u/flawlessfortress

I was thinking about season 2 versus season 3, as one does, and one idea I was chewing on was that I think overall they did a much better job of making the S3 characters thematically streamlined than most of the S2 characters.

• Norma - genius, mechanic, bangboo. No abilities except being real smart.
• Sigrid - knight, captain, horse. No abilities except being real strong.
• Velina - fixer, politician, diplomat. No abilities except being real good at wrangling idiots.

In comparison like fully half the 2.X cast has all these weird unique ether abilities that are briefly relevant in their designated plot chapters and then basically never become relevant again. ZZZ put all of these guns onto mantles and then none of them ever go off. Disappointing AF. Even when you suit up all the Avengers and go into the hollow to kick the creator's ass, your teammates all basically just need to blow up some rocks, and it honestly didn't matter whether it was Spook Shack or Belobog as long as they were there. All your support squads were basically interchangeable.

Just by incorporating some of the 2.X agent abilities into the story it could have been so much better. It's not even hard to give characters time to shine in a comic or something. You built this great cast of characters, let them show off a little.

• "You dare defy me? You cannot! I have HIDDEN some plot-important relic in a place you will never find it! It was buried by kidnapped workers who were all executed! Their secrets died with them! And none shall ever know - what are you doing? They're DEAD! How are they picking up the phone? Where was the foreshadowing? This is BULLSHIT!"
• "Even if you know its location, how will you access it? I dumped it down an ether anomaly pit guarded by HUNDREDS OF ETHEREALS! There is no way that somebody could simply walk past them and steal it without being BRUTALLY ASSAULTED! Wait! What? Are they blind? How is she DOING that?"
• "I knew this kind of thing might happen - but fortunately I have called in EXALTIST REINFORCEMENTS not just from Waifei, but from all of New Eridu! And you will NEVER KNOW where they will strike! What? You do? Somebody infiltrated our comms? Impossible! Only somebody who was BORN AND RAISED IN AN EXALTIST CULT could have possibly infiltrated our networks!"
• "No matter! Even a disordered assault is an assault! Your insignificant PubSec officers may have intercepted our reinforements, but there is no way your PUNY INFANTRY SQUADS will be able to defeat ONE HUNDRED MILITARY MECHS - huh? What!? Helios Academy's last machine talker? Alive? Locked the fuck in and ruining my whole day? She is supposed to be DEAD!"

I'm not even going to say that I'm writing a great story or whatever, it's cheesy as shit, I'm sure Hoyo could easily write something better if they tried. But that's the thing - they didn't try. They just boxed all of your teammates into little boxes that said "reinforcements" that they pushed around the map.

tl;dr - Season two could have been a lot more satisfying if they'd just tried a little harder to incorporate the full depth of the cast they created. I don't know if they ran out of time or if business constraints forced them to rush out of S2 ASAP or what, but it feels like they could have done a lot more. I think the devs realized that it's actually really hard to get it right and really did scale back on how many ideas they were cramming into each character with S3.

A guy who throws a party and only invites his lady friends is a sleaze, but a girl who throws a party and only invites the girls is just having a girl's night out.

Hoyo knows this so that when all the Belle players invite all the girls it's not weird, and when all the Wise harem gooners invite all the girls it's what they're into anyway.

Sorry to everyone who wanted to see Manato crack Wise :(

i was absolutely mogged

I take no credit in making this. A friend made this but he didn't want to post it here by himself so here I am posting it with his permission. May Remielle and Aria pullers be blessed with their 50/50 wins!

it's tough out there in new eridu

I found this video of a Japanese guy with a 30k Koleda DPS run against sbilly and it reminded me of the "DPS ben 50k" shitpost from way back when. I guess I'll never escape skill issue.

https://youtu.be/GxupGkJN5BU

M3W1 Koleda (Norma wengine) M0 Norma M2 Yuzuha and begging for Koleda potential.

I wanted her to follow me up the elevator but she didn't come, and when I went back down to get her I think the elevator pushed her through the floor.

Hopefully she has one of those rockets on hand.

As someone who has enjoyed pretty much every TV mode agent story and most of the side story commissions and wondered why they got rid of it, the abyss made me hate TV mode for the first time.

