#in conclusion: go listen to hadestown. listen to all three versions

[holdharmonysacred]

Waiting for Genshin to come back up from maintenance so I guess in the meantime I’ll finally post my thoughts on the ending of the Inazuma arc.

First off, much as it saved me time when I had to speedrun to unlock the Kazuha event, I think the Resistance questline and the “We gotta fight the Raiden shogun!” questline in act 3 should’ve been just completely different acts rather than something crammed together. Like, give the Resistance their own chapter so that that whole subplot can actually be resolved onscreen properly instead of “Yae saved your ass, we are now completely abandoning what we were doing beforehand”, and THEN jump over to the Final Fight part of the story. As is the speed at which the game abandoned the plot up to that point after Scaramouche KOs you just gave me whiplash.

And then with the actual conclusion like. The final fight against Ei genuinely kicked ass, it was absolutely perfectly done what with the visions yeeting out to support you and Kazuha briefly getting to use Ei’s own element against her. I’m genuinely disappointed that Kazuha doesn’t get to dual-wield visions after this - I get why, since it’d be hell to code on top of how it would break the game balance due to Kazuha being so limited, but it’s still a super cool idea and it sucks to see it get ditched. It is nice to see Kazuha’s friend’s vision actually on his grave in the game once Kazuha leaves it there though, it’s over by Ayaka’s house if anyone hasn’t found it yet.

I think my big concern is that I’m scared of people girlbossing Ei into “Ei did nothing wrong” when that just ruins her character and defeats the point of the arc, and 2. the ending is stuck with a Status Quo Is God situation. I got spoiled on Ei’s situation going in, so I was worried it was going to turn into “Ei actually did nothing wrong and it was Literally Everybody Else”, so it was nice that the game twisted back on itself and went no, Ei really did approve of the Hot Bullshit going on like the vision hunt decree, and her ignorance of just how bad things in Inazuma had gotten was 100% willful. I get the same vibes from her that I get from Hades in Hadestown - someone who is so desperate to protect that which she holds dear that she has built a wall around herself, but who harms the things she loves when she walls them in too. Which I unfortunately have a strong hunch people let her get away with even though it does her character dirty because she’s a hot lady and not an old man, and I Fear for that disk horse. I’m already baffled by the way TV Tropes frames her as “Noooo, she had no idea!!!!!” when like. she herself said in-game that she already knew she was getting played, and didn’t care because she agreed with it all anyway - the most she didn’t know was just how fucked things were until the Resistance marched up on her doorstep and the Traveler kicked her ass.

I’m kind of mixed on the actual ending, because on the one hand it feels like it’s a copout where Mihoyo didn’t want to commit to the full revolution and “Ei is dethroned and has to quit her job” that it felt like the story was building up to. On the other hand, it kind of works in the sense of like - going back to the Hadestown comparisons, the revolution fails, Ei only budges a little bit, but there’s a crack in the wall, and in the future that crack could get bigger and bigger and bigger until finally the wall does collapse. The writing’s still wonky, and the Traveler and friends are a little too okay with the status quo once the chapter ends, but like. It’s a workable ending. Not the best, but not the worst either.