#it's also disappointing that welt and march weren't really used much

[ac-liveblogs]

Honestly they plainly shot themselves in the foot w that one bc like. They COULD do better. The "ichor of two dragons" animation is an endlessly cooler setup for the transformation than what they did in the game lmao.

Hahaha?! Holy shit I didn't know that existed til you mentioned it but you are so right???

Tbh, the way DH's entire storyline was handled is bonkers. The character Blade is introduced so that, despite DH's story saying Blade was hunting him down, you legitimately never get anything like that. This game is usually pretty good about you not needing to read Character Stories to understand what's going on, so Blade being... pretty chill in Dan Heng's presence for the most part reads as extremely strange. (and disappointing for Blade, who is So Boring I Could Cry.)

You would expect Blade to actually... hunt Dan Heng down for revenge. At some point. Argenti broke onto the Express, why not Blade. Instead, Dan Heng misses Blade's introduction into the story, misses Blade's introduction to the rest of the Astral Express (non-verbal), and by the time Dan Heng runs into him the game cares much more about Dan Feng so even their reunion immediately gets derailed into "oops Dan Heng got stabbed time to transform!"

And then the triumphant vocal track over Dan Heng parting the dragon sea even though we have next to no frame of reference why we should give one single shit about him having horns now.

We meet Jing Yuan independently of Dan Heng, and Jingliu (despite apparently being present during the Stellaron crisis) legitimately only shows up to exposition dump after the main storyline is over to a mostly unresponsive Dan Heng. We also learn what Dan Feng even did and why it mattered + why Blade wanted revenge after the main quest, well past when you could possibly capitalise on it for drama.

It is extremely similar to Genshin's horrifically lazy writing style. I had horror reel flashbacks to Scaramouche. It's still better but that's not good.

And it sucks! It seriously sucks because all the pieces of Dan Heng's storyline if handed to someone even slightly competent that wanted to put in the effort it would line up just fine, but the story just!!! Misses all of the emotional beats!!! You don't even get to fight Blade!

Dan Heng is my favourite so seriously, why this. It was also just weirdly early to be dumping all this information on us. Like, not even just a piece of the puzzle, his entire backstory...

Also, why did we leave Bailu there I get he doesn't want to get involved in the succession crisis but she has assassins after her -

Unrelated but how come most of the women, especially March 7th, were so catty in Xianzhou Luofu. It's not just me, right? Wasn't March weirdly mean and condescending there?