Originally uploaded to Bilibili.tv
So Sandrone would have stayed dead but thanks to the brand new mechanic in this game, her revival worked itself out. I'm pretty sure anybody could come up with a better story than that.
Ultimately though I think the idea here is that this event joins Sandrone and Columbina at the hip. Where she previously had her own motivations and storyline, moving forward she'll just be the bff of Columbina. (and Arlecchino) I wonder if that's why the Raiden Shogun is rerunning in this update as well. It doesn't bode well that both happen to also be bad at expressing their emotions and have robot bodies. The Shogun's story is intricately tied to Yae Miko's story and both of the former's Character Quests have involved Miko. On the flip side both Columbina and Miko have their own stories. In this update we're going to explore the moon and it'll just be with Columbina. Back then, Miko had her whole youkai side of her character not to mention the massive Inazuma restoration project going on behind the scenes. She was even involved with assisting in Nahida's Sumeru Archon Quest and now she's getting buffs related to the Hexenzirkel. This girl gets around.
Anyway this story has been one part Megaman, one part sitcom, one part drama and one part coming of age. It muddies the message just a little as a result.
So the idea here is that Sandrone got her Stellar Linchpin because her emotions system was overriding her logic system. As AI does. And it's this spark of human life that saved her from dying. The question is posed; does she have a heart? She'd actually stuffed this emotions system in some dark corner of her core because she feared loss but couldn't logically explain it. Interspersed between this touching story of personal growth though are things like Sandrone hiding in a box. Sandrone getting embarrassed because we read her diary. Also her getting embarrassed because she let us see her memories and it showed us her chunibyou moment. It's a little thematic whiplash. Are we meant to feel moved by her story or get a good chuckle out of it?
I make this comparison. In miHoYo's other game Zenless Zone Zero, we also had a story about a robot figuring out his emotions. Seed, Sr. was a military robot who also asked the question of if he had a heart. He'd find this out one day when he saw a little girl who got lost in a battle but her body was corrupted. As a military robot, his programming dictated that he take her out to prevent the corruption's spread. He fought hard against that programming and even plucked out his control chip. This was a fatal move for him but he did it to save the girl. After that, as his systems slowly shut down he took the girl in and raised her like a daughter. Interestingly because of the corruption, the girl lost her grasp of human emotions and so the robot had to teach her how to understand them again. That same question was asked: does she have a heart? Little by little he nurtured her and little by little his systems failed. Eventually he died and the girl didn't know what to make of it, pretending that he was just sleeping longer and longer and he'd wake up eventually. And so we play through her story where she slowly comes to terms with his death, specifically that it made her sad and how she needed to express it. It's a very emotional ride and even though there are also comedic moments, it's mostly a gut-punch type of comedy because they're based on her lack of understanding. Anyway by the end of it, the girl who called herself Seed because the robot was Seed, Sr. found her way back to where he had originally found her. It turned out he'd been going back to the location ever since adopting her to plant corruption resistant flowers there which he hoped she'd look after in his place. His last words to her played from a recording hidden on his body and revealed that her real name was Flora. She'd finally blossomed.
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