whump me bb one more time

Time travel plots are so hard, so, so, so hard, and unfortunately I think this one was not the best done. The confusion of which cycle we're in at any given moment feels deliberate, but in creating that confusion, they just catapulted me out of the narrative actively as I had to sit back and ensure I understood exactly where each character was on the timeline at any given point, particularly with the XX05, XX06, XX07 endings. I'm still not sure I've fully grasped it all.

Jesus Christ, where was the budget? Did it literally all go to the animated short and they left none of it for regular cutscenes??? Why were critical moments like the "Lygus craves Destruction" and "Mem becomes Cyrene" scenes left to static images? The Lygus one was especially egregious because it was just him painted over static images we'd already seen in Unknowable Domain, ooofff. The fact that Phainon's "inner hero" was using the generic NPC model took me the fuck out and let's please not give them a free pass with something like "Phainon's mental image of a hero was generic because he didn't know what real heroism looked like." I'm not willing to let the devs slide with such a blatantly budget-cut choice.

Who has the memories of which cycles at which point in time and who had them but lost them and who regained them but only pieces and who should have them but doesn't anymore and how did any of these memory transfers other than Phainon's even work? Mem!Cyrene, I am looking at you. (Hoyo: Please just stop thinking so hard about everything. Nod and smile at us, please.)

The decision to continue using Phainon's regular model for the cutscenes versus the other heirs even after he supposedly became Flame Reaver was definitely a choice. Like, I understand that we're seeing this from Phainon's perspective and he's holding on to that humanity, but in choosing only iterations where Phainon was showing his face while attacking the heirs, it just creates complete confusion over when he started taking the Flame Reaver form and why and in how many loops he looked like that, versus just appearing as regular Phainon. Also, why the fuck were we robbed of a sick cutscene actually showing him transforming into the Flame Reaver for the first time?

Phainon fighting Zephyro? Cool. Phainon fighting Zephyro in an animated short only instead of also as an actual playable fight, in a patch that otherwise had no new boss and literally only recycled old boss models and mechanics? Abysmally bad planning. What the fuck were the devs thinking? Out of everything I wasn't happy with this patch, the fact that they couldn't even give Phainon a new in-game boss to showcase his gameplay against was absolutely the biggest fumble. Colossally bad decision-making on the dev team's part, tbh.

Phainon's theme song is beautiful and atmospheric and it works exactly as is needed, but the theme song of the animated short doesn't have anywhere near the earworm value that "Proi Proi" had, and "Proi Proi" playing over actual combat made it immensely more hype to experience in-game. Overall, the lack of actual playable content in this patch just meant that it never hit the gamer high that 3.3 was able to hit with Aquila's boss fight. Normally I'm the last person to complain about the ratio of cutscene+dialogue compared to actual gameplay, because I would still play the game if it was nothing but a visual novel, but in this case, I think the lack of interaction was a serious missed opportunity. The power of video games as a medium is in their ability to link players' actions to the narrative, and this patch missed the mark by sidelining the player too much, at least for my taste.

Weirdly enough, while sidelining the actual player behind the keyboard, the story's absolute insistence that Trailblazer Must Be the Hero(tm), while definitely not surprising, ended up being done in the most disappointing way possible. I fully expected us to be the hero to save the day, but at least in Penacony, etc., they managed to make it feel mostly organic. Here, there was such an on-the-nose: "You were the real Deliverer all along, Trailblazer!" that it feels painfully shoehorned. I understand that, from a logical standpoint, an outside element was needed to break the loop, but for what reason did we watch Phainon bear the pain of being the "Deliverer" 33 million times only to have the title casually handed off in a dialogue option? Couldn't we at least have gotten a touching cutscene where Trailblazer reveals that their method for breaking the loops is to shoulder half of Phainon's burden with him, dividing the "weight" of the memories? It's not that it's wrong for the Trailblazer to become "the Deliverer" alongside Phainon, but the way it was done was so, so bad...

I think what was missing was the "through-line"--the final message of Phainon and Cyrene's first loop should have been, from the start, that they knew they could only buy time, that they had sent out some prayer beyond the heavens, themselves calling for a "Deliverer"--we needed to see them send out that call into space, and then face the reality that "we" left the call unanswered for 33 million cycles. While Phainon was dragging himself through every cycle, killing the heirs over and over, we should have seen him comforting himself with that thought: "Someone will come save us. We only have to carry on until the Deliverer arrives." And then we players would have had to sit with the pain of failing him over and over and over... Then, and only then, could our "becoming the Deliverer" really feel like something we had earned by our guilt--"Thank you for your hard work all this time. You can rest now, Phainon. I'm here."

It's not that this patch had no emotional impact on me, because it did, but... Every truly emotional moment in this patch had a weird layer of "distance" to it that other moments of Star Rail's gameplay did not. Acheron's farewell made me bawl, and I'm not even a Honkai Impact 3rd player. Castorice's animated short blew my heart to smithereens. This patch just never quite hit the right note to really pound on my heartstrings. Yes, watching Phainon drag himself through actual agony and torment was bad, but it could have been so much worse. Why did we not get to see him and Cyrene as carefree kids first, to really hammer home the extent of their loss of innocence? Why did we not get to see Phainon's model literally breaking down under the pain of carrying millions of coreflames? Why did we never get to see him with the blood of his friends on his hands, dealing with that agony directly? Why did we not get at least a tiny moment of our!Phainon having to reckon with the realization that he was the black-robed swordsman he'd hated his whole life, and that he was the one who had been killing his own comrades? We got tears but nothing of the horror the devs should have let that moment have.

Similarly, because the person we were watching descend into Destruction wasn't actually our!Phainon the whole time, there's a one-layer removal on the emotional attachment--this isn't really the person who we've walked beside all this time. This is happening to someone else, and he's just going to pass the memories on. It carries a different--and unfortunately lighter--weight than if our!Phainon had been the one actually forced to do those things.

How does the plot even reckon with Cyrene anymore? If she was literally deleted from Amphoreus's Time itself, how was she also able to reloop each time and ultimately have a sliver of herself become Mem? For that matter, why did she not age even in the first loop? I'm sure they'll put some effort into addressing this stuff in the next patch, but currently it just feels like a bit of a hand-wavy plothole, and especially the bit about her not aging just seems like a bid to buy time to avoid revealing her playable model. (Don't think too hard, Star.)

Honestly there were so many weird hand-wavy moments in this patch. Phainon's "Wow, I almost forgot what the fairies looked like" as an explanation for why Phainon didn't notice that Mem looked like a fairy from Aedes Elysiae might have kind of made sense if only it wasn't confusingly followed with Cyrene going "Oh come now, you wouldn't ever forget them!" Like okay but he did???

I'm sorry but Lygus is just not carrying the whole supervillain thing. Like on the one hand, maybe the devs really did want that simple and straightforward of a villain? But on the other hand, the entire thing just feels also way too... on the nose. Would a Genius-level Erudition pathstrider/possibly emanator (if the new As I've Written is to be believed, whoever is running Amphoreus's actual experiment is at least disguising themself as a Genius Society member) really be that obvious and easy to predict? Maybe I'm thinking into this WAYYYY too much, but at the risk of sounding like a crazy conspiracy theorist, I'd like to revive an early prediction of mine that Lygus is actually an avatar for Nous THEMSELF, conducting the experiment using the Scepter as a deliberate way to either develop a resource needed to defeat Destruction or to determine Nanook's true purpose--to solve the equation of Destruction and determine if it is needed to win "the war of the aeons"--perhaps Destruction is what can save us from Finality?

You know what doesn't get a complaint from me? The ridiculous Phaidei feast they threw in for the shippers on the side. The dev team's determination in going out of their way to repeatedly insist that Mydei is Phainon's designated love interest is truly wild. I respect the hustle.

You know who else gets a pass with no complaints? Nanook. I can't wait until we're all crying about THEIR tragic backstory in 10.X or something.

I am overall happy with the story quest patch. Phainon is living up to what I wanted to see in his character(more on this later) and everything fell into place pretty much as expected. Aside from a few moments of absolute confusion, I came out of the other side of this story feeling like I knew the significance of what was happening and why the Trailblazer can be seen as both ‘Deliverer’ and ‘random interloper’.

You have already laid out a pretty good outline of what I want to say so for now I will respond to your points.

