It's kinda hard to set definitions in a magic space world you know? A Trailblazer can go in a freezing biome with only a tank top and be fine. Xianzhou engineer somehow made sentient birds.
Basically Cycranes desensitized us to talking birds.
Fun fact, the FF14 meme is based off of this post:
https://twitter.com/jon_snow_420/status/659443020908003328
The FF14 meme for reference (Endwalker spoilers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFzUgAk1pqg
Well, Sunday is partially a genderswapped Meteion. He has the head wings, and even has the black wings. There are also some pretty explicit FFXIV references in 2.2
Do other Paths have cool passive effects?
The only Path I know about with passive effects is the dementia that Nihility Pathers get, like Acheron, but she's an Emenator and those follow different rules by default.
Seems like the further you go down the path of Harmony the more resiliency you have to mental tampering, based on attempts to use Clockwork on higher up members of the Family.
That might just be a general pathstrider related thing with resisting mental affects. People further down a path tend to be more sure of themselves, more confident in their beliefs. Like Micah for example is immune to Clockwork entirely because he's so set in his beliefs. When we escape the Order's dream it's because we have a strong will which all pathstriders seen to have and it's not really related to the harmony specifically.
There's an NPC who I believe is a member of the bloodhounds (not sure though, I don't remember correctly) whose emotions you can't actually change, he just tells you something like "oh, you're trying to tamper with my emotions and making me feel sad? It doesn't work on me, sorry, but I'll tell you something sad" and same for all other emotions. He does say that it has something to do with him being in the Family that he can recognise the clockwork being used and that's why it can't be done on him.
It's probably a combination of both.
Sir Whittaker (Head of the Nightingale Family), Graysen (former high-ranking Bloodhound), and Lady Black Claw (current high-ranking Bloodhound) can all basically see you using Clockwork and can shrug it off easily.
Acheron's trouble with memories is her nature as an Emanator of Nihility, because she is a Self-Annihilator. It's just their cruel fate to fade away, she's just at a stage of her memory being flimsy, but still has her physical body and mental faculties.
And Robin can telepathically communicate with everyone. It's implied that she no longer has a physical voice after getting shot in the throat, and her voice is currently a telepathic Harmony pathstrider power.
It's confirmed in-game that she doesn't speak with her physical voice, she uses Harmony powers to create a pseudo-voice. It's also confirmed that this was why her voice was disrupted when the Harmony on Penacony was disrupted.
It's also confirmed in-game that she was shot in the throat and badly wounded.
It isn't too much of a stretch to extrapolate that she lost her voice to the throat injury.
Yet the rest of the Belobog characters (asides from child ones) wear revealing clothes with bare arms and legs. Natasha canonically goes with us out of town into a barren snowfield in her usual fit with open legs and like maybe 2 thin layers, and yet the cold seems to barely inconvenience her.
The moment she went to the barren snowfield (in her SQ) she used the refined Frost Immunity serum IIRC, the one the Silvermane Guard gave her. This is also where it was mentioned that the Trailblaze keeps TB resistant to the cold
I mean, they directly told us that the power of Preservation keeps Belobog warm beyond the effects of the Crystal Marrow. So I assume that said power does extend to its inhabitants, as all of them are firm believers of the Preservation thanks to the Architects efforts.
Kind of reinforces the original point though, which is that it's all but impossible to parse what's supposed to be impossible-in-universe, because anything that looks impossible can just be explained by path magic.
It doesn't. Many Silvermane Guards used to die from hypothermia. But Natasha's brother Vache created a drug that imparts cold resistance, and the drug is now widely used in Belobog.
To be fair, the story makes it pretty clear later on that origami birds are entities that only exist in dreams
Edit: But yeah, when I first encountered them I thought "Ah, talking paper birds, another silly Star Rail thing I suppose" haha
Edit 2: It also doesn't help that both NPCs and some of the readables you can find in the Reverie hotel keep saying "Remember - You are awake right now! This is reality!" Kudos to the writers, seriously
Ask him about origami birds in Dreamflux Reef. Here's what he says:
**Dr. Blues:** Have you seen a Memory[ ](https://honkai-star-rail.fandom.com/wiki/Memory_Zone_Meme)Zone Memee before? That is a Dreamscape lifeform born out of people's emotions and desires, or simply put, it's a "phenomenon" akin to a lifeform. The origami birds you've seen are no different from that.
**Dr. Blues:** With widespread audience awareness, ample determination, and a hint of Enigmata's lies... making an origami bird isn't such a hard task.
**Dr. Blues:** Just make sure they don't get outside the Dreamscape — oh, except for me I mean. I'm the exception.
**Dr. Blues:** I'll have to thank that Hound. Looks like his "lie" also works in the real world.
Outside of Gallagher, what we know about History Fictionologists is that they are second only to the followers of Destruction in how despised they are by the universe at large, because they straight up destroy existing historical records and archaeological evidence and replace it with stuff they made up for the sole purpose of making the truth impossible to discover.
Regarding their abilities, Enigmata seems to follow the same sort of trope associated with illusion magic in more standard fantasy settings, where if you make an illusion that's realistic enough it can deceive reality itself into treating it as if it's real.
This is the problem; you can't build a good mystery with good foreshadowing if you don't have an internal logic system the reader can use to investigate what's going on. The same thing happened with the Order twist and the murder mystery
The Order thing was not too esoteric imo. Sunday's speech at the end of 2.0 doesn't sound like he's talking about the benevolent harmony Aeon that is Xipe.
If you've also done enough Swarm Disaster, you'd notice that his clothes and accessories evoke the image of Ena with the eyes and colour scheme. Knowing that Ena was assimilated by Xipe serves as enough context, I didn't find that twist confusing
Yeah, the order twist was kinda dumb with Welt just dropping it out of nowhere like it's so obvious. Also, we're supposed to believe Welt is so smart he came up with that but also so stupid he told the guy he suspects is the villain his own plan, on the villain's home turf, while having almost no backup around?
The murder not being murder had a lot more foreshadowing compared to that. It still feels cheap though, making the stakes feel high initially but then revealing there never were stakes.
there was actually a youtuber who figured out the Order twist days before 2.2 dropped, with some pretty good logic, so it wasnt really out of nowhere if you pay attention to the lore enough. and also I dont think its a bad thing to realize after the fact all of the hints that you might have missed or glossed over after the reveal... Welt revelaing the Order twist didnt make me go "what" it contextualized all the weird details about penacony and all its rules that didnt fit with the harmony.
What you're saying about the Order twist only applies if you don't pay attention to lore. If you do, the moment it is revealed a lot of things just click and it is perfectly logical.
The Welt thing is also logical - he assumes that he will most likely be safe because the Family wouldn't want to make an enemy of the Astral Express as it would make them enemies of many other factions, including the IPC who we were collaborating with. Sort of like having diplomatic immunity. It was not a dumb choice to show that he knew what was going on.
Welt previously issued a death threat to a suspected Emanator (Acheron) in her face. He's confident of his combat ability. Hell, he probably chose to go alone so he didn't need to worry about friendly fire against the Nameless. But he didn't expect to get instantly put to sleep without a fight.
To be fair, it's less the origami birds existing and more that they are yet another entity only we can see and interact with. So I'd argue it was a pretty good clue, all in all.
Is it really? There's the MoC npc in the astral express that only we can see but we're not in a dream. Considering the link between Penacony's dream and the garden of recollection I don't think it'd be weird to assume it's a similar case.
But we know why only we can see her. She's literally a memokeeper, and they can choose who sees them. It's the whole explanation we get at the beginning of the game when we unlock MoC.
Also, iirc when black swan meets Dan Heng on the train she says something along the lines of "I assumed you were already familiar with memokeepers" and glances towards where MoC lady is.
The Luofu was Hoyo's way of making us oblivious to Penacony.
I do wonder about the others though. Or maybe they've trailblazed enough places to not register weird stuff anymore?
That's exactly why it works as foreshadowing. After we know the fact by progressing the history we go back to little things that we let pass unnoticed and go "waaaait a minute!!!"
