Pretty sure Tin Man was not actually looking for an answer to why it's called Hot Dog, and is only asking expecting answers like "Haha yea it's weird isn't it?"
But noo
Me after reading the latest AK lore from CN:
https://preview.redd.it/pg7pim7h0w2d1.png?width=225&format=png&auto=webp&s=efed3863ec88593898e4d4fa5e9153a5d0aa2246
The dialogue/narration is way better in some story (Kazimierz Saga and Summer Events tend to have more plain language) the biggest culprits is Sui event since all people in Yan speak like a poet, Main story where everyone suddenly a philosopher and maybe this new event where for some reason have soo many German words.
Il Siracusano is peak cuz they have story things thay are not part of the visual novel (the one where you follow a character and you see what they are thinking or doing)
Il Siracusano and Near Light are by far my personal favorites. That writing was really enjoyable to read. The event about Yan came out after those i think, and that was by far the worst writing i have seen. I remember even the chinese crowd had complaints because the writing was just atrociously complicated.
I got put off the story of Arknights after that Yan event, and didn't read any Arknights events for a year after that.
Imo most Chinese gacha suffer from the "too verbose" problem that they apparently don't realize. It's nice that they can write a good story, but I'd appreciate them telling it in a way that's enjoyable and not just dumping it like a visual novel. At least modern visual novels have L2Ds and extra stuff to give the player some kind of interactions; gacha games keep using static sprite and the same sound effects over and over. It's even more jarring when you sit there reading for 30 mins and start zoning out due to how tedious it gets.
Video game by itself is a medium that can do a lot of the heavy lifting for story telling. Yet a lot of gacha failed to realize this and keep pushing for the text dump move. Sure, if your game is limited in what you can do like in AK then the VN-style is somewhat acceptable; but proper semi/openworld games like GI and HSR still have the same awkward mind-bogglingly long text dump for whatever reasons. That and the default walking animation for characters during the rare moments where they move in the story segment.
The only gacha stories I even read properly are mostly Korean-made. Seems like they do understand how to make a good story while not bothering me with useless yapping. Blue Archive story is not the greatest but they're short and straight to the point. PMoon writing style is concise yet can still be intriguing and emotional, on top of being able to write proper character development. GFL is a rare case of a CN gacha that still make readable story that I can enjoy; some big events I can just read it without context from start to finish and still be able to grasp the whole story. That's what I call good writing.
I always laud GFL's writing. I wonder if it's because of its "thriller" style roots, where so much of the writing is done as action scenes as if it was the setup for an action movie. I like to tell people that GFL is one of the only gacha games I've played where the people actually talk like how people in real life would talk.
[Here's an interview](https://youtu.be/AmbVC6peHzg?si=S8KU5_GmB4AGBfCq&t=508) where Yuzhong (CEO) talks about their writing strategy. In short:
https://preview.redd.it/ge5dhr022z2d1.png?width=1874&format=png&auto=webp&s=615746a6bb05629303a086b428fe93d2c4bd7961
Hypergryph writing team should learn from MICA writing team on making dialogue that's simple but effective to what's going on in the narrative and world.
I love AK world and story, but the writing being so needlessly complicated and overly verbose isn't fun or entertaining. It's just work.
.
For project moon, I've noticed that the more powerful and richer the character is, the more verbose their way to speak is. Heathcliff or any rat is simple while yi sang or star of the city level characters in LOR is more verbose.
There's a character in Blue Archive which likes to yap, but
1.) They're a side character
2.) Her clubmates will stop her if there's something else going on.
I've been told that the primary reason for why a lot of younger Asian writers, Chinese and Korean in particular, tend to write like this is that the most common platform for monetizing your writing incentivizes padding word count like crazy.
Which explains why everyone is hyperverbose, and why you get so much repetition of the same thing over and over again, because that's just what they're used to doing and it's what's popular in China.
it’s just translation quirks, to be honest. as a native speaker, chinese does read quite long and winding if translated directly to english, but it’s quite short in the original chinese text due to the inherent differences in structure syntax between the languages. this almost formal, strangely formulated feeling can be found in several other east asian languages- i find it more prominent with korean. what’s interesting is other languages translate much smoothly into english, such as french and spanish, but not east asian languages.
There’s the online AK’s story reader that takes all the in-game dialogue of a story node and puts all in one page so you scroll and read. It’s honestly better to read this way while you farm those material stages.
Lmao arknights' story is so verbose that someone was desperate enough to actually create a story reader to make it easier to read. Jokes aside, it's a great idea
Why I usually just clear the stage first then read the story later.
Plus, even when you decide to skip the story, it gives you a very brief summary of what happened so you're not completely out of the loop.
Arknights trained me to process long-form content
I had an assignment in class where I have to read and evaluate some scientific paper, around 20 pages full of text, spread on 2 columns. Mid way through the work, I realised "Sir HaiMao has prepared me for this, I am more than ready"
When I learned some side content has more words than the Harry Potter novels, I thought... I was tricked to read an entire novel and I liked it. But it's a time commitment...
MANAGER ESQUIRE!!! To where in the world hast thou disappeared!!!!!!!
* Limbus Company Don Quixote
https://preview.redd.it/4st3sabz2w2d1.png?width=632&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4a00217bea40d66be6ababa176ed53c4f0375917
Honkai Impact 3 ever since they introduced the Sea of Quanta. Actually disassociated from the story a few times because I couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were saying.
Sea of Quanta is easy enough to understand, the technobabble really starts to get bad in Kolosten, cools down during Elysian Realm and Elysium Everlasting, then goes out of control from Moon Arc on.
I remember one part during that chapter where some of the characters were trapped on the moon/quantum sea/bubble universe/something and after half an hour of technobabble, they went "of course! Why didn't we think of constructing a semi-physical bridge from dream-ether particles to walk back to earth faster?".
Hardly anyone understands the dialogue. The localization is also horrible and even the CN dudes get confused.
If someone claims to understand the lore, never trust them. They probably got 50% wrong, and even the "Correct" version might just get debunked.
Me after Einstein and Tesla try to explain the scientific and logistical underpinnings of the universe and how I fit into the big picture (somehow this is all related to quantum physics for the 5th time this chapter)
Einstein and Tesla are fine they explain the stuff well. Schrödinger though. I still have flashbacks when she explained to us why Stigma Awakened and Herrschers are opposite of each other in Ch33...
As people said that's not even a good example because everything there has an easy to understand metaphor attached. The confusing for no reason stuff happens when Schrodinger starts to speak.
Yeah... this is the main reason i've been failing to catch up to Arknights story, Even completing some of its events felt like a chore lol . Someday day i'll be able to do it .. i hope ..
I've been reading VNs and FGO for years and even currently loving Limbus Company so its not that i hate to read .. Its just that... reading Arknights always tires me out with the way its written XD .
The problem isn't Arknights' writing, the problem is they cram the amount of text into 8-10 levels and 1-2 interludes. It's literally entire novel's worth of text in that space, it's way too much.
Semantics. The writing *could* be less to make you read less per stage, but that doesn't mean the current writing itself is bad, it means the environment it's being used in is bad.
I'm honestly shocked people still read the story while playing the event normally like how we did it in earlier versions.
Personally, I've come to treat the events like a short read. I start the event by completing all the stages at my own pace, then when I feel like reading something, I have the AK event stages to read.
Reading 1/2 a part every stage just feels awful, especially if you include failure rates, practices and interludes. Big no thank you from me.
Honestly, I want to use the reader and just read it whenever, but then it bums me out when the boss gets revealed or something when I have no idea what's been going on in the plot up to that point. Like with the Witch King showing up and shit in the last event.
ever since i started to play HSR/Genshin, I feel like my literacy and focus decrease a lot.
I have a hard time to fully understand the dialogues even though sometimes they were repeated many times.
I had to go to wiki or some fanpages to understand more about lore :(
It's not a problem with you, I assure you. Hoyoverse writes very obtuse and flowery dialogue which is often quite hard to decipher, even for native speakers and/or people with a high level of literacy. It's fine to a point but I feel like more often than not it's just unneeded and serves only to confuse players.
I'm currently reading a really solid fantasy book (priory of the orange tree) and going from that to the technobabble and soup of technical terms that HSR/Genshin throws at you is like day and night. In fact, read any fantasy book - even the bottom of the barrel romance/fantasy stuff is more intuitive to understand.
Obligatory, I really do enjoy Genshin and HSR's writing when the writers give the terms and world time to breathe, I just don't think it happens often enough
Hoyoverse loves obfuscating things on purpose just for the sake of it. They’re usually holding back in main story or other voiced content for accessibility, but whenever you step into unvoiced side content and especially item descriptions there’s nothing stopping them from going all out.
Genshin be like:
A: Oh no, ouch! I'm hurt!
B: What happened to you, A?
Paimon: Are you OK, A? That looks like it could really hurt!
A: Yes, as a matter of fact, it does really hurt! I was just walking as usual, daydreaming about unimportant things and admiring the sights, and then out of nowhere, I... I...
Traveler: And then you tripped and fell?/Did you forget to look at the road?
A: Yes, that is exactly what happened... I am ashamed of myself, I should really learn how to walk better... I'll pay attention next time...
B: A has always been careless like that. It's not the first time he's tripped out of nowhere. Just last week, he tripped into the fountain, and when I pulled him out of the water his mouth was full of Mora people threw into the fountain for a wish!
Paimon: Good thing I can fly, so I never trip! Tee hee!
Paimon: Wait, that's not a good thing if it means I'll never be able to trip into a Mora-filled fountain and fish out Mora with my mouth! Maybe I should learn to walk?
A: Anyway, I need to get up and finish up my business- Ouch!
B: Are you hurt, A? Is it painful when you try to walk? Do you need a doctor?
Traveler: I can help you up./Do you need a hand?
Paimon: Oh traveler, you're always so kind, helping people who tripped and fell... Surely good things are going to happen to you!
A: I think... I think I might have broken a bone somewhere. Probably somewhere in my legs.
B: Can you figure out what you've broken? If there is a fracture, we have to make sure that we don't accidentally move it until it heals. I'll go grab some bandages, can you stay still until I come back from the store?
B: I'm back with the bandages. A, can you tell me where it is hurting?
Paimon: Took you long enough! If we let the traveler do it, he/she would have finished wrapping the bandages and sent A to the hospital by now!
Traveler: You praise me too much.../Thanks Paimon, but I'm not that fast
A: I... I think I hurt my ankle.
Kal talking about hot dogs lore unprompted after Tin Man jokingly asked her why it is called hot dog is peak AK for me.
I actually find AK writing entertaining enough for me to spend time reading it. Fremont in the most recent event is a joy to read through every time he is on screen.
I loved how that old Lich steal the spotlight since after only few scenes I already knew what I could expect from him, constant stream of verbal abuse toward anybody..... I like him playable when HG
And then turns out he is also a softy at the end since he wants to bring along one of the statues from the university with him lmao.
He loves living in Leithanien and being a lecturer after all.
The fact that its etymology is from the vendors being "hot dogs" and not the product itself is something only Kal'tsit could deliver in such a nonchalant way.
Arknight is very hard to understand but got a funny charm to it. I actually never feel bored reading all those texts even when I cannot connect any of them to make sense.
Yup. And it's funny to me that they said WuWa story is terrible, then praising Herta Space Station story, like bruh. When I read someone tldr of Herta Space Station, it surprises me that I've miss many things.
Not really though ? There were multiple threads criticizing the dialouge for being overly verbose when the last patch dropped, all highly upvoted even if there were people who disagreed in the comments.
