (which is understandable given how much stuff there is to talk about) that irks me to no end is how "Something Onto Death" was handled. I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who thought its design, mannerisms, creepy noises, and the music that plays when fighting it were all 11/10, such an unnatural yet imposing presence. The way it was used as a boogeyman monster in the Child's Dream right after Sparkle forcibly sent you and Firefly there was simple yet excellent, I loved both the scene with the unending doors + TVs and later the scene where it acts like the Grim Reaper, charging straight towards Firefly and enacting what felt like her unavoidable fate in that moment, only for it to then creepily retreat back into the unknown parts of the dream after it executed its target.
I cannot emphasize in mere words just how awesome and scary this thing felt, love the name too... that is until its real nickname was revealed, its subservient nature to Gallagher revealed, and its true purpose as merely a method of transport revealed. All of that absolutely dogshit info dumped on the player off-handedly makes it sting that much more, and retroactively makes 2.0 that much less compelling of a story (and I really enjoyed the 2.0 story just by itself). Shit fuckin sucks, you had something great and you fuckin ruined it man
Yeah I know what you mean, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and for it to be revealed that stuff was a lie because they can't really have built this thing up as death itself so much only to never see it again and it to only casually get explained away as a sentient bus capable of taking the wrong passengers that nobody outside of Dreamscape Reef is aware of
It didn't happen BUT I've seen some good points made by people that the story of Penacony has so many loose threads left, especially around Gallagher, that it may yet happen
Hopefully
cant help but agree. this feels like a hot take but not everything in a story *has* to be explained at all actually, or at least not so explicitly. but this is Hoyo we're talking about...
Literally nothing to add. You said it all.
I am so glad someone else also felt the same way with Sunday and Robin's conversation with the dream chasers in Penacony. The moment Robin just dismissed that old man dying of something terminal and unavoidable, I grew from liking her, to siding with Sunday. She became more of a mouth piece of the writers trying to tell me Escapism is BAD, and less like a character to me.
Anyone else see the irony in them saying 'escapism is bad' when we are playing a gatcha mobile game that lends itself to long wordy cutscenes for the sake of retention?
That's why if I became one of Sunday's victim, I wouldn't be mad. Many people go to Penacony to escape from their real life. Sunday's mistake is he didn't ask their consent. But if everyone is fine with it, so what?
They're speaking to the exact audience that needs this message the most I think it's great
OMG, YES!!! I was so pissed off at Robin in that moment. I still think if there are people who want to escape and someone wants to provide them space to do it (like Sunday) then why they can't do it? I love how Himeko and co were like "excuse youuuuu, people have a right to choose their own destiny" but yet they disagree with people who choose to come to Penacony to escape their problems. So..... can people really decide for themselves or do they have to decide what great Himeko and Robin think is okay?
Also, the irony of TB fulfilling Misha's plans while talking about how everyone should follow their own path.
@n.s.3609 Agree. Sunday's mistake is he didn't ask for consent. But if people agreed with him, so what? One thing to ask for consent, but it's different thing to "force" people to keep struggling in reality.
the point that really got to me was what was the point of having that huge dramatic moment of seeing a spike get shoved through Firefly's chest. We got this emotional cutscene of MC rushing forward to catch her only for her to fade away. Sad shit. Then we see her again and it was like "oh yeah, that's how they teleport us to this hidden area, LOL"
Starting to believe that Belobog won the lottery by having so little five stars to sell
It's almost like when u focus on 6 specific chars,
and not do this weird give main char status the new banner char, and make them irrelevant when there banner ends that penacony did
Ur story is better🤯
@AccountthatexistsAnd when you don't try to fit in over 21 themes and 36 subplots into a single story arc...
“Y’all got any good writing?” “We got aura and hype moments". Posing a philosophical question in the trailers for maximum gatcha revenue
It feels like a case of there being too many cooks in the kitchen. Its difficult to comprehend how they go about the process of storyboarding for a live service game and how that ties in to all the other departments at play, it must be an unholy complicated operation for Mihoyo to keep production running at an acceptable pace. They must have an army of different teams working separately from one another because the story quality certainly reflects that, and it’s an issue that feels prevalent across all their games. Unless they overhaul their workflow, I doubt there will be any meaningful change. They simply lack direction as a company
Man you really hit all the points that i also thought especially the part about writers getting dementia. Like unironically it feels like all 3 patches are written by 3 different writers and all of them have given only surface level information of what other writers wrote
Penacony story was weak. I myself think it was worse than Xianzhou (Xianzhou has actually great characters), but I disagree that Aventurine did nothing for plot. I would argue IPC trying to take over Penacony is as much of plot as Sundays attempt to do same with power of the Order. Maybe even more as while Sunday got his ass kicked, Aventurine succeeded and every single arc there from now will be influenced by his actions. I would also say theme of his arc is not "safety" vs "free will", but "Nihility" vs "hope", with Acheron the agent of Nihility actually standing in oposition of Aventurines nihilism.
My problem with Penacony is that it DOESN'T actually have own identity. Sure you can walk on walls, which is quirky, but it's empty world. There were exactly 4 Penacony characters. 2 of them wasn't real and one of remaining two left planet, probably forever. Whole story was carried on shoulders of outsiders.
Indeed! Despite having Oak, Alfafa, Iris, Bloodhound and Nightingale branches...
I'm hoping the other hours of Penacony bring them forth, but the many factions being present together for the Harmony story didn't really need to ditch any proper Penacony characters. Even if we get them showed off but not yet released, it makes Penacony feel very liminal.
Thank you for this video, it really shows your observation skill and I love how you voice it.
I've been waiting for this review for a while now, lol.
I really wish they really took their time with Penacony, because I really liked the start, before it started faltering
Capitalism DOES save the day! IPC stocks for life! Jade did nothing wrong!
More seriously the entire last patch of the story sucked. Robin, Sunday, and Misha needed way more screen time. Did the Belobog writer start the plot and hand it off the Luofu writer?
The characters being static is because of marketability I think. Aventurine will always be the guy who bets his life on anything no matter what he does in the story to grow, because he's the funny gamblin man who gamble gamble gamble. Buy banner please.
Gamble this character for future character that is a must pull, gamble your time in this game to see if we are gonna see this story happen (example Sampo in belobog), gamble artifacts, gamble everything
Aventurine is literally one of the HSR characters with the best writing what😭
@@suzuyahaise401 And as discussed in the video they immediately reverse his character arc in the literal next scene he appears in. Lol, lmao.
