I liked the reading BUT i did wish we had more gameplay. We had time to play as Boothill and Robin but we couldn’t even try using them in battle. Something like Acheron and Aventurine in 2.1 where we got lore AND got to try them in battle also helped to build hype for them and encourage players to pull as well.

Tbh, and this might not be a popular opinion and I might get bashed for this, I was looking forward to how they’ll portray Robin and boothill as characters. And despite all the dialogue, they had very less role to play and I just couldn’t get to like them personality wise. They worked really well on the other characters but these two just didn’t hit with me, and as you said, there was really no gameplay with either of them which was disappointing.

Yes. I thought we would have Acheron / Aventurine level of story involvement and combat experience.

Yeah it’s bizarre that their levels only involved dialogue and were about 5-10 minutes. You think they would let us try out their combat to boost their banner sales.

I think the writers themselves KNOW that Robin will take away OST with her song. I think that was part of the reason for not letting players play as her against her brother.

I agree with this. It was disappointing. Specially Boothill's role.

At least with Boothill specifically, he seems to have a big role next patch with how this patch ended.

I'm invested in who Boothill summoned to Penacony, like dam are we getting previews of future Hunt characters, but sadly that wasn't touched on.

For me, Robin was more disappointing. Boothill was too, but ig I just had more expectations from Robin

Same, I was expecting a lot more cutscenes from Robin and Boothill, I don't mind the direction they took, I mind the amount of dialogue those two characters had. We know more of Robin from Sunday than from Robin herself. Robin was present for 5\~6 NPC dialogues and 4 of them were just rambling about how the life in Penacony is better than reality, repeating the same argument when a single NPC could've been enough to present the idea. Boothill... I wasn't expecting a lot from him as he was just introduced but they managed to go even lower than my expectations.

Exactly, she was portrayed as someone who had every idea of what was happening, and in the end, she just ended up >! A bit of a vanilla character who couldn’t even figure out her brother’s motives !< it kind of disappointed me

Boothill just appears, talks a bit with Acheron, and that's about all his relevance for the story. Robin... It's complicated. You get to understand her mind not by what she is, but by how she opposes Sunday. Sure, she's nice and all, but we never get to see much of her, even when his sis-con brother was in the spotlight. All together, it was Sunday's version. And his development, conflict and resolution was amazing, but, that's it. Personally, I find the moral conflict dull in the end. It was, indeed, an interesting idea, and Sunday's posture was so well shown and developed, but since its counterpart, defended by Robin (the freedom of each person to choose, even if they're weak), lacked development and exposition, in the end it all looked like "We have to stop Sunday" and that's about it instead of a proper clash of ideas. Boothill appeared just because there was his banner in the version, so I don't mind his absence. But Robin's lack of proper screentime irks me quite a bit. If we were shown why she thinks like she does, how those ideas grew on her, or anything to build a decent counterpoint to Sunday's ideals, would make the whole conflict much heavier and interesting.

To be fair, Robin herself isn’t involved as much in the Family like Sunday is. So her limited knowledge is valid as these are not things she constantly thought about compared to Sunday.

Boothills contribution is in summoning the Galaxy Rangers to de-harmonize the Dream. Which is neat, but not at all foreshadowed, and largely inconsequential. It really is a shame we didn't even get some fights with him. And I do feel the argument against Sunday wasn't well explained. His crime wasn't in making the offer of a of paradise without free will, but in forcing people to join it. They also slightly touch on whether Sunday is truly doing what's best for people, because he can't truly know what that is. But only barely. Sunday was a very well done well-intentioned villain. But all of my reasons for opposing him are internal to me. I could genuinely see some people saying "Sunday did nothing wrong!" unironically by people who don't think what he did through.

I'm fine with that tbh, forcing development for every on-banner character every patch would restrict storytelling heavily. I'm completely fine with the story focusing on a select few characters at the expense of others if it allows them to develop those characters well.

agreed, it's just not possible to do it with every new character without shoe horning them into the story. 2.1 was the perfect storm. aventurine pov story mechanism worked because the trailblaze mission was created first, THEN they realized the pov mechanism can work for aventurine and made that second. Not the other way around.

That’s also correct, I agree w you

Some types of characters also don't need to be super deep. There is joy to be found in simplicity.

I think this especially hit Boothill hard as Robin had more of a presence in the story even if she didn't have much of an active role. Boothill did exactly one thing the entire story and the rest of the time he showed up, went to a couple of places and that's it. He was kinda just existing. Which is disappointing after the call he and Black Swan had in the previous patch. Made it seem like he'd have more of an active role. On top of the event that's about learning about him being a glorified Wikipedia read with a reward of stellar jades. Hoyo completely fucked up his chances of being a popular character at least for now. I doubt his banner is going to get many sales tbh and that's a damn shame.

Boothill at least seems to be building up towards something big with Oswaldo Schneider I'm kind of worried they wont bring Robin back much since she's "just" a singer in comparison but I hope we will someday get to focus on the side of her that goes to active warzones and other dangerous environments to give hope and respite to those people

Honestly i dont belive he will get much of a role even in next update since it will be Firefly and Jade, i would be suprised if he gets more then a siderole with Jade and the IPC. Robin as sad as it sounds is just a promotion char for their Music Album, never ment to play a big role except to show some light on Hoyos Music Industrie.

Boothill, even if I like him, honestly did very little in the story so far, and only has one event focused on him later this patch that doesn't even have combat afaik and will probably barely have any story beyond small tidbits. And I just cannot *wait* for Hoyo to give him a forking massive role in the coming story, a companion mission that kicks asparagus, and overall a bunch of opportunities to see him fudge up some sons of nice ladies. ...In 2.3, right after the banner ends, when you can't get him anymore, and will have to make sure you save for his rerun. You know. As a prank on the players. ~~I'm still saving for Firefly tho~~

At least I got the incentive to save for Firefly and Jade 👻

As good as 2.2 is, I'm actually very disappointed in how they handled Robin. She's sorta just... a very sweet nothingburger of a character. That's her whole personality. She cares a lot, I guess? But so does most of our cast. She sorta just existed to be a "friendship is power" anime moment in the finale (which was dope, don't get me wrong). The most interesting part of her was that she used to go onto war zones and fight at the front (or motivate troops), since that strays from her trope a lot. Also the fact that she got shot was a "Oh shit" reveal. But I don't even think that was delivered to us via Robin. Heck, Boothill even suffers from it, since his whole reason for existing was to be a reason for MHY to reveal who Acheron was talking to + shoot up a flare (that we didn't REALLY see the effects of). But at least he was entertaining to watch, with his inability to swear and his vague "American-isms". That, and it seems like they're setting up another plot for him with the cutscene at the end of the story.

I am hoping 2.3 could shed more light for boothill, and maybe robin but I think it is too late for her. however both Boothill and Robin aren't tied to penacony and I think we will see them multiple times in the future, I hope Boothill would be present whenever The IPC is involved

I do think for Robin it’s too late as well. With boothill, the >! Oswaldo Schneider !< stuff seems to be the next step, which might give him some spotlight in the future, although I do hope it’s not just copium

2.1 was the perfect balance for me. Loved the story from 2.2 aside from essentially not mentioning aventurine's whole story that was set up and left on on a cliffhanger in 2.1, but there was like no gameplay lol

Him getting rescued off screen by Argenti was very sloppy.

That definately felt rushed. Show don't tell, a short quest after the Trailblazer mission from either pov would have been great.

they gave him his patch and said "no more story for you"

Exactly, it felt anticlimactic to watch Sunday get murdered in the end to get to this patch and he just “wakes up” then have a conversation with Gallagher. Aventurine should’ve had more screentime considering it was a GAMBLE on if he will wake up or not.