Hell, overly complicated dialogue was one of the major complaints people had about Luofu.
Or to be repeated 5-6 times.
Arknights is a bit different, they just cram SO MUCH information in a single event. Many of them are insanely good to read but there's so much plot going on it takes ages and block of text to move forward.
Lonetrail, the longest story I've read, has like 5\~6 plot going on at the same time, they're all tied but so dispersed.
I literally dont know what people are talking about in HSR like 90% of the time.
Like some of the major story beats I get the rest is pretentiously overdone.
Probably because the devs are afraid some players may lack reading comprehension. I mean Sunday’s philosophy has been repeated over and over again yet thousands of mfs on twitter still misinterpret it
NGL I have played tons of gacha games and I think Star Rail is the only one that I still enjoy reading. The last patch was a bit rough in the beginning though, but it picked up later.
Anything [Schrödinger](https://youtu.be/jOW1kOhJYSA?si=Q2ZTc8dmmuf5h0Xt) says in HI3. Sis is literal science yapper. And i say this as a person that loves astronomy and theoric physics. HI3 cosmology is complicated as it is dont ruin it more with yapping.
Chinese players called AK's story style "**Riddler"（谜语人）.** Just pretentious person will write like this.
But the younger crowd is attracted to this story style.
[https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Gp42197up/](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Gp42197up/)
Also funny that Chinese is one of most dense writing style in the world. Mean you can convey a lot more with each letter / word than English. The same paragraph translated to Chinese is a lot shorter.
So it seem Chinese writers overcompensated to make their work longer, lol.
yea I've always wondered whether Hypergryph's writing style is done to impress teenagers & college kids, since in both EN and China the Arknights playerbase are majority 18-29 years old
Thank you for your confirmation.
I would tolerate Arknights story more if the "presentation" of it wasn't such a drag. So many times they would show you a scene with these high stakes and emotions for the player to only see 2 static portrait of characters yapping about unchanging for more than 5 minutes.
At best they would occasionally slide the character left or right and finally change the expression after 10 minutes. Doesn't help that we can barely see the characters face or the dialogue font itself being small and slow.
It would REALLY help if they actually spread out the story more so you don't spend 30 minutes BEFORE THE STAGE EVEN BEGIN. I know why they do this, cuz they don't want to give players more Originium but man has it becomes so annoying to play any new event stages.
Basically, they're not utilizing the "VISUAL" aspect of their VN-style story telling as much and trying to condense a long story into only a few stages which makes it a chore to read
When I started Arknights was around the time Break the Ice first ran, and I honestly loved the story. One of my all time favorites out of any gacha game tbh. I enjoyed the Who Is Real rerun story afterwards as well. But then Invitation to Wine came, and it was just so not it for me. Even though I read through every single stage I still came out of it feeling like I read nothing at all.
Still love the gameplay tho, but now I just skip story. I've read plot summaries of the overall story and its rad as hell, but I don't think I have the willpower anymore to sit though Arknight's story in full after I got burnt out in that event.
Invitation to wine will always be that one event that we just can't get as non CN speakers. Though I would recommend you to actually read events because I have looked at summary's and they are pretty good but they rarely pack the emotion of certain parts. [Though I would recommend using this site](https://akgcc.github.io/cc/story.html) instead of the game coz it's easier
believe it or not. I once played arknights story and it made me sleep. lol. I mean it is a very long ass dialogue. I never slept during the talulah arc and the Babel story though. that story was sick.
seriously though. compare to FGO, when I read the story in FGO, it made me excited, engaging and it made felt emotion and each dialogue of the characters are so unique. arknights is like I read a book with the same character and it is the only character in the book. it is so bland and I am not invested on the characters. not sure because it made everything serious though. I kinda like they execute the Babel story because I was really invested of Doktah's story.
After playing the latest story for HSR (Penacony) I realized I'm not a fan of super complicated story with lots of......fancy ? words sprinkle in them. I realized I wanted the story to be a little bit more simple but still complicated enough to be able to convey whatever it is that the writer wanted to convey, my opinion might be a bit of a hot take but I feel like so many gacha games have stories and lore that are wayyyyy too deep that I personally feels like it's "way too much" although having a deep lore is understandable but when it comes to the story itself I feel like they should strike a nice balance between "deep" and "simple" so that the players can actually enjoy reading through the story as they are presented to you and if they liked the story enough, they can explore the additional lore provided inside the game or through something like lore videos on their own.
This isn't AK exclusive. This is true for almost all gacha made by Chinese devs.
Hell, AK isn't even the worst offender with this type of writing for me.
Later parts of Honkai Impact 3rd were way worse than anything AK had even to this day.
I legit couldn't tell you what the fuck happened in HI 3rd during the Moon and Finality arc other than >!Kiana sealing the Honkai on the moon.!<
Every time I saw Kal'tsit show up, I would scream internally --- preparing myself mentally for 15 minutes of yapping with sophisticated nonsense. She successfully made me stop caring.
I'm fine with long dialogues if they're interesting or fun to read. FGO, for example, has some really long dialogues, but they're enjoyable to read because the characters are full of personality and their interactions were interesting.
But when I played AK, I don't know how to explain, but the characters didn't seem likeable? Like, it lacked some sort of emotion, personality, some more "human" interactions?
Idk, maybe the long winded yap makes them feel more robotic to me. Probably it's just a me problem tho.
yea AK is kinda bad at character-driven writing, except for certain events that were clearly written by a different writer like Ebenholz or Jessica the Liberated's event
For a gacha game that's entirely center around characters. It's baffling how most of them are 2-dimensional with others given actual development. If it was a novel centered around its theme and story I wouldn't mind, but the fact it's formatted as a visual novel with a lot of operators. Only some are given character development while most are thought-pieces for the writers.
Yeah AK characters can be a little stoic since AK like to portray the story quite seriously since the stakes is really high....but their stoicness is what make some scene work like Babel event is very doom and gloom but that what make the twist punch you in the gut so hard.
Although maybe that's why summer event is easier and more fun to read since the stakes is not too high usually.
Yeah, maybe the story tone just isn't for me. I personally prefer a more fluctuating tone, like in Limbus for example, where in one minute some character is cracking a joke and in the next one they're going through the most traumatizing moment of their life
But even tho the character dialogues aren't for me, I still think AK has the most interesting worldbuilding in gacha I've ever seen
Yeah I like Limbus for the same reason. AK sometimes can take itself too seriously and writer tend to make an obscure joke like the Hot Dog trivia rather than make character making real joke and pranking one another.
People that make joke or funny tend to be killed first by the writer or never present in main story only present in side story.
Genshin loves to make everything unnecessarily verbose making even the simplest of tutorials sound like advanced trigonometry, not really sure if HSR has the same problem since I usually just space out for like 70% of HSR's dialogues/texts
FGO, on the other hand really just loves the expository dumps and long drawn-out convos but still understandable since it's basically going for the VN feel
Imho whether the dialogue is boring or not really depends on how much the event/story matters to each person
Genshin's dialogue:
A: You broke your ankle, B.
B: I did broke my ankle, A. I broke my ankle from moving too fast while I was running away. In the process of running away I remembered my ankle was injured previously. Then I broke my ankle because I was running too fast. It's a shame that I broke my ankle from moving too fast. Now I can't walk anymore for a while because I broke my ankle running too fast.
C: Hey, A, I think B broke their ankle. They were running too fast while their ankle was previously injured and now they're broken. If only they didn't move too quickly while their ankly was previously injured. They could've made things easier for themselves if they just didn't break their ankle moving too quickly when it was already injured previously. Now they can't walk anymore because of their injured ankle.
D: So you broke your ankle moving too fast while it was injured? That would explain why you were limping so much because your ankle is broken. Now we can't do this plan because your ankle is injured. You shouldn't have moved so much when your ankle was healing from a previous injury. We need to come up with a better plan that doesn't involve B anymore because they broke their ankle.
Edit: All unskippable btw
Genshin just straight up has a ridiculous amount of word count fluffing, like a student pumping in filler words to meet their required word count for an essay. Combined with overt repetition that it almost feels like a kid's cartoon trying to hammer the message to the player.
HSR has a loredumping problem, they love to introduce important terms you need to learn to get understand the story in between tons of lore that *does not matter*. You could be trying to figure out how to solve the current conflict, but all of a sudden you're bombarded with the backstory of a generic NPC's home planet, system, various factions, family, etc.
You will almost certainly never visit that planet, meet anyone else from that faction, or meet their family because they do it so much it's unrealistic for the story to ever use all the lore it gives in any meaningful way.
FGO has expository dumps and has long convos, but ultimately it's a lot more character driven since they rarely make generic NPCs have too big of a role. Past the very quick 1st and 2nd Singularity it doesn't really have that much filler either. Sure you sometimes get SoL scenes to pad things out, but it does it's job well at establishing breathing room between story beats.
I think it's interesting to hear about different planets etc. in HSR. It helps build the world and gives writers tools to pull from later. They use it plenty. Not everything needs to be a Chekhov's gun.
The problem for me in HSR is the amount of fluff and slice of life stuff for the NPC's. Like, write that slice of life stuff for the characters we actually care about..
I think it's the difference between a character driven story and a world building driven story.
They're trying to make the world they created look "lived in" and that entails giving elaborate backstories to NPC's that players won't care about compared to the playable characters.
FGO manages this out by making the dialogue interactive. They add in sound effects, characters doing other things while they're explaining things, sometimes they straight up shift the scene to bring up a amp or explanation, and at the end summarize the info for you to understand. The music, sound effects etc all make it really easy to stay focused, and the long lore dumps are done in a way where it walks you through step by step.
There has only been one time so far I've ever skipped the entirety of an event, and that's just because finals were happening, and I didnt have the mental fortitude to study, farm, and read the story.
Though given it was the Learning With Manga one, apparently I wasnt missing much.
It's not about AK having characters talking like ancient philosophers. It's about them talking high and mighty for 0 reasons all the time. It's like hearing others speaking about "back in the days" every 5 minutes with old English.
It can be good for important points in story for expositional or emotional purposes, but AK just loves to sprinkle talk no jutsu in every moment, especially anniversary events and main story, which degrades the importance of those talks (many of the philosophy combat in lunar new year event was quite nice) and confuses reader, which doesn't help with stories that mix up a lot of subplots regarding other characters. Due to long boring talks we also don't have time to ease into the story or connect to its characters (my honest reactions to all the side characters in Victoria arc: yeah sure i'm sorry for what happened tl;dr) and again, confuses the reader regarding the purpose of those scenes. They have great concepts but butchered the execution about 50% of the time, especially with major events.
Meanwhile mihoyo games also have long boring talks, but it's filled with technobabbles and jargons that nobody cares about and devs probably don't understand either, with exposition so densely written and other scenes so barebone. I might be lit on fire for this but himeko's death in honkai impact was whatever for me, due to so little time spent on building relationships in previous chapters and more of uh, nothing. They probably wanted to have some slice of life but actually accomplish nothing (perhaps i'm supposed to play their first game to feel the dynamics). All those later concepts like 12 not dead yet guardians and herscherrs serve more to dilute the story than to actually get the plot working. It's even worse than ak with the fact that each chapters feel more and more aimless with no actual progress or even any indication of the overarching goals. HSR so far has been quite normal but with the track records of HI3 and GI it doesn't bode well tbh.
Arknights doesn't do this. The right side writing is still too condensed. In arknights, the speaker will first make a historical reference to some past event or some folklore tale. Then talk about a sob-story of someone who did blah blah. Then scaling up to nation level and using the incident as an analogy to how the nation broke. Finally relating back to the speaker's broken ankle.
