Kyogre

For now, I'm kinda eh about it.

New banners: Zankou is a skip (what would I do with another DPS) and Linko is... probably a skip? I don't feel like replacing anyone in my Nanally team, and I don't think there's room for her in the Chaos team, since she can't replace Hathor (necessary for remora passive) or Fadia (sustain) or Hotori (necessary for remora passive). Plus, I can already feel that selecting someone for the follow up thing would get on my nerves. She's cute, but I need to be rational about my pulls.

Reruns: Nanally and Hotori are back, and I'm vaguely considering pulling something for them. The thing is that Hotori sig wouldn't work for how I'm using her (I don't use her skill to record anything), and Nanally's sig is iirc reliant on using both skill and ult every rotation while Nanally... doesn't always get her ult back? Plus, while I like her, she's the one more likely to get booted out of endgame, since I'm determined to use Chaos on the other side. I'm kind of thinking of fishing for an A1 on one or both of them, though I'd need to check how much improvement it would be. Regardless, I'll wait for news on the 1.4 banners first. It's looking like we'll probably get Nitsa and maybe she'll be an important support.

New area: Vaguely disappointing. It's huge, but that likely means it's also super empty. It seems very focused on racing (hate it) and the beach stuff (hate it also). Otherwise, it's more of stuff we already have anyway. I don't foresee any interesting exploration there, and it's vaguely annoying to just get a resort instead of urban stuff. Unlike seemingly everyone else, I'm not looking forward to the theme park in 1.4 either. It's a small area with a bunch of stuff that doesn't look interesting to climb or run around in. What are we going to do? Ride the rides? I can already picture the camera jank.

This one hurts a fair amount because it's really feeling like a drought of exploration in this open world exploration game.

Story: It'll be interesting to see how/if they can resolve the current storyline. I don't have any particular expectations, but we know it's one single quest (because 999 told us that), and I feel like at least one character is going to get the Thyme situation again: bizarre sudden focus despite barely appearing until the climax.

Skins: MASSIVE disappointment. I wanted another Chaos skin, but it's a swimsuit? The slop of skins, truly. Everything is swimsuits, extremely unappealing. Well aside from the Zankou skins, which are... unexpectedly rather meh, imo? I really liked Shinku's skins, they felt very cohesive, but Zankou's are just kind of all over the place. Also, Linko is seemingly getting a school uniform skin. Cool, the other slop skin type. But hey, this makes the vehicle blind box an immediate skip, since they stuffed three swimsuits in there.

Events: It's really hard to tell what they're actually going to be, so I don't have any particular impressions at the moment. I did glimpse a namecard among the rewards for one of the jetski events, hopefully it'll be water-themed, which would make a nice set with my icon border and (soon to be bought) title. There was also one that looked like a rogue-like buff selector, and those kinds of modes can be a bit fun, depending on the execution.

Minor note, but I'm unreasonably annoyed about the bagel points influx at the start, since I went through the trouble of grinding those for the achievement. Might as well have not bothered...

New house: It's cute, but I feel like the small size of the rooms and hallways will make it feel very bad to actually move around in. The camera is just not able to handle tight spaces (not even mentioning the furniture placement mode). Anyway, the actual house itself is pretty irrelevant if they don't add more interesting furniture to decorate with and also do something about the anomaly furniture situation. atm you still have to visit specific houses to pick up the anomaly furniture daily/weekly drops, so you're basically locked to those being your "main" homes purely for simplicity.

Minigame updates: I'm indifferent about adding more minigames. Generally, there's no reason to play them. They're co-op or jank or just not more interesting than fishing, my staple (still need that title). I'm also unimpressed by them expanding the ways to burn PPH budget (I actually enjoyed doing the base version and cleared it easily and quickly whenever it reset) or the increased city stamina burn rate. Those aren't bad updates, and maybe there will be a day when I appreciate the convenience, but they don't matter to me now.

QOL: Not much to say here. The outfit rotation is theoretically interesting? But I don't think any of my overworld party will ever have enough outfits to be worth rotating through, and I use other characters too rarely to get tired of individual skins.

I think that's it? Pretty whatever, but I guess I'll keep grinding my usual things and wait for... October. Because that's when 1.4 will be.

It lays out some interesting details about the timeline and why the fanbase reacted SO negatively. Comments also point out that this is actually Infold's second time fumbling adding a new love interest to their otome games.

sigh x1 (Standard)

sigh x2 (light cone banner)

Yeah, no. It looks like DHPT is staying S0.

How the endgame is going:

Man, I'm only realizing now how bad Phainon's score was. Even E2 can't compensate for a fairly poor buff (the SPD one) and a bad team. And given that they buffed Robikini, we are in for some real hell soon.

AA was actually... really easy?

The only thing I want from AA is to clear and get the purple die, so this was actually way more than I needed. Anaxa is surprisingly capable when given Phainon's team :/

MOC.... finally finished, though it was a goddamn nightmare.

I actually did Graphia with Ashblade first, also in two cycles, while Phainon on Sparxie was seven cycles. However, I started trying to re-do the Sparxie run with slightly different teams (of third-rate supports) and it kept going way worse than before. Sparxie is just a uniquely awful boss. So I ended up switching them like this. Graphia with Phainon just becomes some annoying RNG about who gets targeted, both for energy/coreflames and for Graphia's CC.

