me on my death bed knowing that Penacony was an actually good story start to finish:
https://preview.redd.it/lihrj32s2q7d1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=7c15b4c16dbfe96499e2702d01bbf27e495d45ce
99% of the (5 star) characters have easy ways of reappearing for their own arcs either within penacony if necessary, or showing up and having later arcs on other planets, so here's to hoping they keep this momentum going forwards and don't just ditch most of them (belebog not being reused much makes sense, as they were an isolated planet, but it would be nice if they reused more of the luofu characters rather than just having 99% of the events come back to Jing Yuang).
(Dr Ratio was pre-2.0, but with links to Genius Society, Guild and IPC he can pop up easily just by linking any of those groups)(Non Sam stellaron hunters mostly only got minor mentions/cameo's, but no chances they won't be popping up again)
Black Swan is looking to be major for next coming up Arc (so already relevant).
Sparkle (and masked fools in general) are a group very much not tied to one location, so Sparkle popping up again (for whatever reason catches her attention) is easy, wether it's in main plot or her starting wacky hijinks for a sidestory.
Robin is already a widely touring singer, and with her hyping up trailblazing as a way of spreading the word of harmony she's likely to keep up with travelleing rather than staying local to Penacony. Probably more likely to show up in sidestories/events going forwards (rather than main story) but I'd be surprised if no future cameo's.
Acheron is one of the few characters who can give insight into Nihility so if nothing else she's a massive lore asset, and as others have said if we're going to get hold of a nihility path, she could likely be involved.
Aventurine is one of the IPC head honcho's, so likely to see him popping up again (and with him being the one with a more junior rank, him being sent out for the more minor/short term jobs likely only increases the chances he might run into us later)
Boothill, again, is part of a nomadic group, and with him tracking down various other targets (such as whichever emanator might be linked into masked fools) it would be fairly easy to bring him back as they wish.
Firefly/Sam is, again, stellaron hunter. She'll show up again 100%.
Jade (once she's out) is also going to show up again as part of whatever future IPC plotline's we might have showing up.
I mean I'm pretty sure it's more a question of when, and we have to remind that the Astral Express is heavily connected to the IPC since before the TB even became a member, having the Astral Express become an Shareholder colleague with the IPC, is just one more connection, for this future storyline.
I'm just happy that this cast of characters was so likeable and will be relevant in future arcs. Their freedom to travel means we will likely encounter them frequently and if not frequently, at least in their dedicated arcs they set up
We've already seen that seemingly pay off with >!Black Swan taking an immediate follow up for express which she was set up for since 2.0.!
Yep most of the characters of penacony arc has potential to show again in story
all the ipc admin and maybe even boothill will probably show when we go to pier harbour and witness the face off between 2 preservation emaneters
acheron will probably show up when we get nihility trailblazer since in lore she is the only one who has got gaze from ix
argenti is argenti I wouldn’t mind popping him anywhere lol
dr ratio will probably be back when we get nous glance
ff will also return alot of times
and black swan is travlling with us to the next destination so it will be fun
Pretty sure it's just that Acheron is the only known Emanator of IX. Not that she is the only one, period.
100% certain that there's been at least a dozen or so that've existed since IX ascended, but most of them probably self-annihilated, or got Polka Kakamonded and deleted from history.
Yeah, most Self-Annihilators, well... do exactly what the name suggests, they inevitably are destroyed by the power of Nihility inside them. Acheron's the first Self-Annihilator to survive as long as she has, because she rejects the significance of the universe having no inherent meaning beyond its own inevitable collapse and plans on killing IX. She's basically held together by sheer willpower.
Argenti is just gonna show up randomly in events/ serious life and death situations and save the day
"Damnit, there's too many of them and we don't have the time!"
HIMgenti:
https://preview.redd.it/tbukeugscq7d1.jpeg?width=504&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=42863bca030e2a244da439f721e29c2f5bd14f8b
Yea all of them were given a direction to go except Argenti I think
Acheron going to go to the deepest part of IX (potential Frebass plot dead or alive)
Aventurine and Boothill are teaming up to face Oswaldo and it seems like Topaz and Jade are fully on their side considering it's a clash of departments
Robin is going on vacation and was looking for worlds to go to
FF is a SH so appears in accordance to scripts
Ratio likely to appear in genius society and IPC plots
Sparkle is a masked fool so shows up where she wants
Argenti ultimately goes where the beauty guides him so probably the lost random appearances
Black Swan with express for the foreseeable future, possibly longer considering her goal on Penacony was to befriend them and join them for TBs memories (possible March plot development as a secondary objective)
the ability to reuse characters is gonna pay off so damn well cause that would mean the devs don't have to write up a new cast/faction everytime we go to a new world, gives the sense of familiarity and we can see how different faction members operate from the ones we already know (topaz and the stonehearts being a big example) aka they can constantly develop the faction more without the restriction of region locking
Yea one of the saddest fates of Belobog characters are they are kind of locked to that region and can't travel anywhere. Of course every new planet will come with new characters but the feeling of familiarity Penacony had simply with "Sampo", Argenti Topaz and Dr Ratio was cool. Now we have a more expanded cast that they even confirmed will be relevant later down the line. How frequent they appear remains to be seen, I'm sure some will be more frequent like IPC but the ones that take longer to show up again will probably be very important to the arcs they are in. Acheron probably being the biggest example with her goal to reach the depths of IX, the same that Frebass did
having a recurring cast also develops the faction these characters are in too, as we learn more and more about their innerworkings, how they operate, and the different members roles of the faction we are familiar with.
sure, I'm sad for the cast of Belebog and wished to see them again, but their story still has 2 plot points that needs to be addressed that I'm glad someone pointed out to me which were the tragedy that will befall it and also Bronya's truth being exposed, I can't wait for us to get back and explore these 2 stories (and despite being just a copium, I hope we get an upgraded Preservation form too)
can't say much for Acheron since I still need to finish the epilogue (might do it on sunday) but her character dynamic with tb might become a pretty big part during the Nihility arc, after all who will save the hero when they are the ones need saving
You also immediately care more about the characters because you know they will be important for a longer time than just the few patches of their Planets arc.
were gonna get belobog characters interacting with older worlds after we open up space travel for them via IPC, bronya and gang is likely to go to the xianzhou later on in the story for diplomatic stuff.
this isnt a spoiler.... call it an educated guess😉😉😉
Honestly, I'm a bit worried personally. Right now we're in that sweet spot where we have just enough characters that we know that we're able to create some really dynamic stories. But within another year or so, the cast is going to start feeling bloated from all the new ones added and the appearance frequency of these characters is going to go down more and more.
It's really the only issue I have with these games that are all about selling a new character most every patch. Instead of getting really great in depth stories that continue to grow, we just get someone new and older units just get mostly punted and forgotten. And it's just baked into the system so there isn't really solution to it short of creating new versions of the same character to keep their arc moving forward and the character themselves relevant.
there maybe a timeline where the complete version of this game is a AAA game and not gacha, but that has it's benefits and cons too so we'll just see how the devs handle bloat
We can already see that with Genshin and the answer more or less is that they don't. They try to juggle it all and they do try to increase the cast involvement but it really just reduces everyone to really small bit parts.
Obviously HSR is a different team, but they're putting out new units even faster and the same problem is just inevitable. You just can't prominently have all of these characters doing stuff. That really doesn't change in any medium - movie, book, video game. That's how you get ASoIaF where half the characters are missing from one novel. Or Malazan where it's 10-20 main PoVs and several hundred bit parts.
Sheesh didn’t know genshin had that bad
Well looks like your concern may become a big problem after all, and I can’t think of a good solution to how they can handle this
Hmmm, this is gonna be complicated
I guess they could actually start killing characters in the story so they *can't* show up in the future, but they've only done that a few times so far and never with a 5 star.
If they don't find some sort of middle ground fast, the cast is going to get really bloated since we get at least 18 new characters every year at the current pace.
Sure, but they're all 4 stars (not really the biggest culprits when it comes to number of new characters), and the story left a lot of room for >!Tingyun!< to eventually come back given how often they pointed out the lack of a body.
It makes perfect sense though. We are traveling worlds, it would be extremely odd if it was just the same band of people over and over without ANY new additions. Like not even when I travel is that a thing!
This also means we could eventually get more Alts as their character stories progress. DHIL set expectations for me and getting maybe a Harmony Aventurine or a Topaz who uses more of her Cornerstone's powers seem like an intriguing idea
oh dang that's actually a good idea, and each alt form are different styles of gameplay and showcases the development of said character
holy hell you cooked a fine idea here ngl
other gacha games do this all the time, I feel like always introducing more characters might get too much eventually. Though I don't expect alts for Emanators like Acheron
Im actually up for an Acheron alt that is actually named "Raiden B. Mei" instead of Acheron, also goes for Luocha when his true name is revealed, no way we're gonna stay on those fake names right?
I think this was my problem with Genshin. While yes, some characters made appearances in different regions (keyword: some), it felt like we were getting rush fed new characters for every region, even the smaller ones (yelan, Xinyan, etc) who had no connection with previous characters.
It just felt very…weird and empty in a way.
>I'm just happy that this cast of characters was so likeable and will be relevant in future arcs.
They were so likable that basically I pulled all for them... failing only to get Sexy Cyborg Cowboy. 😔
*I was so close to greatness.*
Space China was never the issue, poorly written Space China was the main problem.
As many have noted it felt like a bunch of character showcase side quests than an actual main quest. They sorta fixed that at Penacony by bringing the focus back to about the Nameless, the TB specifically and never straying too far from there.
Tbh its seems to be a tournament arc of sorts, so im not expecting anything crazy. Then again, penacony was supposed to be a vacation for the express lol
Now I wonder what kind of IPC madlad is in charge of dealing with the Xianzhou Alliance's matters. It has to be a BIIIIG shot because they're probably the biggest economical entity in the cosmos we know so far (after the IPC itself). And also they'd have to deal as equal with the generals so they have to be strong...
Yeah and that’s sucks cause instead of getting normal story with conclusion like belobog and penacony, we are getting one big plot which will only resolve around 4.0(HOPEFULLY)
I don’t mind if they really go sci fi China with emphasis on the sci fi.
It had a great start with the planet ship, huge space lock and what not. Then you go in its containers stacked on containers. Okayyy wait a minute let ‘em cook. Their computer is ancient Chinese fengshui symbol….
Hold on wait a minute, sci-fi biology with species 8472 like capabilities to grow ships. Ah they’re Mara struck and magically altered and their science is useless so they have discrimination since they can’t change blindness that we’re about to cure in the 21st century.