>For that reason I'm kinda curious of why some people here as far as I know tend to want to skip story and have a low opinion against some gacha game story like the newest I see here is that people have very low opinion with Wuwa story I seen people complaining about AK story here too before
Well it is reading, quite a niche thing to do nowadays /s.
I think having voices help with reading VNs. Very different experience just reading a dialogue compared to one with voice acting, like for instance [this scene in GFL2 (spoilers)](https://youtu.be/7X4oGOwIStI). Its amazing what a good VA/direction can do.
Is that SKK talking??? No way. If so, they really did go all out. I heard that he actually gains some agency and becomes his own character at a later point but I didn't expect this.
arknights can be great with some stories but most are garbage and filed with verbal dribble with obtuse terminology to sound sophisticated or deep. also plugged with too many unimportant characters and scenes that bloat the experience. again, it *can* be good, lotta times not. **also, you can just skip them and there isn't some cutscene that plays out that i have to wade through and listen to.** thats the difference compared to these genshin likes. you're forced to hit "f" and select dialogue options as if you weren't checked out the whole time.
and in arknights at least the terminology is still mostly english and fantasy names that you could imagine in an english or european setting for a lot of stories. genshin and wuwa lean ultra hard in chinese lingo ALL the way through that is just jarring to global players. everything said in that kal qoute any english person can understand, it's just yapping too long that makes it annoying to read.
While Writing is a big part of why its boring, I think there's other parts too.
For example, there's hardly ever a change of expression when people talk. You rarely see anyone emote, or do anything, it's really bland. It's always the same drool expression. When they're mad, they have the same face. Sad, the same face. Happy, the same face. Etc etc. Compare that to FGO or Blue Archive, the expressions are absolutely glorious and have massive variety. Brings the scene to life. Hoyoverse sometimes avoids this, but their 3d models can be super static at times in facial expression. They sometimes help with VAs, but that has limits to what it can do when the on screens character is just kinda standing there
then the music. The music is just horrible at setting the scene. At times, the same music will go on the entire scene even in places that don't fit. It's always dreary or the weird happy music, and like, nothing in between. They have like 5 themes used and rarely anything else. Hoyoverse in general is even worse, the BGM is literally just the stage music and nothing else.
Next, sound effects. Whenever there's a fight or any sort of physical interaction, the sound effects are incredibly bland. There's nothing to notify you what is actually happening, nothing that indicates the action being done. Again, in blue archive and FGO, there's a ton of sound effects. From talking, walking, running, fighting, making stuff, eating, etc etc.
Finally movement. It's that the story scenes have no movement. Whenever people fight in arknights, its just two flashes of light and the same sound effect. When people are wandering around, they say it on screen but don't show it. The list goes on and on. I'm expecting more impact, parts that show the action. When someone fights, I expect mroe then two flashes of light, maybe spray some cut effects across the screen, or show an arrow being fired, or arts being cast. It's just...boring.
Hoyoverse mitigates this with cutscenes, but those are...rare.
reminds me of that dialogue of kaltsit and ulpian and ulpian stopped her midway of her talking
does anyone know where it came from? or which story? or the meme itself because i cant find it anymore
Can't remember she had ever spoken to Ulpian, that's probably in Stultifera Navis. The one that told her to cut it was Saint Carmen.
She was explaining something but then he told her to make it short since he's not getting any younger at this point.
Ironically, he also speaks a lot during the event. Truly grandpa energy.
I believe it was near the end of Under Tides, where Kal pipe up near the end to try and explain Iberia's due situation to everyone, only for Dario (known then as High Inquisitor) to tell her to shut up.
The problem with arknights story is its completely world building orianted instead of focusing on individual characters. There is very less you can say about characters relationships and hobbies outside surface level information when world building is detailed to its every end. I like this but for people that like character development/relationship heavy nature of games like BA and Genshin wont be enjoying this
I noticed this year that isn't exclusive to AK, it's a CN writing formula to make it feel like they write to reach a word count when writing a dialogue. And i hate it ☺. No offense to CN writers tho.
>For that reason I'm kinda curious of why some people here as far as I know tend to want to skip story and have a low opinion against some gacha game story
Because I may only have <20 minutes to **play** (keyword: **play**), so if the dialogue in a single section takes up more than that then it means I have to skip out of it as I ran out of time, meaning I also have no motivation to read whatever comes after it either, and second I've not even gotten to **playing** the game, which to me is kind of the point of **playing** a game.
Gacha stories tend to confuse high word count and number of thesaurus common word replacements for depth and intrigue, when it's just filler. I value games that can tell a story while also respecting the player's time, embracing being a game rather than trying to emulate being a book.
>
Since I thought people will be entertain with Arknights because of the way it was written and the philosophical dialogues, so when I heard people were annoyed with that I was genuinely surprised, so this post is meant for that, I really want to know...
Because I don't play a game to read philosophical dialogues, especially when it doesn't have anything to do with the main story. I don't care if the writers got 160 IQ (they don't though) and studied at some top-tier university (they didn't though), I **play** a game to be entertained. **Playing** the game is entertaining to me. Reading a dialogue that gets to the point and doesn't waste my time can be entertaining too. Following the main story and see where it goes can be entertaining too (assuming it's not bogged down by filler.) Reading philosophical BS that got nothing to do with anything at hand is not fun, not entertaining, and it wastes my time. That's why I skip.
You forgot the part in AK where they will have nameless NPCs go on and on about the weather for pages and pages before the actual named characters even make an appearance. That's a great way to lose the player's interest.
I've got something of a dog in this race as a bit of a writer myself.
Even if you have the best story in the world, if the way it is told is bad, then it will never be compelling. Sometimes storytelling is an even more important element than the actual story itself.
When I read Arknights, what I feel is that it lacks focus and direction. It sometimes feels like even they don't know who's a major and who's a minor character in a storyline, and like there's no one to tell them when to just stop, so you get things like a node that contains 8 different scenes with 16 different characters involved, all describing the same event with every separate character's reaction to that event, and then a final scene where Kal'Tsit comes in to explain the entire history of what just happened from the moment of the Big Bang onward.
AK really have a very good world building and the writing improved a lot with the pass of the time but yeah i get why people are scared to get into the story mostly because of to much text and not everyone love the vn format. but if the are people to give it a chance i just said that the lore of this game is insane
I agree with you! While AK writing has a lot of flaws, I think there's a lot of arguments to be made in favor of it, actually! I think some of the points I'm about to list are also why you don't see AK fans complain about story being how it is except for a few memes and stuff.
The biggest being it is ENTIRELY skippable. You can skip any and all story except like 3 'cutscenes' total afaik (which are all just sickass visuals with no dialogue). For people trying to play now and read later, it's perfect. And for people who want to read as they go, it's perfect too!
Secondly, while dialogue is (unnecessarily) verbose, AK doesn't have an infodumping problem. Characters will yap a lot, but it will mostly be philosophical stuff or general conversation or slight elaboration. They don't introduce a lot of new concepts quickly and dump it all over you. This makes skim reading a very real thing. One of the few advantages of having entire books' worth of wordcounts in stories, you can introduce new concepts at a slow and organic pace, letting the reader absorb it all. This is one of the bigger problems with wuwa story besides just being boring imo. They drop like 5 technical terms in the same 3 line dialogue and ramble on explaining each of them (when most of it is, in thr grand scheme of things, just flavor text/cool stuff that doesn't really matter, like wow the rain falls upwards when the monsters come that sure is something mhm better invent a whole term for that)
Thirdly, its just good! In general compared to most gachas I've played, AK has pretty good story and fantastic worldbuilding. Most side stories range from decent to PEAK ~~with a few exceptions~~ and while main story reallt starts picking up at around ch 6, even the early chapters are interesting enough to get yoy invested (while also not being that long since its early AK so they have way lower wordcounts). The only stuff that REALLY suffers from being too verbose are ch 7-8 and a few events released in the same timeframe imo. It's a bit funky when patriot talks about how he's not gonna listen to RI and simply advance but then him and amiya throw words at each other for a solid 5 minutes.
It's probably why it and Near Light are great because they are able to be complicated but not too insanely or exaggerated like other stories in AK. They feel like exceptions than the rule.
I play FGO, HSR and Arknights. FGO is the one that I enjoy reading story the most the second one is HSR and the last one is Arknights. And to show how much I invested in each game main story, I finished FGO’s new story within 1 week for HSR I finished new story within 2-3 weeks and for Arknights I haven’t even finished 3 latest chapter yet.
The only time when i found it hard to understand while reading AK story was during Invitation to Wine and Who is real.The CN New Year events and the way the siblings speak is hard to understand many times.The remnant AK story as for me is one of the very best.You know it hits hard when a simple ep for Kirsten Wright can evoke so much emotions within u.
While I don't really mind when these games tend to be verbose, it really irks me how much these anime games (gacha or otherwise) like to borrow all sorts of elements and references from revered anime and games but are always loathe to take some of the best parts of what make them great, which is the storytelling.
We live in a post-Uncharted, post-Mahoutsukai no Yoru world. I really hope there'd be more in the way of organic dialogue and better pacing in the storytelling around these parts.
An ironically long anecdote;
So, it was a little wild when I first got into AK. I was early in law school and I was taking one of our required courses on writing (specifically on drafting motions and case analysis). One of the biggest things the professor tried to drive home was breaking people out of two "extreme" modes - the folks that wrote in slang and emoji, and the folks that wrote how they "think" lawyers are supposed to write (i.e., legalese). The problem on the first part has to do with being too casual in formal writing - essentially writing as if you were talking to a friend, or on social media, and using inappropriate abbreviations or non-standard colloquial terms. On the other extreme, as he described it, people over time became so accustomed to the idea that lawyers had to talk in overly complicated language with verbose tangents and "find that thesaurus" level word choice, that lawyers themselves started writing that way. He said that his lesson on this came when he was a young attorney, and a judge told him basically that he would grant the motion he filed because it was on sound legal footing, but that he was lucky because he as a judge knew other judges who would have (figuratively) thrown the motion in the trash because of how ludicrously and unnecessarily wordy it was - that they weren't going to bother reading something like that all the way through when they have a docket of a dozen cases with a dozen motions each needing the review of a dozen other applications of case law. The lesson he wanted for us, and that I found repeated by other professors and even among practicing lawyers, is that you sometimes cannot avoid lengthy writing, or using complicated language, due to the topics you're writing about. But that you should be careful to avoid "wordy" writing where you're making it more complicated and harder to read than it needs to be. When we broke up for an in-class group assignment, one of the folks in my group actually brought up AK specifically as an example. I forget what specific exchange from the game was, but we ended up basically rewriting it in simpler, more straightforward, language. Presented it to the class and they were able to get the same meaning with something like a third of the wordiness removed.
So the TLDR here; wordiness is never good. Something may be long because it has to be. But wordiness implies you've added words to create length where it wasn't really needed.
For me is biggest problem that english not my native language, plus the style of writing in AK very complicated for me as my knowledge of language is very mid. I can without problem enjoy different plot oriented games like Persona, 13 sentinels, and other bunch of VN (stein:gate, wallhalla, etc) or jrpg. But when time come to reading text in AK I became feel a head pain. In the end I am in point where I only read main story and skip side stories. For example I wanna to read Lone trail, but always postpone it when I sit to play in AK.