Great analysis, I found myself really confused at the end of 2.2 when everybody was saying this was a great conclusion to the arc.
I was just waiting the whole time for Firefly or Aventurine to do anything of import. Then we get woke from the dream within the dream and start talking about needing to wake up powerful wills against order and I thought 'Oh, this is the setup for 2.3 where we have to do start some dream insurgency with Acheron, Robin, presumably Aventurine and Firefly, and Boothill's ranger buddies'. That sounds fun! Then we were suddenly fighting the final boss and I had crazy whiplash.
I thought in 2.3 we wil get answer for everything. Until now I'm still curious, when Sunday asked Dreammaster who controlled stellaron, he said it's not him. I thought "Wow we will have other villain!" but no! It was never answered even in 2.7. We were just told the Dreammaster and Oak Family are the culprit. Sunday might have suspicion other The Family from other branch was involved somehow or on the move, but it's not about the stellaron. I don't even remember what happened with the stellaron.
I think biggest problem with Penacony was that I had to learn WTF actually happened from UA-cam CCs. Hoyo told the story extremely poorly overall. It's a good story, but it's a poorly told story. Too many fake outs, too many "it's just a dream" moments, and too many pieces that don't fit - like Sparkle, Rappa and Boothill, who don't belong in this arc at all.
Belobog - was way more straight forward, but it also worked. I really love going back there to see what Bronya is up to now.
Yeah that pretty much sums up all my issues with Penacony and it's nice to know that more people are starting to see what a mess this arc was now that the honeymoon period is over.
Seriously, I feel like HSR's need to cram as many characters into an arc as possible to sell banners is becoming a huge detriment to the story, and I don't doubt that this is one of the reasons they're making Amphorius 7 patches long instead of just 3-4 patches.
Personally, I still like the general plot of Penacony. But it should be told better. Yeah need to be longer, tie all loose ends.
A lot of of people still like it, the thing is, we can't replay chapters, so people just stays with perception they had of the arc, and can't see for what it is.
I think most of us that realized, it was during the release of these chapters.
Fingers crossed that Amphoreus being given more time will be worth it, that they'll stop racing to market the characters and just...write characters in a well made story and let that speak for itself!
I feel like Ghallagher was actually pretty cool! But good god did he need more screen time...
And then they just dumped him... I thought his voice acting/personality was interesanting, but oh well, too bad. 😔
He can be more than that. He is a follower of Enigmata!
introducing a follower of enigmata as a narrative mouthpiece that constantly spouts the correct information makes me want to rip my hair straight out of my head. they handled him and misha so horrifically it’s upsetting on a deeply personal level
@@akarifuyuki9763 yes but "Ghallagher" wont show up never again, He wasnt a real person, just a mask or Fictional character. Enigmata...well is a enigma (duh) and even they were supposed to be just a rumor/myth, people didnt think they were actually real and his paht make them take ficional rols on history or make just plain lies about something unless someone reveal the truth, then they disappear/died and then repeat the cycle
(all this taking that the information that the game is give us about them its not compromise by Enigmata themselfs)
1:06 Pretty sure he only used the bird thing as a way to get others to understand his point of view, but his philosophy likely came from...well, life. He's an overprotective brother trying to protect and shelter his sister from the evils of the world, without understanding that she's already aware of it and trying to do her part to help.
It's not just the bird either. His time from being at the confessional and from being groomed BG Gopher Wood's teachings also shaped him to want to do all this
Let's not forget that his planet was razed to the ground and he and Robin watched as their mother died in front of them, only to them be adopted and groomed by Gopher Wood.
2.2's story feels like the worst gut punch I have ever felt
Unreasonable amount of time, 9 hours just for 2.2, and by the time they are done, it feels like not much happened
Since the idea of consequences is pretty much out of the window.
Death fake-outs left and right.
Duke Inferno's gang getting sidelined, OFF-SCREEN
Sparkle being the text book definition of a red herring
30 minute still shots where something important should be happening, but due to the delivery it feels all so jarring
Sunday is like the typical 3rd act villan, where it feels they should be important, yet there wasn't enough time devoted to doing so.
And the dialog is all so long and unnecessarily convoluted
Honestly, to the writers of Penacony, banished from the kitchen. Never cook again
I can agree with all of this except sparkle’s character being a bad thing. The whole point of sparkle is to be a red herring. Hell, she even fights with red herrings.
@andrewfang2399 I still don't like it. It feels like her whole deal was to hype you up for something that was never going to happen. She was that Stewie meme
I heard they rewrote the story a few times.. first the annilation gang was going to be the main villian and sunday was supposed to join the stelleron hunters? It felt more like just them selling banners than actually writing a cohesive story
Made up lies...
After 5 months, the most legitimate sounding "review of an arc-man" is back!! Good to have you back!
Pinecanny felt like lstening to Sleepy Joe telling me about his youth and whole life story while high on his sons sniff candies in one sitting.
LMAO!!!! Very apt and hilarious comparison 😂😅
thank you for articulating things ive been feeling about penacony!! i really did love the characters, but it really felt the plot meant nothing in the end. like. there was no trust put in the players to figure out what was being said- they didn't even try to let us figure things out by giving us the information we needed
I'm going to be honest Hoyo storytelling is so ass to me because the characters take like 3 paragraphs to say the equivalent of 1 sentence and when your mc talks its especially bad because you're forced to respond with 3 different reddit thread meme replies like that's so peak aura and nah i'd win or take the L
Stray coming back with another divisive take!
Coin flip says I agree this time. Penacony got a ton of praise, but I just remember being kinda eh. Aventurine’s story was fantastic but it’s basically entirely unrelated to anything happening there. You could pretty much just say Sunday and the Order failing gave the IPC an opening to get involved, and basically nothing else would change. Also Sparkle literally travelled across the universe to ship two people she’d never met and knew nothing about and then dipped because wow the developers need you to ship Trailblazer with space-cancer patient who’s gonna die (never, really) and you knew for an hour. And hi, Honkai Impact III.
Wonder what Stray is gonna drop about the Rinascita and Natlan discourse. More fire, perhaps.
When you brought up Aventurine's first appearance after his "death" I IMMEDIATELY cringed.. I've been ignoring that god awful scene for a while because it goes against everything version 2.1's conclusion, it felt like the writers were doing it purposely or they didn't even read their own writing.
I saw someone on twitter coping and saying he was just pretending to throw Jade off and I've just been running with that headcanon honestly (it's much better than whatever that that scene is).