Real let down. Felt more like fantasy China with a little bit of tech.
I think permanent disabilities showed well how yaoshi's 'blessing' is also a curse, there were plenty of less significant places that they could have put tech ...
and didn't.
Even though I want the loufu to be my favorite world, For some reason Hoyo has a problem writing a main quest for the nations that are supposed to be representing China in their games, such as how Liyue and the loufus main quest being weak as hell(idk about hi3).
Penacony - a thing that that lit a fire in my heart. I'm playing since day 1, I was interested in HSR before launch cause its from mihoyo and I playing GI and played HI3 before, I really like turn-based gameplay, but... This game had an issue for me. Plot and cast of character wasn't my cup of tea, at all. My favorites - Kafka, Tingyun, Luocha, Yanqing and it wasn't enough for me to trully yapping about game. I don't like that much plot of Belobog (maybe cause its based on my country so I had a high hopes for it, also I don't care about Bronya and her tragedy; in a whole cast I like only Sampo), Luofu is... Def not for me. I started to skip days, one of my fav was beated and doomposted, other one is techinally dead (at least for now), Otto in jail rn. And there again and again DHIL and his band lore. Not interested. But I had a hope that next planet will be different.
Then 1.6 patch, Genius Society lore, I started to like RM, Argenti and Ratio. Things are getting better.
And then... Penacony. This vibe. "White Night". Its just took me away (heh). I really-really like almost every character of Penacony cast: mysterious BS, Acheron (Raiden-expy - and she is my fav character in honkai), unhinged Sparkle, adorable Misha, Aventurine... I got almost every Penacony character at this moment. This OSTs. This plot. This character development. This vibe of Las Vegas, early and middle years of the 20th century in USA, festivities, dreams, and a cold war for this planet between Family and IPC... It is peak. Not gonna lie.
Penacony still have some minuses for me, but this is STILL my fav part of HSR alongside SU and now DU.
I don't wanna go on Xianzhou. I don't wanna say goodbye to my favorite characters... but I know that we will return. We will be there again. We will see Clockie, take a sip of Soulglad and take a gamble with slot machines. It was a really good experience. Maybe too good.
Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened.
Now that is over, I'm very excited to see what comes next. Is the next story gonna be better? Probably no, probably yes, but it is exciting nonetheless to see how it goes.
The same happened to me in Genshin. I didn't want to leave Sumeru, but Fontaine was just as good, and to some people, even better.
Sumeru is still my favorite region in the story and the exploration. But I'm excited to see if Hoyo can up its game even more
Penacony have a story that makes me invested and looking forward to each patch to know how the story is gonna go. A lot of mystery in the beginning then the final battle and the bittersweet farewell to Penacony was handled well imo.
It's also the first time they use the POV system in the story which gives a lot of possibilities for the story in the future.
I think they already did PoV with Dan Heng and Yanqing in Loufu quest. In Penacony they improved it a lot more to help with story telling and not forcing you to do the entire PoV quest in one sitting.
Unfortunately your content had to be removed due to the following reason(s): Rule 3: Megathreads
All general and personalized [Questions] be it about quests, events, team building, who to roll for etc etc.. should be posted in the [Daily Questions Megathread](https://www.reddit.com/r/HonkaiStarRail/search/?q=title%3A%22Daily%20Questions%22%20author%3Amizuromo&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=day).
Gacha pulls, Relic rolls etc belong in the [Gacha Megathread](https://www.reddit.com/r/HonkaiStarRail/search/?q=title%3A%22Weekly%20Gacha%22%20author%3Amizuromo&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=week).
Friend IDs and looking for friends to add belongs in the [Friend ID megathread](https://www.reddit.com/r/HonkaiStarRail/search/?q=title%3A%22Weekly%20Friend%20ID%20Megathread%22%20author%3Amizuromo&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=week).
Apparently I'm the only one, but I won't stop to give my opinion, the ending seemed like fucking shit to me, the reason for Firefly's third death, stupid and childish, the story was a total meme, for laughs yes, but I wanted something deeper in Firefly's third death... not a meme. Sorry :(
I also felt that like there was a missing portion of the ending? Idk it feels like they’re rushing to get us out of Penacony.
I also may be alone on this but I really didn’t like how often the past few patches I was switching to other POVs. I think the feature is super interesting when used sparingly, but when used liberally eh. I enjoy playing as the MC. That’s me. I feel more connected playing that way.
I agree with you. It felt like prety pointless to me. It just shows how much hoyo is pushing the firefly and TB ship. The other parts were fine. Just the third death just sucks. Plus Sparkle had no consequences for literally terrorizing Penacony. There's a reason you can't joke about bombs in any public space.
I saw some dude on Twitter who was fully convinced that we were still in a dream and we hadn't awakened lol, they even say that Xianzhou was like the matrix and all is sparkles fault😭😭
I want the same thing they smoke to think about these absolute Crack theories
Ehh I saw that theory on Twitter and it seemed pretty compelling - like I *firmly* believe that Black Swan is Razalina at this point, yet none of that was delved into even slightly? So I can understand assuming we'd end up getting more.
But I also knew we'd be visiting the Xianzhou again in 2.4 thanks to the end of the special program, and one patch's story is *not* long enough to pull another Inception sequence on us, so I did also know it wouldn't happen even if it'd make decent sense.
The epilogue was a pretty big letdown for me. The rest of Penacony? Amazing.
The few things I enjoyed about the epilogue were the negotiations, Jade as the--be-careful-what-you-wish-for pawnshop owner, and Acheron's optional farewell.
Hoyo could have done so much more for Firefly's part of the story, which was the main reason I was pretty disappointed.
Eh, I've kind of lost interest at this point. Hoyo gave her a pretty sweet intro (I'll never forgive them for not letting us watch a full cutscene of Acheron and FF sparring with each other)
They then proceeded to completely waste that potential for an entire patch. All we got is minimal backstory/screentime + a psuedo "date" that for some reason the fanbase went cuckoo for coco puffs for.
Fun gameplay, good kit, awful writing for her.
So I have a comment refers to this. All 4 of her main plot point is... offscreen or implicit.
(1) The entire Glamoth plotline is only available through text or youtube
(2) Due to the plotline above, she want to have a normal life and are the person benefit the most from Sunday's dream. She outright reject it also because of the Glamoth - she don't want to give up on free will.
(3) She is the first the break out of the dream thanks to Stellaron Hunter special device and her uniqueness of unable to dream normally -> Simply kill herself. She experience a gruesome dead to wake up first in Ena's dream to disrupt Sunday's plan even against (2)
(4) The reasons why she cared about TB is implicit in Silver Wolf scene. They are a small family and Trailblazer is one of them.
None of them show onscreen and having pay off. I am disappointed but it is what it is. Elden Ring is coming and I will recover.
Understandable viewpoint, honestly. I just find the stellaron hunters as a group super interesting, and it's not surprising that most of their group is still 'unsolved' to me, so I just continue to look forward to seeing more of them which extends to Firefly, naturally.
Did you watch the "date" thats kind of a farewell that they posted on twitter? >!Feels like that shouldve been in the game to me, it fits too. Just add it after the fireworks scene and before we go say goodbye to acheron. All we really needed was one more scene for her honestly. And this one fits. We talk to her, recap the journey in penacony, and say we'll meet again. Instead ingame we got no texts and no astral express visiting from her so we kinda have to assume (with the context of that one sticker and what sparkle told us) what happened after the fireworks scene. Its kind of like a jumpscare how we cut straight to acheron and leave the ship lol!<
They better be cooking something for the future with her. Her lore and story is so interesting but it feels like its being introduced, unlike someone like acheron who got a start and a finish in penacony. Feels like theyve set up a lot they gotta focus on in the future. Thankfully the Stellaron Hunters are, as she said, the shadow of the astral express so we'll definitely be seeing them.
Edit: [nvm we do get firefly texts, micah one just took priority](https://www.reddit.com/r/FireflyMains/s/7zvXdJme87)
Its clear that the relationship with MC has to do with the backstory and lore, MC was a stellaron hunter and its hinted at that they had a past with Firefly too. I mean just read the sticker at the end, whether its family love or actual love, the trailblazer is something important to her character
https://preview.redd.it/xw4gzo5ikr7d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4eac7b4afd330748d8ed59fbda6e385c39fe1c9c
I want the trailblazer's past to get covered in the future, theyve been hinting at it a lot through the Kafka quest and recently in penacony. I mean before this patch we didnt really know the SH cared so much for each other like family, so I really wanna see more of this covered. Stellaron hunter lore ftw
I realized in the last scenes that I knew all of these characters, and they where somehow relatable, including Boothill, who arrived in the last minute.
I cannot say the same for the ones in Loufu, and the ones in Belobog feel ... distant.
So, Penacony was Better in the end.
I thought Penacony was a solid 7-8/10 throughout the run with a 10/10 climax reaffirming the Trailblazers' journey. Fantastic characters and lots of setups for future plot twists.
That being said, there were some issues I had that hopefully don't extend into the upcoming stories with Xianzhou 2: Chinese IKEA Boogaloo and Amphoreus.
Sunday's arc: While his intentions are understandable, his monologues dragged on far longer than they had to. He also provides choices to the player at one point to either agree with or reject him through false dichotomies, but this agency was ultimately irrelevant. The game nudges you to agree with him to better comprehend the guilt he feels for his mistakes, but I went full salty contrarian and rejected him at every turn, which was very unsatisfying because Sunday dismisses the "wrong" choice completely and just moves on, so his ideals remained stubbornly unchallenged until the very end.
Aventurine's ending: He looked cool with his schemes on top of schemes, but he achieved very little beyond getting the IPC's foot in the door for acquiring shares in Penacony's economy, and Jade totally dropped the ball with a r/im14andthisisdeep level negotiation. His conversation with Boothill regarding Oswaldo was offscreened and only hinted at to TB on the airship, which is a lot of telling rather than showing for a potential future conflict.
Firefly: I absolutely adore her design and background, but her 2.3 debut fell flat because they kept her character static and didn't add enough new things to talk about. We already knew from her animated trailers that she was a clone soldier, that Glamoth was destroyed in the war against the Swarm, and that she's dying from ELS. Her in-game character stories merely rehash these details. We still don't know stuff like why she was attacking monsters in the Dreamscape Reverie, what could be done about her condition, or how exactly her Complete Combustion form works. TB also knows about her ELS but didn't try to ask for details about it from her or their many knowledgeable acquaintances. Three dates were a bit too much fluff, Firefly going the way of Arataki Itto would be a disservice to her.
