#3.4 hsr

[dotarari]

Take This Pain Away From Me

Needed something to create after experiencing personal things, so sorry Phainon :,))

And never again will I draw him in this form…

Kinda also rushed this so sorry if it looks off. Just wanted it to be done.

You can view here for the time lapse of the piece!

[acilykos-art]

You may crown yourself in my blood

Deliverer... I wish you eternal victory

[a13af]

finally found the time to start 3.4

(haha crappy phone quality)

a different kind of duel... 👅👅

valid crashout 😔

[nerdudi]

Love spills from his hands. It is ichor where his blade pierces the back of his companions.

Your friends, your family, everyone you ever knew and loved suddenly all burned to ash. Destruction was brought upon your loving village. Still, you kept love close to you. The fate of the world was placed on your back. “Deliver us a new era”, they said. “You are an heir without flaw,” they said. So why could you feel yourself cracking? You fought against the titans, gods in their own right, you fought to bring about a new era of peace and joy. So your new people could keep the peace your family could not. The world wanted you to rage, but still you loved. The world killed your new friends, your new family, every person you loved. Still, you loved. The world wanted you to rage. You went through it again. And again. And again. The world still wanted you to rage, but you still wanted to love. The gods have abandoned you- no. The gods are against you. They are playing with you, and there is no one to save you. No one. No one. No one. Everything, all that suffering, it will never stop, and it will fuel even greater suffering. But still you love, you love with rage, you love through millions of lives, you love until you burn and your body and soul are broken and-

Who are you?

What do you dream of?

You don’t know. You just want everyone to be happy. Everything to mean something. You’ll carry the weight of the entire world, the whole universe, if it only means that you’ll protect them all. That’s how you love.

Phainon of Aedis Elysiae, may the world never again need you to carry its weight. May you be carried into a new future, where you are loved back just as intensely. Cradled in the warmth of everything you care for.

[azulawriting]

When morality is set to die: Why 3.4 fails as anything but a reflection of a deeper problem with HSR’s lack of player agency

So, I’m back. It’s me, the same person who made an entire series on Amphoreus back at it again for round 6.

I’m not here to beat a dead horse. I'm here because I think it’s important for the fandom (or at least whoever is willing to read this with an open mind) to see that 3.4, even if we ignore Myriad Celestia, is nothing short of a fabricated tragedy that, in my opinion, delivers a very troubling message: It is your duty, and it is noble, to forsake the universe for a single friend.

But first, I want to address something right off the bat.

There's nothing wrong with being the villain of the story

Before HSR, I've played my fair share of other games, including things like Modern Warfare 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Skyrim, GTA San Andreas, and way too many visual novels of all kinds to list them all without muddying the point of this section.

I list all these games because they give you the choice of doing some of the most abhorrent acts you could think of and that, personally, I just find fun to do in an environment where nothing is real and, most of all: I get consequences for being evil.

Yes, me going on a city guard killing spree in Skyrim should get every new town I step in on high alert. Same thing happens if I decide to abolish the police one cop at a time in GTA and it’s totally understandable.

Yes, me deciding to kill all the refugees in the first town I get to in BG3 should make Halsin absolutely pissed and disgusted. He has every right to see me as an enemy, because, well, technically I am.

Yes, the point of the No Russian mission should be that Makarov is an even greater manipulative asshole than the CIA expected; my role in the undercover mission should backfire and trigger everything nobody wanted to happen.

I enjoy being an asshole even if I'm not being a villain in games. It’s part of my fun, especially with characters I find to be annoying. Having the freedom to be as evil as I want or as nasty as I can be to one or multiple characters is part of what makes games fun.

On one condition.

Being evil isn't fun when you are treated as the hero

And I don't mean this as in “hero guy goes off the rails and becomes the villain while nobody notices”. Player agency and the game punishing bad actions is part of what makes grey morality work, especially in cases like No Russian in MW2. It's shocking. It's sickening, but again, the game doesn't shy away from showing that the very act you're committing is in fact disgusting and evil. Nothing good came from it. It was a gamble and you lost it from the start because Makarov knew who you were and how to use you. Even if you didn't fire a single round at the airport.

Honkai Star Rail has never been very good, like most gacha games, at handling player agency, especially because its plot is less like an RPG and more like a visual novel where you only have one route. Still, even within this forced narrative framework, the game manages to reward the good choices it lets the player make on their own. They even have a way to condemn the most foul choices the players can make. How? Well, through a very minor but interesting item.

The mechanics of the Praise of High Morals

Remember these?

From the Spaces Station up to the Luofu, you could gather these almost exclusively by doing the right thing throughout various missions or encounters with NPCs. And it was worth going through a few good actions because it then let you do the really interesting stuff.

Really interesting stuff like, say, dropping a neutron bomb in the lake where Dan Heng's people spawn.

