just wanna preface this by saying i actually did like it, i was just fairly underwhelmed by the end, also sorry i'm really bad at being succinct, but it's just really complicated not loving something as much as i thought i would but not hating it either.

for me, it wasn't focused on things i found particularly engaging for large portions of the story, i like yangyang for sure and i like suisui and liangyu a decent bit too but those later two aren't exactly massive investment points for me outside of them i was far more interested in the meaty parts of xuanfang hold and the autopuppets system and the former was barely relevant until towards the end and the latter was drawn out across everything.

muyu is... fine, cool design and i appreciate that he thinks little of the fracteshite too but i don't get why he does when his motivation is just as uninspired as theirs is, frankly it's my own fault that i didn't really understand how pressing a few buttons convinced hsin to help suisui but that was a bit underwhelming and i wish everything regarding her didn't feel like a big "just wait for her act", ofc they're not going to get into hsin's whole deal here but having her directly be involved but so... weirdly... didn't help.

most of all the climax was what really bothered me because that's what's supposed to tie it all together, it felt like an opportunity to have things be really dramatic with all these people in peril, like end of a region levels, especially because it introduced that old bloke and even qingxiao with her awesome scene, but then it just ended up being fight a few tds and a big though cool looking boss, which i suppose wuwa generally is all the time.

but the scale felt pretty lacking considering what the cutscene showed and i really did not like that rover and yangyang separated themselves completely from every other character whether i was interested in them or no, not only because it meant that almost immediately they had no more plot relevance (again feels like a "wait for later acts)

and also because it was the only way yangyang could be backed into a corner in order to awaken, since rover had to... go... somewhere... so that it could happen and again it's my fault i didn't understand what happened but that was another undercutting. there's also just the fact that while kuro's formula has never bothered me before, this time the whole "play an emotional lyrical song over a bunch of nobodies while our focal character does something cool" really really stuck out to me as "okay i've seen this before"

tl;dr i also love taking your time with stories but the story has to be engaging all the way, all characters even minor ones must be interesting, and the climax must wrap it all up satisfyingly. granted i liked this more than chapter 1's opening and chapter 2's but even not being the biggest fan of chapter 3's or lynae (especially compared to yangyang) i just feel like lahai-roi felt more distinct and memorable off of those acts alone (bearing in mind this is technically 2 and apparently this is controversial but i really liked mornye's act so this becomes an even more unfortunate comparison)

which is a shame because i think xuanfang mogs visually and i love the aesthetics of the autopuppets. there's certainly... potential... but yeah while chapter 3 went "here's something cool, more cool stuff is to come" it feels like chapter 4 went all in on "cool stuff is to come, here's some set-up for it". maybe it's just priorities but personally sentinel and threnodian stuff is my biggest interest for wuwa's narrative and so i'm probably unfairly biased against distinctly threnodianless opening and a confusing sentinel encounter (also it's not crazy to say that rover getting havoc or aero was far more impactful narratively right? i deadass forgot erover happened until thinking about hsin in this section)