I understand all of the animation complaints and it’s kinda sad that I pretty much was unphased by it because I am so used to that by now. I also have to remember that they are kneecapped by limitations like being a mobile game, and also the ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ problem. Phainon’s inner hero being a regular NPC model was something I definitely noticed but just went “Yep, it’s a literary/plot device that they are kind of messing up”. The fact that this arguably stupid plot device shows up again and is actually SO IMPORTANT to the story made me think they could have done away with it completely and just had Phainon tell the trailblazer “I can’t be a deliverer or a hero, I have to let it go.” and the trailblazer gets to say “I understand, give me your morals and last vestige of your self so I can see this through.” Then Phainon gets to go off and have a fun time destroying a couple of Galaxies and landing a hit on daddy Nanook. The fact that they had Phainon tell the orange NPC blob that he had to get rid of him was stupid and unneeded, considering that at no point before then had Phainon mentioned an inner hero.

I came away with a fairly decent understanding of who has the memories of all of the cycles. The way I understood it was that Original Phainon (Khaslana), holds all of them, and all of the coreflames, until his body physically cannot anymore. So he convinces (willingly or unwillingly) to have the newly birthed Phainon of that cycle take everything on. This makes that Phainon turn into Khaslana essentially. We can assume that the new Phainon also continues on until his body is at the limit. The interval of how many cycles he can last becomes fewer and fewer until every single cycle’s new Phainon has to be transformed into the Flame Reaver. The only person with the memories is that shattered soul of the original Phainon which lives on as the Flame Reaver, who performs the true flame chase. Cyrene had just enough memory and influence to trigger her side of things once the Trailblazer arrived. I might be missing a lot of info here because I was simply uninterested in who was remembering what, but at the end Cyrene didn’t seem so important in terms of who is carrying the right memories so long as someone can explain it all to the “Deliverer”. She passed on the most important information, and then all of her memory of the cycles shattered. (IDK here I was so tired when this quest was over but I also think that this will be more fleshed out in the next patch).

I really wish we could have at least had a static image of Khaslana’s deterioration over the course of his endless cycles. The regular Phainon model doesn’t do it justice, I understand that the artwork between scenes does show Phainon shattering more and more, but it doesn’t hit the same. Joshua Waters carries the burden of showing the slow devolution into the Flame Reaver through his voice alone, no visual backup, and I think he does a fantastic job. Totally agree on the lack of a transformation scene. It’s like they ran out of time to do something so he’s just suddenly the flame reaver. And no, I don’t want to explain it away as “Oh that’s how Phainon saw himself until he suddenly realized he was destroying himself.” He knew the whole time. Later on at the end he can admit his selfish flaw of carrying on with his own personal flame chase and how it broke his own soul and body.

I agree. No new boss was really fucking strange. Just a boss rush with no payoff for the player. I LOVE that animated short, it truly is a culmination of Khaslana’s character journey. I understand they won’t put in a boss fight for a character we might not see for three years, but even a Lygus confrontation would have been better.

I feel like this point is a continuation of the last, not a lot of playable content. I can’t tell if I am okay with it or not. The patch is actually huge with all of the events and I am actually personally okay with just having Phainon’s story and then playing other stuff for a while. There are a few more amphoreus patches and I try to have realistic expectations about when things can be released and how much work can be done for one story at a time. These games truly put out shittons of content on an 8 week cycle. It’s going to fall flat and I am surprised it doesn’t more often. I am in agreement that this one really did not let the player “play” the game and didn’t utilize video game mechanics as storytelling as well as it could have.

This is a point where I agreed with you in the first half of the patch but then realized that the point of Phainon going through all of those cycles wasn’t so he could be a deliverer. They were waiting for the person outside of Amphoreys to be it. IMO PomPom could be the deliverer if they were the one that landed there. The only thing the deliverer needs to do is break through to the outside world. The story cheapens the Deliverer once you realize that the Trailblazer, while special, isn’t the only one that could do it. Dan Heng could be it, anyone from outside of the simulation would work; they could bring the help that is needed and be a variable that isn’t controlled. Phainon wasn’t sidelined, he was relieved of one burden so that he could pick up another; one that he decided on many cycles before the end. He collected flames to destroy the Destruction. Please tell me if I am missing something, because Phainon choosing to not be the hero and letting that part of himself go was what I really wanted for that character and I feel that carries pretty heavy storytelling weight. (Too bad they chose to tell that story by letting a generic orange npc ‘merge’ with the trailblazer’).

