#as he is when he talks about Herta and Screwllum. Or perhaps he is being even more so

[fragmentedblade]

I called it, Ruan Mei is deranged and shady as hell

[aoxizu]

so on xhs a lot of people have been complaining about the star rail live concert, and out of curiosity for how bad it is really, i went to watch it myself

and i don't know what these people were on about the concert is great

so here's my thoughts on it

as i do not happen to live in shanghai and am in fact 15 hours away from it, i watched the stream playback on youtube. youtube's awful compression and my lack of strong wifi signal aside, the concert overall was good and though i haven't watched the penacony part yet, what i have watched was geeat

starting off with herta's space station we have kafka's canon, which weirdly fits penacony with the clock theme, and interstellar journey was very energetic too

i am not a violinist and did not look too hard at kafka's violin playing but it felt a little off, though the overall movements seemed to be about right

apart from kafka, there was relatively little virtual character models showing up and pretending to do the concert themselves, which i expected as i was used to vsinger/chinese vocaloid concerts in which the fictional characters generally pretend to be singing, or dancing while the music plays

as an example here's ordinary disco performed live with an arrangement that includes all 6 vsingers

the graphics chosen for space walk were also nteresting, like i don't get it but i think it's very cool nonetheless, and i did like how it set the scene as a very dreamy vibe to then get interrupted by the antimatter legion i mean battle themes.

overall i think the best parts of the hss section were interstellar journey and silver wolf's theme for me personally, and i did also like the rest of it

for some reason topaz's theme is in here instead of with the rest of belobog

but anyway, moving on now to jarilo vi

wildfire still has the same kick to it as when i first fought cocolia, and i am going to take the chance here to plug one of my favorite analysis videos for star rail i have seen so far: how embers became a wildfire

and the jarilo vi section is also home to one song that is absolutely worth the whole 2 hours of concert, if you don't want to watch the whole thing at least watch serval's song, detonation arrives at dawn, timestamp 40:00 on the youtube video

it is not just a cover of the version used in her trailer, it includes a rap from eunice/88 degrees bedrock, which can be found in the game by talking to eunice in the robot settlement

and it is so cool. it's amazing.

and then we move on to the xianzhou luofu

so far you've been thinking this is a normal concert, with people coming up on stage to sing, dance, or perhaps dance while singing. the luofu throws that out of the water, literally, with the water jets that obscure the stage and then Part as samudrartha kicks in

which speaking of link to a cover of samudrartha by zhao yang, screwllum's chinese va, who was salty that he wasn't able to get tickets to the concert and decided to sing it himself

the suona goes insane during blade's theme, and even though it doesn't last very long, it carries enough energy to make up for it

and the chinese acrobatics section in the middle of the luofu part is pretty fun as well

and i think watching the concert and being able to listen to so many different songs in short succession seems to help with recognizing similar themes or motifs through different songs, such as in samudrartha there is a section of descending notes that parallels the descending bell sequence in the exalting sanctum theme, and which is present in a lot of places on the luofu actually, which leads me to think that it could represent the luofu as a primary motif

the phantylia second phase chant is very menacing also, and the introduction is cool for obvious reasons (jing yuan)

for those who have remained blissfully unaware, i like jing yuan, and i have 102 days worth of posts on this tumblr account chronicling my journey to save for him. clearly i may be slightly biased.

but you should trust me when i say that jing yuan being at the end of the entire luofu section is absolutely amazing and live audience videos capture it particularly well, as the youtube stream doesn't quite do justice to the energy and volume of the audience

jing yuan deserves the finale spot. he's incredible

i wish i could have been there just for the drums, but i will settle with being able to watch it from a different continent at all

as for the rest of the concert, ie the penacony part, i haven't gotten to watch that yet, but i was able to watch funny bone and sam's theme, and funny bone is convincing me to watch the entire hoyofair (star rail section), because i can't believe i missed it it's so good

i think, overall, why people didn't like the concert is because it was not as 2d-heavy as they expected. i think people expected more of a miku or vocaloid style concert, with more interactions between the characters and the audience than this concert had

the star rail live concert seems to lean slightly more in the direction of the chinese new year spring festival night show that happens yearly, which may not be a style that everyone enjoys, but that's ok

personally i thought it was great, and was a more pure music experience typical of a more traditional concert, with cool visuals thrown in alongside