But in the end, it just barely worked out. Funny enough, the final two hits necessary were done by Phainon outside his ult. I think he was actually one coreflame short of going into ult one last time before the cycle ended.

...Using Bronya with Phainon is just so miserable. Having to make sure to ult immediately after her advance specifically... urgh.

below 20: 4

20s: 1

30s: 1

40s: 6

50s: 2

60s: 0

low 70s: 0

74: 4

75: 3

76: 3

77: 5

78: 4

79: 4

80: 3

over 80: 2

The reason it's like this is that 74 is where soft pity starts. It escalates up from there, so in general you can expect to get a character by the 80th pull. I've only had to go over 80 twice.

This is counting only character banners, obvs, not the LC banner, which has a hard pity of 80 instead of 90, so the soft pity starts earlier as well. You generally get LCs at around 70 pulls.

Now, the only memoir rewards left are 2 pulls in CW:

For the story, tbh I started skipping really quickly. Overall, the premise of characters doing DnD just doesn't interest me, and while Mint is cute enough, I didn't find the character interactions enough to carry it. It really didn't help that Iroi... felt kinda off-putting. Glad we could play her here (and that the meta is quite mild right now) so I know to skip her, since I was considering her previously. It also doesn't help that the story seems to be just filler that introduces Shinku, who seems to not have any plot relevance either.

But that's fine. Skip button exists for this reason.

The gameplay is a mixed bag. It's fine for an event, but it's pretty shallow and not terribly refined. I liked the Jump King platforming the best out of everything. It was also fun getting to play Mint (and MC) for a good while before I got to the real endgame builds(tm). (btw, here is the video I used as a guide for those.) That said, it does start to drag later on because it's just mobs that die to the special event dot effects and are too tanky for literally anything else.

Probably the worst part was this damn accomplishment:

There seem to be very few sources of equipment to appraise? I think it's just mythic weapons and accessories that are repeatable. I got those endgame builds just for this and have vastly overfarmed the buttons in the process.

I'm actually a bit unsure how to spend them. I got all the MC outfit stuff, but I only like one of Mint's outfits. I did end up getting all the base versions for her too because why not, and I got the namecard and phone decorations. But the Shinku icon, icon border, costume, those are useless to me, I'm not going to pull her. I'm thinking maybe getting one of Iroi's outfits just in case, but they're currently locked anyway. The other option is really just getting the daily refreshing enemy drop substitutes anyway...

From the comments:

1. Mihoyo 6891 (+214 hires) 2. Kuro Games 2368 (+363 hires) -> Wuwa, PRG 3. Hypergryph 2165 (+493 hires) -> Arknights, Endfield 4. Happy Elements 1036 (+429 hires) -> Ensemble Stars, Silver Palace 5. Manjuu 661 (+184 hires) -> Azur Lane, Azur Promilia 6. Yostar 657 (+96 hires) -> mostly a publisher, Stella Sora 7. Seasun 565 (+84 hires) -> Snowbreak 8. Yongshi 554 (+13 hires) -> Aether Gazer 9. Hotta (Perfect World) 516 (+125 hires) -> ToF, NTE 10. Bluepoch 509 (+55 hires) -> Reverse 1999

and

For the people curious about mihoyo specifically As of the beginning of 2025 hoyo had -about 1000 employees for the studio working on ZZZ and tears of thermes -about 1300 working on HSR -about 2600 working on Genshin And had 100 working on HI3 back at that time, though om sure thats been cut since.

Right now, the only ones I'm missing are these four:

It does show how random 4 stars are, when we haven't gotten new ones for two years, and I still don't have them all maxed out.

Now I am..... 30 pulls into a guarantee. I need 20 more pulls to get Gil LC (in a week). I'll definitely get that, since the collab event alone gives a ten pull, but I'm not sure how much I show focus on pushing past that for DHPT E2. Still thinking about it... If I stop at 50 chara pity (40 LC pity), I'll be able to really easily get to E1S1 Ashveil next patch. You know he's rerunning since the event LC is for him. That would also be pretty good.

Anyway, regarding the story, it's kind of sad that they're making an effort in some areas I've seen complaints regarding. They re-used the idea of altering "peacetime" maps into post-devastation maps from Amphoreus (with the city and the TV tower), which in theory helps lend more atmosphere to the story, showing actual changes in the world, and they seem to have tried to make more dynamic presentation. There was one moment when the next quests starts by having Sunday, outside an actual scene, run up to you. Those kinds of little touches should help with the presentation shortcomings that are such a sore point for people.

Of course, at the same time, you have "boss fights" in Interplanar Jump which is... just not really going to do much here.

Badly!

Actually, Phainon and Ashblade do passably if they have their proper teams. I think it was like 3-ish cycles each? BUT the third team is such a mess that it's functionally meaningless.

Of course, I don't see any of the banners this patch being able to fix that. E2 DHPT is nice, but not THAT big an upgrade, Himenova would need Phainon's team (also, she feels miserable to play), Evernight needs mono rem, and Sparxie needs both Yaoguang and Sparkle. Second half is just trash banners.