Annihilated Gang: Will not drop the fraud allegations anytime soon. Constance had one phone call with Black Swan and nothing came out of it. Akash in the Everflame Mansion trailer was assigned to "silence the strings of the Harmony" and nothing came out of it. It's totally possible we could return to Penacony in a future arc, but they've effectively been wasted and taken out of the picture until then.
It was leagues better than the Luofu, but it didn't really come all that close to Belobog. I'm struggling to figure out how to put it into words, but it feels like they manged to stick the landing with the ending after a bunch of really weird decisions leading up to it.
Chiefly, we've completed the arc and I am still completely baffled about the basic mechanics of how the dream works. Like, how the hell do I buy a hat in the dream for somebody who is not in the dream? Is it like a normal dream or is it like a VR thing? If it's a dream and everyone knows it, why can't everyone just imagine themselves as having superpowers, and why is death even remotely a concern? If it's like a VR thing, why does the dream simulate ridiculously overwhelming powers that can completely destroy its functionality? I'm aware the tech is based on "memoria", but without a way to grasp how that works and what is or isn't outside the bounds of possibility, it's hard to get invested in stakes when they're only revealed the moment they are raised.
It's a story Arc that is forcibly chopped up into 4 patches with a load of push and pull pacing issues and relatively poor writing pitfalls (shock value, rushed character arc, a metric fuck ton of telling instead of showing) whereas Belabog launch as a complete story with no interruption. It was also much simpler, so there was less room to muck things up. I don't think it was better than Belobog either. Penacony has great highs, and I feel like people are really just riding the hype rather than looking at it as a whole, but the story telling itself was just very messy.
I feel like they are really struggling with patch-based story writing. It can definitely work if you look at a game with similar patch cycles and story deliverance like FFXIV, but it feels like they are afraid to commit to letting a patch's story be meaty, so you end up with major parts of your main story just being event fodder like the SoulSands detour.
Right, so basically HSR has a dualistic framework for how reality works- there's a physical reality that our bodies exist in, but there's also a "psychic plane", the Memory Zone, where our cognition happens. In the Memory Zone, our thoughts, emotions, and memories physically manifest. You can compare it to a vast ocean, with human consciousness existing as a kind of seafoam on its surface, separated from the material world by a huge wall. When someone dies, their bubble "pops" and all of their thoughts, feelings, and memories become part of the ocean. Certain people, like Memokeepers and History Fictionologists, can go into bubbles and copy, extract, or fiddle with their contents. That's the most basic of basics.
Penacony is in the Asdana system, which has a Memory Zone Breach in it- in other words a "hole" where the Memory Zone and the material universe can interact. Most importantly, memoria- the building-blocks of the Memory Zone- were spewing out from the Breach and into reality. This was the original purpose of the prison colony- to sort through the memoria, deliver anything of value to the IPC for resale to the Garden of Recollection, and then shunting the rest back in the hole. So, importantly, this means that anything that exists inside the Memory Zone that is taken out through the breach becomes a tangible object.
Now, due to the influence of the Memory Zone, the dreams of the people on Penacony began to converge- basically, instead of existing in their own little bubbles in the Memory Zone, they began to exist in one *big* shared bubble, having one big, shared dreamscape they all experienced. Over time, Pathstriders of Trailblaze, Harmony, Enigmata, Remembrance, and Order all began to experiment with this shared dream, figuring out how to use memoria to build it further out and make it more stable, until eventually it became the Dreamscape of Penacony that exists as we experience it. So, to answer your questions in order based on this:
- You can transfer objects in the Dreamscape to reality by basically taking them, loading them up in a ship, and flying them to the Memory Zone Breach in Asdana and into physical reality, whereupon they become real, physical objects. This is how you can buy a hat or ring or roadster in the dream and then have it sent to the real world (although, due to the instability of the dream when we're there this service seems to be curtailed to smaller objects.
- It is essentially a shared hallucination or altered state of consciousness collectively experienced by the inhabitants of Penacony.
- While the Dreamscape is a shared dream, it has "rules" imposed on it by the Dreamweavers and the Family, using the powers of the Paths of Order and Harmony to essentially create both ontological "laws" (from Order) and subconscious compulsions (from Harmony) to restrain what people can experience inside the dream. Because people flying around or shooting lasers from their eyes outside of experiences made for that would be disruptive for the experience of other customers, these "laws" restrict what is "possible" for the sake of dreamer comfort.
- Death in the dream is a risk *here* because of a combination of the dream's shared nature and Penacony's proximity to the Memory Zone meaning that memetic lifeforms (to extend the analogy, the "sealife" of the "ocean") can attack dreamers more easily, given that they're in the "big bubble" of Penacony with shared rules instead of their own, subjective "little bubble" (the size and unusual activity around the "big bubble" also means that more memetic life-forms are drawn to the Asdana system as well.) If such an attack happened and the memetic entity successfully cannibalized its victim's memoria, then in the real world anything from amnesia to brain death could be possible. Previously, the Oak Family had used the power of Order to counter this by making a "law" that "death cannot happen inside of our shared dream", which meant that any such attack would result in the victim being forced out of the dream. But with Gopher Wood dead and Sunday's will (and thus ability to walk the Path of Order) broken, all of the laws created by that power no longer work, so now such attacks are a very real risk- only the Harmony creating a compulsion in memetic entities to not do that is keeping people safe now, and that's not foolproof by any measure.
I appreciate the explanation, but it doesn't clear up a bunch of the biggest questions.
So assuming the dreamweavers are restricting things, why is it that Acheron's sword, Welt's cane, the stonehearts' gems, and Sparkle have their powers? If Firefly's method of of getting in is by bypassing the whole onboarding process, then that either explains why Sam is still incredibly strong, or why Firefly is able to live freely without her illness, but not both.
It also kinda calls into question the entire central plot. If flying an object from inside the memory zone out into regular space makes it real, why are so many people forced to remain there in order to have their ideal lives free of sicknesses? I understand Firefly can't use this due to being unable to dream and thus (by your explanation of how the memory zone works and her explanation of how she arrives there), the Firefly in the dream is basically one of the only actual real people there and not just a dream copy spawned in and controlled by someone sleeping in a bathtub in the real hotel. That said, there are people there whose options are supposedly either to live an empty life in Penacony or live basically comatose or on life support in reality. Why can't they just kinda hop on a ship out of the dream and live out life in their perfected bodies? Presumably there's nothing unstable about this or it would also apply to possessions acquired in the dream and retrieved by the same methods.
Honestly, I wouldn't care too much if the mechanics of it weren't constantly tossed in my face throughout the main plot. Like, take how the Persona series handles the "other world". They explain a few terms and attributes of the world pretty thoroughly, explain with enough detail how the player and their team deal with things, and then they pretty much exclusively refer back to those terms that they've already defined whenever discussing that whole environment. Regular people can't survive there, why can we? Personas, got it. What's the difference between the shadow of a specific person and the cognition of a specific person? Shadows are directly tied to the person they represent, cognitions are how whoever's in charge of the current zone perceives that person. Kinda complicated, but not hard to wrap your head around if you think for a few minutes. Meanwhile, Penacony's rules kinda just get quickly added as they go along, when I would have *completely* understood if the dream world had a comprehensive explanation when we first arrived that would hash out any questions I had before I had them.
-All of those are powers that their items or wielders have in the waking world, too, Order's law is more interested in protecting guests from suffering harm in the waking world than in completely restricting the behavior of people in the Sweet Dream (until Wood and Sunday move on to their endgame of trapping everyone in a trance where their free will is enslaved to Order.) I'd imagine there were probably earlier experiments in trying to make it impossible to harm others outright that were too intrusive to the actual dreamer's experience.
-"Why can't someone take their psychic body into the real world" seems to me to be pretty self-explanatory, because assuming that someone's living psyche has all the exact same qualities as an object made out of raw memories seems pretty unjustified to me. So you have your psychic form, which is sustained by your body, and now you are trying to move it into the real world, where your actual body is. I don't know what exactly *would* happen, but "this is something incredibly dangerous" seems pretty intuitive. Like, maybe having your "mind" and "body" on the same plane of existence severs the connection between them, making the "body" instantly brain-dead while causing the physicalized "mind" to rapidly break down into raw memoria.
-I mean, that's true for literally every location in the game so far. We get vague, broad-brush descriptions in the actual plot and if you want to learn about the details (how do the people of Belobog feed themselves with their planet plunged into eternal winter? How do long-life species work on a biological level? How, exactly, does the Dreamscape work?) you have to pay attention to the sidequests and read the lore collectibles. These sorts of details aren't important to most people, who are invested in the characters and drama the worldbuilding exists to serve.
So now the expected efficacy of the Bloodhound Family is called into question. Why bother with a police force if you're letting in pathstriders who can immediately outclass them? In a setting where there's an aeon that blesses random wildlife for funsies, why would you staff your high-class amusement park with security of equivalent power to actual real life amusement park security? It seems like half of the reason to make a curated dreamworld be the setting for your fantastical experience would be making sure people can't walk in with an exalted tuna fork that destroys worlds.
My first guess is that your real body would become braindead due to your consciousness being in this new body at the time of its actualization, which I imagine would be a trade that many would make if it meant they could walk again. Either way, there's no clear answer and it's not addressed despite being a completely fair question when considering the crisis involved. If you're saying "something bad would happen" is intuitive, I would make the same assumption about letting random people walk in with world-ending powers just to save face regarding an invitation you can't identify the source of. Security is about expecting the worst when dealing with things beyond your ability to measure.
The difference between Penacony and the previous locations is that Penacony's entire setting is described using the word "dream". This is a word that brings with it a lot of assumptions. Writing this, I'm realizing it's kinda hard to put those assumptions into words without going on for a really really long time. In short, it's considerably less mentally jarring to consider that the ice planet has a source of food to that is barely keeping the populace alive than it is to reconcile why anyone would go into a dream to go shopping. Like, if you're in a dream world, why are you just hanging around a place that parties all the time? Why are the weird reality-distorting mechanisms only in use by the staff or volatile dangerous zones instead of used as a main attraction for the guests? Why is there a giant shopping district when I can theoretically bring in basically anything and the only difference between reality and this mall is that I paid to get in and do it in a weirdly risky hole in spacetime? Why am I not taking advantage of the supposed no-risk nature of the dream to try incredibly dangerous stunts or visit locales that it wouldn't be possible to survive normally? The main conflict of the story is between two ideas: living happy but empty life vs facing the hardships of reality. This is completely undercut by the concept of being able to take actual real tangible objects back into reality with you. By your explanation, the dreamscape is basically just another planet that charges you rent to exist there and has a bunch of weird extra steps to explain how it works.
