#probably it will take a while until we see aventurine again because we're dealing with whatever is happening in penacony

[allegorism]

penacony being an ipc penal colony that fought for its freedom and it being the main scenario for how aventurine, a former slave sentenced to die for killing his master and that is currently working for the ipc, stages his own death while asking himself why can't he feel free. and eventually, through that staged death, he reaches the one place in which the ipc nor the family, the two factions who could have him executed, have any control over him after making peace with his child self...

[msviolacea]

Okay! Random thoughts and observations about Star Rail 2.2! Spoilers, obviously!

tl;dr - not as coherent as 2.1 was, story-wise, but SO MUCH LORE. SO MUCH. But honestly most of the below is random nonsense and shitposting.

I didn't think Xipe was the kind of god to go Catholic, but apparently they have confession? Huh.

Bravo to Hoyo writers for pulling off the "it was all a dream" gambit in a way that actually works.

I was willing to possibly buy that we were just getting a slightly disappointing easy-out right up until a) the IPC went "nah, we don't want the planet anymore" and b) Ratio and Screwllum were vaguely happy to work together. At that point, it was like "ahhhh, we're in a DREAM dream y'all."

Poor Sunday, radicalized by being an overly protective older sibling. Relatable, tbh. You know, except for the making yourself a giant supervillain mecha god. Though that's tempting some days, I won't lie.

On the other side of things, it did feel like a disappointing cop-out after spending SO MUCH TIME on his story in 2.1 to just be told "yeah, actually Aventurine just got rescued off-screen."

HOWEVER, kudos to Argenti for surfing into Penacony, immediately finding the forbidden dreamspace and rescuing an IPC ambassador, then rolling up to take 2nd place in an idol competition before fucking off to find more beauty or whatever. King shit. Bravo. Come back soon.

Speaking of the HSR husbando game, BOOTHILL. Who thinks pointing a gun in your face is a way to say hello and has a Plan C that's just "... guess we'll take hostages!" Stay forever, you insane space cowboy.

On a slightly related tangent, I loved the flashback exchange between Firefly and Blade, showing their relationship to each other as Stellaron Hunters. After all the Luofu nonsense, it's fun to see Blade as a weird older brother figure.

Another related tangent to the above: since I also watched some of the most recent Genshin patch on YT this week, shoutout to Daman Mills for having the "deep raspy voiced tragic murder hobo" to "ridiculous androgynous magician twink" range. [insert Patrick Stewart "Acting" gif here]

But back to Firefly, I think she had a nice showcase here, though I wish they'd given her more focus in the last bit instead of sorta-kinda-maybe-probably not killing her offscreen via a short Acheron speech. I assume she'll be back, given that she's dropping as a playable character next patch, but still. There was just a lot going on in this patch and not enough time to do everything they really needed to do.

However, they COULD have cut the idol competition, because that added absolutely nothing to the plot and only really existed because someone clearly went "huh, how do we fit more puzzles and trash fights here?"

We also needed more Robin. She was awesome, don't get me wrong, but again, I would have given up the stupid idol competition in favor of maybe getting more time to play her and not just Sparkle-as-Robin running around giving people ... doomsday buttons?

Speaking of which .. wtf? Like, those went NOWHERE. Maybe they're for later payoff, but given that she was explicitly telling people to use them during the concert ... it was weird.

Dan Heng: Listen my past life just cold clocked me over the head, I need time to process and not deal for a while, Imma stay out of Dream Disneyland and chill. Also Dan Heng: so, my friends are in trouble AGAIN, not like this isn't a "must be Tuesday" occurrence for the Astral Express crew, but my first instinct is to use this very important button to call the saner of my previous life's ex-boyfriends to bring an army to help.

Like, I'm CERTAINLY not complaining about the Jing Yuan cameo, even just as a dream, but that was a very quick response, Dan Heng. I see you. (PS: as long as we're giving VA shoutouts in this post, shoutout to Alejandro Saab for Jing Yuan's everything.)

Little detail I didn't catch myself, but saw someone online point out today - Welt gave the IPC the ammunition they need to take out the Dream Master. Early in the patch, he points out that the poker chip Aventurine gave us is actually a transmitter and recorder, and takes it with him to meet with Robin and Sunday and the Dream Master. At the very end, we see Aventurine playing with the chip, and Jade mentions that they obtained a recording "from your Trailblaze friend" that would help them on Penacony/with the Dream Master. So shoutout to Welt for ... well, deciding that space capitalism is preferable to crazy assholes who are trying to use innocent people to revive a god? I guess he's seen plenty of nonsense in his time, tbh, so I'm going to trust his judgement.

Speaking of Welt, Acheron's name drop was not the only Honkai Impact 3rd direct reference. It was an interesting touch for them to include Welt's "real"/original name in the credits sequences. Don't know if it's anything more than just an easter egg for HI3 folks, but still. Interesting.

Harmony Trailblazer is actually pretty strong. I'm definitely going to build mine.

All in all, I didn't enjoy this quite as much as the last patch, but it's the difference between like a 9.5/10 and an 8/10. Coherent self-contained stories mean a lot to me, but the lore and character stuff that was in this patch was A+, and I'm still digesting half of it.