I don't even hate the TVs. I hate the fact that it takes 15 seconds of downtime in and out every time I have to fight some basic bitch ethereals. Withered Domain had this problem but at least slightly less so.

The ship has sailed, but if they kept the combat preloaded in the background so you could be in and out in 2 seconds like Hollow Zero, what is a truly mind-numbing experience could actually be somewhat fun. It's just sad.

Cissia is one of my favorite new characters but honestly the reason she's hanging around with us in Roscaelifer is sort of deranged. Jane just shows up one day and says "you can borrow my snake for a week" and then Severian calls and says "we don't want it back." So it's yours now.

Their loss honestly.

Pretty new player, but from reading this sub I've heard that one reason that they aren't making agent stories is that people didn't like them. I assume they're basing this partially on how many people play them, but I'm also wondering now if any of it is because new players just forget they exist.

I started playing a few weeks ago and did some agent stories and then dead-ass forgot they existed until I got to S2 and they said "go play Anby's story now" and I thought oh right, those exist. And I go back specifically to play them when I want to play one (and generally find them great, as good or better than a lot of the rest of the story), but they're not actually that easy to find in the UI all things considered. They don't show up in the schedule or content tables and there's no reminders that you haven't done them yet that exist for basically everything else in the game. They don't even mark whether you've completed them, just a NEW for whether you've ever seen them that goes away permanently if you ever look. You have to walk up to the video shelf yourself and remember which ones you did. Even the NPCs that want you to find their lost dog get quest icons over their heads.

Is there like, a reason it feels like they're hiding agent stories under the rug? Were too many people just getting filtered out by TV mode and quitting? Does it just take too long to do them so that new players aren't catching up with the story? I guess it doesn't necessarily translate into banner sales because, like, me liking Koleda's story doesn't mean I'm going to pull on her nonexistent banner. But whatever the reason it feels somewhat disappointing that it seems like agent stories are mostly going away.

I'm making my way through season 2, middle of the last chapter, lots of fun stuff, nice action scenes, etc. A bunch of squads are about to storm the Hollow, I don't yet know how that plays out except I'm fairly sure we win, but the second-to-last expedition we did has been bothering me a whole bunch.

[EDIT - wanted to emphasize that I was referring the second-to-last expedition with this team where YSG goes senseless, not the raid that's about to happen post-fix as I haven't finished it yet.]

We're going into Lemnian Hollow - fine. We need to bring Shunguang because sword - fine. We need a proxy - fine. Zhao wants to come - fine. And... wait, that's it?​

So we've brought one invalid, one person who collapses if she fights, and one babysitter to fight something that could be big enough to blow up all of Failume Heights. And then, predictably, you (the invalid) get jumped by an ethereal, forcing the girl who collapses if she fights to fight, upon which she immediately collapses.

BRUH.

We left an entire army just sitting outside evacuating civilians for what, exactly? I get that it's a gacha, we can't just have old characters following us around forever, but that didn't make sense even if you locked Failume Heights in a bottle. Please try harder to have this stuff make sense. Like, "I'm hiding the fact I'm back at Suibian Temple" kind of worked for the first half of season two. Even "Yixuan had to deal with bad news bears in Hollow Zero" is a real explanation. But this was just dumb.

tl;dr please Mihoyo if you're going to have characters not be around at least make it make sense. It also bothered me in previous chapters when Lycaon or Jufufu sometimes just literally said "I'm gonna do stuff now, bye" just to get them out of the story. At least tell us they're busy reversing the polarity fields or the whole ship will explode, so we can feel like it's reasonable that they're not around.

[Next Day Update] Okay, I guess I should have kept playing because the very next questline basically explains why Zhao and Lockspring made YSG do so much fighting, both of them were literally trying to screw you over during the first investigation. The total firepower of the team was fine, it just underperformed because it was 2/3rds made of enemy spies.

I guess I respect Mihoyo just very slightly more since the actual team composition almost makes sense now. Even though it's a suboptimal team, at least it's not a literal 0 IQ team anymore. Still not mad at myself for simply crashing out midquest though since my reaction to that scene was "this team JUST shit the bed and you're sending it again, REALLY?" since those facts didn't change.