21:15 this is how I felt about Boothill. Before his release, he never got any screen time and the one thing he did do was accidentally call up Black Swan in 2.1. 2.2 was his patch and the only time he ever got the main spotlight, but only because it was his banner. I’m the Penacony previews leading up to its release, he didn’t exist. So when he drop marketed, it felt very random. His part was good in the story, but like most of the Penacony cost, it felt like he was there to discuss philosophy. We didn’t learn anything about his character and you wouldn’t know unless you pulled for him and read his story. 2.6, as much as a drag it was with the banana brain rot, did give us good insight in boothill’s character and past
2.6 was such a good patch for boothill enjoyer
Good video! Analysis on things that I honestly really like is fun, and I like how well you trod the line between the good and the bad about it! I like how you go about your arguments for what you think isn’t good, even with exaggeration it’s clear that it’s coming from a good place
lmao thank you. I couldn't understand why reddit in particular hyped Penacony up, when the first chapter of the story gave me the side eye.
Finally someone pointing out that, in fact, Penacony was never "Peakcony" ☠️
Ryuuku already did that months ago. I also felt like Maverick came back to Penacony and made another video about it because Ryuuku opened many delulu HSR fans eyes.
Not to sound mean, but I don't know who Ryuuku even is lol. Made this video because it's been on the back burner for me for awhile and I really wanted to discuss it.
@@StrayMaverick Oh; okay. My bad if I sounded condescending.
Ryuuku Sensei is a gacha CC that's infamously known for making one of the first in-depth criticism videos of Penacony and called HSR the worst game because of this arc had way too much yapping and not enough gameplay. He's also the reason why many people are calling HSR storytelling bad now.
I hate how no-one from the Family pointed out Aventurine acted like a terrorist and told IPC goons to go f*** themselves. I was so sure we were still in the dream, there were so many signs pointing to it... and then we went to Luofu. It was when I realised Penacony really was over, that Wood was killed off screen, IPC and AE have now power over Penacony, so cool (sarcasm). I really can't forgive how the murder mystery didn't contain any murder at all.
>Firefly's 3 deaths
Imagine if all 3 deaths were meant to be genuine deaths. Imagine if the first two times she died, we see how her heart stops and something or someone (maybe the SAM suit or another Stellaron Hunter) manages to revive her, but that's just the player’s knowledge and the Express Crew don't know this. Then you get the Sparkle 'bombs' event, and everyone thinks that's that.
Or imagine Firefly dies the third time, but this time, the previous revival method isn't working, and the TB gets a panicked call looking for help.
*OOOOORRRR* we could use the 3 deaths in your Firefly as the final boss thing where Firefly does die 2 times and each death adds a bigger crack in her heart for The Order to sneak in and make her more fearful of the Sweet Dream ending until she becomes The Order's puppet against the crew and the third death can be the boss fight
As for the theming and how they played it out, I would have flipped the order of Sunday and the IRS. Have the Express Crew sort out the philosophy of the Sweet Dream first, and as a result, the IRS comes to reclaim the planet, _and then_ in the process of the IRS takeover, they discover the Stellaron and have a showdown over that, where you get Adventurine as the IRS vanguard and Jade revealing herself in the peace talks afterwards.
>It was all just a dream
Imagine if when Black Swan wakes us up, we arrive at Penacony for real and find that The Order has already won and the rest of the patch is about regaining everyone's freedom.
It's been wonweek since you looked at me
Cocked your head to the side and said, "I'm angry"
Five days since you laughed at me
Saying, "Get that together, come back and see me"
Three days since the living room
I realized it's all my fault, but couldn't tell you
Yesterday, you'd forgiven me
But it'll still be two days 'til I say I'm sorry
Im might update this message with more of my thoughts but...
8:08 HIMEKO!!!!! MISHA LITERALLY HAS A BADGE THAT LOOKS LIKE THE NAMELESS BADGE!!!! You dont need to say it was a hunch!
11:30 knew something felt off still about the express, like they didnt matter
16:08 pain yea aventurine focus in hindsight felt wasted same for boothill, also never caught onto the fact of he said he'd value his life but then immediately bets it again.
21:00 yup yea acheron is done really well, while I still don’t really care for her character I can tell she was well written and same for aventurine in act 2
22:16 I really dislike how firefly was handled, she felt all over the place and I also really wish we got to see her Sam side struggle more and even be given her backstory like the one short they gave. But instead she kinda tells us in the reef what was up and that is kinda it.
25:09 I think I was kinda fine with a Sunday treatment since a lot was also foreshadowed except maybe more context to his past and the dreammaster was needed but…
I really hate how Robin was handled she was barely in the story at all because she appeared at the start, then we saw her dead after act 1 so she stayed dead until act 3 where she starts doing things but it really feels too late.
34:14 man didn’t realize this either but also a bit annoying it’s whole message of why life slumbers is kinda whatever
43:51 firefly as the antagonist?? Hmm I guess it could work? We’d constantly be seeing 2 different sides of the same character but I can’t see something like Sundays big fight with her that I liked.
I do like Robin replacing firefly would be good but what to do with Sam?
48:11 you aren’t prepared for what amorphous is length wise. It’s 10 hrs…. And supposed to span 8 patches
50:56 good point, I did like the twist just so I could have more Sunday villian but more probably could’ve been done more here I see with your point. This reveal has also become important for other honkaiverse games it seems (hi3 and genshin).
Feel like there could’ve been more you talked about like more in-depth on firefly but then all the other characters like sparkle, boothill, jade and the everflame mansion. Also not to mention the finale is such a mess with like even more unresolved issues and questions.
Overall good video but think it needed to talk about afew more aspects of the story.
Penacony has so many to talk about... it's hard for someone to talk about everything😭
Some stuff:
Sunday explaining his plan is fitting for the character. He actually believes in honesty/human goodness, and Order seems to be more of a "good path". Also villains aren't antagonists, he isn't "villain", but I suppose author knows the difference and just slipped.
Welt sensing something amiss isn't very strange. All of Aeons are Imaginary Constructs, all of their authorities(or most, nor sure about IX) is Imaginary. Welt has a great history with imaginary-related stuff so he can sense different Authority.
Himeko repaired THE ONLY warp train in existence. Contemplate that for a moment. Her having "hunch" is stupid, but she did more genius things before.
Whole Order plan is basically Evangelion, just want to say. Persona5 is also that, but Evangelion is much older and Hoyo absolutely loves this show. Not really important, though.
HI3/HSR collab brought nothing. Because it will be disaster for HSR players otherwise.
Welt also won't have any major role due to that. He is most likely there due to some legacy development.
Good video overall.
