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fylwertastic · 2 days ago

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Some Actual 3.5 Main Story Thoughts

The Good:

Hysilens/Cerydra doomed yuri was considerably less subtext and more just text. Possibly the one truly redeeming feature of the patch. The fact that there was an actual "I love her" written into the patch (even if it was still couched in the idea of loving the "monarch") was wild.

Aglaea with her emotions intact was adorable, 10/10 no complaints.

In the first half of the patch they did manage to establish Lygus as a more legitimate threat than they did in any prior patch... To bad they lost momentum in the second half so that by the time we reached the boss battle it felt completely nothingburger.

I like Cerydra's design a lot. Too bad she was criminally under-utilized in her own debut patch.

Evernight's debut was handled better than I expected. I am a Mythus fan first and a HSR player second, so it was satisfying that they are playing into that aspect (at least on the surface--the Voracity references are also really strong here, getting mixed signals).

Herta and Screwllum are always a treat.

Mydei literally said #NotMyDeliverer even in a world where Phainon didn't exist. Thank you king, I was almost to the point where I couldn't go on.

This patch also gave us Mydei's primum mobile, so I'm willing to forgive it.

We got explicit confirmation that events have occurred involving the Trailblazer but which Trailblazer no longer remembers, suggesting Amphoreus is either overall a stable(-ish) timeloop in which the Trailblazer has already worked with Cyrene to change fate and we (the players) are just now working toward an "end" that has already happened, or that events which have occurred are being deleted from memory, leaving only vague sensations of familiarity and "weird hunches":

More on this in a while. I have a Theory(tm).

The Bad:

Everything else. And I'm only sort of kidding. (Okay, I haven't played the cooking event yet. Save me, Phaidei bait, save me.)

Being more serious, there were four massive offenders in this patch:

So, so many things in the scepter-Lygus-Trailblazer plot happen not because those plot points are logical, reasonable for the pre-established lore, or even likely to happen--they happen because the plot just needs to them happen to get to a specific end point. It makes absolutely no sense, if Lygus could trap Trailblazer in a zone with time flowing a thousand times slower, that he wouldn't have just done that from the start to ensure Trailblazer couldn't go back to the right point in time to sway Cerydra. It makes absolutely ZERO sense that the scepter would ever give control of its Ultimate Protocol to one of its own experiments. This was such a blatant "Don't look too close at this; we need to make sure Cerydra has some way to be plot relevant" that I actually couldn't believe what I was reading. Herta, Screwllum, and Cyrene infected Lygus with a memetic virus based on his dual cognition operating in two timeflows at once--so he couldn't just... temporarily leave one system or limit the dual processing to one channel...? Suddenly helpless out of nowhere? "Law dictated that I can change one rule in the protocol by sacrificing a demigod--" LAW IS LITERALLY A VOICE FROM THE BLACK TIDE; HOW IS THIS WORKING!! How can you even "trap" Lygus in the Vortex of Genesis? He is a real robot in the real world who should have just been able to immediately go "Oh you trapped my first proxy? Cool, now loading in Lygus 2.0," especially since we knew he's already come back from having his head sliced off a boat load of times. Why is Zandar One Kuwabara acting like he personally created the concepts of paths when other aeons existed for thousands of years before Nous? Does he think that "paths" didn't exist before he came up with his imaginary tree theory??? Ugh... Shoulda been called "Patch 3.5: Don't Think Too Hard" because the moment you start thinking about it, it all becomes such a series of embarrassingly badly justified deus ex machinae (in multiple cases, literally) that it's painful.

The budget decline for this patch was actually criminal. Star Rail rakes in between 60 million and 90 million dollars A MONTH, and we're getting stuff like this?

I guess we'll just... use our imaginations...

Phagousa being a completely generic NPC that they didn't even bother to slap a starfish on took me the hell out.

Even inside the one new zone we actually got (lighted Styxia), there are bunch of randomly reused assets--why are there Sky's rainbow bridges in Styxia? T_T

Even the fight with Lygus, which should have been really easy to make into a hype moment, ended up being completely dull. My only real thoughts as I was doing the fight were "Well finally I can hit him" and "Oh good, I think this means the patch is over."

Like, just compare Aquila's boss fight to Lygus's. What happened, man??

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While I appreciate that they did add a few more animated cutscenes to this patch compared to the last one, overall there's a strong feeling of neglect. I can only hope that's because they planned to massively invest in either 3.6 or 3.7 to finish strong, but I'm starting to lose a bit of faith here...

