With Penacony's main story starting to come to a close, I figured I may as well write down my thoughts since it’s an arc that fumbled almost all its potential (Aventurine, you're too good for this world) in a deeply frustrating way. But before that, let me list some of the things I liked since there are some pretty good ideas and iterations!

First, the environments and music are still absolutely top-notch and really sell me on Penacony being this hyper-capitalist escapist dream with a perfectly manufactured atmosphere. Every battle theme is a hit, and the final boss of the patch is accompanied by another great vocal song to cap off the arc. The puzzles are still solid even if the pacing can be a little off (playing 15 stages of the new Hanu mini-game in a row turned my brain to mush (yes I know I didn't have to play every stage all at once, but as soon as I see a mini-game in front of me, I am compelled to play it all)). And lastly, the set-pieces. For all its faults, the final boss does a really great job of bringing the characters of this patch together, and moments like Firefly's motif playing during her scene are the exact type of thing I love. But that's where my praises end so time to get into my issues!

These two things were detrimental problems to the Xianzhou arc and unfortunately, Penacony hasn't improved much on either: characterization and exposition. Most of the cast is given little-to-no characterization or screentime, only serving as dialogue machines to move the plot along. Sparkle, Black Swan, Acheron, Gallagher, Robin, Boothill, and especially the entire Astral crew are just so empty that it's impossible for me to care about any of them. Contrast Robin to Sunday; you discover the impetus behind his drive and desire to unite everything under Order, and how the outcomes of the decisions to grant a few people freedom have changed him. Then we have Robin, who gets pretty much nothing; nothing that backs her opposition to Sunday and nothing to build up their relationship as anything more than generic orphan siblings who care about each other. There is one scene that gives her some character while delving into her backstory, showing her suffering an injury on a war-ridden planet yet continuing to push on. This could've been an opportunity to really explore what makes Robin walk a different path, but instead, it's second-hand characterization given through Sunday mostly expositing at the player.

And that's my biggest issue with the game: that any interesting idea is immediately cast aside in favor of flavorless exposition. That HSR is so unwilling to engage with its themes and just wants to provide another (admittedly very nice looking) spectacle while most of its cast vomits exposition or dances around irrelevant HI3 references. It's incredibly frustrating because there are so many interesting ideas that don't get the time they need to be fleshed out, which makes its failure to capitalize on them so much more annoying. In the Main Story Quests (thankfully the side quests are better), we only get mere glimpses into why people want to stay there forever. We meet some people who are trying to escape their past, and some who want to build their fortune, but there's one example that stands out to me. Eventually, we meet an old man: one who’s dying of a terminal illness and whose only source of reprieve is the Dreamscape. This idea isn't anything new (and executed far, far better in Caligula Effect 2), but there's at least something interesting to explore here! While Penacony serves as a prison to many, killing all ambition and letting them live their lives away in a city of hedonism, it offers a solution to this man's physical pain in the real world and an opportunity to live his final moments peacefully. But instead of engaging with this in any meaningful capacity, the game simply mentions that maybe there's another solution out there, and then moves on without a second thought. A similar idea is explored through Firefly and her poorly defined/explored Entropy Loss Syndrome, but, again, there's so little depth to any of it., that her defiance against Sunday doesn't have the weight it should.

There's one more issue I have, and it’s one that bothers me even more than the anemic character writing or constant exposition: the dialogue choices. I'd like to imagine that this isn't a problem (or at least not as big of one) in the other languages, but HSR's English dialogue choices during pivotal story moments are so strikingly terrible and show a lack of respect for the game's own story, that I have to wonder how they even made it in. Some times it's inserting cringe modern pop-culture references into every other choice and others it's undercutting the climax of a patch by having your awful half-silent protag say "Mommy look I'm on TV" (yeah this is from 2.1, but the point stands) seconds before fighting the main antagonist of a patch, but the result is a story that can't take itself seriously even in its best moments. I understand that Caelus/Stelle are supposed to be goofballs to an extent, but at least restrain yourself when it actually matters!

Maybe I'm being too hard on Star Rail, but when I think about how FGO managed to put out something like Camelot (which for all its problems is still a chapter that holds up today) almost a decade ago, it's disappointing to see that a gacha of this scale can't even come close. Hell, even Genshin managed to stick its landing with Chasm and (for the most part) Sumeru.






Also why were there like 5 fake out deaths in Penacony

Innocent Sin and Eternal Punishment spoilers ahead. Don't read if you have not completed both games

Although the relationship between this game and Innocent Sin is very well crafted and deeply interesting, I would be lying if it's poor execution wasn't to the games detriment. What I assume to be about 80% of the assets from the previous game, including music, dungeons and more carried over to this sequel. It's as uninspiring as it is boring, and it's extremely shocking to me that the game is praised for doing such. That being said, it is a very good story overall, even though it drags on at times.

Most of my gripes about IS were exorcised, primarily the tedious contact system being improved to not be as confusing and the game's characters being much more fleshed out throughout the story. I'll save myself the mental strain from reexplaining therefore thinking about the boring and half-assed auto combat system that didn't change at all in this game for some reason. I will say it's nice that they embraced it's boring design to the point where they added a turn list in the PSP version. Even in this game, I still found myself auto battling through pretty much every enemy and boss save for the final one and one other, a shocking reality considering that this is supposed to be the hardest Persona game according to fans, a game where the combat is revolved around auto battling is supposedly the hardest in the series. I even played on hard mode which I later learned does nothing but decrease SP gain when walking around in dungeons. The encounter rate is just as abhorrent as it was in IS, slightly mitigated by the fact that the game is a lot faster in this version.

Something I noticed in this game is that characters don't repeat themselves a lot. At first I was questioning why there wasn't as much dialogue in this game as a normal JRPG or better comparison Persona game and found it boring for a short while near the start, but ended up liking it a lot more with this realization. I'm happy the trope isn't present and it made the newer characters all the more realistic and likable by the end. On the topic of characters, it's a shame that the ones from IS were relegated to the status of "story piece" rather than actual developing character, because they were genuinely interesting near the end of their game. There was a lot more they could have done with them, but they chose not to because of the story? Strange decision, but as long as it continues the story I guess. As far as new characters go, the standouts are clearly Baofu and Katsuya. The dynamic between Katsuya being a police officer and abiding by the law and only the law while Baofu, a prosecutor turned criminal who and is much more vulgar in his methods, charred due to his past blames himself for his wife's death. When they first meet, they both despise each other and their methods but throughout the course of the game start to accept one another. Alongside being well written, it was very rewarding because after a story sequence, they were able to contact together in battle. It's a subtle but nice touch.

Continuing on the topic of characters, I found Ulala to be depthless and bland especially throughout the latter half of the game, though realistically she was hardly a problem. I just didn't resonate with her struggles I guess since I'm just so awesome and i have a lot of friends or whatever her back story was #CouldntBeMe. What is a problem is Maya because she is boring as fuck. Story implications aside, in IS I didn't really like her much and felt nothing when she died at the end of it, and her being a silent protagonist for some reason in this game didn't help that fact at all. Tatsuya also faces the same problems, but I ended up liking his character a lot more near the end because his problems, rather punishment, actually made sense in the end.

Loved that persona 1 shit though ill eat that up any day honestly that entire section with Nanjo was fucking awesome. Fucking love persona 1