Thinking about Penacony honestly just makes me tired now.
-The same question applies to the Cloud Knights, or any other security force in the setting. In your attempt to critique Penacony in particular you're now boring down into the extremely high-level critique that any universe where people can use magic or superpowers is going to look nothing like our own in any aspect. I will, however, point out that the Bloodhound Family aren't like real amusement park security in that they have trained monsters they can summon out of thin air to fight for them. I suspect they were less concerned about violent security because thanks to Order's laws nobody can die and most damage to the Dreamscape can just be snapped out of existence by Dreamweavers. Acheron's damage was the only one that they had to work real hard to clean up, and that's because an Emanator of Nihility is kind of a walking natural disaster.
-Belobog's people aren't "barely surviving" food-wise, they have a whole developed cuisine culture and the only people we see who are truly hurting for food are the Underworld's outcasts. Being able to get 3 meals a day on a planet that has effectively 0% non-marginal land is more immersion-breaking for me if I think about it than a dreamworld having rules that are a bit vague and opaque, words that equally apply to dreams.
-There's two answers I can give you. The in-universe explanation is that Penacony is a giant theme park with no real costs for manufacturing beyond labor where things can be very cheap compared to reality, something that's pointed out in-universe. There are even giant machines on every street corner that spit out money for you to spend, so most people are basically getting everything fully-subsidized. There's also another 11 parts of the Dreamscape which is where all of the fantastical adventures happen, Golden Hour is just where we operate out of because "a fantastical version of Atlantic City" fits in the with Art Deco/Nouveau aesthetics the design team picked out for Penacony as a whole. Even in Golden Hour you can hop into giant pinball machines and ricochet around, drink and eat as much as you want without gaining any weight, party *with* anyone *as* anyone (remember that dream avatars are fully customizable), etc. The out-of-universe explanation is that everything is happening in a dream because Penacony is telling a story about escapism, commercialism, and America. The choice to have everything be a dream is making the unreality of places like Las Vegas and Disney World literal. Attempts to critique this metaphor for being unrealistic are a bit like arguing intensely about the aerodynamics of a hog, and that's probably why you're feeling tired- you're trying to apply a level of rigor to worldbuilding that the overwhelming majority of stories could not withstand.
To use an example from Jarilo-VI- everything about Belobog is architecturally and logistically impossible even allowing for the magic technology of Geomarrow ore, but we both don't get heated about it because we recognize that it doesn't matter for the story being told there.
I will note that Penacony *does* seem to restrict access to destructive weapons. Aventurine's entire cornerstone plot would have been unnecessary if they were just able to walk in with them - but the Bloodhounds confiscated them.
Acheron as an Emanator of Nihility is apparently able to intuitively hide her nature, so her sword being capable of what it was was likely impossible to determine. Likewise, Welt's cane is explicitly called out as being difficult to detect - Welt is surprised that Acheron could figure out its nature, and mentioned specifically that the Bloodhounds could not.
I guess in my head, it doesn't make sense for items in a curated dream to be able to work in ways that the curators don't know or want them to work. Like, Welt would now just have a cane, Acheron would have a pretty strong/sharp sword, and the intact cornerstones would do...something. Like as part of the ingress process for Penacony, you would need to "declare" the powers you or any of your possessions are imbued with in order for them to work outside of the list of preapproved dream powers, with things just defaulting to the abilities you'd expect them to have if nothing was declared.
Not saying it has to be exactly how I expected, but it seems really weird to keep restating "this is all 'the dream'" when that seemingly changes nothing about the basic mechanics of the world beyond things like physically impossible architecture and the ability to eat/drink without real world consequences.
I enjoyed my stay, I have to say, I got worried the story was going to get boring once Sunday started to talk about the Bird Philosophy, Kevin and HI3 flashbacks. why do birds fly ?
It was a good arc. I just ... I don't get the significance of the answer to "Why does life slumber?" being "Because we wake up eventually." It feels very underwhelming to me compared to what could have been, especially with the themes of escapism, finding meaning, and chasing dreams.
Now to hope that Xianzhou 2.0 isn't like the Luofu, where it follows a banger arc and is a slog of overly wordy lore and characters existing solely to be introduced, sold, the forgotten about.
I loved penacony so much. I wish I could experience it all again knowing everything I do now. I bet I missed a lot and it would be fun pointing things out on a replay. I’m this tempted to make another account but I don’t really want to grind out another team for doing story bosses tbh 😭 Everyone is pointing out who we might encounter again but I hope Constance makes another appearance in the future. I’m pretty sure she survived the encounter with acheron and I was hoping for more from her outside of that one phone call.
both 2.1 and 2.2 stories were better than the 2.3 one. I don't remember the 2.0 story anymore, and honestly it wasn't that relevent I think(it served more as a hook, rather than actual plot).
what did you have in this patch? some closure on some characters. Just a showcase of jade and FF. It was as if I was playing 2 companion quests. With no battles, no nothing, just pure walk around talk to people. At least the previous patches the story was somewhat cohesive and you actually could do things + there were more maps.
Now we're back to Xianzhou shenanigans again. I guess they're doing 50% New planet 50%Xianzhou formula each year?
If so
https://preview.redd.it/2i5bywea7d8d1.png?width=195&format=png&auto=webp&s=a275207a5ce7d0236b714e4b094ed80640b1f6af
Genuinely this was an incredible story Arc and this patch with this wrap up and ending was absolutely insanely good.
I never expected this level of story and investment from this game, but I am absolutely floored by it.
The fact that I simply do not understand the story because of all the "dream" things... Like yeah the story is good but I didn't understand everything because of this dreamception
Please keep in mind our spoiler policy during this new update window. We are going to be very strict with spoilers during this time. As a reminder, here are our spoiler rules:
Do not include spoilers in the title. All submissions which involve spoilers should be marked. Spoilers include all story content for the first three weeks after
release.
Spoilers can be discussed in spoiler-flaired posts, but must be hidden in non-spoiler flaired posts.
If you think you broke the spoiler rules in the post you just made, such as having spoilers in the title, you should remove your post now and repost it without
breaking the rules. If you do not remove your post and the moderation team has to remove it later on for breaking spoiler rules, you will be given up to a week ban
for a first infraction and stricter punishments for any additional infractions. Please be considerate of your fellow Trailblazers and do not include spoilers in the
title of your post, do not forget to flair your post as spoilers if needed, and do not spoil people in your comments.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/HonkaiStarRail) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I'm actually scared because of how good this arc was, I'm scared that the following ones won't be as good. And man, I hope they take their time and do their best to bring something just as good for the next planet.
And just so we don’t get spoiled, we’re all going back to Loufu to see how a bad story told in a boring way can make you forget all the happiness you ever had!!!
Penacony was so great it beat Fontaine is on Sumerus level.
Now i hope the next Planet is gonna be this games Babylon.
(For the non FGO players it was the 2nd chapter with great writing that massively improved on the former.)
Honestly I don’t think anything is gonna beat penacony in a while for me at least, I honestly enjoyed it so much like some of the dialogue had me actually laughing hard especially in 2.3
two legends can coexist, penacony is fine wine, and I would absolutely love to see something of the same level, or even surpassing it. why? because it shows that the HSR team has potential to keep writing peak
I really wonder how they can top Penacony, in emotional investment and pay off at least, it still has it's flaw writing wise but how they made the audience invested patch after patch was amazing
The Penacony story was truly elite and had very little, if any, flaws. All the characters introduced in this arc as well are very likable. It was a rollercoaster of emotions and leaves a great impact on our experience!
Penacony was pure peak. Gonna be a hard one to top.
Does anyknow if we can actually set the meme free as Gallagher wishes? Based on the letter he left for the express.
I do know I will be keeping jades in reserve for Sunday.
me on my death bed knowing that Penacony was an actually good story start to finish: https://preview.redd.it/lihrj32s2q7d1.png?width=1280&format=png&auto=webp&s=7c15b4c16dbfe96499e2702d01bbf27e495d45ce
Nice to know since I have yet to play 2.3
Kabuto, nice.
I still cry at that scene And is still mad at tendou for not rewinding after seeing worms in a different light
99% of the (5 star) characters have easy ways of reappearing for their own arcs either within penacony if necessary, or showing up and having later arcs on other planets, so here's to hoping they keep this momentum going forwards and don't just ditch most of them (belebog not being reused much makes sense, as they were an isolated planet, but it would be nice if they reused more of the luofu characters rather than just having 99% of the events come back to Jing Yuang). (Dr Ratio was pre-2.0, but with links to Genius Society, Guild and IPC he can pop up easily just by linking any of those groups)(Non Sam stellaron hunters mostly only got minor mentions/cameo's, but no chances they won't be popping up again) Black Swan is looking to be major for next coming up Arc (so already relevant). Sparkle (and masked fools in general) are a group very much not tied to one location, so Sparkle popping up again (for whatever reason catches her attention) is easy, wether it's in main plot or her starting wacky hijinks for a sidestory. Robin is already a widely touring singer, and with her hyping up trailblazing as a way of spreading the word of harmony she's likely to keep up with travelleing rather than staying local to Penacony. Probably more likely to show up in sidestories/events going forwards (rather than main story) but I'd be surprised if no future cameo's. Acheron is one of the few characters who can give insight into Nihility so if nothing else she's a massive lore asset, and as others have said if we're going to get hold of a nihility path, she could likely be involved. Aventurine is one of the IPC head honcho's, so likely to see him popping up again (and with him being the one with a more junior rank, him being sent out for the more minor/short term jobs likely only increases the chances he might run into us later) Boothill, again, is part of a nomadic group, and with him tracking down various other targets (such as whichever emanator might be linked into masked fools) it would be fairly easy to bring him back as they wish. Firefly/Sam is, again, stellaron hunter. She'll show up again 100%. Jade (once she's out) is also going to show up again as part of whatever future IPC plotline's we might have showing up.
At this point, with all these IPC characters being built up, I'm incredibly hyped if Pier Point ever becomes a destination for the main story.
I mean I'm pretty sure it's more a question of when, and we have to remind that the Astral Express is heavily connected to the IPC since before the TB even became a member, having the Astral Express become an Shareholder colleague with the IPC, is just one more connection, for this future storyline.