3. Second most annoying thing about this patch: Absolutely terrible balance between interactive content and cutscenes. Again, I'm not the kind of person who normally complains about patches having too much dialogue to get through. I clearly, clearly love the story, the lore, all the readables, etc. Hell, I loved 3.0's ten-hour-long patch. But somewhere along the way, I'm starting to worry the devs forgot that there is supposed to be a difference between video games and movies. This patch literally doesn't give us a single puzzle to solve, chest to open, or even a TRASH MOB enemy to defeat until--I timed it--four hours in. There is literally four hours at the beginning of this patch where the only interactive input from you, the player, is clicking the left mouse button to advance the dialogue. There's nothing wrong with having a lot of dialogue! There's nothing wrong with cutscenes! But I'm begging the devs to remember that the players are here because we also like to play the game. If the exploration and puzzles were too much at the beginning of Amphoreus, I get it. But now there's nothing interactive for hours on end. Please... find a balance... Just give us some enemies to kill every few cutscenes. A chest or two to open... A puzzle to solve between dialogues... Please...

4. Finally, the last (and worst) of this patch's cardinal sins in my opinion: We didn't experience Hysilens and Cerydra's stories. We experienced retellings of Hysilens and (a tiny bit of) Cerydra's stories. Now, this isn't out of left-field--Amphoreus's over-arching theme is, and has always been, a clash between fiction and reality, between mythology and truth. Pardon the Hamilton reference but the plot of Amphoreus is essentially just: "You have no control who lives, who dies, who tells your story." It's not as if it's thematically inappropriate for us to have Lygus and Cyrene as our narrators, recapping events we weren't actually there to experience. But the problem is: A recap can't match the original events for immersion or emotional appeal. It's almost impossible to feel deeply sympathetic for Hysilens' plight with her siren sisters when all we get is two generic NPCs shouting from off-screen "Oh no, the Black Tide is getting me!" as she walks through a normal hallway which is actually supposed to be the abyss of an ocean (that we're just supposed to imagine). It's hard to feel tormented by her lonely millennia-something wait in the depths for the Trailblazer to return because virtually all we're shown of it is Lygus going "Then she went to sleep."

It's even worse with Cerydra, who is essentially denied any interiority by the patch. This is obviously intentional; she's supposed to be a polarizing figure, a character that defies being cleanly labelled as a completely good person or bad. She wields violence excessively and sacrifices the innocent for ambition--but she also has things she holds dear and chooses the side of "right" when given the choice. Yet... We are given no actual explanation for her motivations. We don't learn anything of her story before she came conquering Okhema. We don't know what truly drove her to believe that uniting every nation in Amphoreus under one banner using a iron fist was the right thing to do, or what her goal was at all besides "conquer everything." What was she going to do, when she had it all? We're never given enough insight into her character to tell.

Her lightcone hints at a whole ass tragic backstory we got no hint of in the patch itself:

Perhaps they're saving this for 3.6 or 3.7, but I'm not sure whether I should really get my hopes up. In fact, I left the patch overall with a very ambivalent feeling toward Cerydra. Will I be pulling her for my Phainon? Yeah. Do I really feel like I can say I find her likeable? Not so much.

Because we get both of these characters' stories only through Lygus or Cyrene telling us what happened--without getting solid flashbacks, getting to significantly play them as trial characters while "living" the actual events of their memory, or anything similar that would have fully immersed us in the events of their backstories--there's a layer of emotional distance to everything that occurs. Compare Castorice's past getting a detailed animated short so that we could see her pain over the long years--or even compare Anaxa's section of 3.2 giving us actual flashback images of him with his teacher, or moments of levity with Cerces as he climbed Dawncloud, and it's clear that the devs failed to make the player truly connect with Hysilens and Cerydra in the same way they were able to achieve with the early Chrysos Heirs. I walked away from the patch thinking "They seem like cool characters, but I don't really feel attached to them." Seeing Hysilens being the only one standing with us at the vortex as we were supposedly about to bring things to an "end" actually felt wrong, because it's like... "This isn't my friend? This isn't anyone I journeyed with? It should be someone else standing here with me."

To be honest, I think this anti-immersive "Listen while I tell you what happened" storytelling method is a by-product of the game's sudden insistence that the Trailblazer must be the most important character in Amphoreus's story. Instead of early Amphoreus's long sequences with trial characters, where we get inside the character's heads as well as literally live their lives (either directly or in memory), this patch insists on following the Trailblazer almost entirely, only departing from that in the last few minutes to finally give us a tiny scene of walking Hysilens and Cerydra's models around.