What do you mean by legacy development
@pizzazpaz822 he is there due to existing in game versions prior to release. Practically leftover.
While we have no evidence whatsoever, I have the nagging suspicion that Penacony's arc was rewritten pretty late into development, as response to the story leaks. It was mentioned during 2.0 Special Program that devs were rather distraught about the extreme leaks, going as far as to say "We're okay with gameplay leaks but we want the story to be a surprise" basically.
I think this because the 2.0 Trailblaze mission is genuinely a good opening to the mystery, they gave enough clues so the player (not the characters) could piece a lot of things together. Perhaps then, as lore enthusiasts and leakers had both already revealed ALL of the major plot twists (The Order controlling Penacony, Firefly's and Robin's fake death, the Watchmaker's identity, etc), HoYo decided to just scrap and reorder events. Of course, such a sudden change in direction would leave its mark on the story and mostly on the pacing.
Just my schizo theory here. Although, seeing how 3.0 was longer than any other Trailblaze mission so far, it wouldn't surprise me if the previous ones were cut short.
I've been saying since day 1 that Order and Harmony can coexist and I was deadass hoping we'd punt that Michael Rat ahh Clock into the sun (pun intended) by battling the capitalism taken over and Sunday still following his arc shown but with actually showcasing HOW and WHY he grows out of the naive POV he has developed and he and Robin together plus the Trailblaze defeating the Family _and_ IPC (at least within Penacony) and establishing a new form Order where Harmony is the new norm. A good example of those concepts coexisting is the justice system.. Laws exist to protect the people, and laws *can* and inevitably will be rewritten over time, but it doesn't equal keeping their life a rigid, robotic existence. It's supposed to sustain that Harmony. A good direction they took was the Sunday boss!!! A choir withour order cannot have harmonious resonance!!
I say this as someone who resonated with Sunday the whole time too. 2.2 ending genuinely made me cry like a baby for HOURS but I genuinely agree Penacony left much to be desired
Their defense is order is absorbed through harmony, so it still exists somehow. But yeah, I want order still exists as order.
Order in HSR is hive mind you cant control yourself or think about the laws but your take is so good, I wishs eons arent black vs white but since the start its that.
Jazz and blues are harmony without order btw
OH MY GODDD YES!!! I was soo frustrated on the narrative trying to pin all the wrongs on Sunday when I myself (and the npcs) do not see smth that's fundamentally wrong w penacony and what he tries to do w his home
Im so glad more people had the same issues I did. The story had such a massive tonal shift, if you played the 3 parts separately you probably wouldnt be able to tell they were three parts of a grander whole. It was particularly disappointing that the cause of Robin and Firefly' death, the great mystery of 2.0, ended up being a silly puppy monster who lived in american slums
I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought penecony felt like… a lot honestly so far the only arcs I’ve liked have been belabog and so far I’m enjoying amphoreous as well since it’s kinda genshin adjacent and I came from that game first
Haven't touched Amphoreous yet but I've heard good things. Gonna be streaming my reaction/review of it on here soon tho!
@@StrayMaverick excited to hear your thoughts:)
Agreed on being glad to finally hear this perspective; it's such a breathe of fresh air to hear someone else not scream that Penacony arc is PEAK-cony. I personally hated so much about this version's story.
The sad part is the 2 parts you like are the ones that is/is going to be a reliant and sort of retelling of stories already done in honkai impact and that sort of says something about the writers. It seems like they aren’t interested in writing completely new stories for star rail and will instead rely on references and meme fuel when not using honkai as a reference as a substitute for quality writing.
Tbh imo belabog wasn’t even that good either it was just good enough to be enjoyable but forgettable.
You pointed out all the issues i had with this. Really looking forward to your next one!
This. @28:25 - This is the issue with Penacony and a lot of Hoyo storytelling in the last couple years. The Archon/Trailblaze Quests no longer exist to tell a story. They exist to sell characters first and foremost.
Making a good cohesive story is secondary to selling characters and they don’t seem to care how much storytelling suffers because of this.
This is why Robin/Sunday were crammed into the last act and why Aventurine only showed up in the one he did - because that is when their banners were featured.
I don’t think it was always this bad but the last couple years hoyo has gotten so bad at gatcha centered design in terms of their story telling. Natlan is also suffering from this imo in Genshin.
There needs to be game/story telling centered design or it just doesn’t work. Penacony was a train wreck for me in terms of story. I can agree with world design and world building. The underlying themes were of merit but the slop of a story just did no justice to any of it and left the overall experience terrible.
It would be like trying to praise a baseball player for striking out. He may have had great form and wore a very nice uniform and practiced a lot. But all in he missed the ball and struck out. Sad but it is what it is.
And from what I’ve heard the new 3.0 stuff is even worse. The first patch main quest is like 11 hours and Hoyo is supposedly spreading out the main quest over 7 patches or something this time. I can’t do it man. Penacony almost killed me.
Alsooo unrelated- please please do a video on Natlan and WuWa 2.0 once it’s over. Your videos are so amazing and I’m so curious to hear your thoughts.
All of your criticisms make so much sense! I also think Penacony story was so confusing. I can't wait for you to talk about Amphoreus story, I have mixed feeling about it...
The way you describe the mystery being written in Penacony reminds me of Lyney's trial in Fontaine. Absolutely hated that it's 'solved' by Navia bringing in the ACTUALLY alive victim to reveal everything, leaving Traveler to just reiterate what the victim said rather than do any crime solving.
It also shows how bad the Fontaine investigation system is if they couldn't figure the victim wasn't actually dead or who they assumed it to be (because the victim in this case was a pickpocket. She stole tickets from someone and went into the show assuming the original owner's identity. So when she 'died,' they all believed she was the ticket owner. Said ticket owner was alive and well, and the authorities should've figured it out if they had visited her home, or contacted her next of kin and friends who probably would've known she was still alive.)
Oh boy, this one has been long coming.
TBH for everyone who's been playing HI3 before starting HSR the writing shift was unfortunately a looming shadow.
For you see, the lead writers (yes there are 2 of them) of Penacony arc, started their writing shenanigans with Kolosten arc in HI3 and that was such a mess.
When HSR launched they were still not on the HSR team of writers but got roped over from HI3 to write Luofu.
This is why Jarilo-6 went so well, and why Luofu onwards the story got down into the deep end of philosophy.
Lots of concepts, lots of ideas, too many in fact, and thus the writers have no idea how to tie them together at reasonable pace (though this is partly due to Hoyo games' format of being gatchas, aka certain expectations from CN gatcha conventions).