You don't make it go boom, you just drop the thing there. It costs six Praises of High Morals to unlock the option to do such a reckless and possibly destructive act. The dialogue itself even makes you reconsider what you're about to do, noting how dangerous and sacrilegious it is.

Not my gameplay. But it’s the only images I have of this quest.

But well, if you, like me, had the required Praises of High Morals, then the game still doesn't let you go from its judgement. And it's excellent because it shouldn't. Even if you say that in theory it should be fine. Even if, after the fact, nothing happens, you are not immune from having the game reminding you that what you did could've been catastrophic. See the images below.

This was fairly minor but I liked the mechanic. It was a fun way to be the best chaotic neutral you could be within the very limited agency you have within the game.

Until, well, they made the Praises of High Morals something you could buy. Like how the Catholic Church did Indulgences. It’s no longer fun to drop the bomb in the Luofu even if you didn't do so before for lack of Praises of High Morals because now you can just buy your way into this outcome.

I could've brought any of the actions that cost you some Praises of High Morals, but I chose this specifically because it had the potential to bring unimaginable destruction aboard the Luofu.

And, back in 1.2, the game didn't let you forget it.

Dropping a neutron bomb into the lake could've made you an enemy of the Vidyadhara and the Luofu, had things gone wrong.

So, why is it that, in 3.4, we no longer have the same accountability?

On the one hand, we could say that it’s because we're just naive. The trailblazer doesn't know what the player does and thus this is just a tragedy in the making.

Except that doesn't work.

There are no excuses for any character to not question what the trailblazer is about to do, even if we believe the part that we are too naive or not “heroic” to begin with.

The potential costs of saving Phainon and Amphoreus are not a secret

The trailblaze quest starts with a bang; I will admit that I was intrigued, especially considering what Screwllum tells us right off the bat about the “fate” of Amphoreus.

Based on Lygus’s monologues, we know that Amphoreus itself is the Lord Ravager. The Scepter was corrupted in its entirety and repurposed to serve Nanook, as Lygus first tells us, the players, but he also tells this to Caelus during the many flashbacks we're subjected to as we follow Phainon Prime become Khaslana then become the Flame Reaver.

There are many characters who speak about how fate is unavoidable. The game itself says that we have two options:

Preserve the loop.

Break the loop.

Preserving the loop means Khaslana and Cyrene continue to foil the objective of the Chrysos Heirs, but it also buys time for external actors like Screwllum and Herta to study Amphoreus from the outside and find ways through. Now, granted, they might be betting on us, the protagonists to find a way to break Amphoreus from the inside, which should, in theory also destroy Irontomb because, again Amphoreus = Irontomb. As far as we know, there are not that many other effective containment mechanisms for Irontomb.

On the other hand, breaking the loop, should Cyrene's and Phainon’s plan work could also end up with the destruction of Irontomb and… a “true Dawn” for Amphoreus; this implies there is a way for Amphoreus to not only continue its existence without being Irontomb, but also become a real, tangible world, not a buggy SU.

What evidence do we have that Phainon and Cyrene's plan has a chance to work? Well, none. At least none that’s explicitly stated beyond the “we maintained the loop until an external variable came in and hopefully does what we want it to do”.

Meanwhile, what do we know for sure will happen if Phainon and Cyrene are wrong? Oh, right. Irontomb. A Lord Ravager strong enough and with enough hatred for Nous to kill them.

3.4 doesn’t end with a hopeful note in that regard. In the admin terminal we’re given, we see that the liberation of Irontomb is halted, but it hasn't failed or been disabled. It's simply stuck. Phainon’s idea to burn Irontomb from within with the power of the millions of Coreflames he gathered as Khaslana could work. But then we open the terminal and we find that... Whoops! Khaslana merged with Irontomb.

Irontomb is having quite the epic meal time right now.

Now, this should be ringing alarms. Even if we assume Phainon is now the main drive of Irontomb, he's still a Lord Ravager strong enough to kill an Aeon. And, by all measures, he has a bone to pick with Nanook. He’s perhaps strong enough to still trigger a cosmic conflict that will end in Nanook’s destruction.

We haven't solved the problem.

The risk of having a Lord Ravager go out and tear galaxies apart—including those where our friends and allies in Penacony, the Xianzhou and Belobog are— is not lessened by what we just did.

In fact, we might've just made it worse, given that Irontomb/Phainon has more power than it ever had access to before.

I can understand that maybe this is a necessary moral failing from the Trailblazer. This is the one time where they chose wrong. They got carried away by misplaced sympathy and now everyone is fucked because of it.

Except there's not a single character who frames this a bad or at least risky choice.

Why is ‘saving Amphoreus’ a duty?

I would expect the word ‘duty’ to carry the same weight as it does during the No Russian mission. The whole “you will lose a piece of yourself, but you are doing this for the greater good, soldier” kind of mentality.