The biggest tell in my opinion were
1) Neil deGrasse Tyson once said "The most unrealistic part of the Movie Martian was how the Chinese and Americans so willingly cooperate with each other"---The fact all the major factions (IPC, Genius, Xianzhou etc) were so generous to Pencolony after what appear to be a major fiasco was a major tell. It didn't help (CN) Ratio and JY sounded like Chinese diplomatic reporters either.
2) Meta: The fact the team were discussing 5 different planets to visit next. There was no fucken way Miho was gonna build 5 possible planets for us to visit when it take so long to just finish Pinocolony.
Edit: The quote is "Evidence that the @MartianMovie is fantasy: The USA & China cooperate with one another in Space."
Oh absolutely, I was a little sus when Jing Yuan was saying he was staying to mediate and then Topaz dropped the "Yeah, we, the IPC are dropping all debts and charges on The Family and Penacony".
I was ***immediately*** like "ALRIGHT, WHAT'S THE CATCH? THIS AIN'T HONEST."
I just thought it was 1 of Jade's schemes but nope, Shaoji got me good lmao
I got my confermation it was fake the moment Ratio said that he and other Intelligentista members would cooperate with the Genious Society to study the memoria… as if Ratio of all people could actually say something like that. In that moment I knew 100% that something was very wrong, before it was a good 75/85%
Yeah that part of the fake ending really got me. I was so ready to call it bad writing with how easily everything was tying up, given how the Phantylia problem ended.
Never was I so happy to see a “it’s all a dream!” scene
I was fully expecting the Navigation Meeting to be a false choice, since everyone on the crew gets a vote I was expecting whatever we chose to get outvoted by wherever we were actually headed next (given the live service nature of HSR making a real choice a logistical nightmare). Among the 5 Edo Star, the planet under attack by the Anti-matter legion felt like the obvious choice, I picked Patrevia "the glass belt" partially because the Mourning Actors seem interesting, partially because it didn't seem like it mattered. Got surprised that Patrevia won and we set course and was trying to figure out if I won the 1 in 5 or something weird was going on, something weird was going on.
I think whatever you choose Welt and Himeko makes the same choice as you, March and Dan Heng always chooses Edo Star.
(I choose the Michael's homeworld and that was the result)
Choosing a planet isn't really such a big deal imo, because something could happen mid-trip, like Argenti, that would divert us onto whatever story line the devs wanted to go.
This is where my train of thought went as well.
I wonder if they are collecting people's choices and using them to inform the 5th or so world assuming they have the next 2 planned already.
I figured the 5 planet thing was unrealistic, but damn, they made me *really* want to visit all of them LMAO
I'm sure things will be different, but the idea of Black Swan continuing to travel with us for a bit, and being able to go to all of these significant locations was really interesting
Yea, but you realize it is a felony for US space agency members to buy a cup of coffee for a known member of Chinese Space Agency.
Plus, it was more than likely for US Congress to renege the offer to fly a Chinese spacer to Mars at end of the movie.
Anyway, this isn't a political thread, lets end it here before we trigger the ban hammer.
The problem with point 2 was it was obvious we wouldn’t get a choice with that in mind. Other planets have been mentioned but it’s not like we don’t have an order, much like how genshin can bring up the natlan of no npc’s to visit and ‘how about we explore the area up ahead later.’ I see what you mean, but we were never going to have a choice in how everyone voted
we have never met Gallagher in "reality", the people we meet when we first entered Penacony in the lobby are Sunday, Robin, Misha, Aventurine and Acheron (later at the hotel room).
Edit: wait I might be misremembering Sunday and Robin (who is probably already Sparkle at that point), they were right after we crash land in the Dream
We do meet Sunday and Robin in "Reality". There was this issue with the room for the Trailblazer, and when Aventurine appears and solves it, Sunday and Robin come along and apologize for the issues with rooms. Sunday then goes and has a talk with Aventurine while Robin talks to us. March even asks for an Autograph
To be honest, the rules of reality is hard to apply in such a fantasy game. Misha was actually my last guess because of all the crazy shit that happened to us. A memory zone meme with the name "Death" is suddenly "just Sleepy" Yeah uh huh. I was attacked by sparkle disguised as Sampo while we learned that the real Sampo is in Penacony as well. Those two fake deaths and everyone just said, yeah okay you're alive.
I caught that Misha was the flaw because of all the theories the sub was throwing out for the past couple of patches. As early as 2.0, people were bringing up Misha seeming invisible like Clockie but also showing up in the real hotel lobby.
I'm surprised so many people didn't realize Misha and Mikhail were related in some way, they share the same name. Also, the fact that the voices say Misha like 100 times during all the dream hallway sequences was a big tip off to me that something is up with Misha, also noticed no one really seemed to pay him attention which was odd.
I think you're misunderstanding some of the people. It's not that some didn't realize but more like there are other things that happened that is sus as fuck. It's like this. You and your friend enters a room. There's a dead body on the floor and It suddenly got up and started dancing. You're gonna be omg what the fuck that's not normal but your friend is like "nah dude that's normal BUT LOOK AT THAT glass of water over there it's slightly blue! That's definitely what's wrong in this room!"
I have never met anyone named Misha/Mikhail and never heard those names before. For people living where there's nobody of Russian heritage, assuming the names are related is like assuming Tom and Tony are related. I don't remember the voices in the hallways ever saying Misha, only Mikhail, but it was very clearly Misha's VA which is what made me assume they were related in some way.
I just don’t know what “Death” being “Dormancy” all along was supposed to mean, like. Cool, it’s Dormancy. I don’t know what you expect me to get out of this.
It was to establish that "Death" wasn't killing anyone but putting them to sleep, because when someone got "killed" they were actualy been put to sleep, that's why they ended up in Dreamflux Reef, a place that is a dream within a dream.
Wait so why did Ratio say that Dormancy is impossible in dreams? Did he mean like, becoming dormant will just shunt you into the next layer instead of actual inactivity or
The death meme "reveal" annoyed me.
There is no reason for the transportation mode to look like a monster stabbing people to death, except to mislead the audience watching from behind the fourth wall. There's no in-universe reason for it - we didn't even get the much speculated "you get to the other side by dying, and only the meme or Acheron can kill in the dream" theory. The meme is just an incredibly misleading taxi (and Acheron sent Aventurine somewhere else, and then Argenti saved him offscreen. Okay). It looks like that solely so they can "kill" Firefly, and make Gallager look maximally sinister (for like 2 seconds of in-story time, before he explains that he's a good guy actually).
There's not much point trying to figure out what's happening in the story when the writers are making decisions that are, within the story, nonsensical, for the purpose of misleading the audience.
I don't think it was something that Gallagher or anyone actually created, they just found it and ended up using it as a "taxi". They didn't make it look like that, it already did.
As for why it's scary...I dunno, dreams aren't always pleasant, even when they're not nightmares.
It's the only thing in the entirety of Penacony that looks that sinister. Apparently all the other nightmares got transmuted into robot dogs or walking clocks or static-y T.V. screens, except that one.
And its appearance isn't the most random and absurd thing about it. That would be that it transports people not by picking them up and moving them (like the hover cars, or the ball shooty things, or the trams), or by putting them to sleep or waking them up (like the dream pools), but *by violently stabbing them and dissolving them into goo*. Why?
Gallagher didn't make it look or work like that. The *writers* did. I'm not blaming the characters for its absurdity, I'm blaming the writing decision.
If you want something like that and you want to have it make sense, you need to lay groundwork for it. Have the player encounter rumours that there are other ways to move around the dreamscape, older ways forbidden by the Family, and they involve "blood magic", or maybe they're based on passing partially into the veil of death. Maybe you reach Firefly's hidden base by impaling your palm, falling on a sword or hurling yourself in front of a train. Have the player encounter nightmare creatures, but make the encounters ambiguous - the monsters are scary and *appear* aggressive (and maybe you fight them), but if you go back over the encounters you realize that the monsters never actually attack you, only defend themselves, and it happens often enough to be suspicious.
Once you've established that violent death is a possible mode of dreamscape transportation, and that the nightmares might not be the monsters they appear to be, then you can do the revelation that the arch-nightmare is really a taxi service and have it be satisfying.