@@Taxiozaurus but Shaoji wrote Penacony.
While Fanchuan wrote Kolosten. It's another person. And Fanchuan arcs are actually consistent inside even if you dislike physics exposition.
Also, team of writers are absolutely same between games judging by their interview to JP magazine around HI3 collab.
HSR I feel is a game without any character development from anyone like any other open world gacha, there is NO focused characters so far I think(or I'm just bad at detecting change) maybe Amphoreus will do it better with the focus on Flame Chasers
Especially since they have HI3 story writers which can make characters change(although they are very hyperfocusd on the protagonist and takes place in one planet)
There are character development but in much slower rate compared to HI3, because HI3 character groups aren't that many and keep appearing almost every arc.
The HSR chars that got developed mostly came from trailblaze continuance rather than the main story. Like Bronya that has to deal with debt in Jarilo-VI part 2, or Yanqing that has to be more patience with everything and strike when it needed in Xianzhou part 2.
HSR story is more like chess, move slowly until it reach the goal because of the wide world setting.
I can't beleive Hoyo thought penacony went so well that they decided that Amphorus should last an entire year
The funny thing about the end of 2.2 is how Sunday says the poor, weak doesn’t have a say in their fate they can barely escape it and then Himeko saying during the bossfight that witness the will of the weak but they didn’t fcking asked any of the penacony people who lives in the dream so like is it the will of the weak or again the strong explointing the weak🤨 actually that’s why I didn’t want Sunday to join the AE but thanks it seems like to be just temporary so I still have hope. Anyway another plothole is penacony should have vanished the moment they sealed the stellaron but nothing happened😭 Also we had a side quest where Robin says she will be go and see more worlds and such but since 2.2 she always in penacony😭
There's so much you didn't even get to but if you did this would be a 2 HR video.
I actually liked the loufu arc I only had 2 major issues. The tingyun being sus the whole time and nobody calling her out on it. And personally I agree more with Dan Shu's perspective than with Lan the god of friendly fire.
I would agree. IMO none of the storytelling in hsr has been that great but at least loufu made sense and wasn’t such a slog to get thru.
a highly anticipated video from you, fantastic
I started playing around the Wardance, and took few months break until recently.
I managed to get through Belebog, Xianzhou and Penacony within last couple months, and honestly? Penacony was by far the worst, least interesting, most tedious to get through of them all.
Every time i saw Acheron, Adventurine or Gallagher on the screen, i was wishing to have skip button. Which is an issue since all of them revolve plot around themselves.
And honestly? Adventurine's plot was great, but could have been cut and nothing would change much.
Initial plot was to visit Penacony, meet old express passengers and discover secrets of the family. We would get in Sunday's way regardless of IPC's involvement, we would try to find Mikhail regardless of the murder mysteries, and IPC would have entered Penacony anyways. Arguably their hand would be much stronger without Adventurine pretty much becoming a terrorist and indiscriminately attacking everyone. If anything, that should be detrimental for IPC, but fuck if I care about things making sense in that plot.
One day after dinner ahh story telling, also i had a feeling Misha is a important part of the story too, because aside from us, i don't think any other character has directly interacted with misha before the other Asstral express crew showed up, my initial guess is that only TB can see Misha for some reason.
Before watching, just want to say I've been looking forward to this video for a long time. Do you see yourself tackling Amphoreus as well?
Thanks for sticking around! And absolutely! I plan on doing it live as well, here on UA-cam and Twitch!
Thank you omg aventurines story was so good only for them to completely butcher it in 2.2 and I felt like I was the only one who had that complaint. thank god someone else sees this shit for what it is.
The first arc was conditioning us to like Firefly (obv. to condition us in pulling for Firefly/Sam in the next patches). They even introduced her incurable disease and "killed" her for shock factor for us to root for her when her banner comes. Good thing I wasnt affected by it at all. She wasnt really in the main story after that and weirdly somehow left after the final battle? like wtf?? Then she comes back as your date in the ship and exploded into fireworks and is alive again?
I think a lot of people grew to hate Firefly because of how in-your-face she was. Designed as a meek waifubait character, who you went on a forced date with and of course, needed other characters to talk about good the two of you look together just to kill her off for shock value.
The Firefly gfbaiting was so ridiculous that when I first read 2.0, I genuinely thought Firefly had ulterior or sinister motives for acting so coy around the TB and faked her death.
@ the date was fine and it was actually revealed in the recent story that she told us before when we were stellaron hunters before our memories were wiped out that she would pretend not to know us to create a new relationship with our nameless persona. The thing I didnt like was she wasnt full fleshed out and didnt do anything in the penacony quest other than die and everyone was glazing lol
The problem with Firefly is all her great actions are off screen. Her past, her tragic three death, her supposed to be menacing appearance as SAM, all were told. All Hoyo showed us was a little waifu, while in fact, she is more than that.
@@akarifuyuki9763 compared to aventurine and acheron's full-fleshed characterization, FF in the quest rly came off as only a 'sad waifu'
Like, why not tell us stuff abt firefly directly in the quest instead of dumping it in the trailer
@@bubblesparks This. At first I was neutral about her until Hoyo forced us to date her. When I watched her trailer, I thought " Wow so cool!" then I realized, why we don't see something like this in the game? I really liked Sam (until it was revealed he was Firefly), I wanted to see her in action!
Acheron's slash in 2.1 didn't even send everyone to the deeper dreamworld, Firefly and Sleepy did that. Aventurine's story though it had good bits in it was filler that could have been removed and you wouldn't have noticed.
Firefly has to die to exit the dream world or go deeper into it. Her second death was when she flew off, she killed herself in order to wake up and then she woke up Acheron.
The third death was her leaving Penacony. It was only explained in the readable which doesn't make it any better.
The problem with Firefly is all her actions happened off screen. On screen, she is just our little waifu.
Amphoreus 3.0 breakdown about to be crazyy
30:49 That can be explain so easy with the guy saying that he just went to Penacony when he started to feel pain, because the game tells you how much money cost to go and live there, he was rich
I'm glad your back and with a 1h long banger as well. I really love your analysis.
Here are my thoughts:
I genuinely liked the mystery and the themes of penacony but the way they told the story and how it went made my head hurt. I still do not know why the tournament happend and the answer to why life slumbers was so unsatisfying that I had to sit back and let that sink in for a moment. I still think the loufu is the worst but penacony is second. Though, I can't bring myself to hate it. I still like it in some wierd way.