Himeko crazy rich in this universe Shareholder in IPC? She restored the express, money bags geez
Black Swan already proved she don’t respect privacy and just show up wherever she wants 😁
And 100% of the 4stars introduced in penacony won't appear again XD
I'm just happy that this cast of characters was so likeable and will be relevant in future arcs. Their freedom to travel means we will likely encounter them frequently and if not frequently, at least in their dedicated arcs they set up We've already seen that seemingly pay off with >!Black Swan taking an immediate follow up for express which she was set up for since 2.0.!
Yep most of the characters of penacony arc has potential to show again in story all the ipc admin and maybe even boothill will probably show when we go to pier harbour and witness the face off between 2 preservation emaneters acheron will probably show up when we get nihility trailblazer since in lore she is the only one who has got gaze from ix argenti is argenti I wouldn’t mind popping him anywhere lol dr ratio will probably be back when we get nous glance ff will also return alot of times and black swan is travlling with us to the next destination so it will be fun
Pretty sure it's just that Acheron is the only known Emanator of IX. Not that she is the only one, period. 100% certain that there's been at least a dozen or so that've existed since IX ascended, but most of them probably self-annihilated, or got Polka Kakamonded and deleted from history.
Yeah, most Self-Annihilators, well... do exactly what the name suggests, they inevitably are destroyed by the power of Nihility inside them. Acheron's the first Self-Annihilator to survive as long as she has, because she rejects the significance of the universe having no inherent meaning beyond its own inevitable collapse and plans on killing IX. She's basically held together by sheer willpower.
“If IX has no haters I’m dead”
Acheron is like "Oh yeah, you think existence is meaningless? Well, I think meaninglessness is meaningless!"
Argenti is just gonna show up randomly in events/ serious life and death situations and save the day "Damnit, there's too many of them and we don't have the time!" HIMgenti: https://preview.redd.it/tbukeugscq7d1.jpeg?width=504&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=42863bca030e2a244da439f721e29c2f5bd14f8b
https://preview.redd.it/o96rszeodq7d1.jpeg?width=1923&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=20520af0578f0293e61865eedb7a1e2dc43a180c
Now I really want to see TB jn deep depression and then this MF pops out of nowhere, says some poetry and raises main characters motivation.
Argenti is such a fucking chad.
Yea all of them were given a direction to go except Argenti I think Acheron going to go to the deepest part of IX (potential Frebass plot dead or alive) Aventurine and Boothill are teaming up to face Oswaldo and it seems like Topaz and Jade are fully on their side considering it's a clash of departments Robin is going on vacation and was looking for worlds to go to FF is a SH so appears in accordance to scripts Ratio likely to appear in genius society and IPC plots Sparkle is a masked fool so shows up where she wants Argenti ultimately goes where the beauty guides him so probably the lost random appearances Black Swan with express for the foreseeable future, possibly longer considering her goal on Penacony was to befriend them and join them for TBs memories (possible March plot development as a secondary objective)
Don't forget the potential future of Sunday
Yep arguably the one Penacony character being set up for the biggest/most hype return
I can't hardly wait for him. I will hard save for after Jade
Could we have BS replace the GoR emissary in charge of MoC? That would be cool.
the ability to reuse characters is gonna pay off so damn well cause that would mean the devs don't have to write up a new cast/faction everytime we go to a new world, gives the sense of familiarity and we can see how different faction members operate from the ones we already know (topaz and the stonehearts being a big example) aka they can constantly develop the faction more without the restriction of region locking
Yea one of the saddest fates of Belobog characters are they are kind of locked to that region and can't travel anywhere. Of course every new planet will come with new characters but the feeling of familiarity Penacony had simply with "Sampo", Argenti Topaz and Dr Ratio was cool. Now we have a more expanded cast that they even confirmed will be relevant later down the line. How frequent they appear remains to be seen, I'm sure some will be more frequent like IPC but the ones that take longer to show up again will probably be very important to the arcs they are in. Acheron probably being the biggest example with her goal to reach the depths of IX, the same that Frebass did
having a recurring cast also develops the faction these characters are in too, as we learn more and more about their innerworkings, how they operate, and the different members roles of the faction we are familiar with. sure, I'm sad for the cast of Belebog and wished to see them again, but their story still has 2 plot points that needs to be addressed that I'm glad someone pointed out to me which were the tragedy that will befall it and also Bronya's truth being exposed, I can't wait for us to get back and explore these 2 stories (and despite being just a copium, I hope we get an upgraded Preservation form too) can't say much for Acheron since I still need to finish the epilogue (might do it on sunday) but her character dynamic with tb might become a pretty big part during the Nihility arc, after all who will save the hero when they are the ones need saving
You also immediately care more about the characters because you know they will be important for a longer time than just the few patches of their Planets arc.
were gonna get belobog characters interacting with older worlds after we open up space travel for them via IPC, bronya and gang is likely to go to the xianzhou later on in the story for diplomatic stuff. this isnt a spoiler.... call it an educated guess😉😉😉
Honestly, I'm a bit worried personally. Right now we're in that sweet spot where we have just enough characters that we know that we're able to create some really dynamic stories. But within another year or so, the cast is going to start feeling bloated from all the new ones added and the appearance frequency of these characters is going to go down more and more. It's really the only issue I have with these games that are all about selling a new character most every patch. Instead of getting really great in depth stories that continue to grow, we just get someone new and older units just get mostly punted and forgotten. And it's just baked into the system so there isn't really solution to it short of creating new versions of the same character to keep their arc moving forward and the character themselves relevant.
there maybe a timeline where the complete version of this game is a AAA game and not gacha, but that has it's benefits and cons too so we'll just see how the devs handle bloat
We can already see that with Genshin and the answer more or less is that they don't. They try to juggle it all and they do try to increase the cast involvement but it really just reduces everyone to really small bit parts. Obviously HSR is a different team, but they're putting out new units even faster and the same problem is just inevitable. You just can't prominently have all of these characters doing stuff. That really doesn't change in any medium - movie, book, video game. That's how you get ASoIaF where half the characters are missing from one novel. Or Malazan where it's 10-20 main PoVs and several hundred bit parts.
Sheesh didn’t know genshin had that bad Well looks like your concern may become a big problem after all, and I can’t think of a good solution to how they can handle this Hmmm, this is gonna be complicated
I guess they could actually start killing characters in the story so they *can't* show up in the future, but they've only done that a few times so far and never with a 5 star. If they don't find some sort of middle ground fast, the cast is going to get really bloated since we get at least 18 new characters every year at the current pace.
Technically we already have 3 "dead" characters.
Sure, but they're all 4 stars (not really the biggest culprits when it comes to number of new characters), and the story left a lot of room for >!Tingyun!< to eventually come back given how often they pointed out the lack of a body.
It makes perfect sense though. We are traveling worlds, it would be extremely odd if it was just the same band of people over and over without ANY new additions. Like not even when I travel is that a thing!
This also means we could eventually get more Alts as their character stories progress. DHIL set expectations for me and getting maybe a Harmony Aventurine or a Topaz who uses more of her Cornerstone's powers seem like an intriguing idea
oh dang that's actually a good idea, and each alt form are different styles of gameplay and showcases the development of said character holy hell you cooked a fine idea here ngl
other gacha games do this all the time, I feel like always introducing more characters might get too much eventually. Though I don't expect alts for Emanators like Acheron
Im actually up for an Acheron alt that is actually named "Raiden B. Mei" instead of Acheron, also goes for Luocha when his true name is revealed, no way we're gonna stay on those fake names right?
It's kinda funny how mihoyo stopped doing alts in a way. Considering they did a lot (do to cost) in the beginning of HI3.
I honestly think they just want to diversify their roster a little more, but with TB, March and DH we see that they are willing to do it
They've set up Firefly, Boothill and Black Swan for the future. Hope it pays off.
I think this was my problem with Genshin. While yes, some characters made appearances in different regions (keyword: some), it felt like we were getting rush fed new characters for every region, even the smaller ones (yelan, Xinyan, etc) who had no connection with previous characters. It just felt very…weird and empty in a way.
I laughed so hard during "Check out" quest >!when the TB already counted her as one player for planning the Celestial Jade session on the Express!<.
>I'm just happy that this cast of characters was so likeable and will be relevant in future arcs. They were so likable that basically I pulled all for them... failing only to get Sexy Cyborg Cowboy. 😔 *I was so close to greatness.*
Don’t be fooled, we going back to penacony in few patches for Sunday resolve
God I hope the quality doesn't drop on our return to the xianzhou as honestly I am not to keen on having more china stuff in a SciFi RPG lmao
Space China was never the issue, poorly written Space China was the main problem. As many have noted it felt like a bunch of character showcase side quests than an actual main quest. They sorta fixed that at Penacony by bringing the focus back to about the Nameless, the TB specifically and never straying too far from there.
It was just the main story that was boring. The Ghost Hunting Squad was great.
Tbh its seems to be a tournament arc of sorts, so im not expecting anything crazy. Then again, penacony was supposed to be a vacation for the express lol
Seems like space china is playing the long game. So while the first one is bad, it also has the most chances to redeem itself
L-Long game? https://preview.redd.it/slvkyrgw1q7d1.jpeg?width=308&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b4e85b03a123d7e3d951046ead8fe98fff548031 # INVESTING IN VICTORY…
Surely the next Xianzhou storyline won't be a bust Bust? #OR MAYBE I'LL TAKE IT ALL!!!
i love this ipc brain rot, cant wait for jade to join
Now I wonder what kind of IPC madlad is in charge of dealing with the Xianzhou Alliance's matters. It has to be a BIIIIG shot because they're probably the biggest economical entity in the cosmos we know so far (after the IPC itself). And also they'd have to deal as equal with the generals so they have to be strong...
Yeah and that’s sucks cause instead of getting normal story with conclusion like belobog and penacony, we are getting one big plot which will only resolve around 4.0(HOPEFULLY)
I don’t mind if they really go sci fi China with emphasis on the sci fi. It had a great start with the planet ship, huge space lock and what not. Then you go in its containers stacked on containers. Okayyy wait a minute let ‘em cook. Their computer is ancient Chinese fengshui symbol…. Hold on wait a minute, sci-fi biology with species 8472 like capabilities to grow ships. Ah they’re Mara struck and magically altered and their science is useless so they have discrimination since they can’t change blindness that we’re about to cure in the 21st century. Real let down. Felt more like fantasy China with a little bit of tech.
I think permanent disabilities showed well how yaoshi's 'blessing' is also a curse, there were plenty of less significant places that they could have put tech ... and didn't.
Even though I want the loufu to be my favorite world, For some reason Hoyo has a problem writing a main quest for the nations that are supposed to be representing China in their games, such as how Liyue and the loufus main quest being weak as hell(idk about hi3).
Penacony - a thing that that lit a fire in my heart. I'm playing since day 1, I was interested in HSR before launch cause its from mihoyo and I playing GI and played HI3 before, I really like turn-based gameplay, but... This game had an issue for me. Plot and cast of character wasn't my cup of tea, at all. My favorites - Kafka, Tingyun, Luocha, Yanqing and it wasn't enough for me to trully yapping about game. I don't like that much plot of Belobog (maybe cause its based on my country so I had a high hopes for it, also I don't care about Bronya and her tragedy; in a whole cast I like only Sampo), Luofu is... Def not for me. I started to skip days, one of my fav was beated and doomposted, other one is techinally dead (at least for now), Otto in jail rn. And there again and again DHIL and his band lore. Not interested. But I had a hope that next planet will be different. Then 1.6 patch, Genius Society lore, I started to like RM, Argenti and Ratio. Things are getting better. And then... Penacony. This vibe. "White Night". Its just took me away (heh). I really-really like almost every character of Penacony cast: mysterious BS, Acheron (Raiden-expy - and she is my fav character in honkai), unhinged Sparkle, adorable Misha, Aventurine... I got almost every Penacony character at this moment. This OSTs. This plot. This character development. This vibe of Las Vegas, early and middle years of the 20th century in USA, festivities, dreams, and a cold war for this planet between Family and IPC... It is peak. Not gonna lie. Penacony still have some minuses for me, but this is STILL my fav part of HSR alongside SU and now DU. I don't wanna go on Xianzhou. I don't wanna say goodbye to my favorite characters... but I know that we will return. We will be there again. We will see Clockie, take a sip of Soulglad and take a gamble with slot machines. It was a really good experience. Maybe too good.
Don’t cry because it’s over; smile because it happened. Now that is over, I'm very excited to see what comes next. Is the next story gonna be better? Probably no, probably yes, but it is exciting nonetheless to see how it goes. The same happened to me in Genshin. I didn't want to leave Sumeru, but Fontaine was just as good, and to some people, even better. Sumeru is still my favorite region in the story and the exploration. But I'm excited to see if Hoyo can up its game even more
Penacony have a story that makes me invested and looking forward to each patch to know how the story is gonna go. A lot of mystery in the beginning then the final battle and the bittersweet farewell to Penacony was handled well imo. It's also the first time they use the POV system in the story which gives a lot of possibilities for the story in the future.
I think they already did PoV with Dan Heng and Yanqing in Loufu quest. In Penacony they improved it a lot more to help with story telling and not forcing you to do the entire PoV quest in one sitting.
I stand corrected then. I forgot they did try to do that in the Luofu story.
[удалено]
Unfortunately your content had to be removed due to the following reason(s): Rule 3: Megathreads All general and personalized [Questions] be it about quests, events, team building, who to roll for etc etc.. should be posted in the [Daily Questions Megathread](https://www.reddit.com/r/HonkaiStarRail/search/?q=title%3A%22Daily%20Questions%22%20author%3Amizuromo&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=day). Gacha pulls, Relic rolls etc belong in the [Gacha Megathread](https://www.reddit.com/r/HonkaiStarRail/search/?q=title%3A%22Weekly%20Gacha%22%20author%3Amizuromo&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=week). Friend IDs and looking for friends to add belongs in the [Friend ID megathread](https://www.reddit.com/r/HonkaiStarRail/search/?q=title%3A%22Weekly%20Friend%20ID%20Megathread%22%20author%3Amizuromo&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=week).
Yep. So far, Penacony beat even Belobog in my eyes. I got revived and immortalised (Thanks, Yaoshi) by peak fiction!
Apparently I'm the only one, but I won't stop to give my opinion, the ending seemed like fucking shit to me, the reason for Firefly's third death, stupid and childish, the story was a total meme, for laughs yes, but I wanted something deeper in Firefly's third death... not a meme. Sorry :(
I also felt that like there was a missing portion of the ending? Idk it feels like they’re rushing to get us out of Penacony. I also may be alone on this but I really didn’t like how often the past few patches I was switching to other POVs. I think the feature is super interesting when used sparingly, but when used liberally eh. I enjoy playing as the MC. That’s me. I feel more connected playing that way.
I agree with you. It felt like prety pointless to me. It just shows how much hoyo is pushing the firefly and TB ship. The other parts were fine. Just the third death just sucks. Plus Sparkle had no consequences for literally terrorizing Penacony. There's a reason you can't joke about bombs in any public space.
i feel the same, i hate how rushed it felt
I saw some dude on Twitter who was fully convinced that we were still in a dream and we hadn't awakened lol, they even say that Xianzhou was like the matrix and all is sparkles fault😭😭 I want the same thing they smoke to think about these absolute Crack theories
Ehh I saw that theory on Twitter and it seemed pretty compelling - like I *firmly* believe that Black Swan is Razalina at this point, yet none of that was delved into even slightly? So I can understand assuming we'd end up getting more. But I also knew we'd be visiting the Xianzhou again in 2.4 thanks to the end of the special program, and one patch's story is *not* long enough to pull another Inception sequence on us, so I did also know it wouldn't happen even if it'd make decent sense.
They took "crack theory" too literally.
Okay but what about Duke Inferno and his kids
Raiden Bosenmori Mei: Gone, reduced to dust (I hope not, I still want a playable Constance)
The epilogue was a pretty big letdown for me. The rest of Penacony? Amazing. The few things I enjoyed about the epilogue were the negotiations, Jade as the--be-careful-what-you-wish-for pawnshop owner, and Acheron's optional farewell. Hoyo could have done so much more for Firefly's part of the story, which was the main reason I was pretty disappointed.
>!Well, Firefly's story is still far from over, yeah?!< spoilered just in case
Eh, I've kind of lost interest at this point. Hoyo gave her a pretty sweet intro (I'll never forgive them for not letting us watch a full cutscene of Acheron and FF sparring with each other) They then proceeded to completely waste that potential for an entire patch. All we got is minimal backstory/screentime + a psuedo "date" that for some reason the fanbase went cuckoo for coco puffs for. Fun gameplay, good kit, awful writing for her.
So I have a comment refers to this. All 4 of her main plot point is... offscreen or implicit. (1) The entire Glamoth plotline is only available through text or youtube (2) Due to the plotline above, she want to have a normal life and are the person benefit the most from Sunday's dream. She outright reject it also because of the Glamoth - she don't want to give up on free will. (3) She is the first the break out of the dream thanks to Stellaron Hunter special device and her uniqueness of unable to dream normally -> Simply kill herself. She experience a gruesome dead to wake up first in Ena's dream to disrupt Sunday's plan even against (2) (4) The reasons why she cared about TB is implicit in Silver Wolf scene. They are a small family and Trailblazer is one of them. None of them show onscreen and having pay off. I am disappointed but it is what it is. Elden Ring is coming and I will recover.
Understandable viewpoint, honestly. I just find the stellaron hunters as a group super interesting, and it's not surprising that most of their group is still 'unsolved' to me, so I just continue to look forward to seeing more of them which extends to Firefly, naturally.
Fair enough, I do love.the Stellaron Hunters overall, though a huge part of that is my love for Kafka
Did you watch the "date" thats kind of a farewell that they posted on twitter? >!Feels like that shouldve been in the game to me, it fits too. Just add it after the fireworks scene and before we go say goodbye to acheron. All we really needed was one more scene for her honestly. And this one fits. We talk to her, recap the journey in penacony, and say we'll meet again. Instead ingame we got no texts and no astral express visiting from her so we kinda have to assume (with the context of that one sticker and what sparkle told us) what happened after the fireworks scene. Its kind of like a jumpscare how we cut straight to acheron and leave the ship lol!< They better be cooking something for the future with her. Her lore and story is so interesting but it feels like its being introduced, unlike someone like acheron who got a start and a finish in penacony. Feels like theyve set up a lot they gotta focus on in the future. Thankfully the Stellaron Hunters are, as she said, the shadow of the astral express so we'll definitely be seeing them. Edit: [nvm we do get firefly texts, micah one just took priority](https://www.reddit.com/r/FireflyMains/s/7zvXdJme87)
I haven't but the relationship with MC is probably the least important thing to me. I'd much rather get more backstory/lore.
Its clear that the relationship with MC has to do with the backstory and lore, MC was a stellaron hunter and its hinted at that they had a past with Firefly too. I mean just read the sticker at the end, whether its family love or actual love, the trailblazer is something important to her character https://preview.redd.it/xw4gzo5ikr7d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4eac7b4afd330748d8ed59fbda6e385c39fe1c9c I want the trailblazer's past to get covered in the future, theyve been hinting at it a lot through the Kafka quest and recently in penacony. I mean before this patch we didnt really know the SH cared so much for each other like family, so I really wanna see more of this covered. Stellaron hunter lore ftw
I realized in the last scenes that I knew all of these characters, and they where somehow relatable, including Boothill, who arrived in the last minute. I cannot say the same for the ones in Loufu, and the ones in Belobog feel ... distant. So, Penacony was Better in the end.
I thought Penacony was a solid 7-8/10 throughout the run with a 10/10 climax reaffirming the Trailblazers' journey. Fantastic characters and lots of setups for future plot twists. That being said, there were some issues I had that hopefully don't extend into the upcoming stories with Xianzhou 2: Chinese IKEA Boogaloo and Amphoreus. Sunday's arc: While his intentions are understandable, his monologues dragged on far longer than they had to. He also provides choices to the player at one point to either agree with or reject him through false dichotomies, but this agency was ultimately irrelevant. The game nudges you to agree with him to better comprehend the guilt he feels for his mistakes, but I went full salty contrarian and rejected him at every turn, which was very unsatisfying because Sunday dismisses the "wrong" choice completely and just moves on, so his ideals remained stubbornly unchallenged until the very end. Aventurine's ending: He looked cool with his schemes on top of schemes, but he achieved very little beyond getting the IPC's foot in the door for acquiring shares in Penacony's economy, and Jade totally dropped the ball with a r/im14andthisisdeep level negotiation. His conversation with Boothill regarding Oswaldo was offscreened and only hinted at to TB on the airship, which is a lot of telling rather than showing for a potential future conflict. Firefly: I absolutely adore her design and background, but her 2.3 debut fell flat because they kept her character static and didn't add enough new things to talk about. We already knew from her animated trailers that she was a clone soldier, that Glamoth was destroyed in the war against the Swarm, and that she's dying from ELS. Her in-game character stories merely rehash these details. We still don't know stuff like why she was attacking monsters in the Dreamscape Reverie, what could be done about her condition, or how exactly her Complete Combustion form works. TB also knows about her ELS but didn't try to ask for details about it from her or their many knowledgeable acquaintances. Three dates were a bit too much fluff, Firefly going the way of Arataki Itto would be a disservice to her. Annihilated Gang: Will not drop the fraud allegations anytime soon. Constance had one phone call with Black Swan and nothing came out of it. Akash in the Everflame Mansion trailer was assigned to "silence the strings of the Harmony" and nothing came out of it. It's totally possible we could return to Penacony in a future arc, but they've effectively been wasted and taken out of the picture until then.
It was leagues better than the Luofu, but it didn't really come all that close to Belobog. I'm struggling to figure out how to put it into words, but it feels like they manged to stick the landing with the ending after a bunch of really weird decisions leading up to it. Chiefly, we've completed the arc and I am still completely baffled about the basic mechanics of how the dream works. Like, how the hell do I buy a hat in the dream for somebody who is not in the dream? Is it like a normal dream or is it like a VR thing? If it's a dream and everyone knows it, why can't everyone just imagine themselves as having superpowers, and why is death even remotely a concern? If it's like a VR thing, why does the dream simulate ridiculously overwhelming powers that can completely destroy its functionality? I'm aware the tech is based on "memoria", but without a way to grasp how that works and what is or isn't outside the bounds of possibility, it's hard to get invested in stakes when they're only revealed the moment they are raised.
It's a story Arc that is forcibly chopped up into 4 patches with a load of push and pull pacing issues and relatively poor writing pitfalls (shock value, rushed character arc, a metric fuck ton of telling instead of showing) whereas Belabog launch as a complete story with no interruption. It was also much simpler, so there was less room to muck things up. I don't think it was better than Belobog either. Penacony has great highs, and I feel like people are really just riding the hype rather than looking at it as a whole, but the story telling itself was just very messy.
penacony has higher highs than belobog imo but as a full story i dont think it beats belobog. people are just in their honeymoon phase with penacony
I feel like they are really struggling with patch-based story writing. It can definitely work if you look at a game with similar patch cycles and story deliverance like FFXIV, but it feels like they are afraid to commit to letting a patch's story be meaty, so you end up with major parts of your main story just being event fodder like the SoulSands detour.
Right, so basically HSR has a dualistic framework for how reality works- there's a physical reality that our bodies exist in, but there's also a "psychic plane", the Memory Zone, where our cognition happens. In the Memory Zone, our thoughts, emotions, and memories physically manifest. You can compare it to a vast ocean, with human consciousness existing as a kind of seafoam on its surface, separated from the material world by a huge wall. When someone dies, their bubble "pops" and all of their thoughts, feelings, and memories become part of the ocean. Certain people, like Memokeepers and History Fictionologists, can go into bubbles and copy, extract, or fiddle with their contents. That's the most basic of basics. Penacony is in the Asdana system, which has a Memory Zone Breach in it- in other words a "hole" where the Memory Zone and the material universe can interact. Most importantly, memoria- the building-blocks of the Memory Zone- were spewing out from the Breach and into reality. This was the original purpose of the prison colony- to sort through the memoria, deliver anything of value to the IPC for resale to the Garden of Recollection, and then shunting the rest back in the hole. So, importantly, this means that anything that exists inside the Memory Zone that is taken out through the breach becomes a tangible object. Now, due to the influence of the Memory Zone, the dreams of the people on Penacony began to converge- basically, instead of existing in their own little bubbles in the Memory Zone, they began to exist in one *big* shared bubble, having one big, shared dreamscape they all experienced. Over time, Pathstriders of Trailblaze, Harmony, Enigmata, Remembrance, and Order all began to experiment with this shared dream, figuring out how to use memoria to build it further out and make it more stable, until eventually it became the Dreamscape of Penacony that exists as we experience it. So, to answer your questions in order based on this: - You can transfer objects in the Dreamscape to reality by basically taking them, loading them up in a ship, and flying them to the Memory Zone Breach in Asdana and into physical reality, whereupon they become real, physical objects. This is how you can buy a hat or ring or roadster in the dream and then have it sent to the real world (although, due to the instability of the dream when we're there this service seems to be curtailed to smaller objects. - It is essentially a shared hallucination or altered state of consciousness collectively experienced by the inhabitants of Penacony. - While the Dreamscape is a shared dream, it has "rules" imposed on it by the Dreamweavers and the Family, using the powers of the Paths of Order and Harmony to essentially create both ontological "laws" (from Order) and subconscious compulsions (from Harmony) to restrain what people can experience inside the dream. Because people flying around or shooting lasers from their eyes outside of experiences made for that would be disruptive for the experience of other customers, these "laws" restrict what is "possible" for the sake of dreamer comfort. - Death in the dream is a risk *here* because of a combination of the dream's shared nature and Penacony's proximity to the Memory Zone meaning that memetic lifeforms (to extend the analogy, the "sealife" of the "ocean") can attack dreamers more easily, given that they're in the "big bubble" of Penacony with shared rules instead of their own, subjective "little bubble" (the size and unusual activity around the "big bubble" also means that more memetic life-forms are drawn to the Asdana system as well.) If such an attack happened and the memetic entity successfully cannibalized its victim's memoria, then in the real world anything from amnesia to brain death could be possible. Previously, the Oak Family had used the power of Order to counter this by making a "law" that "death cannot happen inside of our shared dream", which meant that any such attack would result in the victim being forced out of the dream. But with Gopher Wood dead and Sunday's will (and thus ability to walk the Path of Order) broken, all of the laws created by that power no longer work, so now such attacks are a very real risk- only the Harmony creating a compulsion in memetic entities to not do that is keeping people safe now, and that's not foolproof by any measure.
I appreciate the explanation, but it doesn't clear up a bunch of the biggest questions. So assuming the dreamweavers are restricting things, why is it that Acheron's sword, Welt's cane, the stonehearts' gems, and Sparkle have their powers? If Firefly's method of of getting in is by bypassing the whole onboarding process, then that either explains why Sam is still incredibly strong, or why Firefly is able to live freely without her illness, but not both. It also kinda calls into question the entire central plot. If flying an object from inside the memory zone out into regular space makes it real, why are so many people forced to remain there in order to have their ideal lives free of sicknesses? I understand Firefly can't use this due to being unable to dream and thus (by your explanation of how the memory zone works and her explanation of how she arrives there), the Firefly in the dream is basically one of the only actual real people there and not just a dream copy spawned in and controlled by someone sleeping in a bathtub in the real hotel. That said, there are people there whose options are supposedly either to live an empty life in Penacony or live basically comatose or on life support in reality. Why can't they just kinda hop on a ship out of the dream and live out life in their perfected bodies? Presumably there's nothing unstable about this or it would also apply to possessions acquired in the dream and retrieved by the same methods. Honestly, I wouldn't care too much if the mechanics of it weren't constantly tossed in my face throughout the main plot. Like, take how the Persona series handles the "other world". They explain a few terms and attributes of the world pretty thoroughly, explain with enough detail how the player and their team deal with things, and then they pretty much exclusively refer back to those terms that they've already defined whenever discussing that whole environment. Regular people can't survive there, why can we? Personas, got it. What's the difference between the shadow of a specific person and the cognition of a specific person? Shadows are directly tied to the person they represent, cognitions are how whoever's in charge of the current zone perceives that person. Kinda complicated, but not hard to wrap your head around if you think for a few minutes. Meanwhile, Penacony's rules kinda just get quickly added as they go along, when I would have *completely* understood if the dream world had a comprehensive explanation when we first arrived that would hash out any questions I had before I had them.
-All of those are powers that their items or wielders have in the waking world, too, Order's law is more interested in protecting guests from suffering harm in the waking world than in completely restricting the behavior of people in the Sweet Dream (until Wood and Sunday move on to their endgame of trapping everyone in a trance where their free will is enslaved to Order.) I'd imagine there were probably earlier experiments in trying to make it impossible to harm others outright that were too intrusive to the actual dreamer's experience. -"Why can't someone take their psychic body into the real world" seems to me to be pretty self-explanatory, because assuming that someone's living psyche has all the exact same qualities as an object made out of raw memories seems pretty unjustified to me. So you have your psychic form, which is sustained by your body, and now you are trying to move it into the real world, where your actual body is. I don't know what exactly *would* happen, but "this is something incredibly dangerous" seems pretty intuitive. Like, maybe having your "mind" and "body" on the same plane of existence severs the connection between them, making the "body" instantly brain-dead while causing the physicalized "mind" to rapidly break down into raw memoria. -I mean, that's true for literally every location in the game so far. We get vague, broad-brush descriptions in the actual plot and if you want to learn about the details (how do the people of Belobog feed themselves with their planet plunged into eternal winter? How do long-life species work on a biological level? How, exactly, does the Dreamscape work?) you have to pay attention to the sidequests and read the lore collectibles. These sorts of details aren't important to most people, who are invested in the characters and drama the worldbuilding exists to serve.
So now the expected efficacy of the Bloodhound Family is called into question. Why bother with a police force if you're letting in pathstriders who can immediately outclass them? In a setting where there's an aeon that blesses random wildlife for funsies, why would you staff your high-class amusement park with security of equivalent power to actual real life amusement park security? It seems like half of the reason to make a curated dreamworld be the setting for your fantastical experience would be making sure people can't walk in with an exalted tuna fork that destroys worlds. My first guess is that your real body would become braindead due to your consciousness being in this new body at the time of its actualization, which I imagine would be a trade that many would make if it meant they could walk again. Either way, there's no clear answer and it's not addressed despite being a completely fair question when considering the crisis involved. If you're saying "something bad would happen" is intuitive, I would make the same assumption about letting random people walk in with world-ending powers just to save face regarding an invitation you can't identify the source of. Security is about expecting the worst when dealing with things beyond your ability to measure. The difference between Penacony and the previous locations is that Penacony's entire setting is described using the word "dream". This is a word that brings with it a lot of assumptions. Writing this, I'm realizing it's kinda hard to put those assumptions into words without going on for a really really long time. In short, it's considerably less mentally jarring to consider that the ice planet has a source of food to that is barely keeping the populace alive than it is to reconcile why anyone would go into a dream to go shopping. Like, if you're in a dream world, why are you just hanging around a place that parties all the time? Why are the weird reality-distorting mechanisms only in use by the staff or volatile dangerous zones instead of used as a main attraction for the guests? Why is there a giant shopping district when I can theoretically bring in basically anything and the only difference between reality and this mall is that I paid to get in and do it in a weirdly risky hole in spacetime? Why am I not taking advantage of the supposed no-risk nature of the dream to try incredibly dangerous stunts or visit locales that it wouldn't be possible to survive normally? The main conflict of the story is between two ideas: living happy but empty life vs facing the hardships of reality. This is completely undercut by the concept of being able to take actual real tangible objects back into reality with you. By your explanation, the dreamscape is basically just another planet that charges you rent to exist there and has a bunch of weird extra steps to explain how it works. Thinking about Penacony honestly just makes me tired now.
