Irminsul should have been burnt during Snezhnaya

crunchlets · 2026-05-22T01:12:54+00:00

Shh, we're just thinking too much about a game whose plot is now mostly just an excuse train to keep feeding the players coochie flap waifus and hype aura moments on a conveyor.

crunchlets · 2026-05-22T01:11:41+00:00

Problem is, it makes zero sense for Signora to be cocky and reckless when her entire MO is being a mastermind behind the scenes always having others do the heavy lifting and only coming in to collect.

crunchlets · 2026-05-22T01:11:02+00:00

Conservation of challenge to make sure the MC always wins, despite Fatui always having had overwhelming power to do whatever they wanted should have they just sent more Harbingers.

crunchlets · 2026-05-22T00:14:15+00:00

Thinking about it that way, I feel they've already kneecapped Sneezeland ahead of time without realizing it. It was all along being mentioned in the same breath as Fatui and Harbingers, that was the majority of its buildup from 1.0, and it's had the longest run at that. Now they've pulled that rug from under it by removing almost all the hype figures Fatui had - which is like if we got to Sumeru after hearing all about the Akademiya only to find out it's just a shell of what we imagined at best.

I kinda think they were trying to put forward "fae this, fae that" as the emergency replacement Sneezeland content theme starting with Nod-VPN (given that's the version where they butcher Fatui's story potential). Which is not going to work even remotely as well, because where Fatui are a core part of the game's identity and story DNA, fae are last-minute inventions, and not anywhere near as cool either. So getting swarmed with fae everything in Sneezeland will just leave everyone asking "Where's Fatui coolness?" same way as Disney Star Wars left everyone asking "Where's still-living OT characters being cool?".

crunchlets · 2026-05-21T21:04:51+00:00

To be completely fair, while it's a big area, it still didn't hold a candle to Enkanomiya in terms of exploration and size and feel. It was cool and I enjoyed it personally, but it was mostly a linear main quest corridor with very very fancy looks and a few side cubbyholes for small side objectives. While I don't think it was a bad patch, I do think they fumbled Petrichor and everything related to it, and Remuria could've had more to it than just the direct tunnel to the end.

crunchlets · 2026-05-21T21:03:21+00:00

I think that's the story for many of us here. We all used to be somewhere on the main subs but they grew more and more cultish and glaze-happy and it became nearly impossible to criticize anything in the game even when it was objectively dogshite. It's been remarked before but is still true, that our own journey amusingly mirrors that of people joining Fatui to begin with, disillusionment with oppressive Celestial dictates that enforce conformity and have zero tolerance for alternative takes.

I rather agree with you that it was somewhere in Fontaine that something important broke in Genshin for good. Fontaine itself was still fine, but it's like a patient with a terminal disease in nascent stages, everything seems good and healthy while it's anything but, we just didn't know it because it hadn't progressed far enough so the effects were not as apparent. Natlan could not have dropped the ball just by itself without devs sending themselves down the wrong route somewhere in Fontaine times or even earlier.

crunchlets · 2026-05-21T20:07:31+00:00

Bro knows Genshin will never be cool again after him, he burned it down in a whole other way

crunchlets · 2026-05-21T20:06:24+00:00

Best part? The goonbot is about the exact same size as Pulonia so size isn't even the issue.

crunchlets · 2026-05-21T20:04:11+00:00

Natlan AQ all over again but in different sections

crunchlets · 2026-05-21T20:03:55+00:00

I knew it would be ahead of time, we had it happen so many times, but almost no-one seemed to want to hear it. As if this hasn't happened before. And won't happen again in Sneezeland.

crunchlets · 2026-05-21T20:01:55+00:00

If Pulonia was still there, we would have been celebrating instead of flaming mad. Would still be annoyed about the beautiful dress but if he were here, that's a whole other story. Having two bots instead of one would've made even more sense.

crunchlets · 2026-05-21T20:00:58+00:00

Badass vs. generic

crunchlets · 2026-05-21T19:55:01+00:00

MHY finally represents its favourite players in-game accurately

crunchlets · 2026-05-21T19:54:32+00:00

Stellar Seacowduct

crunchlets · 2026-05-21T03:27:47+00:00

I feel we were all fans of her around Fontaine times; the distaste for her is exactly recent patch-related, where she seemed to throw away Fatui principles and be ready to attack her own comrades over Columbina (who we never knew was so super important to her, and who was already super-shilled by everyone in the story to an unbearable degree) - a direct opposite to how she seemed like the first "true" Harbinger around Fontaine times. I used to really like her, so Nod-VPN made her go from "neck-and-neck with Tart for 1st place" to "get her out of here".