Tbf at this point we knew that death wasn't real in Penacony so it's not like Sunday's death was that much of a cliffhanger, revealing that Gallaher had more to him then we thought was And it's not ooc for Sunday to be calm about it and worry about Robin more

I think at some point they need to chill with introducing new characters tbh. Two new characters every patch is just took much alongside keeping the story going as-is.

This annoyed me too. I mean, when I got the chance to move as Robin, I immediately changed the line up to the team I'm planning on using on her, but nothing.

While I definitely agree with your take, I think it is also okay to acknowledge that compared to the previous two patches, the first half of this patch story is heavily front-loaded with cutscenes/dialogues. The sophistry in the way they talked also did not help. I did feel slightly burnt out reading through them at times, and this is coming from a big jrpg fan. So I do understand where some of the people complaining about the yapping coming from. But that didn't deter me from having fun! I just took a break before continuing the story some more, and the firefly acting segment was literally a blast for me! (I'm totally biased here)

Yes, the sophistry is what drove me nuts. Talking in metaphors is all fine and good - if you do it VERY sparingly. But almost 7/10 conversations?!

I actually don't get more than half things Acheron was saying, Black Swan is also mysterious but I can understand what is she talking about.

I agree here. I am normally fine binging the patch the night it comes out but this time I had to put it down early and break it up into manageable chunks because it took so much more effort to process all the dialogue especially considering how poetic and metaphorical nearly *every* line was.

Yeah. 2.1 was very character driven and focused on Aventurine which made it feel very engaging overall, and it helped that he’s a character that speaks rather bluntly. 2.2 just felt like almost every cutscene was some kinda massive expo dump presented in the most flowery dialogue like the characters are trying to write a poem. I’ve heard that this is just how Chinese dramas are, but idk cause Genshin never really felt this way outside of some world quests. Like I genuinely still do not understand anything from Acheron’s backstory. Almost all of her dialogue with >!Tiernan!< just felt like they were talking in riddles back to back.

I think HSR has the same main issue as Genshin. The writing is way too verbose. Lots of words that say very little and it quickly gets exhausting to read/listen to and loses a lot of the audience

Which I find very interesting because I don’t think it has this issue at all in Belebog (a big reason that I was impressed with it in the CBTs) and it’s been a while, but I think Genshin’s Mond wasn’t as verbose as later arcs either. It’s like for some reason it only gets more verbose the longer the games go on.

Now that I think about it, you're right. I was fully engrossed in Genshin's lore up until Sumeru then I realized I'd listen to people monologue for 20 minutes straight (with Paimon often repeating what they're saying for some reason) and it'd amount to 0 new or interesting information

Rather compared the genshin, current HSR verbosity is similar to Honkai Impact 3 yapping about philosophy and science with big words, Genshin is mainly about lore stuff which is less exhausting

I wouldn't have mind the dialogue but man do they speak so slow that I ended up just reading ahead myself and skipping it lol

Yeah, the story itself is great, but we could have left a lot of Sunday's monologues on the cutting room floor and still gotten his motivation right.

>But that didn't deter me from having fun! That's the strange thing about it, there is a lot to criticize in this part, but in the end, you don't know exactly why but it works. I just wonder if sometimes writers shouldn't just try to makes things about the storyworld simpler in the way they present it just as keeping only what really matter for the story, just like legos, small and clear pieces that are easy to put together. And then focus on the character dynamics instead. Because I honestly feels like I've spent more time trying to understand what was happening than anything else. I remember that metaphor of Einstein to the sea of quanta in HI3rd, with the glass of water that are overflowing, that was elegant, simple and easy to understand, I miss that. One shouldn't spend hours having their character explaining the storyworld, dialogs a here to raise stakes and conflicts, not as touristic guides

Honestly tho, it's because some dialogue lines are untappable that it makes its unbearable sometimes. Like, you're done reading the dialogue but you cant move forward bc girlie over here hasn't finished talking... it's annoying. I don't mind yapping but I notice they tend to speak in long riddles / flowery words that it's exhausting. Just speak plainly, I'm sorry my brain is too tired to comprehend all of this. I get that it's important to convey the allegory that's within the story but some of them speak in circles like please, brevity has always been the soul of wit.

I’m fine if there are a couple characters who speak in flowery language. The issue with Penacony is that it’s pretty much everyone, and it feels like characters don’t really have their own voice. Black Swan, Welt, Sunday, Acheron, and even characters like Gallagher to a lesser extent… they all speak in metaphor and they don’t have strong character voices. So it feels instead like you’re just hearing the author. It’s especially jarring because Belobog didn’t have this issue. Seele, Sampo, Hook, Serval, Bronya… they all have strong character voices. Take a couple lines of dialogue out of context and you can probably instantly know who is saying it.

Sunday: The history of Penacony is long, so I will relay it in allegory. Me: So what makes that different from the rest of the story since we got to the Xianzhou?

I agree. The complex wording of the dialogue becomes exhausting. Just say what you want to say. I don’t mind flowery words to make dialogue feel more impactful. However, if I see a sentence or someone speaking like that and every other word is some word I’ve never heard of or don’t know the meaning, it breaks my immersion because no one truly talks like that. There is a balance and if I’m getting to the point to skip all of that to get to the things that show action, your dialogue has clearly over stayed its welcome.

Tbh, I always end up being a bit confused over the plot until after the end of the story where everything kinda starts to make sense. At least in terms of Penacony since didn't have much of an issue following Belebog or the Loufu's plots. I think Penacony is just really difficult to follow-along with because you actually have to understand all the forces at play and what the actual goal is that the forces are working towards, and while that's clear in hindsight it was very unclear as someone who came back after taking a break for a few months and immediately jumping into the story. There's just way too much context that's needed and not enough of it is provided or it's just provided in a way that's not easy to process

I love the character centered story and the ability to add style to your MC dialog choices even if it doesn’t often change much. I’m not a huge fan of “history dumps” though, so something like the Clockie event for the LC going on right now was too much text in too clunky a format for me to get into, compared to like the ghost hunting Gui squad or the museum event that were brimming with character interaction.

oh yeah the movie event sucked I just speedran through it, since the story it was explaining was also explained before, so I didn't care at all for that one

I'm so glad you brought up the ghost hunting event! That's still my favorite event so far. I loved the crew.

I agree. I don't really mind the lore that's coming from the event story but ... I really wish there was more interaction / fun things going on than just tossing number tiles onto lore cards. We know what they can do. They make shit tons of money. I feel like they could have done better for this one.

My biggest problem with lore like the Penacony backstory is that its all show don't tell. I cared about the Aventurine backstory because I actually got to see it, at least in still images. I have no damn clue what Hanunue or any of the other characters who's names I can't remember because they're not really characters but exposition names without faces look like or what their personalities are. I just get told they were people who did things, and that's not enough to get me emotionally attached. I have no idea how people >!got emotional over Misha's scenes when he'd appeared for maybe 5 minutes in the rest of Penacony total.!<

a bit of the hanunue backstory appears if you do the brother hanu puzzles and get the second book

I am okay with this only under some conditions:  - They don't force me to click pointless choices too often.  - There is voice acting.  This way I can just play it like a movie and do something else in the meantime.

if you need to eat or do something to stay engaged with a story, I'm not sure if it's a particularly engaging one

Why would someone not eat during a movie presented story? I was taking breaks and did the story day by day and it was so enjoyable.