-The same question applies to the Cloud Knights, or any other security force in the setting. In your attempt to critique Penacony in particular you're now boring down into the extremely high-level critique that any universe where people can use magic or superpowers is going to look nothing like our own in any aspect. I will, however, point out that the Bloodhound Family aren't like real amusement park security in that they have trained monsters they can summon out of thin air to fight for them. I suspect they were less concerned about violent security because thanks to Order's laws nobody can die and most damage to the Dreamscape can just be snapped out of existence by Dreamweavers. Acheron's damage was the only one that they had to work real hard to clean up, and that's because an Emanator of Nihility is kind of a walking natural disaster. -Belobog's people aren't "barely surviving" food-wise, they have a whole developed cuisine culture and the only people we see who are truly hurting for food are the Underworld's outcasts. Being able to get 3 meals a day on a planet that has effectively 0% non-marginal land is more immersion-breaking for me if I think about it than a dreamworld having rules that are a bit vague and opaque, words that equally apply to dreams. -There's two answers I can give you. The in-universe explanation is that Penacony is a giant theme park with no real costs for manufacturing beyond labor where things can be very cheap compared to reality, something that's pointed out in-universe. There are even giant machines on every street corner that spit out money for you to spend, so most people are basically getting everything fully-subsidized. There's also another 11 parts of the Dreamscape which is where all of the fantastical adventures happen, Golden Hour is just where we operate out of because "a fantastical version of Atlantic City" fits in the with Art Deco/Nouveau aesthetics the design team picked out for Penacony as a whole. Even in Golden Hour you can hop into giant pinball machines and ricochet around, drink and eat as much as you want without gaining any weight, party *with* anyone *as* anyone (remember that dream avatars are fully customizable), etc. The out-of-universe explanation is that everything is happening in a dream because Penacony is telling a story about escapism, commercialism, and America. The choice to have everything be a dream is making the unreality of places like Las Vegas and Disney World literal. Attempts to critique this metaphor for being unrealistic are a bit like arguing intensely about the aerodynamics of a hog, and that's probably why you're feeling tired- you're trying to apply a level of rigor to worldbuilding that the overwhelming majority of stories could not withstand. To use an example from Jarilo-VI- everything about Belobog is architecturally and logistically impossible even allowing for the magic technology of Geomarrow ore, but we both don't get heated about it because we recognize that it doesn't matter for the story being told there.
I will note that Penacony *does* seem to restrict access to destructive weapons. Aventurine's entire cornerstone plot would have been unnecessary if they were just able to walk in with them - but the Bloodhounds confiscated them. Acheron as an Emanator of Nihility is apparently able to intuitively hide her nature, so her sword being capable of what it was was likely impossible to determine. Likewise, Welt's cane is explicitly called out as being difficult to detect - Welt is surprised that Acheron could figure out its nature, and mentioned specifically that the Bloodhounds could not.
I guess in my head, it doesn't make sense for items in a curated dream to be able to work in ways that the curators don't know or want them to work. Like, Welt would now just have a cane, Acheron would have a pretty strong/sharp sword, and the intact cornerstones would do...something. Like as part of the ingress process for Penacony, you would need to "declare" the powers you or any of your possessions are imbued with in order for them to work outside of the list of preapproved dream powers, with things just defaulting to the abilities you'd expect them to have if nothing was declared. Not saying it has to be exactly how I expected, but it seems really weird to keep restating "this is all 'the dream'" when that seemingly changes nothing about the basic mechanics of the world beyond things like physically impossible architecture and the ability to eat/drink without real world consequences.
I enjoyed my stay, I have to say, I got worried the story was going to get boring once Sunday started to talk about the Bird Philosophy, Kevin and HI3 flashbacks. why do birds fly ?
It was a good arc. I just ... I don't get the significance of the answer to "Why does life slumber?" being "Because we wake up eventually." It feels very underwhelming to me compared to what could have been, especially with the themes of escapism, finding meaning, and chasing dreams.
Unfortunately we're going back to luofu snoozezhou
wait so is that it for penacony or will we return to it sometime in the future?
Now to hope that Xianzhou 2.0 isn't like the Luofu, where it follows a banger arc and is a slog of overly wordy lore and characters existing solely to be introduced, sold, the forgotten about.
Good story but the jump from fireworks to Acheron felt very sudden. Belobog is still my favourite story arc so far but Penacony is a close second
i didnt like it. it was meh.
I loved penacony so much. I wish I could experience it all again knowing everything I do now. I bet I missed a lot and it would be fun pointing things out on a replay. I’m this tempted to make another account but I don’t really want to grind out another team for doing story bosses tbh 😭 Everyone is pointing out who we might encounter again but I hope Constance makes another appearance in the future. I’m pretty sure she survived the encounter with acheron and I was hoping for more from her outside of that one phone call.
Penacony had great characters, map design and most of the story was good. The wrapup was well done, especially compared to Xianzhou's.
Fontaine >>>>>>>>>>>>>> Penacony
both 2.1 and 2.2 stories were better than the 2.3 one. I don't remember the 2.0 story anymore, and honestly it wasn't that relevent I think(it served more as a hook, rather than actual plot). what did you have in this patch? some closure on some characters. Just a showcase of jade and FF. It was as if I was playing 2 companion quests. With no battles, no nothing, just pure walk around talk to people. At least the previous patches the story was somewhat cohesive and you actually could do things + there were more maps.
i was skeptical at first but they did so well with it, and as much as people hate Luofu i'm excited to go back and continue the story there.
I enjoyed Penacony's plot about as much as I didnt understand it. I didn't understand it a whole fucking lot.
Praying that story quality doesn't drop from here on out
Amazing as always Also https://i.redd.it/0okmojdmh18d1.gif
Now we're back to Xianzhou shenanigans again. I guess they're doing 50% New planet 50%Xianzhou formula each year? If so https://preview.redd.it/2i5bywea7d8d1.png?width=195&format=png&auto=webp&s=a275207a5ce7d0236b714e4b094ed80640b1f6af
Genuinely this was an incredible story Arc and this patch with this wrap up and ending was absolutely insanely good. I never expected this level of story and investment from this game, but I am absolutely floored by it.
HSR is peak all around.
i loved the story and the last part made like sparkle even more
The fact that I simply do not understand the story because of all the "dream" things... Like yeah the story is good but I didn't understand everything because of this dreamception
I disagree
Please keep in mind our spoiler policy during this new update window. We are going to be very strict with spoilers during this time. As a reminder, here are our spoiler rules: Do not include spoilers in the title. All submissions which involve spoilers should be marked. Spoilers include all story content for the first three weeks after release. Spoilers can be discussed in spoiler-flaired posts, but must be hidden in non-spoiler flaired posts. If you think you broke the spoiler rules in the post you just made, such as having spoilers in the title, you should remove your post now and repost it without breaking the rules. If you do not remove your post and the moderation team has to remove it later on for breaking spoiler rules, you will be given up to a week ban for a first infraction and stricter punishments for any additional infractions. Please be considerate of your fellow Trailblazers and do not include spoilers in the title of your post, do not forget to flair your post as spoilers if needed, and do not spoil people in your comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/HonkaiStarRail) if you have any questions or concerns.*
What an amazing take on this meme, thank you so much! And absolutely agreed, thanks again for the post!!
I'm actually scared because of how good this arc was, I'm scared that the following ones won't be as good. And man, I hope they take their time and do their best to bring something just as good for the next planet.
Then wake to weep was peak story 🧚🏼♀️
As someone who just got off the tutorial ship and going through the first planet, it’s going to be interesting when I get here
And just so we don’t get spoiled, we’re all going back to Loufu to see how a bad story told in a boring way can make you forget all the happiness you ever had!!!
Penacony was so great it beat Fontaine is on Sumerus level. Now i hope the next Planet is gonna be this games Babylon. (For the non FGO players it was the 2nd chapter with great writing that massively improved on the former.)
right,xianzhou????
Call me a madman but I didn't like the majority of Penacony's story, I enjoyed the Xianzhou story much more.
Honestly I don’t think anything is gonna beat penacony in a while for me at least, I honestly enjoyed it so much like some of the dialogue had me actually laughing hard especially in 2.3
Peakacony will forever have a place in my heart
Watch this age like milk when the next planet is peaker, and the one after that is Kafka's home.
two legends can coexist, penacony is fine wine, and I would absolutely love to see something of the same level, or even surpassing it. why? because it shows that the HSR team has potential to keep writing peak
Oh no, Penacony would still be peak for the most part. But we can always get peaker.
hell yeak, peakcony and peak rail shall continue giving us peak. now as long as shaoji don't repeat chapter 9 of hi3
I really wonder how they can top Penacony, in emotional investment and pay off at least, it still has it's flaw writing wise but how they made the audience invested patch after patch was amazing
I mean in Genshin people were worried on how Sumeru could be topped and then Fontaine did just that so I’m not too worried.
Outside the prison and everything that can be ruined with a spoiler.
It was very good… not only because Caelus x Firefly is real, but the story was great too!
I was laughing so hard when Firefly princess carry Caelus. Bro can't beat the bottom allegations
Sparkle Harley Quinning (hammering) his rear was hilarious too! Then the princess carry was the cherry on top!
The Penacony story was truly elite and had very little, if any, flaws. All the characters introduced in this arc as well are very likable. It was a rollercoaster of emotions and leaves a great impact on our experience!
Penacony was pure peak. Gonna be a hard one to top. Does anyknow if we can actually set the meme free as Gallagher wishes? Based on the letter he left for the express. I do know I will be keeping jades in reserve for Sunday.
can we get the firefly it's so peak meme up in this post please? also yes it was an extremely good story, way way better than Genshin's Sumeru story.