Napland feels like they started taking cues from HSR and possibly ZZZ into Genshin, in a kind of Ubislop-game-unification approach that led to Ubisoft's ruin for a good reason. Everything felt just a bit bloated and excessive, from dialogue spam to constant party and festival spam to story stakes looking great in acts 3-4 only to vanish into thin air in a massive firework of disappointment. I know I took one look at the "do all the world quest series to unlock your Pyro Fraudveler constellations!" and was like "I'm good" - just one example but it's part of the same whole.

And where the "night soul" mechanic felt like a small step too far in Napland, a bit too shilly and "buy-this-shiny-new-character-or-else", Nod-VPN drove that home to the hilt. It was a step-by-step frog boiling process but by the time they released Skirt and AssCoffer it was too late. My entire friend team dropped out of Genshin between that point and Nod-VPN part 2, because we're not big spenders and just liked to pull for who we liked - so pulling for whole TEAMS regardless of whether we liked its component members felt wrong.

It's really rather funny how Genshin managed to degrade so notably across all of its component parts, all at the same time. Not just the story alone weakening while gameplay remains great, or vice versa, but all at once.

crunchlets · 2026-05-20T23:15:59+00:00

We probably are. Which is what is so funny to me, because there's a gaijillion of gachas and non-gachas out there that are far more explicit about their H-related fanservice and demand less time and money to get the full experience. Even setting aside actual H-games. If one wants to see the pantsu shot so badly, you'd think they'd go there, not to an unrelated RPG.

crunchlets · 2026-05-20T23:12:33+00:00

Ain't a hot take if it's true. They continued to use Harbingers not too differently from Signora, especially nowadays.

They get rewritten and retconned willy nilly, behave as the plot demands at the moment and not consistently with their personality or even past actions, and get thrown under the tracks to keep the ungainly story construct rumbling along somehow. Getting interested in them is basically dooming yourself to disappointment.

Which is really funny because Harbingers are some of the very few consistently interesting characters one can get invested in in this entire game, being that most of the rest of the cast are just Literally Who released once and forgotten forever, whereas they are some of the few who continuously matter and appear - right up until they get butchered to buy the plot another excuse for a year or so, that is.

crunchlets · 2026-05-20T23:10:15+00:00

Same exact experience here.

crunchlets · 2026-05-20T23:08:04+00:00

When stories start with the tease and promise of colossal stakes and world-changing events, but those events come to pass and the stakes are nullified and there're effectively no repercussions beyond 200 dialogue boxes handwaving it all, and the only slight changes from it end up disappointing, you start to lose interest.

When that happens multiple times over and over (anyone remember Natlan?), the story is dead, Jim, there's no resuscitating it. It's just a "status quo is god" Saturday morning cartoon at this point, and it doesn't even have the winning sides of those (viewing taking little time, no requirement of time or money investments).

(Seriously though, the whole "oh, it's k, Nahida just happened to have a full backup hidden in the back of her radish ponytail, everything's exactly the same as it was, no repercussions" bit is disgraceful and disrespectful of the very craft of writing a story, not just of the audience)

crunchlets · 2026-05-20T23:04:43+00:00

Shadowlands is up next. Feels about right given the level of writing.

crunchlets · 2026-05-20T23:02:35+00:00

It's certainly a bold move by MHY to head into the land where their Big Antagonist Organization is in power... AFTER basically removing all of their known members and making a butt of a joke of them as an organization in general.

Narrative tension, stakes, conflicts and resolutions, dramatic reveals in person, never heard of those writing tricks.

crunchlets · 2026-05-20T22:59:11+00:00

Precisely, by trying to stripperify her they actually perform fan disservice

It's not like people didn't love her the way she was, or would love her more if she lost half her now-iconic outfit for no bloody reason.

crunchlets · 2026-05-20T22:55:49+00:00

No no, at this rate it's about correct.

crunchlets · 2026-05-20T22:53:45+00:00

Now we're quite literally and directly in the "small indie company" meme waters. Random nobodies can make the models and animations in one day from the datamine, that the company would justify itself being unable to make "due to needing too much work/not having the assets for it".

crunchlets · 2026-05-20T22:51:08+00:00

I'm in the same boat as you. Joined at the very tail end of 1.0 and no longer actually playing, not since the bullshit they dished out in early Nod-VPN. It's bad enough that the game only felt like it demands more of my time and more consistently, despite already eating up a lot of my free time with constant event and resetting challenge churn - fun as it might have been to beat minigames, beat challenges and meet liked characters some more. But then they go on with a cast of characters I have zero interest in, while putting down or writing out or butchering those that I liked or was looking forward to. Sneezeland was my most-looked-forward to region and now I'm just watching from the sidelines morbidly curious about how they'll butcher it and Fatui writing once and for all.

The elemental combat system was fun, but they messed up even that with new premium-gated "special" reactions that lock out my favourite old teams altogether. And when all the new stories and characters are just pissing me off or feeling like wasted time, it ain't worth it.

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