I am really excited for Amphorious though. Maybe in part cause I am huge sucker for myths and the overall aesthetic but I also think that the first chapter wasn't bad. Though I'm scared how they handle the mystery portion. That said I think I read somewhere that they changed the script mid story. Sunday wasn't gonna be the big bad and robin had a bigger role. This would explain why penacony was such a mess.
I felt let down by the Penacony arc, but I couldn't quite put it into words why. This video pieces together exactly why i felt the way i did.
I agree with a lot of things, the real theme here is "back to square one". But I'd also argue that the first half was just as bad as the second. The unnecessarily dating sim instead of investigating what's going on or findig the crew was jarring. And unlike OP I don't think every character being a dick like that somehow makes them clever is interesting. A truly clever character would have been nice to manipulate the MC instead of behaving all kind of suspicious, slimy or outright hostile.
Edit: correcting autocorrect
Yes I agree. 2.0 story as I recall was a long date with firefly that basically was a string of mini game tutorials in disguise.
@AfterAFashionASMR I generally like the puzzles in HSR but this part with Firefly constantly buzzing around with her useless smalltalk bored me to tears. At first I didn't have a problem with her but after realising she wasn't just an intermezzo, a random npc popping up and going away but meant as this greal life altering bond I was disgusted. Her existence wasted my time and robbed me from the mistery and investigation I was promised. By the time of her dramatic death I was in the mood to high five the monster that killed her.
I think that their experience with Penacony is the reason why they decided to make future stories starting with Amphoreus last from X.0 to X.7. They now have so many much time to address many more things. Despite all my love for 2.X, I feel like the main story had to be trimmed to fit in a limited number of patches
I'm not gonna lie, a lot of the reason I like certain characters in HSR is because of how likeable the voice actors are and how strong a lot of their performances are. So yeah, i did like Acheron, but that's almost 100% due to how much I loved Allegra Clark's acting. Without that, she would have been incredibly boring to me. Same goes for other characters like Himeko. They are leaning hard on the much better writing that they did in Honkai Impact to carry over into their newer games, and it just feels lazy. There's no reason for me to like these characters other than them being hot and well-acted. In Amphoreus it was fascinating to see just how heavily impacted characters are when you take away their voice, like with Dan Heng who feels like such a nothing, pointless character to the point where he could have just stayed on the express and it wouldn't matter at all.
I never really realzied the problems with penacony while playing through it, but one of the most striking things I realized was, like, how you don't even MENTION boothill or sparkle in this video. why? BECAUSE THERE'RE TOO MANY DAMN CHARACTERS?? like, I love each and every character in this game (uh, well, most.) but my gosh you lost track of them sometimes, don't you? I really really REALLY hope and pray that amphoreus can be better. I love penacony to bits for what it tried to do but GOSHHH pleaseee>??
Aventurine's story mainly felt like a diff side of the greater theme of penacony which is as you said freedom and dreams much like for ff and acheron.
He is the character that came into penacony not believing in what penacony is trying to sell but ends up doing a turn on it and comes out, seemingly with a better understanding of what he trully wants after he was forced to face his own self and past.
Acheron comes into penacony unable to experience what penacony is, shes an antithetical force to what penacony and the order stand for and ultimately plays a pivotal role in their undoing, in the process she also manages to return a soul to its home fulfilling *his* dream for him.
Firefly is the character that came into penacony hoping to buy what they want to sell her, her moment on the rooftop is not who is she outside the dream but is who she wants to be, she knows that this is all fake yet wishes it wasnt. Shes the type of person sunday made this plan for yet at the confrontation Firefly understands that she would be living in a dream leading a fake hollow happy life (sidequests also tackle this speciric concept).
She gets one last bout with this dilemma in 2.3 when Jade tells her she can have the life she wants by sacrificing the stellaron hunters.
The way I see it Ff is serves the inverse purpose from Aventurine in penacony. Neither make a total transformation of character but they both leave penacony with a hopeful, and clearer mind.
The takeaway from penacony tho imo seems clear, the story wasnt paced appropriately, each character would benefit more from extra screentime.
That's prob why amphoreus is 10 hours long and this will likely go on for 8 more patches. You brought up persona 5 and hey, maybe having the runtime of a persona game is what hoyo stories need.
thank you for these videos! I often feel like I'm the crazy one when I see everyone satisfied with how they handle story right after updates when I'm left feeling very questionable about it all and have criticism for what happens 😭
I find Penacony works a lot better when its viewed less as one larger arc and more like a series of smaller arcs with loose connections. Almost episodic even.
Also, i would describe the arc as a beautiful mess
Yes. It was definitely a mess and it did look very pretty 😂
My biggest fault with Penacony is Firefly and my absolute hatred for her like when she was introduced I saw EXACTLY what she stood for from a real world standpoint she was entirely made to emotionally manipulate the player. When I say this I mean you and me not the Trailblazer the actual player as she's a cute sick girl with a poorly defined backstory with the MC to dig her claws into you with "she's such a wubby she's gonna die player keep her safe :). SHE DIED PLAYER HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?!?!?! Oh wait she's fine and she loves you don't you want to pull for her?" And after that I despised her with every fiber of my being and it just ruined the entire story for me and she is directly related to the tonal shift from murder mystery to "lol jk Sunday bad guy"
Great analysis
43:45 - I thought the absolutely same when i played through Penacony. If this arc was about Firefly/SAM and her struggles, while also giving us the opportunity to explore Trailblazer's past with the stellaron hunters and keeping the Trailblazing message with the whole Misha scene and passing the legacy forward. I think it would be great.
That was precisely my greatest disappointment with Penacony. I saw this as the GREATEST opportunity to explore the TB's past and create a dilemma about going back to who they were and the path of Trailblazing they walk now. I think it all could be PEAK CINEMA! But no... we got this gigantic mess of entangled interests.
///// 3.0 SPOILER BELOW /////
instead... we got a glimpse of TB's past in Amphoreus... like... what? Okay i guess... and the execution was kinda mid, but still, my desire to see this conflict about TB's past and present was so strong that it ended up being my favorite moment from 3.0
I’ve heard 3.0 is worse than Penacony and that it’s gonna be twice as long 😅 ?
@@AfterAFashionASMR Worse or better, it depends on your preference. The yapping is the same for me. Because I don't mind it so I'm fine. For some people it's too much. The puzzle is a bit tiring. There were scenes I wanted to watch the cutscene, but instead I got black screen with text. For the plot and characters, overall it's good.
It's around 7-10 hours.