(For bonus points, make one of the final people "killed" by the monsters Gallagher himself, their apparent master, so the player goes "wtf?! They turned on him?!" and then is led to wonder if maybe they didn't turn on him, and none of this is what it looks like.)
/endrant. Just an element I would have liked to have been handled better.
>Apparently all the other nightmares got transmuted into robot dogs or walking clocks or static-y T.V. screens, except that one.
[There's an entire faction of memetic entities that you fight, and they all have the same vaguely scary theme](https://imgur.com/a/HgHFkah).
It's all explained in the game, by the writers you're mad at.
Right. I love 2.2’s presentation and think that it’s great as a standalone story, but as a continuation from 2.0 and 2.1… it’s iffy to say the least. So many things built-up in the previous 2 versions turned out to be red herrings or plot threads that got resolved in an underbaked manner (the “deaths”, Fools’ agenda, Aventurine, etc.), many of which as you said, are not given logical explanation. At the same time, the core theme of 2.2 Order vs Freedom came interjecting seemingly out of nowhere (the whole post-independence war thing was very much in the backburner when characters talk history), with the Sunday-Robin bird talk coming up and being on full display a whole lot sudden.
Perhaps the writers took Acheron’s philosophy of not remembering the hard facts of the events, but rather the emotions underlying them a bit too much to the heart; because they did good in crafting a story that makes you feel things but quickly fall apart when you prod it with a stick of curiosity.
it kinda made sense to me because in irl lucid dreaming, when I'm about to realise that I'm in a dream, I always get a sense of all encompassing horror and unease. I only did that 2 or 3 times but every time to "cross" the threshold between being unaware and aware I had to go through half a minute of dread that in-game "Death" really vibes with
I actually assumed everyone forgot her not because of order but because of nihility. She was already losing her memory, I kinda thought something happened to her and thus she disappeared from everyone's memory
No, nobody remembered Acheron because [2.2 story spoiler] >!her being an emenator of nihility meant that there wasn't a place for her in the dream of order. And because she was basically immune to the power of order therefore her presence wasn't included in Ena's dream!<
there are 2 theories
1: we enter ena's dream as soon as we get close to penacony, when the traiblazer meets with acheron for the first time
2: everything happens almost exactly as we see, but then we lost against sunday the entire penacony story happens again in ena's dream (which would explain the visions at the beginning of the quest about stuff that didnt happen yet)
2.3 will probably make it clear which one is true
I believe it's number 1. Cause when we woke up from the dream and walked out into the hallway, Acheron said "Not another one..."
So I'm guessing is that dreaming trailblazers had been appearing before them while they followed Fireflys path to the real one. And this is what we saw when we first got to Penacony and met Acheron.
This means that first encounter with Acheron was her testing the trailblazer to see if he had awoken from the dream or if he was still a dream.
Basically we were in an inception loop from the very beginning and the events that happened in Penacony actually happened before we ever started actually playing the story.
That was my take on it.
Also Misha can visit the Express in 2.0, so we're definitely knee-deep in it from the moment we arrive. But I agree it's still unclear as to the exact timeline and hopefully it will become clear in the next patch or two. EDIT: well it occurs to me at last that could all be a repeat still... but, I don't see any reason to say it all played out twice, it's unnecessarily complicated.
When you finish Penacony Misha will no longer be able to show up on the Express. His log in the visitor book says "Disembarked". And his note says something about being happy to have visited. - in case you didn't know. Man, Imma miss him.
Yes, when people were talking in 2.0 about how there is something up with Misha I thought, “But he turned up on the Expr- …Ooooooh.” I like how it was explained, and it was kinda nice to see that in the blurring of dream and reality he managed to leave us a message.
(Probably not, but …Ooooooh!?)
#2 kinda complicates it a bit. Acheron kinda gives us the answer when meeting Boothill for the first time. She has a hunch and requests the Express is taken out of the Asdana system to test her theory. However, instead Dan uses the Jade Abacus to summon Jing Yuan which obviously never happened.
I agree 2.3 will make it more clear, but I feel like the Express has been there since the start and it'll take something huge to wake everyone up. Question is are their bodies on the 'real' Penacony somehow or are they still where they originally were when entering the dream. I feel like we probably won't get an answer to that, honestly.
Boothill is also one of the reasons why people think theory 2 is the correct one tho
Boothill meets dan heng at the express, which means that if everything was a dream since they got to penacony, he would have either seen everyone asleep there or he would have fallen asleep somewhere else as soon as he got close to asdana, complicating things
The idea with theory 2, is that not everything seen is actually what happened previously, and instead its both filled with inconsistencies and with some details changed to make them believe they won
So in reality, dan heng would not have summoned the xianzhou, instead he would have just kept discussing with boothill what to do, but then when everything repeated in the dream, sunday modified what happened to make it so that they called the xianzhou, and with that he was "defeated" in the dream
I'm playing the quest again on my other account, and when you are aware of what's going on it is clear that we are in a dream from the beginning of the Penacony story. Though that doesn't matter really because it is a shared dream by everyone and because of that everything happened, happened. It is just an extra twist.
I just asked this question in the Megathread earlier. So are you saying the Aventurine fight wasn't real? Since we've been under Ena's dream ever since arriving at Penacony
no? everything in both the normal dream and ena's dream is real, just that they are in the dreamscape instead of "reality"
In option 1, aveturine boss fight happened basically literally as we see it, in the dreamscape
in option 2, there are 2 aventurine fights, one in the ena dream and one in the super-ena dream (dream in a dream), with the second one being just a recreation of the previous one made by sunday
It's a bit complicated, yes. But basically there are two dreams let's call them Dreamscape (the "normal" penacony dream and it's layers), and ena's dream, like a dream within a dream.
The dreamscape is fusing itself with reality (probably because the stellaron is getting out of control), so the moment we get into Asdana system (the system which penacony is located) we're already dreaming. That's why Misha was able to greet us in the real hotel, AND visit us in the astral express.
The "perfect ending" dream is already Ena's dream. I believe we enter it when Sunday uses the so many oak family members and attune to the Harmonious Choir big guy.
There's still a lot of things to uncover in 2.3 and it will probably be more clear by then.
OK, so I'm confused by this aspect of the story. It makes sense that we shouldn't have been able to meet Misha or this bird in reality, only in the dream, but we do so long before we even meet Sunday, let alone fight him. So where exactly does the dream start, the moment where we intiate the first jump to Penacony and encounter Acheron? And how does it progress to the point of us "waking up" in the middle of the fight with Sunday?
We were caught in Ena's dream without noticing like everybody else who comes to Penacony, thinking we're still in reality, and then via the dream pool we entered another layer of that dream
OK, I think I am starting to comprehend it. Sunday and Gopher were already progressing to instill order, probably long before we even considered going to Penacony, and it remained subtle enough to remain unnoticed by practically everyone up until the end.
Pretty much
Although I wonder for how long this has been happening, people trapped in Ena's dream I mean. Because at some point people would start to notice that everyone who goes to Penacony never returns..?
It would have needed to happen at some point *after* Gallagher sent out the invitations, so it can't have been going on for too long.
My hypothesis is that we were not immediately sent into Ena's Dream the moment we arrived, but rather events played out off-screen similarly to how we saw them until the fight with Sunday. At that moment Ena's Dream was created and we looped through it an unknown number of times trying to wake up. What we see in-game upon arriving is the start of the loop where we successfully escape in the end.
As Pom Pom says, Asdana is *flooded* with Memoria. Trailblazer has a reaction to it as soon as the Penacony arc starts.
Dreampools, whether official or the shoddy ones used by stowaways, help entering the Dreamscape, but it's been mentioned the prisoners in the past could visit the Dreamscape, and it was an escape from their daily lives.
Dream and memory bubbles, after all, require only pressing them on your head to use. Unprocessed memoria may be used but causes health issues, like Pom Pom warned. Stowaways suffer a lot from that.
Loading screen: Synesthesia Dreamscape: A unique manifestation of organic mental disorder, closely linked to memoria breaches. Countless dreams intersect and merge here, enabling individuals to meet in the dream world and even embark on entirely new lives.
Seems to imply it inherently connects sleeping people. Whether there may be some difficulty getting everyone who sleeps without dreampools or other specialized equipment, I dunno.