"Funny" enough, I actually just got a copy of her on my alt too. I actually use her on my alt tho.

Here is me on 89 of 90 for standard banner:

You cannot get this in other games. The highest I've ever gone in HSR is 84. Genshin was either 84 or 85 as well. That's the point where the soft pity escalation gets to be so high that you can't really go past that. But I'm not an exception for hitting 89 in NTE. I've seen comments and screenshots from other as well.

(Btw, for those curious, if you hit pull 90 and trigger the hard pity, you roll the die -> a backhole appears and your die is swallowed up, disregarding whatever number you rolled -> you get the character -> your position on the board does not change.)

Aside from the text box issues, it's also just kind of confusing about what is needed or how things are used.

Regarding Planarcadia's maps, it's... interesting? Because they definitely were trying something with the Interplanar Jump system.

The only other kind of puzzle in Planarcadia is the color puzzles, which basically use the same style and models, just with the 3D rotation gimmick. And the maps overall are definitely smaller than Amphoreus because so much of the map "exploration" is actually in the Interplanar Jumps. There's entire sections of areas that you traverse only through that, most obviously in the TV tower but in other maps too.

This is very different from the previous worlds, which had multiple puzzles types that got updated with new versions and maps, including those that added to the map exploration, like the past/present gimmicks on Amphoreus or the wall running and bird's eye view stuff in Penacony. The 2D replaces that here.

And it's... it's hard to really pin down how I feel about that. I think that, if I felt positively about Planarcadia as a whole, I'd find some of it very cute. There's a lot of little gimmicks in the Jump sections, like assembling the robot, the fake kaiju reenactment, the Cocolia and Phantylia fights, or the drink mixing and the helicopter. Some of the stages are visually interesting and there is variation in the exact requirements for the gameplay (going by HSR standards, at least). I can see it being charming.

But I don't like Planarcadia, and this is very... in line with it in the worst ways.

Like, why is the avatar Pompom, but dressed in a bunch of kindergartner outfits? Why is the game so insanely patronizing, with the wispae constantly praising you for nothing? And just the blocky retro video game visuals on the whole... yes, all of Planarcadia is like that, but it's just not good? Akihabara But Even More is not a good or cohesive concept for a whole ass planet, especially not when you account for the supposed backstory of this place. And that's before you even get into the contents of these maps as a whole (the AE fes that recaps our "journey" when we just had the anni event doing the same thing?? and we have only three worlds to recap anyway??).

But aside from that, it really just feels very strange. Why does HSR need this kind of heavily used... side mode...? in the middle of its maps and story? They have working 3D models and 3D maps, we ran around very similar city maps in Penacony with more aesthetically suitable gimmicks, so why did we end up with this? Why did the team think this was the way to go?

I do have an entire rant about the weird mismatch in the story of HSR and its gameplay, but I'm not sure whether it's related. Maybe the team really did think that this was just such a cool (and money saving?) concept.

Chaos build while out of the active party, 57% crit:

When in active party but not yet in combat, you can see Street Boxer's first +14% crit has been applied (71% total):

After triggering Remora, second +14% applied (85% total):

I plan to run him with Hathor for her passive, so he'll get an additional 10% crit from her. It's when attacking Remora-affected enemies, so it probably won't show on the stat screen though. Still, the aim in Genshin and Wuwa was around 70% crit, so 85% should already be fine.

NTE is really nice in regard to the gear because there are no duplicate rolls into the same substat, unlike Genshin/HSR. Rather, you unlock a set of substats as you level up, like Wuwa, and you can see them when you get the module, like Genshin and HSR updated later to be.

But even better than Wuwa, there are no min/max rolls on substats. For example, Crit rate is always exactly 1% per square block on the gold pieces. So a Type II module (has two blocks) will always give 2% crit, a Type III will give 3%, etc.

Since Chaos can fill out all 20 of his grid, he can get a max of 30% crit rate (one of his type IIs doesn't have crit here, so he's only getting 18%). The console meanwhile can give 18% for the mainstat of 10% for the substat. These can double up (same main and sub stat), like in Wuwa, but this only applies for the console, not the modules.

So the total you can get on a character from console is 30+10+20=60% assuming they can fill their entire grid... though some characters can't, the requirements of the set make it impossible to maneuver the pieces to fully fit, like Hotori on Lost Radiance:

Those gaps are unavoidable from what I can see.

Chaos's sig gives 24% crit rate, while the BP arc on Hotori gives 22%.

So the total you'll get from console and arc will end up for 87-89%, counting the base 5% crit rate. But of course, this also means that character who don't have a crit arc or any other form of crit boost in their kit will end up with only 65%.

That said, my other DPS, Nanally who doesn't have a crit arc but does have the crit rate bonus from equipping specifically Type II pieces, up to 36%.

This means that for her and also Chaos, it's actually possible to overcap on Crit rate if they get it from every source they can. This is why Chaos should not run Crit rate console main stat (I'm trying to decide between Lakshana and cdmg for him), same for Nanally if you have her sig (though I don't).