What endlessly frustrates me about the writing in the moon arc is that it is so focused on technobabble and philosophical arguments that it completely neglects what even made honkai such a good story in the first place - the masterful portrayal of the characters' emotions, struggles and growth.
We love Kiana because we saw and heard how she was a bratty kid, and then became depressed, and then slowly climbed out of that hellhole. Props to the translaters, the scriptwriters, the voice actors, the staff behind the CGs. Mei's arc was heart-rending also because we saw how crushed she was by Kiana's struggles. Seele in CG slamming her fist on the ground and crying to herself, "Move, you coward!" will always haunt me. Veliona seeming like a psychopath and being pit against Saule and then eventually reconciling was the best thing ever, because the team really did such a good job of making it really seem like Veliona might harm Seele, and then later of conveying just how much Veliona actually loved her.
What do we get of that kind of character-building in this arc? Basically nothing. The characters are so busy talking about the technicalities of Project Stigma that we don't really know how they feel about the whole thing apart from (stock action movie hero voice) "that is so despicable and we will stop you!"
Senti is thankfully an exception, because she doesn't bother engaging with conversation unless it directly affects her. And she's got the right idea!
imo, when it comes to storytelling, the worldbuilding only needs to be as coherent as is necessary for the emotional stakes to make sense. The writers have spent so much time trying to explain the tech to us that they completely forgot about establishing the emotional stakes. Anyone who's stuck around with Honkai this long knows that the worldbuilding doesn't really make sense. Things gets retconned all the time. Anything that doesn't make sense gets blamed on Fenghuang Down. The writers really don't need to spend so much time convincing us that the worldbuilding make sense. We already know, it doesn't, and we loved you anyway. Why did you stop doing what you were good at?
Another thing that takes time away from actually establishing the emotional stakes is the philosophising. Okay, so most of the world is going to die and be reborn as a new entity that isn't really them. But the characters we love are mostly spared from that fate, so why should we care? I know this might make me sound heartless, but I only care about these fictional nameless people because the characters I love care about them. These nameless masses are fictional. I don't care. I can't even tell if the protags even care about these masses outside of an abstract "killing people bad" ideology. I don't know if it's because I haven't cleared the chapter yet (the writing is just that boring; the trio just met Kevin). But after hours of gameplay, the trio have never displayed any emotion outside of mere disapproval. The kind I might have when I go "wow that person has such a shit take on things, but I'll just live and let live". What are they even fighting for?
Granted, I do think the philosophical arguments are interesting and I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any in Honkai at all. But I can only enjoy it to a certain point, and it's not even done well here. We don't get to see any of the protagonists actually engaging with the philosophical argument. From what I can tell, it's just "Project Stigma is the only way some semblance of humanity can live past Finality" "Okay but CE isn't as driven into the corner as PE, can you let us try our things first before you effectively kill all of us?"
That's not a conversation. There's literally no emotional grappling with the fear that maybe, maybe Kevin is right and they will really fail, and that if they miss this chance then all of humanity really will be doomed.
Not to mention that we already covered this philosophical argument with the Kolosten arc. "Do a small group of elite, powerful people have the right to decide the fates of the masses, even when they've arguably already made it a good deal for them?" The answer is no, not when the timeline and form in which they existed would no longer exist, and when they didn't even consent to it. We got it! We had to go through that long arc to reach the moon arc! We got it! Can we move on to the character arcs now?