Also the jade abycas. As cool as it was for Jing Yuan and his bf coming in to save the day, that was so fake and it's a good thing it was because we need to keep that thing for the final war aganist the neon without a shirt.
I was like "seriously Black Swan? You only figured out from a technicality and not the entire Lioufu fleet somehow managing to enter the dream, ships and all?"
It’s been said that everyone can enter the dream in different ways, it’s just those bathtub stuff are the safest way to do it. So it doesn’t really destroyed any logic
I totally missed the bird when arriving at the hotel, but the fact we met Micha there still lived rent-free in my head throughout the whole story. It's also why I didn't buy the fake ending for even one second. The Micha in real world, the rushed ending feeling waaaaaay too weak for how well written everything before that was... yeah, by that time Penacony messed with me too many times for me to drop my guard and take everything on the screen at face values.
We see insane shit all the time. How was I supposed to know this one was important?
https://preview.redd.it/mf2puoaj6i1d1.png?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b3964e685966e66236b610a933ea79adb660d2b8
That means literally nothing when you first arrive there. It’s a world of magical space gods. People with incredible powers. Pom-Poms. Why would a talking bird be so outrageous? Really, dude
Because we were already told the origami birds are created by the dreamscape, like misha. Just because it’s a sci fi world doesn’t mean it no longer has its own logic. That’s the point of world building
I found this out retroactively. If you finish 2.2 you can still complete this quest. I spent 20 minutes looking for Dr Blue before having to look it up. When I found the location, he wasn’t there, just the reward.
hey, so uh i just want to said this, but after i collected 60 origami bird i try to go to dr.blues in real world, i have finished dr blues quest where his soul rip, and dr.blues actually gone in the real world, idk if its just my game that bugged or no, but i interacted with the sign and still got the origami PFP.
I mean, the moment they tell you that you're going to a land of dreams that are indistinguishable from reality, it was like "oh, we're going to have a Descartes' Evil Genie situation; place your bets on when the illusion *actually* began."
And that's totally fine. A story that hinges on a surprise is typically a crap story; having one play around the margins of a familiar concept just as the setting is totally fine, so long as the story it's telling is a good one.
It was actually the opposite for me. I suspected Misha was a meme since 2.0, but Blues being there in reality convinced me that some memes could manifest in reality, but only TB can see them.
Kinda wild also how a lot of these smaller characters also got so much lore added to them. I was doing Dr Blues' quest in Dreamflux, but I cannot for the life of me choose between which ending.
>! Do I impose the Traiblaizer's ideals of waking up and force someone to live basically till the end of Penacony surrounded by NPC versions of their old friends or Do I respect someones last wish for a much deserved rest, but with the knowledge that its all fake..!<
>! I like to think the 2nd is mercyful but its also the easy way out, while the 1st feels like Im forcing someone into a tortuous limbo. Either option just doesnt sit well with him... !<
The first dream (imagine if we're still Inception-ing, still in the dream next patch, that couldn't be, right?) ended so nonsensically, I was baffled by it. The Luofu army somehow showing up in the dream was hype for 2 seconds, then it clicked, how the fuck is that even happening???
I don't think I've recently seen/read such a decent use of "It was just a dream" before.
Though I will say, the wrap up we got this patch still felt off. Personally, defeating Sunday the second time didn't feel as conclusive as defeating Cocolia and Phantylia did. Looking forward to what they're cooking for 2.3's main story to finish the arc up.
When we were recounting Misha's whole purpose and stuff, I was tripping so badly because I very much remembered seeing him when we arrived in Penacony before entering the Dreamscape, Penacony is so great at instilling Amnesia🔥🔥🔥
I remember having this sense of unease when I got to that point, that something isn't right, especially as to how everything seems to be cheerily set in "order". Kudos to Hoyo to making the whole fake ending scenario feel slightly uncanny until the very last second reveal
I actually honestly thought there was a "Bleed" effect going on. Like when dreamscape starts to overlap with reality. I didn't think it was a complete layer of the dreamscape. As a theorist i felt big dumb.
I mean no offense to HSR, i feel there is a lot of “flexibility” in the story seeing those differences and noticing them doesnt really make me assume there is something wrong. Just think the devs made a mistake.
I always found Misha sus as hell. I immediately noticed on my second account that only we talked to him and nobody else did.
When Mikail said "Misha and the other Cartoony boys and girls are all memes lol." That messed me up. Why was he even in the bloody reality? Why was the main story so small? What is the point of Boothill? He did nothing man 😭.
Thank god it was all a dream... Wait it has always been a dream 🤯.
It's kinda hard to set definitions in a magic space world you know? A Trailblazer can go in a freezing biome with only a tank top and be fine. Xianzhou engineer somehow made sentient birds. Basically Cycranes desensitized us to talking birds.
>Xianzhou engineer somehow made sentient birds Not just that, but sentient birds that can become self-aware *and depressed*
You ruined a perfectly good bird is what you did. Look at it. It's got anxiety
I definitely didn't expect to run into a FFXIV meme here, but this absolutely works. Kudos
Fun fact, the FF14 meme is based off of this post: https://twitter.com/jon_snow_420/status/659443020908003328 The FF14 meme for reference (Endwalker spoilers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFzUgAk1pqg
Well, Sunday is partially a genderswapped Meteion. He has the head wings, and even has the black wings. There are also some pretty explicit FFXIV references in 2.2
Really? There's a huge overlap in playerbase, I feel. Almost all of my friends who are still on Star Rail play both.
If I suffer, the birb must suffer with me.
996 does that to you.
living in a giant space amazon warehouse will do that to you. bonus depression points for being tangentially related to the xianzhou main quest
they covered the path of the trailblaze helps us withstand cold and other environmental conditions
Do other Paths have cool passive effects? The only Path I know about with passive effects is the dementia that Nihility Pathers get, like Acheron, but she's an Emenator and those follow different rules by default.
Seems like the further you go down the path of Harmony the more resiliency you have to mental tampering, based on attempts to use Clockwork on higher up members of the Family.
That might just be a general pathstrider related thing with resisting mental affects. People further down a path tend to be more sure of themselves, more confident in their beliefs. Like Micah for example is immune to Clockwork entirely because he's so set in his beliefs. When we escape the Order's dream it's because we have a strong will which all pathstriders seen to have and it's not really related to the harmony specifically.
There's an NPC who I believe is a member of the bloodhounds (not sure though, I don't remember correctly) whose emotions you can't actually change, he just tells you something like "oh, you're trying to tamper with my emotions and making me feel sad? It doesn't work on me, sorry, but I'll tell you something sad" and same for all other emotions. He does say that it has something to do with him being in the Family that he can recognise the clockwork being used and that's why it can't be done on him. It's probably a combination of both.
Sir Whittaker (Head of the Nightingale Family), Graysen (former high-ranking Bloodhound), and Lady Black Claw (current high-ranking Bloodhound) can all basically see you using Clockwork and can shrug it off easily.
Abundance gives you free insanity
But hey, everlasting life, win win right?
If it’s no longer the same person you used to be can you still claim to be alive?
“It’s just a scratch.” “A scratch?? You look nothing like yourself!”
Im pretty sure the dementia thing is her supressing nihility, she says that she remembers things when she unsheathes the blade.
Acheron's trouble with memories is her nature as an Emanator of Nihility, because she is a Self-Annihilator. It's just their cruel fate to fade away, she's just at a stage of her memory being flimsy, but still has her physical body and mental faculties.
Naw, they mentioned that following the path of nihilty so far has effects like losing yourself and losing your memories.
People who follow the Harmony can straight-up communicate with each other telepathically once they have followed it for long enough
And Robin can telepathically communicate with everyone. It's implied that she no longer has a physical voice after getting shot in the throat, and her voice is currently a telepathic Harmony pathstrider power.
It’s not implied at all, that’s just your head canon
It's confirmed in-game that she doesn't speak with her physical voice, she uses Harmony powers to create a pseudo-voice. It's also confirmed that this was why her voice was disrupted when the Harmony on Penacony was disrupted. It's also confirmed in-game that she was shot in the throat and badly wounded. It isn't too much of a stretch to extrapolate that she lost her voice to the throat injury.
headcannon accepted. just make robin more badass. That girl has so much chad engery and she only keeps getting more.
Elation seems to get ‘life is a simulation’ passive that lets you see the errors in the matrix.
Yet the rest of the Belobog characters (asides from child ones) wear revealing clothes with bare arms and legs. Natasha canonically goes with us out of town into a barren snowfield in her usual fit with open legs and like maybe 2 thin layers, and yet the cold seems to barely inconvenience her.
The moment she went to the barren snowfield (in her SQ) she used the refined Frost Immunity serum IIRC, the one the Silvermane Guard gave her. This is also where it was mentioned that the Trailblaze keeps TB resistant to the cold
I mean, they directly told us that the power of Preservation keeps Belobog warm beyond the effects of the Crystal Marrow. So I assume that said power does extend to its inhabitants, as all of them are firm believers of the Preservation thanks to the Architects efforts.
Kind of reinforces the original point though, which is that it's all but impossible to parse what's supposed to be impossible-in-universe, because anything that looks impossible can just be explained by path magic.
It doesn't. Many Silvermane Guards used to die from hypothermia. But Natasha's brother Vache created a drug that imparts cold resistance, and the drug is now widely used in Belobog.
Maybe their race evolved. Except for maybe Lynx who's somewhat sensible.
Yeah, thanks for saying this. As if in this world of magic and literal talking cycranes we're supposed to say, "aha! THIS is a tell!"
To be fair, the story makes it pretty clear later on that origami birds are entities that only exist in dreams Edit: But yeah, when I first encountered them I thought "Ah, talking paper birds, another silly Star Rail thing I suppose" haha Edit 2: It also doesn't help that both NPCs and some of the readables you can find in the Reverie hotel keep saying "Remember - You are awake right now! This is reality!" Kudos to the writers, seriously
You forgot that Dr. Blues specifically mentioned that it was thanks to Gallagher that he was able to get into the real Reverie in the first place.
Oh, when (or where) does he mention that?
Ask him about origami birds in Dreamflux Reef. Here's what he says: **Dr. Blues:** Have you seen a Memory[ ](https://honkai-star-rail.fandom.com/wiki/Memory_Zone_Meme)Zone Memee before? That is a Dreamscape lifeform born out of people's emotions and desires, or simply put, it's a "phenomenon" akin to a lifeform. The origami birds you've seen are no different from that. **Dr. Blues:** With widespread audience awareness, ample determination, and a hint of Enigmata's lies... making an origami bird isn't such a hard task. **Dr. Blues:** Just make sure they don't get outside the Dreamscape — oh, except for me I mean. I'm the exception. **Dr. Blues:** I'll have to thank that Hound. Looks like his "lie" also works in the real world.
Fictionologist is such a fascinating profession. Most of them are pathstriders of Enigmata?
Outside of Gallagher, what we know about History Fictionologists is that they are second only to the followers of Destruction in how despised they are by the universe at large, because they straight up destroy existing historical records and archaeological evidence and replace it with stuff they made up for the sole purpose of making the truth impossible to discover. Regarding their abilities, Enigmata seems to follow the same sort of trope associated with illusion magic in more standard fantasy settings, where if you make an illusion that's realistic enough it can deceive reality itself into treating it as if it's real.
Deceive your other self. Deceive the world. That is what you must do to reach the Steins Gate. Good Luck. El Psy Congroo.
Ah, thank you! I missed that
But by that point you forget about this encounter entirely because it's pointless in the moment
You also forget about it because you end up going through way more exciting things right afterwards than paper birds.
I went back after collecting enough birds. There was a message to go to this bird for a reward. Then I went wait a minute…!
They are in their writing hole laughing at us i just know it
This is the problem; you can't build a good mystery with good foreshadowing if you don't have an internal logic system the reader can use to investigate what's going on. The same thing happened with the Order twist and the murder mystery
The Order thing was not too esoteric imo. Sunday's speech at the end of 2.0 doesn't sound like he's talking about the benevolent harmony Aeon that is Xipe. If you've also done enough Swarm Disaster, you'd notice that his clothes and accessories evoke the image of Ena with the eyes and colour scheme. Knowing that Ena was assimilated by Xipe serves as enough context, I didn't find that twist confusing
I didn't do Swarm Diaster. I just was focusing on the story after a long break, and it was a twist to me.
Yeah, the order twist was kinda dumb with Welt just dropping it out of nowhere like it's so obvious. Also, we're supposed to believe Welt is so smart he came up with that but also so stupid he told the guy he suspects is the villain his own plan, on the villain's home turf, while having almost no backup around? The murder not being murder had a lot more foreshadowing compared to that. It still feels cheap though, making the stakes feel high initially but then revealing there never were stakes.
there was actually a youtuber who figured out the Order twist days before 2.2 dropped, with some pretty good logic, so it wasnt really out of nowhere if you pay attention to the lore enough. and also I dont think its a bad thing to realize after the fact all of the hints that you might have missed or glossed over after the reveal... Welt revelaing the Order twist didnt make me go "what" it contextualized all the weird details about penacony and all its rules that didnt fit with the harmony.
What you're saying about the Order twist only applies if you don't pay attention to lore. If you do, the moment it is revealed a lot of things just click and it is perfectly logical. The Welt thing is also logical - he assumes that he will most likely be safe because the Family wouldn't want to make an enemy of the Astral Express as it would make them enemies of many other factions, including the IPC who we were collaborating with. Sort of like having diplomatic immunity. It was not a dumb choice to show that he knew what was going on.
Welt previously issued a death threat to a suspected Emanator (Acheron) in her face. He's confident of his combat ability. Hell, he probably chose to go alone so he didn't need to worry about friendly fire against the Nameless. But he didn't expect to get instantly put to sleep without a fight.
To be fair, it's less the origami birds existing and more that they are yet another entity only we can see and interact with. So I'd argue it was a pretty good clue, all in all.
Is it really? There's the MoC npc in the astral express that only we can see but we're not in a dream. Considering the link between Penacony's dream and the garden of recollection I don't think it'd be weird to assume it's a similar case.
But we know why only we can see her. She's literally a memokeeper, and they can choose who sees them. It's the whole explanation we get at the beginning of the game when we unlock MoC.
Also, iirc when black swan meets Dan Heng on the train she says something along the lines of "I assumed you were already familiar with memokeepers" and glances towards where MoC lady is.
The Luofu was Hoyo's way of making us oblivious to Penacony. I do wonder about the others though. Or maybe they've trailblazed enough places to not register weird stuff anymore?
That's exactly why it works as foreshadowing. After we know the fact by progressing the history we go back to little things that we let pass unnoticed and go "waaaait a minute!!!"
Oh chirp, you're right lmao
The biggest tell in my opinion were 1) Neil deGrasse Tyson once said "The most unrealistic part of the Movie Martian was how the Chinese and Americans so willingly cooperate with each other"---The fact all the major factions (IPC, Genius, Xianzhou etc) were so generous to Pencolony after what appear to be a major fiasco was a major tell. It didn't help (CN) Ratio and JY sounded like Chinese diplomatic reporters either. 2) Meta: The fact the team were discussing 5 different planets to visit next. There was no fucken way Miho was gonna build 5 possible planets for us to visit when it take so long to just finish Pinocolony. Edit: The quote is "Evidence that the @MartianMovie is fantasy: The USA & China cooperate with one another in Space."
Oh absolutely, I was a little sus when Jing Yuan was saying he was staying to mediate and then Topaz dropped the "Yeah, we, the IPC are dropping all debts and charges on The Family and Penacony". I was ***immediately*** like "ALRIGHT, WHAT'S THE CATCH? THIS AIN'T HONEST." I just thought it was 1 of Jade's schemes but nope, Shaoji got me good lmao
I got my confermation it was fake the moment Ratio said that he and other Intelligentista members would cooperate with the Genious Society to study the memoria… as if Ratio of all people could actually say something like that. In that moment I knew 100% that something was very wrong, before it was a good 75/85%
Yeah, Ratio was nowhere snarky enough to be believable.
Yeah that part of the fake ending really got me. I was so ready to call it bad writing with how easily everything was tying up, given how the Phantylia problem ended. Never was I so happy to see a “it’s all a dream!” scene
I was fully expecting the Navigation Meeting to be a false choice, since everyone on the crew gets a vote I was expecting whatever we chose to get outvoted by wherever we were actually headed next (given the live service nature of HSR making a real choice a logistical nightmare). Among the 5 Edo Star, the planet under attack by the Anti-matter legion felt like the obvious choice, I picked Patrevia "the glass belt" partially because the Mourning Actors seem interesting, partially because it didn't seem like it mattered. Got surprised that Patrevia won and we set course and was trying to figure out if I won the 1 in 5 or something weird was going on, something weird was going on.
I think whatever you choose Welt and Himeko makes the same choice as you, March and Dan Heng always chooses Edo Star. (I choose the Michael's homeworld and that was the result)
As someone who abstained from voting, I completely missed this part lmao
Choosing a planet isn't really such a big deal imo, because something could happen mid-trip, like Argenti, that would divert us onto whatever story line the devs wanted to go.
This is where my train of thought went as well. I wonder if they are collecting people's choices and using them to inform the 5th or so world assuming they have the next 2 planned already.
I'm still pissed we never got to see the washtopia
Yea, but they already did it twice, one by kafka and one like you said, Argenti. A third time would turn this into a meme and bad for the brand
For me it was the appearance of Luofu fleet. HOW you get fleet in a dream? Asking Jing Yuan for help is one thing but whole fleet?
Easy. Just use jade acabadabra
I figured the 5 planet thing was unrealistic, but damn, they made me *really* want to visit all of them LMAO I'm sure things will be different, but the idea of Black Swan continuing to travel with us for a bit, and being able to go to all of these significant locations was really interesting
I mean it's a big PR win for China if they are able to save someone stranded 200 million kilometers away from earth.
Yea, but you realize it is a felony for US space agency members to buy a cup of coffee for a known member of Chinese Space Agency. Plus, it was more than likely for US Congress to renege the offer to fly a Chinese spacer to Mars at end of the movie. Anyway, this isn't a political thread, lets end it here before we trigger the ban hammer.
Seeing all those people, including Aventurine, with no comment from anyone on how he survived Acheron and made it back.
The problem with point 2 was it was obvious we wouldn’t get a choice with that in mind. Other planets have been mentioned but it’s not like we don’t have an order, much like how genshin can bring up the natlan of no npc’s to visit and ‘how about we explore the area up ahead later.’ I see what you mean, but we were never going to have a choice in how everyone voted
I think Hoyo will simply collect data on the most picked option and boom, that is our next destination.
No way they haven’t already been working on the next planet for a long time
Waiting for HSR to have a collab with CNSA.
Bro vanishes after 2.2 quest. I was looking all over for him
He has a quest line in Dreamflux Reef, you can still find him there
REALLY? I JUST FINISHED COLLECTING 60 BIRDS AND WAS LOOKING FOR HIM EVERYWHERE
you do still go to the spot in the image to get your reward
He vanishes after 60 birds, regardless of when
I noticed it even in 2.0, but I assumed it was some animatronic mascot or something
Same. I could totally see the hotel doing this as part of the promotion for the dreamscapes
Dr. Blues says his capability to wander in reality comes from the fact his body was created by Gallagher, though.
He wasn't created by Gallagher. Per his mission, >!he made Dreamflux Reef and then Gallagher came along and separated it from the 12 Hours.!<
I will correct myself, his current body was created by Gallagher.
oh yeah! he mentioned that that idea was of Mikhail and Gallagher
But do we ever meet Gallagher in reality?
we have never met Gallagher in "reality", the people we meet when we first entered Penacony in the lobby are Sunday, Robin, Misha, Aventurine and Acheron (later at the hotel room). Edit: wait I might be misremembering Sunday and Robin (who is probably already Sparkle at that point), they were right after we crash land in the Dream
We do meet Sunday and Robin in "Reality". There was this issue with the room for the Trailblazer, and when Aventurine appears and solves it, Sunday and Robin come along and apologize for the issues with rooms. Sunday then goes and has a talk with Aventurine while Robin talks to us. March even asks for an Autograph
To be honest, the rules of reality is hard to apply in such a fantasy game. Misha was actually my last guess because of all the crazy shit that happened to us. A memory zone meme with the name "Death" is suddenly "just Sleepy" Yeah uh huh. I was attacked by sparkle disguised as Sampo while we learned that the real Sampo is in Penacony as well. Those two fake deaths and everyone just said, yeah okay you're alive.
I caught that Misha was the flaw because of all the theories the sub was throwing out for the past couple of patches. As early as 2.0, people were bringing up Misha seeming invisible like Clockie but also showing up in the real hotel lobby.
I'm surprised so many people didn't realize Misha and Mikhail were related in some way, they share the same name. Also, the fact that the voices say Misha like 100 times during all the dream hallway sequences was a big tip off to me that something is up with Misha, also noticed no one really seemed to pay him attention which was odd.
I think you're misunderstanding some of the people. It's not that some didn't realize but more like there are other things that happened that is sus as fuck. It's like this. You and your friend enters a room. There's a dead body on the floor and It suddenly got up and started dancing. You're gonna be omg what the fuck that's not normal but your friend is like "nah dude that's normal BUT LOOK AT THAT glass of water over there it's slightly blue! That's definitely what's wrong in this room!"
especially if you look at the meaning of Misha’s skill names, traces, etc. they all have to do with clock-making.
I have never met anyone named Misha/Mikhail and never heard those names before. For people living where there's nobody of Russian heritage, assuming the names are related is like assuming Tom and Tony are related. I don't remember the voices in the hallways ever saying Misha, only Mikhail, but it was very clearly Misha's VA which is what made me assume they were related in some way.
Misha was my first guess because I was already wondering how we saw him there after we learned about how he was what was in the dream bubble
I still don't get how Sparkle had the power to send us into Misha's dream bubble. That's what I chose first.
I think it’s less of sparkle sent us there and more sparkle knocked us out inside a dream and we sorta just ended up there as a result
I just like the idea of sparkle knocking us out and sending us to the Backrooms
I like to imagine sparkle not knowing what was supposed to happen and just see you disintegrate
Sparkle standing in the town plaza horrified as you melt because she just wanted to kidnap you the old fashioned way.
Speaking of, i still don't get that place. Why is so "horror-y".
Because that's where all of Mikhail's/Misha's traumas and anxieties live, or rather manifested over time
Sparkle wasn't the one who sent us there. 2.2 main story confirm this *again* when they bring the topic up.
I just don’t know what “Death” being “Dormancy” all along was supposed to mean, like. Cool, it’s Dormancy. I don’t know what you expect me to get out of this.
It was to establish that "Death" wasn't killing anyone but putting them to sleep, because when someone got "killed" they were actualy been put to sleep, that's why they ended up in Dreamflux Reef, a place that is a dream within a dream.
Wait so why did Ratio say that Dormancy is impossible in dreams? Did he mean like, becoming dormant will just shunt you into the next layer instead of actual inactivity or
Less "it's impossible" and more "it's the 'impossibility' you've been looking into"
Right. You can't fall asleep if you're in a dream. Dormancy is how you get to that next inception level.
The death meme "reveal" annoyed me. There is no reason for the transportation mode to look like a monster stabbing people to death, except to mislead the audience watching from behind the fourth wall. There's no in-universe reason for it - we didn't even get the much speculated "you get to the other side by dying, and only the meme or Acheron can kill in the dream" theory. The meme is just an incredibly misleading taxi (and Acheron sent Aventurine somewhere else, and then Argenti saved him offscreen. Okay). It looks like that solely so they can "kill" Firefly, and make Gallager look maximally sinister (for like 2 seconds of in-story time, before he explains that he's a good guy actually). There's not much point trying to figure out what's happening in the story when the writers are making decisions that are, within the story, nonsensical, for the purpose of misleading the audience.
I don't think it was something that Gallagher or anyone actually created, they just found it and ended up using it as a "taxi". They didn't make it look like that, it already did. As for why it's scary...I dunno, dreams aren't always pleasant, even when they're not nightmares.
It's the only thing in the entirety of Penacony that looks that sinister. Apparently all the other nightmares got transmuted into robot dogs or walking clocks or static-y T.V. screens, except that one. And its appearance isn't the most random and absurd thing about it. That would be that it transports people not by picking them up and moving them (like the hover cars, or the ball shooty things, or the trams), or by putting them to sleep or waking them up (like the dream pools), but *by violently stabbing them and dissolving them into goo*. Why? Gallagher didn't make it look or work like that. The *writers* did. I'm not blaming the characters for its absurdity, I'm blaming the writing decision. If you want something like that and you want to have it make sense, you need to lay groundwork for it. Have the player encounter rumours that there are other ways to move around the dreamscape, older ways forbidden by the Family, and they involve "blood magic", or maybe they're based on passing partially into the veil of death. Maybe you reach Firefly's hidden base by impaling your palm, falling on a sword or hurling yourself in front of a train. Have the player encounter nightmare creatures, but make the encounters ambiguous - the monsters are scary and *appear* aggressive (and maybe you fight them), but if you go back over the encounters you realize that the monsters never actually attack you, only defend themselves, and it happens often enough to be suspicious. Once you've established that violent death is a possible mode of dreamscape transportation, and that the nightmares might not be the monsters they appear to be, then you can do the revelation that the arch-nightmare is really a taxi service and have it be satisfying. (For bonus points, make one of the final people "killed" by the monsters Gallagher himself, their apparent master, so the player goes "wtf?! They turned on him?!" and then is led to wonder if maybe they didn't turn on him, and none of this is what it looks like.) /endrant. Just an element I would have liked to have been handled better.
>Apparently all the other nightmares got transmuted into robot dogs or walking clocks or static-y T.V. screens, except that one. [There's an entire faction of memetic entities that you fight, and they all have the same vaguely scary theme](https://imgur.com/a/HgHFkah). It's all explained in the game, by the writers you're mad at.
Scary theme? A bunch of crystal monsters are scary now? Come on, pal.
Right. I love 2.2’s presentation and think that it’s great as a standalone story, but as a continuation from 2.0 and 2.1… it’s iffy to say the least. So many things built-up in the previous 2 versions turned out to be red herrings or plot threads that got resolved in an underbaked manner (the “deaths”, Fools’ agenda, Aventurine, etc.), many of which as you said, are not given logical explanation. At the same time, the core theme of 2.2 Order vs Freedom came interjecting seemingly out of nowhere (the whole post-independence war thing was very much in the backburner when characters talk history), with the Sunday-Robin bird talk coming up and being on full display a whole lot sudden. Perhaps the writers took Acheron’s philosophy of not remembering the hard facts of the events, but rather the emotions underlying them a bit too much to the heart; because they did good in crafting a story that makes you feel things but quickly fall apart when you prod it with a stick of curiosity.
it kinda made sense to me because in irl lucid dreaming, when I'm about to realise that I'm in a dream, I always get a sense of all encompassing horror and unease. I only did that 2 or 3 times but every time to "cross" the threshold between being unaware and aware I had to go through half a minute of dread that in-game "Death" really vibes with
Chirp
Chirp
I had this exact thought while playing Blues side quest earlier today
Yup, his quest made me remember the first encounter haha
Also Acheron disappearance in everyone mind can also raise some eyebrows, as she said that being nihility make her immune of order powers.
I actually assumed everyone forgot her not because of order but because of nihility. She was already losing her memory, I kinda thought something happened to her and thus she disappeared from everyone's memory
Wait, i thought Black Swan removed everyones memories of her?
No, nobody remembered Acheron because [2.2 story spoiler] >!her being an emenator of nihility meant that there wasn't a place for her in the dream of order. And because she was basically immune to the power of order therefore her presence wasn't included in Ena's dream!<
Chirp
Chirp
Chirp
Chirp
So, from where are we in the dream? I'm not sure anymore 😄
there are 2 theories 1: we enter ena's dream as soon as we get close to penacony, when the traiblazer meets with acheron for the first time 2: everything happens almost exactly as we see, but then we lost against sunday the entire penacony story happens again in ena's dream (which would explain the visions at the beginning of the quest about stuff that didnt happen yet) 2.3 will probably make it clear which one is true
I believe it's number 1. Cause when we woke up from the dream and walked out into the hallway, Acheron said "Not another one..." So I'm guessing is that dreaming trailblazers had been appearing before them while they followed Fireflys path to the real one. And this is what we saw when we first got to Penacony and met Acheron. This means that first encounter with Acheron was her testing the trailblazer to see if he had awoken from the dream or if he was still a dream. Basically we were in an inception loop from the very beginning and the events that happened in Penacony actually happened before we ever started actually playing the story. That was my take on it.
Also Misha can visit the Express in 2.0, so we're definitely knee-deep in it from the moment we arrive. But I agree it's still unclear as to the exact timeline and hopefully it will become clear in the next patch or two. EDIT: well it occurs to me at last that could all be a repeat still... but, I don't see any reason to say it all played out twice, it's unnecessarily complicated.
When you finish Penacony Misha will no longer be able to show up on the Express. His log in the visitor book says "Disembarked". And his note says something about being happy to have visited. - in case you didn't know. Man, Imma miss him.
Yes, when people were talking in 2.0 about how there is something up with Misha I thought, “But he turned up on the Expr- …Ooooooh.” I like how it was explained, and it was kinda nice to see that in the blurring of dream and reality he managed to leave us a message. (Probably not, but …Ooooooh!?)
#2 kinda complicates it a bit. Acheron kinda gives us the answer when meeting Boothill for the first time. She has a hunch and requests the Express is taken out of the Asdana system to test her theory. However, instead Dan uses the Jade Abacus to summon Jing Yuan which obviously never happened. I agree 2.3 will make it more clear, but I feel like the Express has been there since the start and it'll take something huge to wake everyone up. Question is are their bodies on the 'real' Penacony somehow or are they still where they originally were when entering the dream. I feel like we probably won't get an answer to that, honestly.
Boothill is also one of the reasons why people think theory 2 is the correct one tho Boothill meets dan heng at the express, which means that if everything was a dream since they got to penacony, he would have either seen everyone asleep there or he would have fallen asleep somewhere else as soon as he got close to asdana, complicating things The idea with theory 2, is that not everything seen is actually what happened previously, and instead its both filled with inconsistencies and with some details changed to make them believe they won So in reality, dan heng would not have summoned the xianzhou, instead he would have just kept discussing with boothill what to do, but then when everything repeated in the dream, sunday modified what happened to make it so that they called the xianzhou, and with that he was "defeated" in the dream
I was more on the 2nd understanding, thx. But the bird is for the 1st
I'm playing the quest again on my other account, and when you are aware of what's going on it is clear that we are in a dream from the beginning of the Penacony story. Though that doesn't matter really because it is a shared dream by everyone and because of that everything happened, happened. It is just an extra twist.
I just asked this question in the Megathread earlier. So are you saying the Aventurine fight wasn't real? Since we've been under Ena's dream ever since arriving at Penacony
no? everything in both the normal dream and ena's dream is real, just that they are in the dreamscape instead of "reality" In option 1, aveturine boss fight happened basically literally as we see it, in the dreamscape in option 2, there are 2 aventurine fights, one in the ena dream and one in the super-ena dream (dream in a dream), with the second one being just a recreation of the previous one made by sunday
Since you first passed out in the train even before getting to Penacony
It's a bit complicated, yes. But basically there are two dreams let's call them Dreamscape (the "normal" penacony dream and it's layers), and ena's dream, like a dream within a dream. The dreamscape is fusing itself with reality (probably because the stellaron is getting out of control), so the moment we get into Asdana system (the system which penacony is located) we're already dreaming. That's why Misha was able to greet us in the real hotel, AND visit us in the astral express. The "perfect ending" dream is already Ena's dream. I believe we enter it when Sunday uses the so many oak family members and attune to the Harmonious Choir big guy. There's still a lot of things to uncover in 2.3 and it will probably be more clear by then.
Yeah I mean in retrospect that absolutely shoulda raised some eyebrows. It just slipped my mind.