Like, imagine if, instead of getting to walk Mydei through the gates of Castrum Kremnos at the end of his sequence in 3.1, we got Lygus giving us a voiceover going "Then Mydeimos walked the lonely road to Castrum Kremnos" and the patch just instantly moved on. That's literally what they did to Hysilens and Cerdyra. Because the story insists on following the Trailblazer almost exclusively, the devs are obligated to use retellings, voiceovers from Lygus/Cyrene, and 2D image recaps to convey important events like Hysilens' past and the thousand years of the cycle that the Trailblazer missed, leaving us largely emotionally disconnected from those events.

Then, while all that's happening, we're forced to sit through "Deliverer, go save the world," "I can't wait to meet our precious Deliverer," "The Deliverer will definitely come to save us!" Ahhhhhh, make it stoppppp. A whole patch of hyping us up while we contributed the bare minimum to the actual events of the plot? Whyyy? It was Cyrene who swayed Cerydra to our side, Cyrene/Herta/Screwllum who devised the plan to stop Lygus, Evernight who rescued both Cyrene and us, the Chrysos Heirs who carried the fight on their backs for a thousand years while we yapped at Lygus in the Exomyth, Cerydra who sacrificed herself to do... something... to the rules of the scepter, and Hysilens who kept Lygus's form imprisoned for 200+ whatever more years until we could finally arrive to do our one (1) meaningful action of the patch.

I still maintain that passing the torch to the Trailblazer could have worked just fine if the writing handled it well and actually let the Trailblazer make a significant difference in the plot, but this ain't it, dawg. The narrative simultaneously insisting on framing Trailblazer as the narrative center while then assigning all of the meaningful plot actions to the other characters anyway just creates a story completely at odds with itself, resulting in a "tell not show" writing method that leeches its own ability to deeply impact the player or produce the highs of earlier Amphoreus patches.

Then there's just a host of other, smaller complaints:

Contributing yet again to the patch's "contradictory" feeling was the random insistence on Trailblazer/Hysilens bait. Like, I am not normally a person who cares about Trailblaze self-insert baiting--in fact, I am very much a Trailblazer/Firefly truther--but when the patch is simultaneously going out of its way to bait Cerydra/Hysilens, the overall feeling is like a tug-of-war, pulling Hysilens in two directions and leaving both possible ships feeling under-developed. What was the point of this, even?

Normally, I am also not especially against fanservice--it's a gacha game, it literally monetizes fanservice--but something about the Hysilens fanservice in this patch felt so on-the-nose that it turned me off.

It gives off the feeling that the devs weren't confident Hysilens would sell well on her own virtues/character and so they frantically added in Trailblazer bait, like some sort of glaring "PLEASE BUY OUR CHARACTER" sign over Hysilens' head every single time it happened. (Is it just me or does it feel like the writers might have been in a bit of a disagreement over what to do with Hysilens, with some voting for Trailblazer bait and others wanting her to be the yuri ship bait, so they just split the difference and did both??)

We already have both Castorice and Cyrene showing (physical) closeness with the Trailblazer in Amphoreus; like it's OKAY if a couple of the female characters are bait for the yuri fans instead? 😭

2. Purple prose the patch, my lorddddd. You know it's bad when the game gives you a dialogue option to point it out.

Half the stuff Lygus says in his explanations to Herta Co., particularly in the second half of the patch, are effectively "sound and fury" sentences, "signifying nothing," because they're so overly infested with metaphors and vague terms that they could be taken to mean anything you want them to--or anything it's convenient for them to mean at the moment (the word "Time" being the number one offender of this patch, literally being peppered in anywhere the devs don't want to give an actual explanation).

Herta, mouthpiece of the viewers:

3. So, sooooo many things are just being handwaved in this patch. For example, loved finally getting to see Mydei's notes in the As I've Written log but uhhhhhh, how does this even WORK?

Mydei's ability to self-rez comes from being influenced by outside data which was "abandoned" by Castorice and Polyxia. But how does an electrical signal within the system--not knowing it even is an electrical signal at all--"abandon" data at all? And why would Castorice or Polyxia ever abandon the ability to revive when Polyxia literally had to give her entire life just to get Castorice back into the realm of the living? How does this align with the idea of Mydei's weak spot even being a thing? I honestly think this complicates the lore surrounding Mydei's immortality much more than it clarifies it lol. Same with this:

How did the soul-breaking ceremony give Mydei the security clearance in the scepter's system to suddenly promote his own permissions? We know that what is appearing in the logs as "hacking" functions as the magic in Amphoreus (Hysilens' siren songs, Anaxa's alchemy), but since when does Mydei have the power to affect the system?

Seriously--"Don't Think Too Hard, the Patch."

4. Fuck whoever wrote this line, for real.

The Ugly:

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