I love Path to Nowhere as it's just normal people talking to each other nothing too deep + lots of emotion and less logic and throwing in some insults and cursing words in it. A perfect package like I watch some movies instead of reading lore and of course not all the events is good but most of them feel nice to read.
I find that the storytelling where the characters are talking in the open world kinda boring. So games like Genshin and WuWa, I didn’t play HSR for long but I’m think it’s following the same formula.
The stories themselves could be good or interesting but the majority of the time, characters are actually just standing around and talking with minimal movements and the most interesting bits that happen are during cutscenes.
With Arknights, I can for the most part visualize how the characters move, how they interact, their facial expressions, body language and different camera perspectives. It’s not that Genshin or the other games don’t have those features but what I see on screen is exactly what I get, and what I get is mostly standing around.
Also the hot dog lore is actually interesting to read. It’s a small piece of world building no one asked for but it’s an interesting fact in the world rather than just because it is.
https://preview.redd.it/oj2uf43j2x2d1.jpeg?width=623&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=79cb29d629c56212de1128904186487e6da7cafc
as someone who likes ak story and dislikes wuwa story (i love wuwa as a game tho still, but i finished all acts and the story still isn't really hitting) personally i'd say it's cause wuwa story is wordy but not in a very interesting way. Alot of the extra dialogue doesn't really add much to the story whether it's in terms of humor, vibe or actually interesting information. Something that also bothers me is how sometimes you'll get a dialogue choice but it's really obvious it doesn't branch into different responses?
i feel like a good example of this is when jiyan asks you what to do with the combat troops. It was cool watching the soldiers move around on the 3d map with the camera panning but after the third dialogue choice it got kinda tedious, especially if you got the wrong answer more than once since you'd need to wait until mc finishes explaining why you're wrong LOL
i think another thing that adds to this is that the overall story isn't really told in a way that keeps you hooked? especially at the beginning. The stakes feel a lot higher in the ak story vs the wuwa story, like all these people are saying they know you're an amazing person and some key figures died to get you out of your coffin and now they're relying on you to cure rock cancer vs these people found you randomly and are helping you find out more about yourself cause a dragon said you'll save them
People keep saying "Arknights writing is long and winding" but I don't really see it. The Main problem I have with Arknights sometimes is that there are just way too many factions in some stories, and this can leave some parts to be undercooked. This is especially a problem with the main story atm.
But idk man, people keep prattling on about "long windy hard to understand philosophical yadda yadda" Bro have they ever read an event story? Dorothy's vision has some philosophical debates but with the subject matter it makes perfect sense. And my favourite stories: Children of Ursus, Come Catastrophes or Wakes of Vultures, and The Black Forest Wills a Dream are quite well paced with a very sharp focus.
TLDR: People really exaggerate the problems of Arknight's writing
I'll continue to stan World Flipper here, but the one Summer Event with Gerard/Marina/Alice/co. was just hilarious. A good mix of gag moments with Gerard, but equally serious moments with Marina + the main plot.
In general, from just playing through the mainline quest/major event chapters, the plot or themes that they want to discuss don't feel like they overstay their welcome as much versus other gachas' stories. Even sometimes Fate will take waaaay too long to get to a point as somebody else already stated.
Also loved the balance between the crew because you'll have characters that'll outright say or accept wacky shit like Stella, a character who's a bit of both like Alk, and the serious character in Light/Nimbus that lets each of them be able to interact with the general gacha characters well in their mini-stories.
I'll miss it because I think it's hard to replicate that fun feeling between the main cast + the gacha chars like World Flipper does. The closest I can think that matches that vibe would be Star Rail with the Trailblazer optionally saying stupid shit while Dan Heng/March just slap them alongside the head.
I remember seeing a suggestion that in order to completely fix the AK story they need to hire an editor who will look at the finished story and order writers to cut at least 40% of text from it.
Nikke's current event with Trony and Elegg... Like, I just dont care at all about what's happening. Not sure what writer they hired for this, but its so bland and boring.
Basically [LEARN TO WRITE PROSE LIKE IN ARKNIGHTS](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Pt38Bd2dUtzaetNptUcQ-oO8Dw0_13O26CxFQO348vw/edit)
I do like Arknights story/lores though and always came back whenever new chapters/event drop in.
I love the world building, I love the music, the artstyle then wonder why I even leave the game in the first place.
Then I remember ep 8 and goes "ah yes".
Still I just recently come back and made a new account during Adele's banner because I just love her.
I feel the same. I read novels and did war roleplays when I was younger, so long form content is my kind of thing.
I do realize that not many are like us though. So I can understand how some people can tune out things they have no interest in.
you know it's gonna literally (no jokes here) be hard once they got like dragons, space and time, many gods, etc. even in Genshin, they just have too many over the top terms of how they say things and what it actually mean. IMO you can understand them better and easier if you just listened to JP VA. there are often different translation between the Voice over and the text.
Honkai Star Rail is big on the "I've been reading everything in the main story and even a bunch of side story content, and I still can't understand what the fuck they're talking about half the time."
Actually that kind of writing is pretty normal for Wuxia novel and stuff. Too bad it's not appropriate for gacha, at least from my perspective. While gacha mostly are visual novel, some like AK, has pretty good gameplay and that long-ass Wuxia writing just make it harder to enjoy the gameplay
Isn’t Kaistit infamous for her jargon tho? I remember one of the Inquisitors from an Abyss event telling her to shut up because he’s old af and don’t have time for her shit.
I'm too used to GFL's writing where people waxing philosophical usually get cut off by gunfire.
Now whenever I try to read other Gacha's writing [I'm thinking the same thing as Diplomat.](https://youtu.be/6OqQLDiz1B4) especially Genshin where there's no skip button and I have to listen to some random thug's whole life story before I kill them in 2 hits and have to talk to someone else about how scary those random dudes were.
As a Genshin and HSR player can confirm they don't come under that "other gatcha" either
Both games routinely fall into the trap of "using big words and long sentences will make me look smart". Which it doesn't. It might trick you for some time but sooner or later the trick stops working and you see the dialogue as nothing more than empty. Which is a shame because both games are going hard with the story. Penacony being one of the best narratives not in just a gatcha game but games in general for me
Bright side AK is getting anime season 3 which till cover up to chapter 9. Meaning 9 chapters of the main story is much easier to digest xD
If only the Events will get anime :(
I still enjoy reading it, but only from a reader app. Cause reading while playing sucks xD
Let's be fair, the only interesting thing out of Meursault's lips from the story is that little
***Jesus fuck that fucking tasted awful and I will explain why in complete fucking detail especially to you Yi Sang you tasteless FUCK.***
Because that was stand on Business timing.
GFL really helps with the setting as well as the general knowledge of the TLers. There are a lot of references to other literature, but it does not feel inane because it seems like there is an understanding of what is being referenced, and a lot of references are Western literature rather than Eastern, which helps.
PNC does great work as well though it can be a bit more verbose than GFL but I pin that down to some of the characters seemingly wanting to speak like that while others speak like normal human beings.
I wish the MICA games were more to my style when it comes to gameplay, the games feel very old-fashioned, and as someone who has a lot less time than they have to, It is hard to play a game that is very inspired by its KC roots. It's a bit odd to complain about gameplay density but GFL really feels like a hard ask for me to maintain sadly.
I still love the series in my heart even if I don't play it anymore though.
I'm used to read VN but GI and AK story telling is too round about and not to the point. And I feel is a waste of time to read all of them and prefer to read the synopsis instead.
Reverse1999 be like:
The ankle… was it broken? Or was I the one broke with a healthy ankle? Have I walk this paths with a twisted view?
-Time for dinner- someone says
Who is Someone? How does he know what time it is? Is this… 1999 again?
-Concertto, Dickson, Alberta Luisa María, YuanXi, Remote Controller, Chair… we must leave this place
Hoyo writer: "Once per scene, whilst the man is standing, if the man has not initiated a field of Injurious Aura, the man will initiate a field of Injurious Aura in a random ankle that does not currently possess the Injurious Aura field. Injurious Aura swells within the man's spirit, whilst simultaneously unleashing 3 stacks of Tibius Fracturus. No more than 3 stacks of Tibius Fracturus may be present in the Injurious Aura field. Once per 6.4 seconds, each remaining stack of Tibius Fracturus that has not been removed by the universal Passage of Time effect will inflict an amount of non-elemental pain equal to 12.6% (21.9%) of the man's pain threshold + 312 (674), with a fixed crit ratio of 100%. Only one field of Injurious Aura may be present per ankle at any given particular specific certain distinct time."
The hate i have for when i have to read the guy, circlejerking the narrative for saying something basic that should have been 3 lines worth of my time, is immense.
Not just gacha but in anything.
Ah yes the lore about Hot Dogs being called Hot Dogs in this world is definitely an integral part of the mission at hand Kal
"Kalt'sit small talk without turning it into a 1000 page dissertation" challenge (impossible)
Pretty sure Tin Man was not actually looking for an answer to why it's called Hot Dog, and is only asking expecting answers like "Haha yea it's weird isn't it?" But noo
To be fair the explanation was like three sentences.
Anthony Bourdain would like a word with you
This is rather tame for Kals yap
Me after reading the latest AK lore from CN: https://preview.redd.it/pg7pim7h0w2d1.png?width=225&format=png&auto=webp&s=efed3863ec88593898e4d4fa5e9153a5d0aa2246
Skadi is just like me fr https://preview.redd.it/aaypc2l1wv2d1.png?width=366&format=png&auto=webp&s=b084800b61b6602c8304d74efcf690d1211336b9
The dialogue/narration is way better in some story (Kazimierz Saga and Summer Events tend to have more plain language) the biggest culprits is Sui event since all people in Yan speak like a poet, Main story where everyone suddenly a philosopher and maybe this new event where for some reason have soo many German words.
Il Siracusano is peak cuz they have story things thay are not part of the visual novel (the one where you follow a character and you see what they are thinking or doing)
Il Siracusano and Near Light are by far my personal favorites. That writing was really enjoyable to read. The event about Yan came out after those i think, and that was by far the worst writing i have seen. I remember even the chinese crowd had complaints because the writing was just atrociously complicated. I got put off the story of Arknights after that Yan event, and didn't read any Arknights events for a year after that.
The story for the R6S collabs were great too. Also dome side events like Break the Ice and Wakes of Vultures.
Skadi was just based character in general
Imo most Chinese gacha suffer from the "too verbose" problem that they apparently don't realize. It's nice that they can write a good story, but I'd appreciate them telling it in a way that's enjoyable and not just dumping it like a visual novel. At least modern visual novels have L2Ds and extra stuff to give the player some kind of interactions; gacha games keep using static sprite and the same sound effects over and over. It's even more jarring when you sit there reading for 30 mins and start zoning out due to how tedious it gets. Video game by itself is a medium that can do a lot of the heavy lifting for story telling. Yet a lot of gacha failed to realize this and keep pushing for the text dump move. Sure, if your game is limited in what you can do like in AK then the VN-style is somewhat acceptable; but proper semi/openworld games like GI and HSR still have the same awkward mind-bogglingly long text dump for whatever reasons. That and the default walking animation for characters during the rare moments where they move in the story segment. The only gacha stories I even read properly are mostly Korean-made. Seems like they do understand how to make a good story while not bothering me with useless yapping. Blue Archive story is not the greatest but they're short and straight to the point. PMoon writing style is concise yet can still be intriguing and emotional, on top of being able to write proper character development. GFL is a rare case of a CN gacha that still make readable story that I can enjoy; some big events I can just read it without context from start to finish and still be able to grasp the whole story. That's what I call good writing.