@@AfterAFashionASMR compared to penacony's start in 2.0, amphoreus felt more serious and not as light hearted. It also has much slower pacing, with lots of time-wasting irrelevant puzzles too
The presentation was mid, lacking illuatrations and cutscenes so to me it felt like a wasted potential of an epic introductory arc
@@AfterAFashionASMR Yeah, at least in Penacony i was interested and invested. In Amphoreus there is nothing that makes me give a damn so... at least up until now it feels like torture without a skip buttom. But hey... it has a few memorable and really cool moments to me. Maybe it'll get better. Honestly? It has more potential than Penacony tbf
Firefly villain wouldve went so hard
I'll say this outright: If it wasn't for the Gacha Game structure of H:SR, Penacony COULD'VE been so much better. In fact, 2.6 is evidence of this. 2.6 only had one new character, Rappa, and I adore this update. It's the reason why Rappa is my second favorite. (Well, kind of? She's my first favorite for actually rational reasons, but my second favorite of all characters because Misha is cute and I adore that little guy.) It went into the backstory of this character and while we, most likely, will never see her again like we've seen mentions of Ratio in Divergent Universe (or, y'know Penacony.) or Luka in the Wardance, I'd say 2.6 gave us enough about Rappa to care about her as a character.
If it wasn't for the fact that they needed us to care about Boothill suddenly, I doubt he would have gotten that much attention at 2.2, if *any at all* . This isn't to say Boothill is a completely badly written character, hardly, he got justice in 2.6 as well, but part of the reason I never pulled for him is because 2.2 did such a terrible job at telling me about him, that I just didn't care. I didn't see the reason why I *should* care about Boothill, because he felt like a footnote in the Penacony story, only there to just BE a character I 'should' care about, so that I 'should' pull for him.
(major edit: changed 2.7 to 2.6. I thought 2.7 was the nonexistant 2.8)
You mean 2.6? 2.7 is Sunday and Fugue banners
@ yep, thought 2.7 was 2.8, which doesn't exist
2.0 and 2.1 were absolutely amazing and set up a really good story, and then 2.2 dropped the ball bad.
Aventurine and his cliffhanger were amazingly done, only for it to be handled offscreen, great.
• *Jarilo-VI part 1:* Simple lore, great dialogues & pacing, interesting characters but pretty mid design, satisfying ending
• *Xianzhou part 1:* Too many lore, too many namedrops in dialogues without explanation, Rushed pacing, Characters have no personality other than the lore but cool design, confusing ending
• *Penacony part 1:* Decent amount of lore, overly non-direct & philosophical dialogues, Choppy Pacing, Layered characters (with the help of POV switches & their interaction) & PEAK good designs, satisfying ending
• *Amphoreus 3.0:* BIG amount of lore but thankfully they are explained well, good dialogues (similar to belobog), Decent pacing (too many map puzzles tho), Decent characters (not that deep but their interaction & POV are pretty interesting) & good designs, ending is ???
@@jerryeljeremy7790 i agree but we cant judge amphoreus as a whole yet. But I like the concept of the lore its very much like genshin’s
Amphoreus so far offered the most coherent plot and dialogues
Too bad the script got such mid presentation
@ The presentation was fine to me. Compare that to Jarilo-VI (that people keep praising even tho it was not that great) it is far better.
@@jerryeljeremy7790 to me they failed to setup the importance of these titans when they don't even give us Nikador and Mydei's fight and instead off-screened them
Amphoreus definitely is a step up from previous worlds, but not by huge difference.
The part when Black Swan checked on March in the beginning could've been told by illustration or even legit 3d model that touched foreheads but instead they still opted for black screen. Exact same method since the release
There is no excuse for the lazy cam angles or static char model animation bc another game w similar genre managed to provide more creativity in its story presentation
@@jerryeljeremy7790 I agree, I just started the game 2 weeks ago and caught up to the story and I fight it odd to see so many people prasing Jarilo -VI when it was honestly mid for the most part imo.
It really just seems to me that people are looking at early HSR with rose tinted lenses.
Thank God Ryuuku made that criticism video about Penacony. People are starting to see the light now🙏🏿 However; the only thing I disagree with Ryuuku about Penacony is that he said the storytelling is bad, but the story itself is good. I feel like the storytelling AND story are bad, but the storytelling is so bad that it covers up the bad writing of the story and characters.
Penacony has hella potential, but it felt like they tried to stuff too many themes and subplots into it and forgot about how they're gonna execute all of it... And people wanna tell me that Wuwa story is trash, but plot that as convoluted and condensing as Penacony is peak?? Make it make sense🤣
People finally realizing that hoyoverse stories arent that good. Put some pretty colors and good songs and people will just turn theit brains off
The idea of everyone is protagonists are essentially no one is the protagonist, not even the protagonist is the protagonist of the story😅
Even though I still did enjoy Penacony, one thing I will add about hsr's story (genshin suffers from this too but a little less) is that a lot of what happens in the plot feels very much "this could've been an email". A lot of the story is so heavily drawn out in an uncompelling way and I feel like Amphoreus has not necessarily improved on it by a lot.
All the persona 5 royal references in the video take me back because that's exactly what i have thought of the whole time while playing the story on release. When welt and acheron's conversation was playing i thought to myself "this feels..... oddly similiar to persona". Then as the story progress I was just so confused because it went so fast from being a whodunnit to p5 royal 3rd sem on sae's palace real quick. It's so unfortunate because penacony really started as "peakacony" with how they nailed the world, the theme, the philosophies, the characters backstory, and the story. But as the patches went on they nailed everything but the story (don't get me wrong, it's still alright but there were so many missed potentials and questionable decisions, most of which is stated in the video and in others' comments).
god the tournament part of that quest drove me up the wall, i was already tired and frustrated with how long the story was and here comes a scene that is such an obvious waste of time all i could do was laugh. i mentally checked out after that and a patch later uninstalled the game, legitimately my last straw lol
great video as always! definitely worth the wait and i'll for sure be tuning into ur streams
a small question, are you planning on reviewing zenless zone zeros story? especially now that the first "season" has concluded i'd be interested in hearing your thoughts about it, totally fine if not
Nice video!
I'm curious what you're gonna think about Rappa and Sunday continuance quest consider how divisive it is in the community
Everytime somones says that "Penacony was AMAZING!!!" I ask "Alright, who's Goffer Wood?"
It's all about put a character in to the Story to promote the Banner no matter it's better for the storyplot. Sadly the Charakters feels so Off. They Put 1,000 characters Questlines into the Mainstory. I don't like that. characterquests should be optional and Hit the Mainstory that hard. 😢
He's back!!
And better than ever!.... hopefully. Lmao
@@StrayMaverick kinda worried that you're gone from all the hate from shitty people. Glad you're back! Really like the commentary, I can't put words on why I don't like penacony, but your vids explain everything! Also erasing the whole astral express and maybe firefly/boothill and the story can run is crazy. I think the writer wrote the story too long that even the game coder also gave up, this can explains the dementia part.
It was so interesting in the beginning, I loved it so much, the second arc felt boring and then it was just okay, I guess. I really liked what they did to Mikhail's/Misha story, Aventurine was great, and a whole Sunday plot felt like Persona 5 DLC. It's okay, but I expected more and better, considering how good the beginning was. I love visual design of all locations though. Very atmospheric.
12:28
Because that's the point. The trailblazers arent the one name these people go by. Another prominent one is The Nameless. Their goal isnt to be heroes, its to inspire change, then to have their names forgotten by time. What would remain of the pathstriders would be their actions and impact on the world, opening the doors no one else thought of.
Isn't the whole story of Penacony about the Watchmaker? A Nameless? Also I'm not entirely sure saying that they're supposed to be characters who aren't given anything to do makes it any better. It also doesn't defeat the point of why there are so many. This world could have had just our main Trailblazer and your point would still stand.
@@StrayMaverickI think you are just downplaying Himeko, Welt, Dan Heng part in the story too much (March is still useless but why not lmao, it's like Paimon in genshin). Yes the execution can be better but that doesn't mean you can just put all of them on MC's shoulders.
• The "hunch" is just a short way to tell that Himeko has been piecing together the hints like how Misha keep appearing with Clockie, why no one bet an eye to Misha other than the Nameless, and the fact this "legacy" a.k.a the dream bubble is just for the Nameless. Our MC is not that smart to crack the code, heck she's the first person that read the code from invitation letter in the Nameless.
• Welt's sudden reveal with the Order stuff is bad presentation but if you at least have read the data bank or SimUni once, you will already know these stuff very well, our MC however does not know that. Welt is a historian type of guy similar to Dan Heng so that part fits him the most.
• Dan Heng may not play a major role in Penacony itself but that's okay since he is in the train from the start anyway. If not because of him, Boothill cannot enter the dream, even someone as strong as Acheron needed the invitation letter from duke.
Something is definitely off with the writing. It has happened to HI3 (part 2 os just rubbish compared to part 1. And really it's the first half of part 1 that's the best)
Genshin is getting worse
And I can already see it happening in ZZZ.
It's no surprise HSR has some really bad writing and I don't see it getting better.
I say this as someone who loves HSR. Sad to see
I think hoyoverse games GI HSR ZZZ are suffering from success making them too comfortable to improve their games and causing downfall of quality
@mjsupport78 I think you're right.
i'll be really sad if Zenless falls down to a similar level of storytelling that Genshin and HSR have in their recent patches because it's currently my fav hoyo game. though, even i had to leave Honkai Impact due to how awfully long its story arcs started becoming and that was my first gacha game.
i think you miss under stand the stellaron part because even at the end we don't even destroy it. the point is more on who control it like a macguffin so I don't think it a cop out. so it a fight between controls and freedom for the macguffin power
sure himeko canbe replace by other character but she here because she is connected to the trailblazer so she still have a role to be there
I don't thing Aventurine character is reset I think he sound like a joke more then actually gamble
There more I disagree but that some point I disagree and yes I agree the storytelling is terrible make it confusing , hard to understand some time, some character do get the rush concussion and development
I agree with most you said in the video. In fact I finally feel validated in regards to Welt pulling that part about remnants of the Order remaining in the Harmony out of his butt. But I still have to disagree on the start of the story being good. The "relationship" between the TB and Firefly is rushed as hell. They spent at best like 6 hours together. Another part is (and I guess this is more personal) that Patch 2.0 (and specifically just 2.0) is WAY too similar to a story one of Hoyo's competitors did roughly 2 years prior. The Arknights event "Lingering Echoes" has basically the same story structure. What makes it worse is that Firefly herself as a character is way too similar to Kreide who is a central character of that event. Both have a connection to the PoV character, both were experimented on as children to be turned into weapons, both even transform into said weaponized form for a boss fight at the end of the patch/event. Where this is the most obvious tho is with both having a terminal disease. Kreide suffers from Oripathy and Oripathy is barely explained in "Lingering Echoes". Meanwhile Firefly suffers from Entropy Loss Syndrom which also gets barely explained. There is one massive difference here tho: Oripathy is a massive lore factor in Arknights and basically common knowledge what it does so Lingering Echoes never had to explain what the disease is. And I think that is what irks me the most about 2.0. Firefly's disease being so handwaved and barely explained but still made an important aspect feels like whoever wrote 2.0 (Shaoji was his name iirc) went "well the thing I'm imitating put that in so I have to as well".
This is something I just have to get of my chest. I get it's barely discussed in english circles since Arknights is far more niche compared to anything Hoyo related on the global stage.
He is back
Finally the third part of the series. i thought you dropped hsr after seeing the disaster of the penacony ending lol
Feverdream. Take it or leave it.
the best thing about penacony was the annihilation gang trailer before it started. and HSR decided to throw that in the trash, so now we have a pointless waste of time world with garbage character stories and a stupid hat.
So glad you continued your very sober and sincere Penacony's Qualities and Flaws trilogy! :^)
see i think sometimes the characters you fight are too challenging like beyond a reasonable challenge level. i was at eq level 2 maxed out (which was recommended) but THE FUCKING TRASHCAN VILLIAN FIGHT took me way longer than it should've 😭
Not to be that guy but the stories in my dreams rarely make a lot of sense, stick to a single genre or pay off everything they set up to begin with because. they're dreams. That's how you could tell it wasn't real.
11:05 if you choose stelle you can argue it's still just as gay
I was really waiting a long time for your review. You just disappeared and stop posting content i thought you already moved on which was a bummer because i really like how you explain stuff. Its a lot more insightful compared to wanna be critics in this space. Good to know you were simply stuck on penacony.
Thank you because though I love penacony I had a hard time putting my thoughts into words why I hated the story telling.
Ah damn it girlie, you're too late 😭
I literally just now started to think fondly of Penacony's story
Lmao! Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Hopefully that applies to my content as well if I'm coming for a story you like. 🤣 lol
@@StrayMaverick I do think this video will be indeedly interesting to watch XD
Peakony... Yeah, sure, maybe for zoomers who did not ever read any actually decent story. 😆
welcome back!