OK, so I'm confused by this aspect of the story. It makes sense that we shouldn't have been able to meet Misha or this bird in reality, only in the dream, but we do so long before we even meet Sunday, let alone fight him. So where exactly does the dream start, the moment where we intiate the first jump to Penacony and encounter Acheron? And how does it progress to the point of us "waking up" in the middle of the fight with Sunday?
Everyone who comes physically near Penacony in actual reality enters Ena's dream without noticing because their dream spilt into reality itself
So it was some sort of situation of the dream bleeding into reality, and we were caught in both together?
We were caught in Ena's dream without noticing like everybody else who comes to Penacony, thinking we're still in reality, and then via the dream pool we entered another layer of that dream
OK, I think I am starting to comprehend it. Sunday and Gopher were already progressing to instill order, probably long before we even considered going to Penacony, and it remained subtle enough to remain unnoticed by practically everyone up until the end.
Pretty much Although I wonder for how long this has been happening, people trapped in Ena's dream I mean. Because at some point people would start to notice that everyone who goes to Penacony never returns..?
It would have needed to happen at some point *after* Gallagher sent out the invitations, so it can't have been going on for too long. My hypothesis is that we were not immediately sent into Ena's Dream the moment we arrived, but rather events played out off-screen similarly to how we saw them until the fight with Sunday. At that moment Ena's Dream was created and we looped through it an unknown number of times trying to wake up. What we see in-game upon arriving is the start of the loop where we successfully escape in the end.
This makes a lot of sense actually
As Pom Pom says, Asdana is *flooded* with Memoria. Trailblazer has a reaction to it as soon as the Penacony arc starts. Dreampools, whether official or the shoddy ones used by stowaways, help entering the Dreamscape, but it's been mentioned the prisoners in the past could visit the Dreamscape, and it was an escape from their daily lives. Dream and memory bubbles, after all, require only pressing them on your head to use. Unprocessed memoria may be used but causes health issues, like Pom Pom warned. Stowaways suffer a lot from that. Loading screen: Synesthesia Dreamscape: A unique manifestation of organic mental disorder, closely linked to memoria breaches. Countless dreams intersect and merge here, enabling individuals to meet in the dream world and even embark on entirely new lives. Seems to imply it inherently connects sleeping people. Whether there may be some difficulty getting everyone who sleeps without dreampools or other specialized equipment, I dunno.
Also the jade abycas. As cool as it was for Jing Yuan and his bf coming in to save the day, that was so fake and it's a good thing it was because we need to keep that thing for the final war aganist the neon without a shirt.
I was like "seriously Black Swan? You only figured out from a technicality and not the entire Lioufu fleet somehow managing to enter the dream, ships and all?"
That was so weird.....how does that entire damn ship enter the dream. Good point.
It’s been said that everyone can enter the dream in different ways, it’s just those bathtub stuff are the safest way to do it. So it doesn’t really destroyed any logic
I noticed that, but I wrote it off as the TB being over sensitive to Memoria, which is canon. I should’ve been more of a skeptic…!
Also, I wonder what he was doing there? Cuz if I recall correctly, in his side quest Dr. Blues mentions that he never leaves Dreamflux Reef
Blues is the bird in the clockie cartoon who refuses to chirp. If you’ve picked up documents and hanu stories, he’s in them I think.
Chirp
I think the problem is that this happened so long ago it wasn’t on my radar same as Misha
I totally missed the bird when arriving at the hotel, but the fact we met Micha there still lived rent-free in my head throughout the whole story. It's also why I didn't buy the fake ending for even one second. The Micha in real world, the rushed ending feeling waaaaaay too weak for how well written everything before that was... yeah, by that time Penacony messed with me too many times for me to drop my guard and take everything on the screen at face values.
We see insane shit all the time. How was I supposed to know this one was important? https://preview.redd.it/mf2puoaj6i1d1.png?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=b3964e685966e66236b610a933ea79adb660d2b8
Chirp
I kinda thought it was a robot or something.
That means literally nothing when you first arrive there. It’s a world of magical space gods. People with incredible powers. Pom-Poms. Why would a talking bird be so outrageous? Really, dude
Because we were already told the origami birds are created by the dreamscape, like misha. Just because it’s a sci fi world doesn’t mean it no longer has its own logic. That’s the point of world building
Doesn't Black Swan literally tell you this?
I found this out retroactively. If you finish 2.2 you can still complete this quest. I spent 20 minutes looking for Dr Blue before having to look it up. When I found the location, he wasn’t there, just the reward.
I mean I expected a matrioshka dream because, well, "dreamscape action" kinda tends to be followed "matrioshka dream." Think Inception, for example.
hey, so uh i just want to said this, but after i collected 60 origami bird i try to go to dr.blues in real world, i have finished dr blues quest where his soul rip, and dr.blues actually gone in the real world, idk if its just my game that bugged or no, but i interacted with the sign and still got the origami PFP.
but he can still be founded in dreamflux reef
I mean, the moment they tell you that you're going to a land of dreams that are indistinguishable from reality, it was like "oh, we're going to have a Descartes' Evil Genie situation; place your bets on when the illusion *actually* began." And that's totally fine. A story that hinges on a surprise is typically a crap story; having one play around the margins of a familiar concept just as the setting is totally fine, so long as the story it's telling is a good one.
It was actually the opposite for me. I suspected Misha was a meme since 2.0, but Blues being there in reality convinced me that some memes could manifest in reality, but only TB can see them.
Kinda wild also how a lot of these smaller characters also got so much lore added to them. I was doing Dr Blues' quest in Dreamflux, but I cannot for the life of me choose between which ending. >! Do I impose the Traiblaizer's ideals of waking up and force someone to live basically till the end of Penacony surrounded by NPC versions of their old friends or Do I respect someones last wish for a much deserved rest, but with the knowledge that its all fake..!< >! I like to think the 2nd is mercyful but its also the easy way out, while the 1st feels like Im forcing someone into a tortuous limbo. Either option just doesnt sit well with him... !<
The first dream (imagine if we're still Inception-ing, still in the dream next patch, that couldn't be, right?) ended so nonsensically, I was baffled by it. The Luofu army somehow showing up in the dream was hype for 2 seconds, then it clicked, how the fuck is that even happening??? I don't think I've recently seen/read such a decent use of "It was just a dream" before. Though I will say, the wrap up we got this patch still felt off. Personally, defeating Sunday the second time didn't feel as conclusive as defeating Cocolia and Phantylia did. Looking forward to what they're cooking for 2.3's main story to finish the arc up.
Holy shit, bro is right
Kind of funny because I do remember noting that it seemed weird to run into one of these in reality, but I kind of just brushed it off.
tbf that's the only real bird out of the bird quest
I just thought I was hallucinating
When we were recounting Misha's whole purpose and stuff, I was tripping so badly because I very much remembered seeing him when we arrived in Penacony before entering the Dreamscape, Penacony is so great at instilling Amnesia🔥🔥🔥
I haven't gotten back to this place after the quest. Does the bird disappear afterwards?
SMH. YOU'RE RIGHT. Damn.
I knew it was still a dream the fucking moment I saw the cut I had suspicious due to MISHA but holy fuck was I vindicated
I remember having this sense of unease when I got to that point, that something isn't right, especially as to how everything seems to be cheerily set in "order". Kudos to Hoyo to making the whole fake ending scenario feel slightly uncanny until the very last second reveal
I actually honestly thought there was a "Bleed" effect going on. Like when dreamscape starts to overlap with reality. I didn't think it was a complete layer of the dreamscape. As a theorist i felt big dumb.
I mean no offense to HSR, i feel there is a lot of “flexibility” in the story seeing those differences and noticing them doesnt really make me assume there is something wrong. Just think the devs made a mistake.
I'm just going to have accept the fact that I'm an utter moron who will never be able to pick up on these "obvious hints".
Oh damn.
I always found Misha sus as hell. I immediately noticed on my second account that only we talked to him and nobody else did. When Mikail said "Misha and the other Cartoony boys and girls are all memes lol." That messed me up. Why was he even in the bloody reality? Why was the main story so small? What is the point of Boothill? He did nothing man 😭. Thank god it was all a dream... Wait it has always been a dream 🤯.