I always laud GFL's writing. I wonder if it's because of its "thriller" style roots, where so much of the writing is done as action scenes as if it was the setup for an action movie. I like to tell people that GFL is one of the only gacha games I've played where the people actually talk like how people in real life would talk.
[Here's an interview](https://youtu.be/AmbVC6peHzg?si=S8KU5_GmB4AGBfCq&t=508) where Yuzhong (CEO) talks about their writing strategy. In short: https://preview.redd.it/ge5dhr022z2d1.png?width=1874&format=png&auto=webp&s=615746a6bb05629303a086b428fe93d2c4bd7961
Hypergryph writing team should learn from MICA writing team on making dialogue that's simple but effective to what's going on in the narrative and world. I love AK world and story, but the writing being so needlessly complicated and overly verbose isn't fun or entertaining. It's just work. .
For project moon, I've noticed that the more powerful and richer the character is, the more verbose their way to speak is. Heathcliff or any rat is simple while yi sang or star of the city level characters in LOR is more verbose.
There's a character in Blue Archive which likes to yap, but 1.) They're a side character 2.) Her clubmates will stop her if there's something else going on.
Blue Archive also got some heavy lift with its various character expressions and small animations.
Chinese gacha game in a nutshell, i think it's a cultural thing, cause i encounter the same issue in Arknights, honkai star rail, Wuthering wave etc2
Part of it is Chinese literature being written in a winding style in general, part of it is written Chinese being more compact than written English
I've been told that the primary reason for why a lot of younger Asian writers, Chinese and Korean in particular, tend to write like this is that the most common platform for monetizing your writing incentivizes padding word count like crazy. Which explains why everyone is hyperverbose, and why you get so much repetition of the same thing over and over again, because that's just what they're used to doing and it's what's popular in China.
Pretty telling from their chinese novels. Me reading 20 cultivation novels with 5000 chapters. 😅
Some Japanese VA said that Asians tend to overexplain things because they are afraid of being misunderstood and Chinese are the worst at it.
it’s just translation quirks, to be honest. as a native speaker, chinese does read quite long and winding if translated directly to english, but it’s quite short in the original chinese text due to the inherent differences in structure syntax between the languages. this almost formal, strangely formulated feeling can be found in several other east asian languages- i find it more prominent with korean. what’s interesting is other languages translate much smoothly into english, such as french and spanish, but not east asian languages.
Fr star rail simulated universe is a skip fest
Arknights story takes so long you forget what the stage layout was. Ngl wish gameplay and story were separated.
There’s the online AK’s story reader that takes all the in-game dialogue of a story node and puts all in one page so you scroll and read. It’s honestly better to read this way while you farm those material stages.
Oh nice, it's a lot more comprehensive than I thought，thanks
The reader also includes the audio that plays in the scenes. It's really a useful site.
what site is that?
Specifically, it's [this site](https://050644zf.github.io/ArknightsStoryTextReader/#/en_US/menu)
Lmao arknights' story is so verbose that someone was desperate enough to actually create a story reader to make it easier to read. Jokes aside, it's a great idea
Why I usually just clear the stage first then read the story later. Plus, even when you decide to skip the story, it gives you a very brief summary of what happened so you're not completely out of the loop.
Arknights trained me to process long-form content I had an assignment in class where I have to read and evaluate some scientific paper, around 20 pages full of text, spread on 2 columns. Mid way through the work, I realised "Sir HaiMao has prepared me for this, I am more than ready"
Even visual novels have shorter texts than this, well some of them
When I learned some side content has more words than the Harry Potter novels, I thought... I was tricked to read an entire novel and I liked it. But it's a time commitment...
MANAGER ESQUIRE!!! To where in the world hast thou disappeared!!!!!!! * Limbus Company Don Quixote https://preview.redd.it/4st3sabz2w2d1.png?width=632&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4a00217bea40d66be6ababa176ed53c4f0375917
QUALICHANALIIIIII (I dont know Korean so it's my best impression)
If the Hangul-To-Latin alphabet converter isn't fucking with me you're looking for "gwallija-nim"
Honkai Impact 3 ever since they introduced the Sea of Quanta. Actually disassociated from the story a few times because I couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were saying.
Sea of Quanta is easy enough to understand, the technobabble really starts to get bad in Kolosten, cools down during Elysian Realm and Elysium Everlasting, then goes out of control from Moon Arc on.
I remember one part during that chapter where some of the characters were trapped on the moon/quantum sea/bubble universe/something and after half an hour of technobabble, they went "of course! Why didn't we think of constructing a semi-physical bridge from dream-ether particles to walk back to earth faster?".
Hardly anyone understands the dialogue. The localization is also horrible and even the CN dudes get confused. If someone claims to understand the lore, never trust them. They probably got 50% wrong, and even the "Correct" version might just get debunked.
Usually them "understanding the lore" is just watching a Homu Labs video or two lol
Literally this
Depends, irc the moon arc issues were not present in CN and had a lot of people liking it
Don't you like this dialogue " .... " Or this "?"
Me after Einstein and Tesla try to explain the scientific and logistical underpinnings of the universe and how I fit into the big picture (somehow this is all related to quantum physics for the 5th time this chapter)
Einstein and Tesla are fine they explain the stuff well. Schrödinger though. I still have flashbacks when she explained to us why Stigma Awakened and Herrschers are opposite of each other in Ch33...
As people said that's not even a good example because everything there has an easy to understand metaphor attached. The confusing for no reason stuff happens when Schrodinger starts to speak.
Here's one of my [favorite screenshots](https://i.imgur.com/7Ok9aXR.jpeg) of all time. Absolute literature😩 Spoilers up until HI3 chapter 26 I guess?
Yeah... this is the main reason i've been failing to catch up to Arknights story, Even completing some of its events felt like a chore lol . Someday day i'll be able to do it .. i hope .. I've been reading VNs and FGO for years and even currently loving Limbus Company so its not that i hate to read .. Its just that... reading Arknights always tires me out with the way its written XD .
The problem isn't Arknights' writing, the problem is they cram the amount of text into 8-10 levels and 1-2 interludes. It's literally entire novel's worth of text in that space, it's way too much.
Yes you just indeed explain the problem is the writing. Which it's not that bad but it certainly can be improved.
Semantics. The writing *could* be less to make you read less per stage, but that doesn't mean the current writing itself is bad, it means the environment it's being used in is bad.
I'm honestly shocked people still read the story while playing the event normally like how we did it in earlier versions. Personally, I've come to treat the events like a short read. I start the event by completing all the stages at my own pace, then when I feel like reading something, I have the AK event stages to read. Reading 1/2 a part every stage just feels awful, especially if you include failure rates, practices and interludes. Big no thank you from me.
Honestly, I want to use the reader and just read it whenever, but then it bums me out when the boss gets revealed or something when I have no idea what's been going on in the plot up to that point. Like with the Witch King showing up and shit in the last event.
Some of them is clearly the writing, as it can be explained with fewer text.
I really wish font changing is an option, cuz while i enjoy reading, those skinny ass letters hurt my brain
ever since i started to play HSR/Genshin, I feel like my literacy and focus decrease a lot. I have a hard time to fully understand the dialogues even though sometimes they were repeated many times. I had to go to wiki or some fanpages to understand more about lore :(
It's not a problem with you, I assure you. Hoyoverse writes very obtuse and flowery dialogue which is often quite hard to decipher, even for native speakers and/or people with a high level of literacy. It's fine to a point but I feel like more often than not it's just unneeded and serves only to confuse players. I'm currently reading a really solid fantasy book (priory of the orange tree) and going from that to the technobabble and soup of technical terms that HSR/Genshin throws at you is like day and night. In fact, read any fantasy book - even the bottom of the barrel romance/fantasy stuff is more intuitive to understand. Obligatory, I really do enjoy Genshin and HSR's writing when the writers give the terms and world time to breathe, I just don't think it happens often enough
Hoyoverse loves obfuscating things on purpose just for the sake of it. They’re usually holding back in main story or other voiced content for accessibility, but whenever you step into unvoiced side content and especially item descriptions there’s nothing stopping them from going all out.
Probably the reason why people love most of Genshin World Quests
Genshin be like: A: Oh no, ouch! I'm hurt! B: What happened to you, A? Paimon: Are you OK, A? That looks like it could really hurt! A: Yes, as a matter of fact, it does really hurt! I was just walking as usual, daydreaming about unimportant things and admiring the sights, and then out of nowhere, I... I... Traveler: And then you tripped and fell?/Did you forget to look at the road? A: Yes, that is exactly what happened... I am ashamed of myself, I should really learn how to walk better... I'll pay attention next time... B: A has always been careless like that. It's not the first time he's tripped out of nowhere. Just last week, he tripped into the fountain, and when I pulled him out of the water his mouth was full of Mora people threw into the fountain for a wish! Paimon: Good thing I can fly, so I never trip! Tee hee! Paimon: Wait, that's not a good thing if it means I'll never be able to trip into a Mora-filled fountain and fish out Mora with my mouth! Maybe I should learn to walk? A: Anyway, I need to get up and finish up my business- Ouch! B: Are you hurt, A? Is it painful when you try to walk? Do you need a doctor? Traveler: I can help you up./Do you need a hand? Paimon: Oh traveler, you're always so kind, helping people who tripped and fell... Surely good things are going to happen to you! A: I think... I think I might have broken a bone somewhere. Probably somewhere in my legs. B: Can you figure out what you've broken? If there is a fracture, we have to make sure that we don't accidentally move it until it heals. I'll go grab some bandages, can you stay still until I come back from the store?
B: I'm back with the bandages. A, can you tell me where it is hurting?
Paimon: Took you long enough! If we let the traveler do it, he/she would have finished wrapping the bandages and sent A to the hospital by now!
Traveler: You praise me too much.../Thanks Paimon, but I'm not that fast
A: I... I think I hurt my ankle.
Kal talking about hot dogs lore unprompted after Tin Man jokingly asked her why it is called hot dog is peak AK for me. I actually find AK writing entertaining enough for me to spend time reading it. Fremont in the most recent event is a joy to read through every time he is on screen.
I loved how that old Lich steal the spotlight since after only few scenes I already knew what I could expect from him, constant stream of verbal abuse toward anybody..... I like him playable when HG
And then turns out he is also a softy at the end since he wants to bring along one of the statues from the university with him lmao. He loves living in Leithanien and being a lecturer after all.
Fremont going for that hater of the year.
The fact that its etymology is from the vendors being "hot dogs" and not the product itself is something only Kal'tsit could deliver in such a nonchalant way.
I do like me some hot pierros.
Would.
Fremont is such a smug little shit, he's great.
Arknight is very hard to understand but got a funny charm to it. I actually never feel bored reading all those texts even when I cannot connect any of them to make sense.
That hot dog dialogue is pretty funny ngl. Imagine the Old Well actually making that up, you just wouldn't know.
Currently playing Star Rail, I also don't know why a topic that can be sum up in a few words manage to took like 5-10 minutes of conversation.
Share your opinion on their sub, and watch your post get downvoted to oblivion.
Yup. And it's funny to me that they said WuWa story is terrible, then praising Herta Space Station story, like bruh. When I read someone tldr of Herta Space Station, it surprises me that I've miss many things.
Not really though ? There were multiple threads criticizing the dialouge for being overly verbose when the last patch dropped, all highly upvoted even if there were people who disagreed in the comments. Hell, overly complicated dialogue was one of the major complaints people had about Luofu.