It could be easy to frame the choice to take Phainon and Cyrene up on their extremely risky gamble as the only shot they have to actually destroy Irontomb. All they had to do is have Screwllum insist that, yeah, the risk to freeing Irontomb is very bad, but they have no way to act from the outside. The only way to defuse the bomb, so to speak, is doing it from within. Then, if we had a hint that the loop was only increasing Irontomb's power, then it would be very logical to take the gamble. There is no other way, after all.

Alas, that is not how the story is presented. Instead, we have Lygus himself tell us this:

So, what is Phainon’s destiny, exactly? To usher in the “pale dawn?” Or, as he later says, to “Bring Nanook a dawn where the stars will die”?

Over and over, we are told to stay and witness or usher in the “Fate of Amphoreus”, even when said fate is quite grim for everyone else outside of it. Even Screwllum does this.

And I keep asking myself… why would he wish for this? Why would anyone want this?

Caelus, though stupid or reckless or villainous as he might be, still has friends outside of Amphoreus. There could be at least one line where he could question just how solid Cyrene's and Phainon's plan is. Like the quest of the neutron bomb in the Luofu said, we can't just say “in theory” or “we hope” when the alternative is blowing up the stability of the universe as we know it.

Besides, do we have any concrete reasons to trust that our new friends even care about the galaxy the way we do?

I would argue that we have proof of the contrary.

Cyrene doesn't care about the galaxy, and if she doesn't, then why would Phainon?

Let me put you a quote from Cyrene that unsettled me from the moment it began to dawn on me that the game was pushing the release of a Lord Ravager (be it Phainon or Irontomb) on us, the player.

“it's okay if we blow up the universe if we get to hold hands at the end!”

See, the reason why I think it's important for someone foreign to Amphoreus to at least ask these two how they know their plan has a shot at working, it's because these people know nothing of how the galaxy is like beyond Amphoreus. They have nothing to lose, really, even if they allowed Irontomb to be released.

From the start, their quest to stop Irontomb is less about the greater good for the rest of the cosmos and more about their right to self-determination. They don't want to have their destiny be prewritten by Lygus.

That’s it.

It’s an understandable goal, but, we, the players, should be allowed to at least have some doubts creep in.

As sad as Phainon’s arc is, the moral weight of helping these two defective bots is just not the same for the trailblazer. It’s not just a matter of freeing two friends from an unjust fate. It's about also keeping all our other friends safe from an existential threat.

The trailblazer has friends all over, starting by the Astral Express being parked right outside Amphoreus. These are real people. Unlike Phainon and Cyrene, the souls of everyone outside of Amphoreus can't be stored in a USB key as a backup. Once they're gone, that's it. Even Dan Heng's next reincarnation won't remember a thing and will be, for all intents and purposes, a completely different person.

So again, I ask you: if in 1.2 we were admonished by the game itself to not do something potentially catastrophic to the Vidyadhara… why are these our only choices in 3.4?

Why paint this as something we should regret as the player character? Mind you, this is a little before Screwllum talks to us, but even after that, we are told to stay. Because it is our “mission”, our “duty”.

The only answer 3.4 offers to my question can be read in two ways:

It's our duty because Phainon is friend-shaped and he has the benefit of recency bias. When was the last time we saw anyone from Penacony, the Xianzhou, Herta's Space Station or Belobog? Forever ago. This ain’t about them. They don’t even deserve a single thought.

The writers said so. This is their “tragedy” in the making. Everyone believes we're doing a great thing when in fact it's very “morally grey”. Nevermind that we never get any actual grey morality because said thing can only come when a disastrous, risky gamble is allowed to be questioned at least once.

Both interpretations don't help the cause the game is trying to sell to me. I think it's a betrayal far worse than the valuable lessons patch 3.3 left me about lies being “noble” or genocide being a product of a “boundless love” for humanity.

Nothing is allowed to be questioned, not by the player nor any other NPC. When the stakes aren't just the survival of some buggy SU but the survival of the cosmos as we know it, I'm sorry, but I can’t endorse the writing behind this "tragedy".

Phainon’s existence doesn’t hold any weight compared to the lives of everyone else and Myriad Celestia gives us a very dark and depressing glimpse at what we've just done.

And all of that because the game frames it as a “duty”.

It is not.

It is a choice.

And, just like any other choice, we must be condemned immediately for choosing it. Or, at the very least, have one moment of doubt. A single line where we question the ramifications of what we're doing.

Hoyoverse, not so long ago, was capable of condemning the player for reckless choices.

I have to wonder why they stopped.

[idratherdiethanbefam0us]

3.4 honkai star rail spoilers!!

this quest actually broke me. hyacine’s screams while being BURNED ALIVE?? sobbing.

phainon being forced to kill his friends over and over again, a total of 33,550,336 times? screaming crying throwing up

[somnisweet]

The Aeon :

Their strongest soldiers

It seems like having pink hair is the secret to succsess as a follower of Rememberance

[jad3-d]

⚠️ HSR 3.4 spoiler

the game (about my beloved fictional characters): they were never real

me: