The sp shows some more images of Fontaine and the traveler swimming underwater.
Phase 2 features kokomi, who was recently fired from her job. Barbara has always existed in the game as an off-field healer, and Fontaine will bring more hydro units, including hydro traveler and hydro archon. For hyperbloom, Barbara is good enough as hyperbloom does not really require special hydro app. Hyperbloom has essentially made hydro more egalitarian. Units such as Yelan, XQ no longer have the same competitive edge compared to other units like Barbara.
The person deciding the banners has clear bias and favoritism for every version between 2.8 to 3.8, trying to put all the rarer characters on one side compared to other, trying to accelerate and exacerbate inequality. This is called laissez-faire capitalism and is the reason why the USA is perhaps the most unequal country in the world. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
This is translated as 琉形蜃境 liuxing shennjing in Chinese. Veluriya is Sanskrit for lapis lazuli. In previous years, the summer version took place in Golden Apple Archipelago. The mirage is the largest streaming projector in Teyvat.
Hydro eidolons (floating droplet cyclops creatures) appear in the mirage. As Rhodeia of Loch says, the nature of water is to take any shape. The eidolons indeed can transform and shapeshift into many different things.
The mirage also features 2d 'mario puzzles' involving being projected on a screen. The music sounds like something you would hear at a circus. Specifically, some songs sound like classic ragtime piano songs (like 'The Entertainer') that developed in the early 1900s in the USA. Perhaps one can start hearing sounds of Fontaine from here.
The mirage is found in a genie lamp (bottle) in the Sumeru desert. We join Eula, Collei, Kokomi, Klee on an adventure through the mirage. Eula finds her lost cousin Lessig Lawrence. Collei compares Eula to an ice cube, describing how elegantly Eula dances.
Klee brings the traveler to the mirage using a letter from her mom Alice. Kokomi also visits the mirage for therapy after getting fired from her job.
We act through a script created by director Zosimos. It is cast on a 2d projector screen. The player has to interact with various props like stars and thickets to progress through the play. According to Idiya, the story is inspired by a tale from 1000 nights. Zosimos is also the creator of the new Kaeya and Klee skins.
The part where the player has to act on a stage is reminiscent to the beginning of FF9 in the castle. There are some paper mario games that also feature acting on stage. Kaeya plays as the Dagger Bandit.
It turns out that Idiya and other blue-haired humans in the mirage are oceanids transformed into human form. They took on the form of humans who have entered the bottle before. She entered the mirage after the previous hydro archon (lord of amrita) died.
It would be a nice idea to criticize kokomi, hu tao, li, wei to destroy political circles and cliques revolving around them. These people need to learn how to take criticism. Also the people hiring voice actors appear biased to the li family. Hire someone named Fang or Duan to voice act Genshin characters.
Hu just got fired and is in no position to criticize the organization that fired hu. Maybe hu should have spent more time trying to improve their gaokao score rather than rely on biased media organizations. In retrospect, removing hu from key government/corporate roles and decision making organizations was a genius prescient idea. The people who did that deserve a Nobel Peace Prize. Hu is not a team player, lacks empathy, does not think before acting, is extremely selfish, and only causes suffering to people around the world.
The spino-blaster challenge involves shooting cannons. The guy Chatillon introducing it mentions it is related to the navy. The barking fox challenge is like the Sorush challenge of 3.8.
The finch game is a curling type event. There are normal finches, finches that attract others, and finches that stick. This kind of game is what you can find at some bar parties. The operator of this event is Basim. The player also gets to ride rollercoasters throughout the mirage. Thinking about it, one wonders if certain designers got inspiration from reading the personal chat histories of certain people.
The combat challenge takes place on a circus stage. When the spotlight shines on the player, it will deal around 40k true damage every 0.5s within an aoe. 40k damage is around 1000% mv, so the spotlight has 2000% dps when shining, around C6 Xiao level. Of course the spotlight has cooldown and appears periodically, so dps over a longer time horizon is less.
Venti is good for this event.
Rewards for the event include Layla and Kaeya's pirate skin. Kaeya's skin is obtained by collecting the Joyous Vouchers via exploration. Layla's skin is obtained by completing the minigames.
There is a camera setup referencing 'Journey to the East'.
There is a quest where one follows 3 different storylines: a castle in the sky, a haunted mansion, and a pirate shipwreck. The pirate story is the worst.
If one uses elemental sight on the human-looking hydro eidolons (like Gretchen and Mandora), they appear blue, indicating they have hydro elemental energy.
The Scaramouche stage is a warning of how broken he can be for exploration if he did not have kp stamina and could fly forever without cd.
This is an example of a safe combat event where you do not have to worry about which trial character is placed 4th. It is better that all events are like this.
Events where they give you trial characters, play games with the ordering, and put certain characters in the 4th slot to make political attacks are just much worse. By this point, it is very obvious what are the political biases of the people deciding the ordering. In the future, if there are events with trial characters or character names, just skip whatever is in the 4th part of the event because it is going to be some nasty political attack. This has been a re-occurring problem with the version 3.0, 3.1, 3.4, 3.5, 3.7 events.
The people deciding the ordering in these trial events need to be inspected for discrimination and bias. Either do that or have different people decide the ordering of the characters in such events. A media platform that irresponsibly abuses its power to repeatedly make political attacks on people does not deserve to be given a global audience. This is why censorship has been invented.
There is no point to name the animals. The event would be 1 million times better if the animals did not have names.