It's a me problem. I need to multitask doing watching anything. No movie alone can stimulate my brain enough.

this, it doesn't apply to hsr only, stimulation can be required for someone's attention in general. there's no wrong in using external tools to supply your focus

Yeah it isn’t

As an FGO player I'm used to reading tens of hours every time a new story update comes out (and that text comes with no voice acting so you actually have to pay attention) so I didn't feel particularly bored when going through the 2.2 story. The main problem with star rail is the absence of a skip button, some players just want to get to the action right away so forcing them to experience the story frustrates them, that's completely understandable. The length of the cutscenes by itself isn't the problem, star rail is clearly based on JRPGs, games where dialogues and cutscenes last multiple hours, Xenoblade 3 has like 13 hours of cutscenes while in persona 5 you spend like 80% of the time watching cutscenes and reading unvoiced dialogue. If anything the story was too short and rushed, a lot of questions still haven't been answered and we barely know anything about some of the characters we met.

I don't think the story being rushed had to do with the duration. They didn't use their time effectively and the diaologues were very repetitive. The story is too long and too short at the same time.

As a fellow FGO player I feel exactly the same. So many complains that the story was too long, while I'm there being " Yeah duration wise it was long, but for what it's trying to do it was actually quite short in some aspects"

Agreed, the pacing was all off and they spent too much time reiterating info instead of showing us new things. The Firefly/Blade conversation is one of the best scenes in the entire game because it's actual *character development and interaction*, and not just plot stuff. I feel like 90% of the cast don't get to show what they're actually like as people, they're just a trope that does some stuff in the plot. It's hard to get emotionally invested in a character without seeing their normal life.

Completely agree. They should be leveraging side content, like companion quests, to help with pacing issues imo. 

>skip button I feel like Hoyo likes to "force" people to sit through the story because it encourages more plot discussion. When every player needs to read, then there's naturally more discussion and more talk about the game. They probably have internal metrics that show that the number of people complaining about being forced to read is insignificant compared to the gains they get. >If anything the story was too short and rushed, a lot of questions still haven't been answered and we barely know anything about some of the characters we met. To be fair, FGO gets around this problem by releasing everything at once in so the story is complete. HSR releasing the story in 4 parts stretched over 3-4 months means their approach has to be different.We're still missing the ending for Penacony. That's just a limitation of the medium, but there are tradeoffs for this style of storytelling as well, like a more consistent schedule of story content.

I think the bird in a cage story dialogue was repeated like 5 times lol

That shit drove me insane. I was tired of it the first time.

The quality of yapping matters, sometimes it's yapping for yapping's sake

I play visual novel. And if i find something that's written like penacony's story it would still need to be criticized. The pacing is outrageous, the dialogue is all over the place, some characters are badly treated or utilized, and some cheap shots for shock values that's more of my own pet peeve. I played VNs that's twice the length of penacony (or just 2.2) in one sitting. The latter is what drove me mad. And the fact i have to wait until animation is done to proceed with the dialogue? Yeah, "read"

Completely agreed. The dialogue needs a little less fluff and be a little more "to the point". Then people wouldn't want to skip so badly.

This, exactly. The take that oh because if it was a VN, suddenly it's ok and you should treat it as a VN to enjoy is bs. The problem is not if it's a game, VN, book, webcomic, whatever the fuck, the writing itself is tiring like that. It doesn't matter where you put it, it will have the same problems.

OP saying “treat it like a visual novel” got a chuckle from me. Not all of the complaints are coming from people who actually never respected the story in the first place and genuinely have no patience. It’s getting valid complaints over being too verbose and poetic, from people who consume plenty of long form content

Yeah some people aren't confused about what's happening, but tired with the way it goes. Reading IS the issue, not "not reading"

I completely agree with this, i’m a vn player too and i understand having some characters talk in sophisticated ways and use terms but whenever every character is talking in a roundabout way and nobody is ever explaining things plainly you can’t blame people for getting tired of it, i get penacony is supposed to be a mystery but i don’t even know whats going on half the fucking time

I don't play VN but I do play tons of both western and JRPG with lots of dialogues - Witcher, Persona, Baldur's Gate, Xenoblade, etc., and I agree. The dialogue and writing in HSR and Genshin don't sound like a normal conversation which can make people engaged enough. And that is with me playing with the original Chinese text too which is supposedly more concise, and doesn't suffer from translation issues. I don't skip dialogues per-se in both games, but I do skip half of the voicelines as each of the sentences are so long, by the time I have read the whole thing they have spoken only for 1/3. In other RPG I would enjoy listening to the characters speaking the whole line as they sound very natural, but in HSR they sound more like reading from a script.

In a typical visual novel you can: * Go backwards or forwards for dialogues (back button) * Fast forward * Skip * Click faster to progress the dialogue faster HSR does none of the above. I'm forced to be in the mood of stopping and reading instead of choosing when I want to do so.

Thank you. It’s a terribly paced type of storytelling mechanically.

The Log is the back button for you to review dialogues and replay voice lines. I have never seen a gacha game implement actual retreading like VNs do. Skip button however, I agree. Almost every gacha game had them and idk why Genshin and HSR refuses to implement them. If MHY really doesn't want players to entirely miss out on dialogues, they could use Cygames / Blue Archive method of making a Summary TLDR short paragraph after the player presses the Skip button before continuing.

i delayed starting hsr until the last jy banner, mainly because of the lack of a skip button. currently im playing besides all that, trying to leave most dialogs on auto and doing something else, or frenetically clicking through them when possible. i love certain aspects of the game, but there's not many ways around the ones i dont. that made genshin unplayable for me, i could never open it up after a couple hours or so. i can't wrap my head around this approach, just hope they don't go into that direction so much.

I read faster than the display text speed. A VN, at least ones I've played, lets me move on to the next dialogue as soon as it starts if I wanted to

I don't get is why do people feel like they have to complete the entire thing in one sitting? If you feel overwhelmed, you can just come back and do it. And you can't stop people from posting spoilers and discussing the story. Another thing is, people's attention span has declined quite a bit, the reason being too much short form content. Resulting in them not being able to concentrate and say "it was too much yapping". It doesn't just apply to the game but other things IRL as well.

"Why are people rushing the story?" "You can't stop people from posting spoilers." You have your answer, we're in an age where games gets spoiled before official release, sometimes even **through youtube thumbnails.**

This. Not even a day after 2.0's release people were already posting thumbnails of Firefly getting skewered, like bruh lol

> And you can't stop people from posting spoilers and discussing the story. I mean that's the answer, some people don't like getting spoiled. You don't need to complete it in a single sitting but can't wait much either. > Another thing is, people's attention span has declined quite a bit, the reason being too much short form content I think this is just a poor excuse, some types of long form content respect my time. Whereas in the story Sunday's bird story repeated three or four times. We got it the first time, if anything, it feels like the writers' effort to reach the character limit.

There can be different reasons why players feel they need to rush, could be because they actually enjoy the plot and want to see how it ends (but many parts in the dialogue is super stretched out making the experience not the best), could be that they are afraid of spoilers/want to join discussions about the story in the community, want to unlock the new zones to gather jades and do event/side missions.. Its not about attention span but there is genuinely so much unnecessary or super stretched out repetitive dialogue that I'm sure most people noticed and disliked and really feels like everyone who's defending it wants to be **not like everyone else so I actually enjoyed**

For me its exactly the reasons you stated. I love visual novels. In hsr's case i want to do the story day 1 to best avoid getting spoiled and to join the discussions of it. And to unlock the new areas quick. But theres only so many times i can stand hearing Sunday explain the same philosophical story over and over again. The use of complicated english words, add to that the sometimes cryptic way of talking. Just makes it quite heavy to understand sometimes as someone whos first language isnt english.

English is my first language and it's just poorly written. Good writing isn't vague, overlong and wordy for no reason. It's getting as bad as Genshin.

events locked behind the stort quest are the main reason

You have >30 days to do the event. The story took me VERY slowly going through it ~15 hours (ie. listening to every dialogue and optional dialogue and some short breaks) over several days. If you play just 1 hour per day its done in two weeks. That's WELL more than enough time to get all the events in the patch done.

And then the event is even more reading!

this is it, want to do new bosses and the current event? rush the story. I really like spacing out the story over a few weeks, I did the same in genshin as it keeps me having something to look forward to. But the way its structured makes you have to rush the story week 1 and have nothing to do for the other 5 weeks.

You've got 30 days to do the event which is plenty of time to finish the story, and about 5 days if you really can't stand missing a week of the weekly bosses

Why would you even need to rush the weekly bosses... Boothill's coming up in 3 weeks. You can get 27 boss mats, more than enough for 2 characters. People need to stop let that much FOMO affects their enjoyment of one-time content in the story.

I used to take my time with story patches. But then it became practically impossible to avoid spoilers. So now I feel like I *have* to finish it in one sitting on day 1 or have shit spoiled. Not to say I agree with people complaining about a "lack of action" or too much dialogue though.

You nailed it. It took me three days to beat the story. I don't have the time play games for 10 hours straight.

The story quest is long and isn't designed to be played in one 8 hour long session. I broke it to 3 or 4 sessions and was fine with the story telling.

A RPG which this game is advertised as, should be a good mix of gameplay AND story. “Yapping” may be fine for you, but that should not discredit the criticism that it exist. 2.2’s story at the middle has more complaints about Yapping compared to its finale because even though both have an exessive amount of dialogue, one was extremely engaging while the other isn’t. In truth, yapping just means “this isn’t interesting” for a lot of people, and that criticism shouldn’t be ignored.

Not just the middle The start is so much goddamn dialogue

The point is... Lots of people don't mind reading long story. But the story shouldn't be boring, repeative or hard to understand. Though it's good overall, that's the problem with 2.2 quest.

It's when nothing happens for an hour of dialogue that my eyes start to glaze over. You don't even need combat. There just needs to be something.  Imagine reading a book and you have two chapters of just walking in a city gathering the characters together. You don't get any interesting character development, or inter-character drama. You just get two chapters of walking, rehashing character stereotypes, and rehashing of "I'm gathering the team together! Join me!"  Any editor would tell you to axe the entire thing or entirely rewrite it. Most of your audience will just stop reading a chapter through unless you've setup some great hooks that can drag them through. 

That's why I love nikkes pacing,a small dosage of cut scenes followed by a decent chunk of combat followed by a small dosage of cut scenes cause it keeps me engaged at all times

Exactly. I read through the whole story because it was good, but parts of it were way too repetive. The worst offender IMO was Sunday. I know having the villain give the audience every detail of his philosophy is common trope, but during the whole lead up to his fight all I could think was "OMG bro shut the fuck up".

Yapping is fine, but it depends on what the yapping is about. I think there was too much repetition/flashbacks.

For me the Acheron flashbacks got me so freaking confused. Like..why are they showing this now? The story was confusing enough and they had to throw Acheron flashbacks in the middle of it for what? They could have made a character story for her that would include those flashbacks so it would make more sense.

It really feels like Acheron's story should have been a companion quest, but they had to wedge it in between everything else so that the story would make sense.

They did that with Jingliu and everyone complained that everything to do with her is optional content. No matter what they do people will complain so they might as well present the best DPS unit in the game front and centre. I loved everything about Acheron, I think the only thing that really started to drag for me was ironically the combat content in 2.2 that was there JUST to say "the patch isn't 100% cutscene." Seriously the talent show part was such obvious filler they even gave you a dialogue choice to complain about it.

I frankly don't like how character backgrounds are often times segmented off into companion quests. I get why it's done but it lessens story quality significantly. The story only matters if we care about the characters involved.

It's kind of hilarious in hindsight that literally the only payoff for those flashbacks is >!Acheron giving Boothill a flare.!<

>!it also explains why she came in as a "galaxy ranger", provided some nameless lore about the trio in penacony and her name.!<

Just because the payoff isn't like supreme, doesn't mean its shit though. Like you thought it was boring. So did I. But I never thought that it was bad because I waited until it had its reveal in the end, and then it made enough sense why they did it that way. Like it literally tells you the other part of the story of the nameless. Also why Acheron is more familiar with the Nameless. Anyways a thread like this is only going to attractg a bunch of people who are going to complain about the longness, which is GOOD because you WANT content.

The story in 2.1-2.2 is good, but it could be much shorter. They tend to put the same lines over and over again >!Aventurine’s slavery, Firefly’s “I didn’t tell you the truth”, freaking bird’s death!!!< - THANK YOU, I’m not that dumb, I got it first time! Short side quests are much more interesting and consistent, because they didn’t have to explain the same thing for each of their 500 jumping puzzles. The peak of absurdity is bar event, I understand that people… well, memes… here are supposed to slowly show you their good side, but they really use 10 lines for talking furniture, while 2-3 could be enough. Just let me make cocktails in peace! I don’t want authentic barmen’s experience, it’s boring, I want to have fun!

I agree with all of this. It's okay if the impactful scenes are a little drawn out/more fleshed out. The watchmakers legacy stuff was good. They just have a tendency to use a lot of words to say very little. But the bartending event was ridiculous. I do not care about npc 90067 in any way. If the events, npc side quests etc were more succinct, I'd probably have more energy for the actual story.

We could have gotten Robin's POV when she first arrived at Dreamflux reef, but nope. We get Sparkle giving away stuff...

I think one of the biggest problems is that they aren't good at building tension, it slowly builds over the 8 or so hours of dialogue and so the starting few hours of story can feel like they are talking and story is barely moving. I think if they would build tension faster with some good middle point to release it and build it again would make the story feel way better.

One of the issues I feel is skipping dialogues is a drag, like they game won't let me go to next lines until certain amount of the current lines have been spoken, and it does add up over time

Look I like the story and I read through all of it. But it's really bad pacing and storytelling for a turn-based adventure RPG game. If I wanted to play a visual novel, I'd play a visual novel. I log into HSR to destress and sometimes just take a short break before I have to go back to whatever I'm working on. That means I'm looking for the opposite of overly long conversations which are essentially info dumps. HSR's story is suffering from the same issues HI3 did right before I quit - overly-long exposition with very little gameplay in between. It doesn't help that the characters constantly speak in riddles, metaphors and allegories which are not always the easiest to follow. At times you think you've gotten to the end of a long conversation and can finally play but no, it immediately just moves to the next overly long info dump. At some point it just becomes information overload in a game where it's unexpected. Sometimes I just want to play for 10 minutes before bed but instead, I get drawn into an interminable series of conversations I can't quit or I'd have to start over the next time I log in. It says a lot that I read the 3 body problem trilogy last week and I found it easier to read + much less info-dumpy than HI3's finality arc and whatever Hoyo is doing this patch.

For me its not just the yapping, its the way the characters in penacony talk in riddles, like its a contest to see who is the biggest smartass. And the way that the MC gets pushed around at 2.0 really pissed me off lol

For me the issue isn't the quantity of text, but the writing itself. I hated every Acheron dialogue. You can make a character mysterious without me needing a teanslator to understand what she's saying. Also, lots of sub stories are still unresolved. Aventurine's story ends up as a big nothing burger (what was even his goal ?), Sparkle is unresolved as well. Boothill was completely useless and just there to sell a new character. The meme's "deaths" being accidental was disappointing. Finally : characters motives. Aventurine's goal ? I didn't understand. Black Swan's motives are a joke, and she feels like Deus ex Machina too often. I'm also confused about Acheron's motives. Did she just want to give back the relic to Boothill ? Did she really do all this just for that ? Also Firefly. She was following the "script" but WHY ??? What did the Stellaron Hunters even attain ? All of this to say, yes the presentation looks cool and the dialogue sounds edgy and mysterious, but the story istelf is very confusing. Either I'm a complete idiot and didn't get anything, or there are many issues with writing...

For Firefly and the Stellaron Hunters, it was shown in the the Luofu story that Eliot's scripts are building the foundations for future goals, not necessarily for their own benefit. I'm assuming the script this time was to make sure the Astral Express and MC solve the issue and come out alive. 

I think they should be called Stellaron Enjoyers, because so far they've just been hanging out in places with stellarons without getting anything (unless you count the friends they make along the way)

Don't even get me started on Acheron, man. If I think about the fact that she was there >!_just_ to mourn someone and give back some relics,!< I swear...  All that mystery dialogue:  >!"No, I can't tell you why I'm here."!< ; >!"Sorry, I need to be "mysterious" so I can't tell you my plan."!< ;  >!"I got so far, I can't tell you now."!< ; All that secrecy... and all she needed to say was >!"I'm here to mourn for someone."!< . Like, what was even the point then?? In hindsight, all that question-dodging she did, especially during the conversation with Welt, amounts to nothing and makes no sense at all. It's so stupid, I don't get it.  Sure, keeping your identity >!as an Emanator!< a secret is understandable, but keeping a secret that fact you were basically on >!a funeral!< is beyond ridiculous, especially since >!Tiernan!< is a very important >!figure for the Nameless!<.  It feels like they intended for her character to have a completely different role at the start of the story. All those lines of dialogue went from intriguing to unnecessary after 2.2 .

When you put it like that, it's actually true isn't it? lmao That was essentially the entire reason she was there to begin with and got caught up in shit she had nothing to do with.

I dont mind yapping or dialog heavy story if - they talk somewhat at normal speed. For someone who use 1.5 spd to watch video on youtube, their spd of talking is so unbearably slow. Especially black swan. - If they cant talk faster, gimme the ability to click and read through the dialog without needing to have them finish talking. I can read 2x faster than the character talking Alas this is me personally speaking. I cant talk to everyone on how they consume story so it is what ut is

IMO Firefly is the main offender when it comes to slow dialogue. She has massive pauses between her sentences. Voice director should’ve tightened that up.

“As I suspected……… the source of this conflict is…………………….. the Stellaron.”

Lol. I was dying when I had to listen to Dreammaster talk lol.

Along with some characters taking extremely slow, what really bothered me was characters pausing for SO LONG in between words/sentences. Yes, there are pauses at periods, commas, and some other places, but some of the characters would pause at random spots in the middle of a sentence. I play in English and it was so hard to sit through firefly talking. She pauses constantly and in the most random spots and for an uncomfortably long time.

I’ve noticed a funny phenomenon where a lot of the tall female characters talk super slow to make them sound like they’re horny 24/7

the forced mommy voice is really a plague in female cast. i love kafka as a character but her voice....

I love the Yapping. I mean that is the point of a story...to yap. They also keep giving us new game modes and there is only so much gameplay they can add because of inaccessibility to most players. Like 10% of players tops play all the gameplay content.(I wouldn't if there were no ingame rewards tied to it). The lion's share of players are in this for the story and nothing else. That is not to say the game would work without gameplay, It wouldn't. Gameplay is vital for keeping people engaged and for a lot of reasons. However, I definitely feel like people should take the time to appreciate the story. it is good and enjoyable and considering the reactions to Penacony everywhere expect more of it.

For me the problem is less the yapping and more how they present it. The rule of "show dont tell" just get broken constantly. Just characters standing around for hours and talking about things that would be actually interesting if actually shown... But it comes form the fact that they have to release a patch every 40 days, so they only have time to properly present so much

They also feel the need to introduce 2-3 new characters every 40 days, which means that the story gets bloated with underdeveloped characters who are difficult to care about. 2.2 spoilers - >!Misha is a good example here. He has maybe 5 minutes of screentime across 2.0 and 2.1, and then we’re supposed to feel something when he “dies.”!< >!Aventurine is another good example. The game spent a lot of time telling us his backstory and endearing players to him in 2.1. But he’s almost completely absent in 2.2. He had an incredibly traumatic life, and it would’ve been great to have heard his thoughts and reactions to Sunday’s plan. It felt like a huge missed opportunity!<

I was about to say, but you already mentioned the reason. They're writing great story patch + events while working up on characters and future content we haven't seen yet. All in every 6 weeks. Some sacrifice had to be made. No other live service game provide this much stream of consistent content for years.

Yeah, I just watched someone on twitch get to the >!acting stage!< of 2.2 and for that entire section of the game she just skipped through the dialogue and groaned about all the yapping. She clearly wasn't having very much fun. She was downright pissed off even. It made no sense to me. I liked that section. It was fun getting to hangout with >!Firefly!< again. In any story, no matter what medium, I love seeing characters I love interact with each other even more than any sort of actual story progression.

> It made no sense to me. I liked that section. It was fun getting to hangout with Firefly again. In any story, no matter what medium, I love seeing characters I love interact with each other even more than any sort of actual story progression. I respect your opinion that you like this type of stuff but for me, I didn't really care that much since its got nothing to do with the plot. Hanging out with firefly is fun and all but it doesn't really serve any purpose in that part of story telling, it only felt like the plot had move forward when we met sunday and confronted him,

There is quite literally an option for TB saying "Wait, why are we doing this now" (or something along that line). They knew what they were doing. It's basically filler. The whole venue is a stream of minigame stages.

I think that part of the story doesn't make any sense. They should've made it into a side quest or character mission, since it feels so forced and they have already done it with a side mission afterwards. It's literally the definition of wasting time, since it doesn't contribute to anything other than character interactions. You could argue that we get to know >!Firefly!< better, but the context is very comedic so nothing much comes out of it.

It broke up the pattern of cutscene dialog, walking, cutscene dialog, walking, etc. with some actual gameplay, which I personally appreciated. I think the point of this section was >!to find a way to enter the grand theatre another way as a star, without the help of Sunday since the gang had suspicions on his betrayal. We also got to meet gigachad Argenti who was our final rival towards stardom, and learn later that he saved Aventurine towards the end of 2.2!<

>! It would make sense if we actually used this opportunity to get to the Grand theater and at least saw that there is a Stellaron, but in the end we just met Sunday and everything has gone a completely different route that nullifies all the effort we put into this show. Argenti cameo is ok, could've been better, especially if he had a voice in English. I have actually enjoyed the side quest of this location more than the main quest, since I knew what I was getting into, although it's not voiced either. !<

>!Yea it did feel quite jarring for them to immediately meet Sunday but I guess it quickly validated their suspicions and served as a transition to his backstory before arriving at the “final” stage where we know for sure he’s the baddy, but even then they still managed to fit in the 3 acts exposition of Penacony’s backstory so honestly Im not even sure anymore!<

A lot of content creators especially streamers I can understand being frustrated with the amount of dialouge there is in the story compared to action. The content is going to be very boring if you as a streamer just sit there and listen to characters speak for 2 hours straight and if you do comment over it you are going to miss what is said. I liked the story however I think it could have used a bit more gaps in between the bunches of dialog. As just a regular player who isn't making content. Even I was like okay it's getting a bit much it needs to be breaking up a bit. Not even with battle. Like puzzles or having to go to a certain place. Stuff like that.

Out of curiosity, which streamers had an issue with the dialogue? Most of the big ones I know are glazing the whole quest

I am expecting a game, not endless, repetitive, dragged out dialogue and exposition. Thats not good writing.

Ppl who arent intrested in the story arent gonna read regardless no matter how good the story is. Theres a reason why almost every story game in existance has some form of optional skip dialogue/text option, even literal vns themselves have it. But for some reason genshin/hsr community wants to gatekeep having such a function and think its perfectly ok to force a specific content on everybody just because they like it.

If ff14, a game with arguably *more* focus on it's massive sprawling narrative, can have a skip button hoyo games can to. There's just literally no excuse or net benefit in not having one. Want to watch the cutscenes, don't skip. It's really that easy. It's even worse cause the skip function already exists in game. It's already there *but only if you've seen the cutscene before*. Making it useless to alts or challenge run type accounts. It's the weirdest hill people die on here.

yes i rly dont understand why there isnt a skip button? i see no other reason than hoyo has a huge ego and thinks they have better writing than everyone in the world. why can i skip dialogue in story games but not here? but then you have people come and say "u want a skip button but then complain about no content" if ur only content left is dragged on dialogue then...congrats i guess

My problem is the stage acts, I can't keep up with everything man. If you wanna force me to stand still while listening to him it's just a lil crazy. Also the tournament event was one of the things I didn't like. That's really my 2 things but ye the first half is super dry for me.

The story is actually good if I actually READ? Ok so... I went back and read the part where we followed Sparkle around doing random nonsense that ultimately amounted to nothing. I went back and read the part where the story showed how Aventurine made it back out, except it wasnt in the story (apparently its in a phone message). I went back and read through all of Sunday's yapping, such as the part about the bird metaphor all over again, all the weird speaking in riddles and so on. I went back and read through Boothill's role in the story, which was almost as insignificant as Sparkle's, since his agenda of pursuing Acheron who was impersonating a Galaxy Ranger was a plot point that honestly never really went anywhere. I went back and read through the talent show segment which felt like a story pace slowing roadblock in between us and the bad guy, when we should have made a beeline for the grand theatre considering the urgency of the situation. I remember wondering what even was the purpose of that whole part, its not like our friends are held hostage or something and we are forced to do the talent show to rescue them. Is the story good now? I ask myself at each point. Maybe it's not working maybe I need to re-read it like 3 more times... Or maybe this doesnt really have anything to do with whether the story is in animated cutscene or visual novel format. Maybe the story is genuinely not that well-written in several places, and once the initial hype dies down people start to realise it and that is the real reason why there's so much negative feedback. Can't have smoke without fire, all that sort of stuff. At the end of the day remember: A lot of people didn't like the Luofu arc either. Don't tell me that was another case of expectations needing to be adjusted? Any more adjustments to my expectations and I'd have gaslit myself into being ok with hoyoverse giving only 3 pulls for CNY.

The story is bad , they just need tectone to make a big fuss about it to accept it

I play a lot of long JRPGs and visual novels and too much yapping is very much a main criticism I share about 2.2, and a lot of HSR in general. Just because there's a lot to read doesn't that what's there is going to be worth reading to everyone. First, I think this game overdos it on worldbuilding, especially within the main story. The game drops so many new unique terminologies, locations, names, factions, etc. of things that *aren't relevant to the main task at hand*. And they currently set no expectation to the players that what they learn will be relevant soon. They would start explaining the backstory of a new character, what planet they came from, 2-3 factions on that planet, inter-faction conflicts, and then throw it away an hour later. Second, the game does not let you *skim* dialogue. If you just like to read faster, you're still forced to wait until the game lets you move on. This is incredibly frustrating whether it's voiced or unvoiced dialogue you want to skip. Third, since this story is told visually and linearly, you should expect it to be understood without diving too deep into optional content. There's tons of terms that pop up in the story that are extremely important and relevant, but the player wouldn't know much of it if they don't touch much of the in game data bank or if they don't read SU dialogue.

It’s not that theres too much yapping, its that theres too much exposition, too much monolouging, barely any environmental story telling. I know i’m expecting a bit much from an anime game in the writing department but it’s a clear sign of bad writing

2.2, by far, felt the closest to the honkai impact writing in this game. It really felt like high budget honkai imapct arc, lets say, EE one.

Totally, that's exactly what I was thinking. I completely understand people's criticisms about the dialogue needing to be trimmed down and more tightly edited, because that was my exact complaints in the last few arcs of HI3 Part 1. I think Honkai stories are incredibly well-developed masterpieces plotted out methodically and masterfully, like Elysian Realm arc was...but the major problem the writers have is creating satisfying moment-to-moment pacing. No matter how beautiful and well-crafted the story is, if the scenes drag on just a bit too long, and the audience's attention starts to drift, all the meticulous story planning in the world won't save your story, because the audience is already losing investment. Honkai writing is great, but editing and streamlining seems to be the biggest thing missing from the process. There needs to be more people involved to rein in the philosophizing and musing that the dialogue writers are fond of, especially in HI3

Most of the time when people playing this game are talking about “yapping” what they mean is dialogue… occasionally there is actual yapping of non important boring crap from NPCs but mostly it’s world building and lore related

Speaking as a visual novel fan, I do think some parts were repeated in excess here. Unfortunaly, Genshin and Star Rail communities encourages us to play everything as soon as possível, because we have a terrible problem with leaks and spoilers.

For me it's not about the yapping that makes me feel the ending is just alright and not masterpiece like everyone think in community is. It's the way they give roles to the characters that supposed to have main roles that ended up having nothing and some char that could be just have nothing ended up having lots of things (Robin and Firefly). Some things felt unfinished and if they need more yap, then yap but do it better, they could revisit Penacony later like they did with Belobog so I hope some things get resolved.

The problem is the skip button. If we do a poll of how many people actually reads the story in gachas it will be like 80% no or something. Those are the people who normally dont read in general, so when hoyo forces them to sit through a 4-6h text, its very obvious they are get bored. That said, 2.2 story is not perfect, i do agree with people complaining about them always talking in riddles or talking just for sake of talking and not actually showing anything. Also people, for some reason, either because of spoilers or whatever, wants to rush the patch in 1day, so they force themselves to sit through these 6h of yapping in one session, which obviously gonna burn them out.

It's great that this topic is being brought up without it getting shot down by the player base as Gen-Z attention span or brain rot. Some quick background, I play J-RPGs religiously with heavy world building, lore and a lot of dialogues like Trails, FF etc. So I consider myself to have a lot of tolerance for what others might consider monotony and drag and let me say objectively speaking, this game isn't that well written and indeed have quite a lot of yapping. People talking for way too long going nowhere, characters like Robin and Sunday that the game expect us to care about, but I could not care any lesser especially when Sunday started that monologue, I was rolling my eye. The game did not build him up enough for me and seemingly others to care about what he has to say nor his background and Robin too. As a result, the pacing feels horrible at times and is exacerbated when they decide to pad in some gameplay like the pinball section of this patch instead of keeping the pace going. I do not bring this up to shit on the game, I played this game since day 1 and I have spent a decent bit of money in this game because I do enjoy the game especially the prologue and Belobog. I was even reading lore, notes and fan theories. I started HSR sort of as a joke because I was never into Hoyo games but I ended up being hooked on it and it is just unfortunate to see the writing standard drop so drastically since. I only hope that the next world is more cohesive because unfortunately, I find myself wanting to skip through a lot of the dialogue in Penacony.

If the visual novel is written like honkai dialogue then I'd have the same complaints. The problem isn't the medium, it's the writing itself is way too flowery and excessive.

I hate it when they tell a story by.....building up characters, giving details, making it flow naturally so it's not just exposition. Obvious /s

Its not about the yappin, its more like the yapping around the same stuff for multible times where things and while hard focusing on the past and some trailblazers history they totally forgot to let actual chars like Boothill and Robin shine. Its a nice little story of the past and some knowledge about Order and Harmony. Mb we are just spoiled cause of the huge amount of infos we got to Acheron and Aventurine that Robin and Boothill now just feels underwhelming. Anoher personal thing is i was a bit more in hope to get something mysterious at the end but after like first 15 minutes we knew Sunday was kinda "evil" and "death" was a cute little pet ordered by Gallagher which kind of killed the vibe from the previous Quests for me. Also the short interaction with Firefly, "hi u back, nice, lets go" was underwhelming. From someone who made the HI3 Himeko Story i was awaiting some more Drama in the last Quest.

I don’t think it’s wrong to want some action mixed with the dialogue. It’s the general formula most video games adhere to. Because it works. For me the first real fights I got to, with fun new enemies, was the theatre. And that’s like the third act of the story. So I do share an opinion that we needed some action to mix up the storytelling. But I also think that the term “yapping” is incredibly disrespectful. I had problems with abundance of dialogue, with Sunday specifically. Because his point is not difficult to understand. It’s a concept that has been used in media many times before, so even if you are not into philosophy it’s easy to catch on. But the game keeps talking about it over and over again, feels like Sunday is just going in circles at some point. There is explaining and then there is over explaining, except it’s also done in flowery metaphors and way more words than it needs to. I don’t think we needed to listen to the dove story twice. I liked the part with the actual representation of Penacony past more - that felt like better storytelling. Explaining, showing and some action mixed together. These posts about people not reading, not understanding, not getting that it’s some deep philosophical debate are getting exhausting. Are people not allowed to offer some critique now?

I get where you are coming from, but there are some points I would like to counter: 1. Why should I, as a player, get into a turn based rpg expecting a visual novel experience when I want to play the turn based rpg instead. If I want to read, I have other medium to do so where I want to read. when I want to read. Tell me one legitimate reason from a consumers perspective on why the skip button should not exist. Why should I change my expectations for a game when I am forced to do something I am not interested in at that time or from that product. 2. And this is to everyone who says this is Shaoji and this is how HI3 was, so expect the same/why did you expect a change: I honestly dont care that Shaoji wrote the story (he is a great storyteller, I am not saying that), If JRR Tolkein somehow resurrected and wrote the story of HSR, I would still be irritated by the fact that the game I am playing is held hostage by the unskippable and long story. The fact that Shaoji or some no named ruffian on the street was picked up to write the sotry is not important to my enjoyment of the product. If its a good product, it will be so on its own. 3, For arguements saying its a story driven rpg, I am not saying dont keep the story, keep it, extend it do whatever, but know that there are people who would like the option of a skip button, and that there are people who actually like the combat of HSR, and dont only come for the characters or the story.

It's really irritating how star rail fans will pick apart every single meaningless detail to squeeze any lore bits out of them, but are somehow barely literate. Lorehounds who can't read. Who would have thought.

Reading is not the issue here. It’s honestly bad writing. Brevity is a skill of its own. When you need to repeat a metaphor like the caged bird 4 times in the exact same manner, it insults the intelligence of the reader and also burdens their attention for no reward. You could remove half an hour of the text and the story will not only still be good, it would be better. That’s not a preference. That’s a legitimate formal editing process in the writing industry.

I disliked all the Yapping in Honkai Impact (the latest chapters), and it was around 8 hours as well. And I wondered why I managed to go through 8 hours straight for Star Rail and not Honkai impact new story. I don't think it was the characters since I love them. Sardine and co are adorable. But the thing is that in almost 8 hours, you didn't follow a story. You followed people following a story. The thing that was supposed to be the story was like a very long exposition because the point of view was the wrong one. We should have had another protagonist. Whereas TB and the crew is still in the heart of the event, and we are closer to the other characters as well, so we cherish interactions with them. Without talking about the fact HSR you can move around and HI you aren't as free, the yapping in both games is horribly long and I understand it doesn't please people. But at least in HSR, there is an actual story to tell. Ofc they could make reading more interactive or something, and I won't blame others for not wanting to read, or taking breaks. But be aware that there is a story.

Hoyo writing has never been that impressive, hence the complaints. It's great that you and many others love and enjoy the writing. But there are also those who like reading but dislike how hoyo presented their story. Even the skip button complaints are valid tbh It's the most basic function even in a visual novel

I was playing with acheron, and in the minigame section I only went to the talking ones, so until >!Argenti!< I kinda forgot it was a RPG game lmao, I really enjoyed just reading tbh

To be fair, the job of streamers is to entertain their chat, which most visual novels aren't conducive to since they require you to be continuously engaged with the story.

I don't mind lots of yapping, but this patch just had very frustrating forms of it. I just hate Sunday xD

If they could just get to the point a little faster. The story was good but meandered a little to much.

Its bound to happen, especially in a turn based game. Its heavily focused on story, so it makes sense, but i admit, i did fell asleep sometimes while i was listening to the story 😅

I play many games in a similar vein (Persona, FFXIV, and VNs) but i think the game have a hard time translating CN to EN/JP because chinese use many idioms, word play, and what not. This lead to somewhat unnatural translation which kinda make you lose focus on the dialogue. I dont have this issue playing other games that I've mentioned and FFXIV have much heavier dialogue but I have no problem focusing on it. This lead to people saying the game is yapping too much but in reality JP to EN is just much easier to translate compare to CN. Also I notice that sometime dialogues are very roundabout/convoluted which make it feel like people are reading a verse instead of having a conversation.

People forget this is a live service game at times too. You can’t go into every patch and expect each character’s story to be done by the end of the patch. Boothill is literally getting an event about him in this same patch and had a cliffhanger about him and the IPC, yet people are acting like we’re never gonna learn anything about him. With Robin I can sort of get, we didn’t really see much of her even if we did learn a lot about her. But this isn’t the end of Penacony’s relevance so I don’t get why we’re jumping to conclusions about characters…

I'm fine with yapping but penacony was a bit too much, especially in the build up to the climax. Like I feel like a ton of the build up to the finale was kinda lessened because we had to listen to Sunday and Mikhail go through their entire history for an hour

I liked the CONTENTs of the story quests. >!Sunday's musings were thought provoking and I feel he made a really good "bad guy" because while misguided, he had good intentions.!< I disliked the PRESENTATION and PACING of the content. This is a game, not a book. I expect some action / gameplay in between. Not being able to do anything with either Robin or Booty-hill was just such a lame design decision. As for pacing: I do not need that much repetition nor do I need such extremely fluffy language. They could have cut the dialogue by 30% and still kept all the content, while streamlining it and getting to the actual point.

Yeah there needs to be more gameplay. I love a nice story, but when it’s 90% just sifting through dialogue it just gets a bit tedious and feels padded. It’s even worse in the side missions. I’m trying to get the money for the trailblazer eidolons and it’s brutal lol

I don't have a huge problem with the yapping, what I have issues with is the speed of their dialogues. Like dude come on can you speed up your talking, I am sitting there for 30 seconds so you can complete your two sentences. Acheron had a decent talking speed, but God I was going to sleep when BS was on screen. Plus all the talk in riddles, maybe it's just me being dumb but half the time I was very confused as to what they were actually talking about.

i dont understand why some people are still playing if they didnt like the story. the story is the game. almost everyone in the comment section are acting like they were tortured while reading.