Or to be repeated 5-6 times. Arknights is a bit different, they just cram SO MUCH information in a single event. Many of them are insanely good to read but there's so much plot going on it takes ages and block of text to move forward. Lonetrail, the longest story I've read, has like 5\~6 plot going on at the same time, they're all tied but so dispersed.
I literally dont know what people are talking about in HSR like 90% of the time. Like some of the major story beats I get the rest is pretentiously overdone.
Probably because the devs are afraid some players may lack reading comprehension. I mean Sunday’s philosophy has been repeated over and over again yet thousands of mfs on twitter still misinterpret it
NGL I have played tons of gacha games and I think Star Rail is the only one that I still enjoy reading. The last patch was a bit rough in the beginning though, but it picked up later.
Anything [Schrödinger](https://youtu.be/jOW1kOhJYSA?si=Q2ZTc8dmmuf5h0Xt) says in HI3. Sis is literal science yapper. And i say this as a person that loves astronomy and theoric physics. HI3 cosmology is complicated as it is dont ruin it more with yapping.
Chinese players called AK's story style "**Riddler"（谜语人）.** Just pretentious person will write like this. But the younger crowd is attracted to this story style. [https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Gp42197up/](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Gp42197up/)
It's funny that in other cultures they start to write simpler and easy to understand, meanwhile China still likes to write long and verbose story.
Also funny that Chinese is one of most dense writing style in the world. Mean you can convey a lot more with each letter / word than English. The same paragraph translated to Chinese is a lot shorter. So it seem Chinese writers overcompensated to make their work longer, lol.
yea I've always wondered whether Hypergryph's writing style is done to impress teenagers & college kids, since in both EN and China the Arknights playerbase are majority 18-29 years old Thank you for your confirmation.
I would tolerate Arknights story more if the "presentation" of it wasn't such a drag. So many times they would show you a scene with these high stakes and emotions for the player to only see 2 static portrait of characters yapping about unchanging for more than 5 minutes. At best they would occasionally slide the character left or right and finally change the expression after 10 minutes. Doesn't help that we can barely see the characters face or the dialogue font itself being small and slow. It would REALLY help if they actually spread out the story more so you don't spend 30 minutes BEFORE THE STAGE EVEN BEGIN. I know why they do this, cuz they don't want to give players more Originium but man has it becomes so annoying to play any new event stages. Basically, they're not utilizing the "VISUAL" aspect of their VN-style story telling as much and trying to condense a long story into only a few stages which makes it a chore to read
When I started Arknights was around the time Break the Ice first ran, and I honestly loved the story. One of my all time favorites out of any gacha game tbh. I enjoyed the Who Is Real rerun story afterwards as well. But then Invitation to Wine came, and it was just so not it for me. Even though I read through every single stage I still came out of it feeling like I read nothing at all. Still love the gameplay tho, but now I just skip story. I've read plot summaries of the overall story and its rad as hell, but I don't think I have the willpower anymore to sit though Arknight's story in full after I got burnt out in that event.
Invitation to wine will always be that one event that we just can't get as non CN speakers. Though I would recommend you to actually read events because I have looked at summary's and they are pretty good but they rarely pack the emotion of certain parts. [Though I would recommend using this site](https://akgcc.github.io/cc/story.html) instead of the game coz it's easier
If you enjoyed reading previous events, there is no reason to let one abstract event stop you from enjoying others.
believe it or not. I once played arknights story and it made me sleep. lol. I mean it is a very long ass dialogue. I never slept during the talulah arc and the Babel story though. that story was sick. seriously though. compare to FGO, when I read the story in FGO, it made me excited, engaging and it made felt emotion and each dialogue of the characters are so unique. arknights is like I read a book with the same character and it is the only character in the book. it is so bland and I am not invested on the characters. not sure because it made everything serious though. I kinda like they execute the Babel story because I was really invested of Doktah's story.
After playing the latest story for HSR (Penacony) I realized I'm not a fan of super complicated story with lots of......fancy ? words sprinkle in them. I realized I wanted the story to be a little bit more simple but still complicated enough to be able to convey whatever it is that the writer wanted to convey, my opinion might be a bit of a hot take but I feel like so many gacha games have stories and lore that are wayyyyy too deep that I personally feels like it's "way too much" although having a deep lore is understandable but when it comes to the story itself I feel like they should strike a nice balance between "deep" and "simple" so that the players can actually enjoy reading through the story as they are presented to you and if they liked the story enough, they can explore the additional lore provided inside the game or through something like lore videos on their own.
This isn't AK exclusive. This is true for almost all gacha made by Chinese devs. Hell, AK isn't even the worst offender with this type of writing for me. Later parts of Honkai Impact 3rd were way worse than anything AK had even to this day. I legit couldn't tell you what the fuck happened in HI 3rd during the Moon and Finality arc other than >!Kiana sealing the Honkai on the moon.!<
Every time I saw Kal'tsit show up, I would scream internally --- preparing myself mentally for 15 minutes of yapping with sophisticated nonsense. She successfully made me stop caring.
I'm fine with long dialogues if they're interesting or fun to read. FGO, for example, has some really long dialogues, but they're enjoyable to read because the characters are full of personality and their interactions were interesting. But when I played AK, I don't know how to explain, but the characters didn't seem likeable? Like, it lacked some sort of emotion, personality, some more "human" interactions? Idk, maybe the long winded yap makes them feel more robotic to me. Probably it's just a me problem tho.
yea AK is kinda bad at character-driven writing, except for certain events that were clearly written by a different writer like Ebenholz or Jessica the Liberated's event
For a gacha game that's entirely center around characters. It's baffling how most of them are 2-dimensional with others given actual development. If it was a novel centered around its theme and story I wouldn't mind, but the fact it's formatted as a visual novel with a lot of operators. Only some are given character development while most are thought-pieces for the writers.
I think it helps that FGO has multiple character sheets for different emotions compared to AK's single facial expression for the entire scene.
Yeah AK characters can be a little stoic since AK like to portray the story quite seriously since the stakes is really high....but their stoicness is what make some scene work like Babel event is very doom and gloom but that what make the twist punch you in the gut so hard. Although maybe that's why summer event is easier and more fun to read since the stakes is not too high usually.
Yeah, maybe the story tone just isn't for me. I personally prefer a more fluctuating tone, like in Limbus for example, where in one minute some character is cracking a joke and in the next one they're going through the most traumatizing moment of their life But even tho the character dialogues aren't for me, I still think AK has the most interesting worldbuilding in gacha I've ever seen
Yeah I like Limbus for the same reason. AK sometimes can take itself too seriously and writer tend to make an obscure joke like the Hot Dog trivia rather than make character making real joke and pranking one another. People that make joke or funny tend to be killed first by the writer or never present in main story only present in side story.
Genshin loves to make everything unnecessarily verbose making even the simplest of tutorials sound like advanced trigonometry, not really sure if HSR has the same problem since I usually just space out for like 70% of HSR's dialogues/texts FGO, on the other hand really just loves the expository dumps and long drawn-out convos but still understandable since it's basically going for the VN feel Imho whether the dialogue is boring or not really depends on how much the event/story matters to each person
Genshin's dialogue: A: You broke your ankle, B. B: I did broke my ankle, A. I broke my ankle from moving too fast while I was running away. In the process of running away I remembered my ankle was injured previously. Then I broke my ankle because I was running too fast. It's a shame that I broke my ankle from moving too fast. Now I can't walk anymore for a while because I broke my ankle running too fast. C: Hey, A, I think B broke their ankle. They were running too fast while their ankle was previously injured and now they're broken. If only they didn't move too quickly while their ankly was previously injured. They could've made things easier for themselves if they just didn't break their ankle moving too quickly when it was already injured previously. Now they can't walk anymore because of their injured ankle. D: So you broke your ankle moving too fast while it was injured? That would explain why you were limping so much because your ankle is broken. Now we can't do this plan because your ankle is injured. You shouldn't have moved so much when your ankle was healing from a previous injury. We need to come up with a better plan that doesn't involve B anymore because they broke their ankle. Edit: All unskippable btw
And then the player has to pick a dialogue: * Your ankle... * ...does indeed look broken.
60% of it is narrated in Paimon’s pipsqueak voice
Genshin just straight up has a ridiculous amount of word count fluffing, like a student pumping in filler words to meet their required word count for an essay. Combined with overt repetition that it almost feels like a kid's cartoon trying to hammer the message to the player. HSR has a loredumping problem, they love to introduce important terms you need to learn to get understand the story in between tons of lore that *does not matter*. You could be trying to figure out how to solve the current conflict, but all of a sudden you're bombarded with the backstory of a generic NPC's home planet, system, various factions, family, etc. You will almost certainly never visit that planet, meet anyone else from that faction, or meet their family because they do it so much it's unrealistic for the story to ever use all the lore it gives in any meaningful way. FGO has expository dumps and has long convos, but ultimately it's a lot more character driven since they rarely make generic NPCs have too big of a role. Past the very quick 1st and 2nd Singularity it doesn't really have that much filler either. Sure you sometimes get SoL scenes to pad things out, but it does it's job well at establishing breathing room between story beats.
I feel HSR is worse than Genshin in that regard
I think it's interesting to hear about different planets etc. in HSR. It helps build the world and gives writers tools to pull from later. They use it plenty. Not everything needs to be a Chekhov's gun. The problem for me in HSR is the amount of fluff and slice of life stuff for the NPC's. Like, write that slice of life stuff for the characters we actually care about..
I think it's the difference between a character driven story and a world building driven story. They're trying to make the world they created look "lived in" and that entails giving elaborate backstories to NPC's that players won't care about compared to the playable characters.
FGO manages this out by making the dialogue interactive. They add in sound effects, characters doing other things while they're explaining things, sometimes they straight up shift the scene to bring up a amp or explanation, and at the end summarize the info for you to understand. The music, sound effects etc all make it really easy to stay focused, and the long lore dumps are done in a way where it walks you through step by step.
There has only been one time so far I've ever skipped the entirety of an event, and that's just because finals were happening, and I didnt have the mental fortitude to study, farm, and read the story. Though given it was the Learning With Manga one, apparently I wasnt missing much.
It's not about AK having characters talking like ancient philosophers. It's about them talking high and mighty for 0 reasons all the time. It's like hearing others speaking about "back in the days" every 5 minutes with old English. It can be good for important points in story for expositional or emotional purposes, but AK just loves to sprinkle talk no jutsu in every moment, especially anniversary events and main story, which degrades the importance of those talks (many of the philosophy combat in lunar new year event was quite nice) and confuses reader, which doesn't help with stories that mix up a lot of subplots regarding other characters. Due to long boring talks we also don't have time to ease into the story or connect to its characters (my honest reactions to all the side characters in Victoria arc: yeah sure i'm sorry for what happened tl;dr) and again, confuses the reader regarding the purpose of those scenes. They have great concepts but butchered the execution about 50% of the time, especially with major events. Meanwhile mihoyo games also have long boring talks, but it's filled with technobabbles and jargons that nobody cares about and devs probably don't understand either, with exposition so densely written and other scenes so barebone. I might be lit on fire for this but himeko's death in honkai impact was whatever for me, due to so little time spent on building relationships in previous chapters and more of uh, nothing. They probably wanted to have some slice of life but actually accomplish nothing (perhaps i'm supposed to play their first game to feel the dynamics). All those later concepts like 12 not dead yet guardians and herscherrs serve more to dilute the story than to actually get the plot working. It's even worse than ak with the fact that each chapters feel more and more aimless with no actual progress or even any indication of the overarching goals. HSR so far has been quite normal but with the track records of HI3 and GI it doesn't bode well tbh.
While it's not wrong the way Arknights characters talk in their game, I rather they get to the point and not beat around the bush.
Yo have you read Come Catastrophes or Wakes of Vultures?
Thankfully skip button exists
Arknights doesn't do this. The right side writing is still too condensed. In arknights, the speaker will first make a historical reference to some past event or some folklore tale. Then talk about a sob-story of someone who did blah blah. Then scaling up to nation level and using the incident as an analogy to how the nation broke. Finally relating back to the speaker's broken ankle.
>For that reason I'm kinda curious of why some people here as far as I know tend to want to skip story and have a low opinion against some gacha game story like the newest I see here is that people have very low opinion with Wuwa story I seen people complaining about AK story here too before Well it is reading, quite a niche thing to do nowadays /s. I think having voices help with reading VNs. Very different experience just reading a dialogue compared to one with voice acting, like for instance [this scene in GFL2 (spoilers)](https://youtu.be/7X4oGOwIStI). Its amazing what a good VA/direction can do.
Is that SKK talking??? No way. If so, they really did go all out. I heard that he actually gains some agency and becomes his own character at a later point but I didn't expect this.
I mean, the commander definitely started to become their own character in some of GFL’s later story events
Arknights gave me PTSD for reading the in game text. Thats is why i just watch resumes on every gacha.
You forgot the incurable sickness and the pain and sorrow.
arknights can be great with some stories but most are garbage and filed with verbal dribble with obtuse terminology to sound sophisticated or deep. also plugged with too many unimportant characters and scenes that bloat the experience. again, it *can* be good, lotta times not. **also, you can just skip them and there isn't some cutscene that plays out that i have to wade through and listen to.** thats the difference compared to these genshin likes. you're forced to hit "f" and select dialogue options as if you weren't checked out the whole time. and in arknights at least the terminology is still mostly english and fantasy names that you could imagine in an english or european setting for a lot of stories. genshin and wuwa lean ultra hard in chinese lingo ALL the way through that is just jarring to global players. everything said in that kal qoute any english person can understand, it's just yapping too long that makes it annoying to read.
While Writing is a big part of why its boring, I think there's other parts too. For example, there's hardly ever a change of expression when people talk. You rarely see anyone emote, or do anything, it's really bland. It's always the same drool expression. When they're mad, they have the same face. Sad, the same face. Happy, the same face. Etc etc. Compare that to FGO or Blue Archive, the expressions are absolutely glorious and have massive variety. Brings the scene to life. Hoyoverse sometimes avoids this, but their 3d models can be super static at times in facial expression. They sometimes help with VAs, but that has limits to what it can do when the on screens character is just kinda standing there then the music. The music is just horrible at setting the scene. At times, the same music will go on the entire scene even in places that don't fit. It's always dreary or the weird happy music, and like, nothing in between. They have like 5 themes used and rarely anything else. Hoyoverse in general is even worse, the BGM is literally just the stage music and nothing else. Next, sound effects. Whenever there's a fight or any sort of physical interaction, the sound effects are incredibly bland. There's nothing to notify you what is actually happening, nothing that indicates the action being done. Again, in blue archive and FGO, there's a ton of sound effects. From talking, walking, running, fighting, making stuff, eating, etc etc. Finally movement. It's that the story scenes have no movement. Whenever people fight in arknights, its just two flashes of light and the same sound effect. When people are wandering around, they say it on screen but don't show it. The list goes on and on. I'm expecting more impact, parts that show the action. When someone fights, I expect mroe then two flashes of light, maybe spray some cut effects across the screen, or show an arrow being fired, or arts being cast. It's just...boring. Hoyoverse mitigates this with cutscenes, but those are...rare.
reminds me of that dialogue of kaltsit and ulpian and ulpian stopped her midway of her talking does anyone know where it came from? or which story? or the meme itself because i cant find it anymore
Can't remember she had ever spoken to Ulpian, that's probably in Stultifera Navis. The one that told her to cut it was Saint Carmen. She was explaining something but then he told her to make it short since he's not getting any younger at this point. Ironically, he also speaks a lot during the event. Truly grandpa energy.
I believe it was near the end of Under Tides, where Kal pipe up near the end to try and explain Iberia's due situation to everyone, only for Dario (known then as High Inquisitor) to tell her to shut up.
The problem with arknights story is its completely world building orianted instead of focusing on individual characters. There is very less you can say about characters relationships and hobbies outside surface level information when world building is detailed to its every end. I like this but for people that like character development/relationship heavy nature of games like BA and Genshin wont be enjoying this
project moon game have good dialog
I noticed this year that isn't exclusive to AK, it's a CN writing formula to make it feel like they write to reach a word count when writing a dialogue. And i hate it ☺. No offense to CN writers tho.
>For that reason I'm kinda curious of why some people here as far as I know tend to want to skip story and have a low opinion against some gacha game story Because I may only have <20 minutes to **play** (keyword: **play**), so if the dialogue in a single section takes up more than that then it means I have to skip out of it as I ran out of time, meaning I also have no motivation to read whatever comes after it either, and second I've not even gotten to **playing** the game, which to me is kind of the point of **playing** a game. Gacha stories tend to confuse high word count and number of thesaurus common word replacements for depth and intrigue, when it's just filler. I value games that can tell a story while also respecting the player's time, embracing being a game rather than trying to emulate being a book. > Since I thought people will be entertain with Arknights because of the way it was written and the philosophical dialogues, so when I heard people were annoyed with that I was genuinely surprised, so this post is meant for that, I really want to know... Because I don't play a game to read philosophical dialogues, especially when it doesn't have anything to do with the main story. I don't care if the writers got 160 IQ (they don't though) and studied at some top-tier university (they didn't though), I **play** a game to be entertained. **Playing** the game is entertaining to me. Reading a dialogue that gets to the point and doesn't waste my time can be entertaining too. Following the main story and see where it goes can be entertaining too (assuming it's not bogged down by filler.) Reading philosophical BS that got nothing to do with anything at hand is not fun, not entertaining, and it wastes my time. That's why I skip.
You forgot the part in AK where they will have nameless NPCs go on and on about the weather for pages and pages before the actual named characters even make an appearance. That's a great way to lose the player's interest.
I've got something of a dog in this race as a bit of a writer myself. Even if you have the best story in the world, if the way it is told is bad, then it will never be compelling. Sometimes storytelling is an even more important element than the actual story itself. When I read Arknights, what I feel is that it lacks focus and direction. It sometimes feels like even they don't know who's a major and who's a minor character in a storyline, and like there's no one to tell them when to just stop, so you get things like a node that contains 8 different scenes with 16 different characters involved, all describing the same event with every separate character's reaction to that event, and then a final scene where Kal'Tsit comes in to explain the entire history of what just happened from the moment of the Big Bang onward.
AK really have a very good world building and the writing improved a lot with the pass of the time but yeah i get why people are scared to get into the story mostly because of to much text and not everyone love the vn format. but if the are people to give it a chance i just said that the lore of this game is insane
怎么鹰言鹰语的 Damn the Arklish
silly Hypergryphese
I agree with you! While AK writing has a lot of flaws, I think there's a lot of arguments to be made in favor of it, actually! I think some of the points I'm about to list are also why you don't see AK fans complain about story being how it is except for a few memes and stuff. The biggest being it is ENTIRELY skippable. You can skip any and all story except like 3 'cutscenes' total afaik (which are all just sickass visuals with no dialogue). For people trying to play now and read later, it's perfect. And for people who want to read as they go, it's perfect too! Secondly, while dialogue is (unnecessarily) verbose, AK doesn't have an infodumping problem. Characters will yap a lot, but it will mostly be philosophical stuff or general conversation or slight elaboration. They don't introduce a lot of new concepts quickly and dump it all over you. This makes skim reading a very real thing. One of the few advantages of having entire books' worth of wordcounts in stories, you can introduce new concepts at a slow and organic pace, letting the reader absorb it all. This is one of the bigger problems with wuwa story besides just being boring imo. They drop like 5 technical terms in the same 3 line dialogue and ramble on explaining each of them (when most of it is, in thr grand scheme of things, just flavor text/cool stuff that doesn't really matter, like wow the rain falls upwards when the monsters come that sure is something mhm better invent a whole term for that) Thirdly, its just good! In general compared to most gachas I've played, AK has pretty good story and fantastic worldbuilding. Most side stories range from decent to PEAK ~~with a few exceptions~~ and while main story reallt starts picking up at around ch 6, even the early chapters are interesting enough to get yoy invested (while also not being that long since its early AK so they have way lower wordcounts). The only stuff that REALLY suffers from being too verbose are ch 7-8 and a few events released in the same timeframe imo. It's a bit funky when patriot talks about how he's not gonna listen to RI and simply advance but then him and amiya throw words at each other for a solid 5 minutes.
Lone Trails was fucking KINO, one of the best-written sci-fi in Gacha
It's probably why it and Near Light are great because they are able to be complicated but not too insanely or exaggerated like other stories in AK. They feel like exceptions than the rule.
I play FGO, HSR and Arknights. FGO is the one that I enjoy reading story the most the second one is HSR and the last one is Arknights. And to show how much I invested in each game main story, I finished FGO’s new story within 1 week for HSR I finished new story within 2-3 weeks and for Arknights I haven’t even finished 3 latest chapter yet.
It's all fine, expect kalsit parts. I always skip her part, that old fossil just look pretentious to me at this point.
The only time when i found it hard to understand while reading AK story was during Invitation to Wine and Who is real.The CN New Year events and the way the siblings speak is hard to understand many times.The remnant AK story as for me is one of the very best.You know it hits hard when a simple ep for Kirsten Wright can evoke so much emotions within u.
While I don't really mind when these games tend to be verbose, it really irks me how much these anime games (gacha or otherwise) like to borrow all sorts of elements and references from revered anime and games but are always loathe to take some of the best parts of what make them great, which is the storytelling. We live in a post-Uncharted, post-Mahoutsukai no Yoru world. I really hope there'd be more in the way of organic dialogue and better pacing in the storytelling around these parts.
Meanwhile the Queen of France in Fate Grand Order: **WASSUP MY HOMIES!**
Kal'tsit saying all those words to describe hotdog
An ironically long anecdote; So, it was a little wild when I first got into AK. I was early in law school and I was taking one of our required courses on writing (specifically on drafting motions and case analysis). One of the biggest things the professor tried to drive home was breaking people out of two "extreme" modes - the folks that wrote in slang and emoji, and the folks that wrote how they "think" lawyers are supposed to write (i.e., legalese). The problem on the first part has to do with being too casual in formal writing - essentially writing as if you were talking to a friend, or on social media, and using inappropriate abbreviations or non-standard colloquial terms. On the other extreme, as he described it, people over time became so accustomed to the idea that lawyers had to talk in overly complicated language with verbose tangents and "find that thesaurus" level word choice, that lawyers themselves started writing that way. He said that his lesson on this came when he was a young attorney, and a judge told him basically that he would grant the motion he filed because it was on sound legal footing, but that he was lucky because he as a judge knew other judges who would have (figuratively) thrown the motion in the trash because of how ludicrously and unnecessarily wordy it was - that they weren't going to bother reading something like that all the way through when they have a docket of a dozen cases with a dozen motions each needing the review of a dozen other applications of case law. The lesson he wanted for us, and that I found repeated by other professors and even among practicing lawyers, is that you sometimes cannot avoid lengthy writing, or using complicated language, due to the topics you're writing about. But that you should be careful to avoid "wordy" writing where you're making it more complicated and harder to read than it needs to be. When we broke up for an in-class group assignment, one of the folks in my group actually brought up AK specifically as an example. I forget what specific exchange from the game was, but we ended up basically rewriting it in simpler, more straightforward, language. Presented it to the class and they were able to get the same meaning with something like a third of the wordiness removed. So the TLDR here; wordiness is never good. Something may be long because it has to be. But wordiness implies you've added words to create length where it wasn't really needed.
I really like Kal dialogues, I mean she can say everything in few words but I love the detours she takes to say something.
For me is biggest problem that english not my native language, plus the style of writing in AK very complicated for me as my knowledge of language is very mid. I can without problem enjoy different plot oriented games like Persona, 13 sentinels, and other bunch of VN (stein:gate, wallhalla, etc) or jrpg. But when time come to reading text in AK I became feel a head pain. In the end I am in point where I only read main story and skip side stories. For example I wanna to read Lone trail, but always postpone it when I sit to play in AK.
I love Path to Nowhere as it's just normal people talking to each other nothing too deep + lots of emotion and less logic and throwing in some insults and cursing words in it. A perfect package like I watch some movies instead of reading lore and of course not all the events is good but most of them feel nice to read.
I find that the storytelling where the characters are talking in the open world kinda boring. So games like Genshin and WuWa, I didn’t play HSR for long but I’m think it’s following the same formula. The stories themselves could be good or interesting but the majority of the time, characters are actually just standing around and talking with minimal movements and the most interesting bits that happen are during cutscenes. With Arknights, I can for the most part visualize how the characters move, how they interact, their facial expressions, body language and different camera perspectives. It’s not that Genshin or the other games don’t have those features but what I see on screen is exactly what I get, and what I get is mostly standing around. Also the hot dog lore is actually interesting to read. It’s a small piece of world building no one asked for but it’s an interesting fact in the world rather than just because it is. https://preview.redd.it/oj2uf43j2x2d1.jpeg?width=623&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=79cb29d629c56212de1128904186487e6da7cafc
The FFXIV translators tip their hats to Arknights' writing team when it comes to making things as unnecessarily fancy and long as possible.
FGO writings are chef kiss in later parts IMO
as someone who likes ak story and dislikes wuwa story (i love wuwa as a game tho still, but i finished all acts and the story still isn't really hitting) personally i'd say it's cause wuwa story is wordy but not in a very interesting way. Alot of the extra dialogue doesn't really add much to the story whether it's in terms of humor, vibe or actually interesting information. Something that also bothers me is how sometimes you'll get a dialogue choice but it's really obvious it doesn't branch into different responses? i feel like a good example of this is when jiyan asks you what to do with the combat troops. It was cool watching the soldiers move around on the 3d map with the camera panning but after the third dialogue choice it got kinda tedious, especially if you got the wrong answer more than once since you'd need to wait until mc finishes explaining why you're wrong LOL i think another thing that adds to this is that the overall story isn't really told in a way that keeps you hooked? especially at the beginning. The stakes feel a lot higher in the ak story vs the wuwa story, like all these people are saying they know you're an amazing person and some key figures died to get you out of your coffin and now they're relying on you to cure rock cancer vs these people found you randomly and are helping you find out more about yourself cause a dragon said you'll save them
People keep saying "Arknights writing is long and winding" but I don't really see it. The Main problem I have with Arknights sometimes is that there are just way too many factions in some stories, and this can leave some parts to be undercooked. This is especially a problem with the main story atm. But idk man, people keep prattling on about "long windy hard to understand philosophical yadda yadda" Bro have they ever read an event story? Dorothy's vision has some philosophical debates but with the subject matter it makes perfect sense. And my favourite stories: Children of Ursus, Come Catastrophes or Wakes of Vultures, and The Black Forest Wills a Dream are quite well paced with a very sharp focus. TLDR: People really exaggerate the problems of Arknight's writing
Bait used to be believable https://i.redd.it/qssv26acfw2d1.gif AK story is boring bro
I'll continue to stan World Flipper here, but the one Summer Event with Gerard/Marina/Alice/co. was just hilarious. A good mix of gag moments with Gerard, but equally serious moments with Marina + the main plot. In general, from just playing through the mainline quest/major event chapters, the plot or themes that they want to discuss don't feel like they overstay their welcome as much versus other gachas' stories. Even sometimes Fate will take waaaay too long to get to a point as somebody else already stated. Also loved the balance between the crew because you'll have characters that'll outright say or accept wacky shit like Stella, a character who's a bit of both like Alk, and the serious character in Light/Nimbus that lets each of them be able to interact with the general gacha characters well in their mini-stories. I'll miss it because I think it's hard to replicate that fun feeling between the main cast + the gacha chars like World Flipper does. The closest I can think that matches that vibe would be Star Rail with the Trailblazer optionally saying stupid shit while Dan Heng/March just slap them alongside the head.
I remember seeing a suggestion that in order to completely fix the AK story they need to hire an editor who will look at the finished story and order writers to cut at least 40% of text from it.
Agree. Although AK story stages has very long chapter, it really make u want more.
Meanwhile WuWa: https://preview.redd.it/lfjhoviydw2d1.png?width=1828&format=png&auto=webp&s=17947aa2024b66654bddc6949aa595a1842b05c2
>Meanwhile WuWa: ain't you forgot WuWa intro dumped entire lore in 40 minutes at players
Nikke's current event with Trony and Elegg... Like, I just dont care at all about what's happening. Not sure what writer they hired for this, but its so bland and boring.
Basically [LEARN TO WRITE PROSE LIKE IN ARKNIGHTS](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Pt38Bd2dUtzaetNptUcQ-oO8Dw0_13O26CxFQO348vw/edit) I do like Arknights story/lores though and always came back whenever new chapters/event drop in.
Meanwhile, in Last Cloudia... https://preview.redd.it/om7zjp3q4y2d1.png?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7dc0d3f1641b438884ab3a811fa8cbefb306811d
Honkai Impact 3rd. Just... just Honkai Impact 3rd.
I love the world building, I love the music, the artstyle then wonder why I even leave the game in the first place. Then I remember ep 8 and goes "ah yes". Still I just recently come back and made a new account during Adele's banner because I just love her.
I still have nightmare about that talulah monologue :(
I feel the same. I read novels and did war roleplays when I was younger, so long form content is my kind of thing. I do realize that not many are like us though. So I can understand how some people can tune out things they have no interest in.
you know it's gonna literally (no jokes here) be hard once they got like dragons, space and time, many gods, etc. even in Genshin, they just have too many over the top terms of how they say things and what it actually mean. IMO you can understand them better and easier if you just listened to JP VA. there are often different translation between the Voice over and the text.
as someone in the AL sub said "AL stripped so AK could go to college"
Honkai Star Rail is big on the "I've been reading everything in the main story and even a bunch of side story content, and I still can't understand what the fuck they're talking about half the time."
HOLY YAPPING 🥵
Actually that kind of writing is pretty normal for Wuxia novel and stuff. Too bad it's not appropriate for gacha, at least from my perspective. While gacha mostly are visual novel, some like AK, has pretty good gameplay and that long-ass Wuxia writing just make it harder to enjoy the gameplay
Isn’t Kaistit infamous for her jargon tho? I remember one of the Inquisitors from an Abyss event telling her to shut up because he’s old af and don’t have time for her shit.
Basically Honkai star rail last 2 planets...especially Sunday and his pgilosopgical monologue who repeat 3 times per patch
Arknights trained me to understand hi3 and HSR lore (except luofu ) without repeating their quest .
… I kinda just zoomed in on the line ‘scantily clad perro female’ and ‘hot dog’ and ignored the rest.
It genuinely feels like 90% of gacha just bloat the dialogue to keep engagement metrics high
yapfest
After playing multiple different gachas, I have come to the conclusion that... ...they're all like this. Easier to name an exception.
I'm too used to GFL's writing where people waxing philosophical usually get cut off by gunfire. Now whenever I try to read other Gacha's writing [I'm thinking the same thing as Diplomat.](https://youtu.be/6OqQLDiz1B4) especially Genshin where there's no skip button and I have to listen to some random thug's whole life story before I kill them in 2 hits and have to talk to someone else about how scary those random dudes were.
As a Genshin and HSR player can confirm they don't come under that "other gatcha" either Both games routinely fall into the trap of "using big words and long sentences will make me look smart". Which it doesn't. It might trick you for some time but sooner or later the trick stops working and you see the dialogue as nothing more than empty. Which is a shame because both games are going hard with the story. Penacony being one of the best narratives not in just a gatcha game but games in general for me
Spent 40 minutes reading story before I could play first stage. Finished it in 2 minutes. Skipped the rest. I simply dont have have for this
Bright side AK is getting anime season 3 which till cover up to chapter 9. Meaning 9 chapters of the main story is much easier to digest xD If only the Events will get anime :( I still enjoy reading it, but only from a reader app. Cause reading while playing sucks xD
I'm not so sure it will get all of 9. I think they may be taking the flashbacks out and putting them alongside 7.
me and Penacony story
Look, i love arknights story, but sometimes it feels like i need a degree to fucking read it
well some people do seem to like it, hence it kept its ranking even after 5 years
Let's be fair, the only interesting thing out of Meursault's lips from the story is that little ***Jesus fuck that fucking tasted awful and I will explain why in complete fucking detail especially to you Yi Sang you tasteless FUCK.*** Because that was stand on Business timing.
GFL really helps with the setting as well as the general knowledge of the TLers. There are a lot of references to other literature, but it does not feel inane because it seems like there is an understanding of what is being referenced, and a lot of references are Western literature rather than Eastern, which helps. PNC does great work as well though it can be a bit more verbose than GFL but I pin that down to some of the characters seemingly wanting to speak like that while others speak like normal human beings. I wish the MICA games were more to my style when it comes to gameplay, the games feel very old-fashioned, and as someone who has a lot less time than they have to, It is hard to play a game that is very inspired by its KC roots. It's a bit odd to complain about gameplay density but GFL really feels like a hard ask for me to maintain sadly. I still love the series in my heart even if I don't play it anymore though.
I'm used to read VN but GI and AK story telling is too round about and not to the point. And I feel is a waste of time to read all of them and prefer to read the synopsis instead.
Reverse1999 be like: The ankle… was it broken? Or was I the one broke with a healthy ankle? Have I walk this paths with a twisted view? -Time for dinner- someone says Who is Someone? How does he know what time it is? Is this… 1999 again? -Concertto, Dickson, Alberta Luisa María, YuanXi, Remote Controller, Chair… we must leave this place
Hoyo writer: "Once per scene, whilst the man is standing, if the man has not initiated a field of Injurious Aura, the man will initiate a field of Injurious Aura in a random ankle that does not currently possess the Injurious Aura field. Injurious Aura swells within the man's spirit, whilst simultaneously unleashing 3 stacks of Tibius Fracturus. No more than 3 stacks of Tibius Fracturus may be present in the Injurious Aura field. Once per 6.4 seconds, each remaining stack of Tibius Fracturus that has not been removed by the universal Passage of Time effect will inflict an amount of non-elemental pain equal to 12.6% (21.9%) of the man's pain threshold + 312 (674), with a fixed crit ratio of 100%. Only one field of Injurious Aura may be present per ankle at any given particular specific certain distinct time."
The hate i have for when i have to read the guy, circlejerking the narrative for saying something basic that should have been 3 lines worth of my time, is immense. Not just gacha but in anything.
Expecting good dialogue or story in a gacha lol