#not over the dainsleif quest. the twins and caribert... love them so much

[torgawl]

caribert alberich my sweet boy :(((

[ac-liveblogs]

We Will Be Reunited ch4; Caribert

dain quests are usually solidly alright, by genshin standards.

dain. why did you do this to me. daaaaaiiin

Points of note, because I don’t have much to say:

Kaeya

It’s bad. I’m sure a lot of people are going to love that Kaeya immediately reassures us that he doesn’t care or know that much about Khaen’riah anyway, he’s not going to betray Mondstadt, but the entire conversation with him absolutely obliterates the drama HYV seeded back in his Character Story at launch. Two years of waiting for any kind of acknowledgment, and we get;

Kaeya just tells us, completely unprompted, he’s from Khaen’riah. This is a secret he’s kept close to him for years, the revelation of which absolutely devastated his relationship with Diluc to the point that his best friend and sworn brother attacked him over it but yeah, sure, Kaeya’s just gonna tell the first person that vaguely asks about his past. In the context of “have you been to Sumeru before”, sure, whatever. Not that HYV hasn’t quietly been making the Kaeluc situation less explosive than it originally seemed for quite some time now.

Dain and Kaeya meet purely so that Dain can exposit Alberich family lore. You know this is why they met, because as soon as the lore is dropped and Kaeya’s assured Dain he’s not gonna do anything, the plot no longer has any further use for him so he leaves mid-conversation and we don’t see him again for the rest of the quest. Bye, dude. That spice merchant was definitely more important than anything we were talking about.

Kaeya very conveniently doesn’t want to betray Mondstadt. Given the will he-won’t he was the main drama present in his character concept along with his relationship with Diluc, HYV has now successfully defused any drama with his character. Off-screen. I love offscreen character arcs. They just keep happening. Sure, they could revisit it later, but I seriously doubt it after how they handled Collei. I will genuinely be shocked if it matters in any considerable way.

Basically, if you were interested in Kaeya’s character concept at all, fuck you. He’s a vehicle to deliver lore, just like Kazuha and Scaramouche were.

The Lore

It’s... ugh. Okay, firstly, while this “surprise! you were in a flashbackall along!” deal where you at least get to interact with what happened Way Back When is infinitely preferable to us standing around and getting lectured at, it doesn’t escape my notice that the clever plot twist (revealing you were in your sibling’s memories the whole time at the last second) did mean that HYV got to avoid writing your sibling and Dainsleif interacting for any extended period of time in the context of a serious plot.

Convenient, that. It’s so wild how that keeps happening. These writers are seriously allergic to player characters having serious conversations in serious situations. Not like that’d be interesting or anything.

It’s also really convenient that Dain just so happened to remember the lore in Sumeru now that Sumeru is unlocked, huh.

Disappointing as it is that even the godless nation of Khaen’riah still ended up worshiping something because not worshiping SOME kinda deity is illegal unless it’s stupid (Keqing), the story with the son was... fine. Except for Eide’s eng voice direction, that was hilarious. Mostly just sucks that we didn’t get to see our sibling’s thoughts on the matter, since we were apparently them. Convenient, that.

The lore drips are... whatever. The plot seems to be trending towards Khaen’riah having screwed themselves over, which... I would probably be more accepting of in a different game, but I’m sure this is just gonna turn into “Heavenly Principles did nothing wrong”, so....

I’m just so unenthusiastic about the mysteries in this game because I know HYV will always take the easy way out on writing them. Man. I don’t even care about the twins’ lore anymore.

I think the only thing I really liked in this quest was Dain wanting to finish his drink before doing plot shit.

I’m gonna go do Windblume, anyway. Mondstadt usually delivers on fluffy fun.