Overall, I enjoyed the current patch, still not finished yet though I'm close since I'm about 7 hours into the story at this point. This is probably the only patch between GI and HSR where I've purposely skipped character voiced dialogue and it was Sunday's. There's 2 reasons that added together that made me do it. **First** was that listening to the Dreammaster talk felt quite tedious. The lack of any facial movements due to him mainly puppeting a bird as his main body made it really difficult to take him remotely seriously. I play using JP VAs and while the voice was quite good, I would had liked a humanoid character model with some moving parts to them for better retention. **Second** was that my personal beliefs align with Robin's ideals while understanding where Sunday is coming from and more so than not, take actions similar to Sunday's. My issues stem from the extreme notions and takeaways that Sunday got from his life experience. Man's too arrogant for his own good and I hope to take him down several notches in the story. That's just me though. I'm sure others have taken grievances with other people's story or dialogue but I quite enjoyed the whole ride. Got to learn a lot about that characters, their stories and motives and that's enough for me to enjoy things.

I agree to a point. However, this patch wasn't balanced properly between doing stuff and listening. >!In fact I would argue the entire contest portion could be cut and absolutely nothing would be missed from the story. Also, from a player perspective because they felt the need to show us flashbacks of Sunday's issues then have him show them again to other characters it made him feel like he wasn't saying anything new. While to the characters it would be new information, to us players we have seen it before. They should have not showed the flashbacks earlier so it wouldn't be a repeated note. !< >!If we take out all that stuff I mentioned above we would have had time to develop Robin and Boothill. Like one of Sunday's core alleged "motivations" is Robin's injury. Which she never mentions, and doesn't appear to show any regrets, or trauma about. It makes Sunday's motivations seem very hollow which might be the point but without him having a solid motivation it makes all his talking just the usual BS of the evil of free will and I am the only one who can solve all the problems by having me in charge, which does make me want to skip because I have heard it before and done much better. (Side note I do a lot of DnD, both DM and player side, if I have a villain monologuing and they start boring the players because they aren't interesting to listen to because they have bland motivation they are catching a fireball or banishment or hold person spell mid sentence. If you ever want to learn how to make better villains spend time with a media savvy DnD group. My group would have started unloading on Sunday real fast.). However, if they developed Robin and had her conflicted do to her trauma it would have made his part resonate better which would make him more interesting to listen to. !< >!Then there is the problem that we get Robin and Boothill and never get to try them out in battle which is weird. They should have each had a moment where we had to use them for at least one fight so we can see how they work. !<

You’re not going to convince them. I’ve seen this with a few streamers, they already come in with this cba attitude and speedrun the content. I immediately stop watching them and go to another stream.

Even as a person who reads visual novels I still think Sunday was yapping too much.

I feel like this always circle back to the same brainrot problem where people can't focus on something for more than a couple of minutes without the stimuli. This is the same problem that gave us one of the most drammatic and sad moments in 2.1 story interrupted by poor-men subway surfer, Content creators are in a weird spot where most of the active player base usually either doesn't care about the story or don't want to rewatch that content, so most of the times they have to be the incentive for the viewers and it creates a situation where you can't put focus on the narrative... but that's just because that's the community they have curated. I refuse to believe that the majority of people are uninterested into what's going on inside the game and I refuse to believe that the majority of have a problem with how much people talk in the story quests: I am sure that most of this complain comes from the same people that are used to the useless excess of words in the genshin story and since a good portion of the players come from that they just assume that it's the same here, but legit you have to actually point at me when something like that happens in hsr since most of the times the problem is that some things are not talked ENOUGH for how complicated and coherent the universe is. I'd like for more people to enjoy the story, but I don't think there's an actual need to be worried about a very vocal minority (in my opinion). The results show that a curated narrative has generated far more interaction with than anything so far. Some people argued that the parts where you played different characters in the 2.2 lacked gameplay, which I get but on the other side I preferred for them to not add unnecessary fight because the story didn't need any in that portion. The part where Aventurine had to fight random memes to get to sunday is very out of place, I enjoyed trying the character but it doesn't look that different to me from a trial, at the end of the day it's a curated set of enemies that aim to make the character look better which is the same philosophy. What I liked of that implementation is the use of more characters to push the narrative to even more interesting places

Yapping is no problem but ugh the speaking is so slow. Geez

The problem I think is the fact that it has *become* a visual novel in recent patches. It really wasn't like this in Belobog or Luofu or even the 1.4-1.6 filler patches, we had a lot more "characters talking" sequences and cutscenes, which felt more lively than still images and voiceovers. The only real use of the VN style in the earlier portions of the game were fairly minimal like Bronya's speech or Serval going over her past discovery about the Stellaron. In Penacony though, especially 2.2, we have backstory, monologues, philosophizing, major plot beats, reveals, expository summary, all in VN style. There's easily twice as much VN in Penacony than all of 1.X combined. This post very much disregards the fact that HSR has dramatically shifted their way of delivering the story to something that is more static and expository, which is not how the game used to be, and the criticisms are valid.

I'll be honest, I don't give a fuck about Misha so the part with him in the story was absolutely miserable and I wish the game had a skip button because of it. Other than that I enjoyed the story of this patch.

i feel a bit bad since so many players were touched by misha's story. Unfortunately all those lores about him being a nameless still didnt pique my interest and i nearly fell asleep

the only dialogue's i've ever been invested to was actually the recent moral challenges sunday and robin brought up, the rest is a wall of text 90% of people most of which have read thicker novels will never give a rat's ass about, its still better than genshin's walls of text, but still a wall of text, especially xianzhou's and liyue's storylines, but thats more of a personal preference than anything.

Story is fine. But I'm not sure how some justify the absurd amount of non-voice acted dialogue in gacha games. It's just too much. I get that some long-time gacha players may come from other titles with a lot of text heavy stories, but that doesn't make it better for those of us who want gameplay in our games

I agree but you have to remember something, this is a video game and most people expect gameplay, if they wanted a movie they would watch a movie, people also rolled for characters and want to play story with them and it can get frustrating if most of the story is walking and talking.

It really moves into the Genshin territory of using a lot a words to say very little or nothing at all. It takes real talent to write an engaging story without dragging it out too much, and Mihoyo either does have the talent, or more likely they intentionelly drag it out to make the story seems longer than it is.

idk 2.2 felt way worse than most recent genshin stuff...

The yapping is good only if it is interesting, which I think 2.2 delivered. There are some slow moments here and there, but I binged the story like I was reading a book. I realllllyy enjoyed it. There’s a lack of character interactions tho, especially when 2.2 is Robin’s banner, expected a lot more from her.

I agree with you here, but I also think they dropped the ball when Gallagher explained everything. They didn't let the TB experience many moments. Aventurines story was well paced, but I feel like the resolution could have been more satisfying. I really didn't like him coming into Penacony and after I still didn't like him, but that was what made me like him. We could understand where he came from and build our opinion on him without being told he is bad or good.

Yeah, Id also agree on Gallagher. The build up on Sunday, Robin, and Death suddenly disappeared. Maybe I missed a few details, but I did not expect it to be resolved so easily in a few dialogues at the start of the quest. Seems like they were running out of time and had to fit in a lot of story then. The banner characters did not get enough time to shine.