Originally uploaded to Bilibili.tv
I get that the underlying plan was to collect all these memory things just to lure out Rhinedottir and then even that was a smokescreen for the real plan but then did it need to take over two hours? I'm glad it isn't the four plus hours of murder mystery that Act II was but it's still excessive. I think both Acts I and II and now Acts III and IV could have been compacted into single acts. This is actually something I said about Fontaine's Archon Quest too and then I rewrote them to do just that. It gave me tons of extra space to work in a more complicated Fatui story which then played out in a much more intense Act V.
Similarly, I feel like the current dev team focuses too much on cute than thematically appropriate. For example, Liyue back in the day had your fun characters like Hu Tao and Yaoyao but the Archon Quest was still serious. It focused on the conflict between the very no nonsense adepti and the equally grown up Qixing. At best it was actually Zhongli who was a literal god in disguise that took it all the least seriously and why wouldn't he? The whole thing was actually his plan and he was basically enjoying his retirement. Inazuma as well was very grim and only saw levity because Yae Miko again a goddess, knew what was going to happen and was having her fun with it. But ever since these new guys took over in Natlan, we had cute. Natlan the Nation of WAR had a bunch of cute little Pokemon creatures and characters that were pretty much a bunch of kids hanging out at the beach. Now the general of the Tsaritsa's army is a pixie girl and her personal aids are a bunch of oompa loompas.
And that played into this act's story. This general had us "infiltrate" the most secure bank of the country and then it turned out that 1, it was all a plan set up by the Tsaritsa so for some reason the general of her armies was out of the loop and 2, we only managed to get as far as we did including all the perils encountered because the guy who runs said bank didn't activate all the real security measures that would have shot us to hell. In the end, the collection of people's memories and then finding the culprit stealing them didn't amount to anything because it turned out to never have been part of the plan anyway. And we'll see what the real plan is next time.
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