I might be misremembering here, but I feel like the story told us fairly early on that they knew they were creating a loop and had to wait and that it could be a long time because there was no way to get a message out. I will have to watch again for this one. Phainon thought he was a hero at first, in a delusional way. My friend and I were watching him still wanting to complete the journey and both of us mentioned how delusional he is for thinking he can win when he knows he’s waiting for outside help. We recognized it as his flaw, then eventually we also guessed that his motivation changed from saving to destruction only to have it confirmed in the next scene. So I do feel like we understood the through-line the whole time, but I might be missing stuff here now too and looking back there were a few parts where I turned to my friend and said, “What the fuck is actually happening right now?” Also, I did feel like the TB taking on Phainon’s inner hero, that burden of deliverance, was more of a “You can go fuck shit up now” instead of “You can rest now”. Similar concepts, but different payoff for me personally. I consider myself a story drama accelerationist and I really REALLY wanted that bright-eyed hero from a small village to turn into a rage monster. Me being no better than Lygus.

Short and sweet. I agree. This patch felt a little distanced. I had more emotional damage from Aventurine and, back when I played Genshin Impact, Furina. In fact, I could tell they were going for the same emotional high as the Fontaine Archon Quest with the cycles and the shattering loneliness and all that. Fell short, but I still liked it.

I understand what you are saying. He wasn’t our Phainon, but at the same time he kinda is. All of the Phainons make the same decisions, they are the same person over and over, and now our Phainon’s memories now exist in Khaslana. He’s merged into what should be correctly interpreted as a horrifyingly tragic amalgamation of rage and power pointed at Nanook. The whole idea of Phainon was that, just like the rest of the flame chasers, he would always be the same every single time. We got to be the variable that made a different Phainon, and now we have his ‘hero within’ and perhaps that can be a beacon for him once he emerges as/from irontomb.

Not to be hand-wavy with this but I don’t remember enough of the very beginning of her stuff. But wasn’t that what she said she would do? Hide away somewhere outside of time? The reloop isn’t her restarting everything millions of times, it is because she took time and hid so they can reset back to 0 when the time comes. Without time Khaslana resets every cycle by destroying it all. (Much of that is explained in the computer log at the end of the quest. Khaslana is the reason behind every single reset when he fails to breach the Scepter.)

THE FUCKING FAIRIES ARE THE ONLY THING I HATE. Everything else I just go “huh whatever not a big deal, hoyo shit ammirite?” Where are these fairies coming from, why have we never heard about them? The Flame Reaver might have forgotten, but that doesn’t mean that the 33 million reborn Phainons forgot. And the only way I think this can be explained is that when a Phianon is reborn, he is brought to the moment before the destruction of his home. We get to go see fairies as TB, new Phainons don’t, so simulation just dumps them out of his memory. (vigorous hand waving).

I like Lygus. I like to hate him. And I wish the story had done a better job explaining how much control he actually has over Amphoreus. It took me reading the computer files to realize that he is an Administrator of the Amphoreus simulation and is sending data about the progress on the Destruction Equation to the IPC. It also looks like he has been testing the Equation’s real world applications. He might be an emanator for Nous, but we know that Erudition does not follow a moral path, it simply wants to learn.

Phaidei in this patch was so doomed. And so good. I love that they let Mydei be the only person that didn’t try to save Phainon. He saw Phainon’s self-destruction and went “bro me too, kill me and continue on”. There were so many moments where I was wondering why Mydei specifically, as part of the simulation, even exists. Original Phainon, who weighed a potential deliverer against Mydei’s people on the scales, started a flame chase of his own. To collect as many coreflames as he possibly could. And Mydei, who stood in his way every single time, got stabbed in the back by him. Phainon went to the library and burned it down. How many times did he hear the line, “You should visit my library.” Only for him to get there and nothing is changed, Mydei is still a god that must be killed. UGH. 

Phainon and Nanook parallels are starting to add up. If all of this pain and torture created what only amounts to a Lord Ravager, what made Nanook? And why does the Aeon have contempt for wanton destruction? He must also view his path as a way toward a rebirth of some kind. Or at least a deliverance from suffering.

I loved that Hyacin wanted to heal him. That she saw him as someone in need of help, but at the same time she knew she couldn’t. I could go on about this and other flame chasers but I am out of mental energy.