New 6 star, will I pull...
New 6 star got announced on sg/my, and I am... intrigued.
The teaser was just an apple, and many people's guesses were right. There's a clear Lilith/snake theme in the set, but they mixed it up with references to.. Bloody Mary? And the French Revolution? The necklace looks like blood splatter that comes from... events such losing your neck, and one of the items that will release in the new home update is a guillotine to make it more obvious.
My first impressions are as follows. It bares a striking resemblance to the harp set in it's silhouette, but I think the textures are handled differently enough to stand out. The first thing I thought of when I saw the trailer was Sakamoto Shinichi's Innocent, especially this specific frame.
The snake is surprisingly "small" for a 6 star set, and overall it gives more of a lowkey vibe. I prefer that to obnoxiously huge animals floating behind your avatar, I always like the avatar herself to be the main focus, which is why I rarely use floating/animal elements. I think this dress will look great when dyed with black, and even with light colors. The earlier resemblance to the harp set doesn't bother me much since I didn't pull on that set. This might be the chance for me to pull for a similar dress that I like the theme of! But I still need the update to drop on sg/my so that I can inspect all of the individual items, I can't decide before that. I am torn on the big mirror item, even though I don't usually enjoy these big floating items the open windows one from the Sakura set made me change my opinion on them a bit and now I'm warming up to the idea, but I still think they're by and large too tacky and flashy.
Right after looking at the trailer, I of course went to rednote. I don't think there's any other community that speaks as freely as my chinese gachasisters do, so I always look forwards to their feedback. Needless to say, there are complaints. The main one having to do with the image to your left, which is the dress resemblance to older dresses. There's a lot of back and forth going on right now, between people that think that the dress is too similar to older dresses and those that think it stands out. I am somewhere inbetween. I think out of the three dresses shown in the image, it's only really similar to the first dress in silhouette (that's the harp dress). The biggest resemblance comes not only from the mermaid shape with the tilted "disk" shape on her hips, but also the huge flower smack dab on the side of their hips. I can't deny those two factors make the dresses very similar to each other and leads me to another issue I want to talk about, and a lot of people bring up too.
Lately, their 6 stars have been lacking some inventiveness, or they fall short in other aspects. When you look at their 2024 6 star sets, there's not a single set that doesn't have a cohesive theme. Even if they're flashy and wild, they stand out among each other, both in their default colorways and in the elements. Mermaid, dragon master, corpse bride, Valkyrie, clockwork ballerina, bai ze, controlled puppet, galaxy dress etc. This year, only a handful of sets would pass this "cohesive theme" test, as in they don't borrow elements from sets that are close to them in release date, or they just mix 3 themes together and come up with a frankenstein set. If they do have a cohesive theme, they fall short in some aspect (like material quality which has been pretty disappointing in 6 stars this year). They've also been overabusing the color red, which is GREAT when it comes to pulling and not wanting to extend the dyes because red is locked behind extensions, but it sucks when they release the set and it's just like... Oh it's a red set again... More than half of the sets this year have been exactly that, red. When it comes to themes in particular, this set disappoints with the fact that they couldn't decide on one thing. Why mix the opulence of pre french revolution era with lilith and bloody mary? Maybe you could find a thin thread connecting these three, but why? Why not hone in on one of these and refine it and release something truly cohesive? On the other hand their 5 star sets have been killing it this year and I look forwards to them more than the 6 stars.
There's two aspects of this gacha I like though which is the cute 5 star and the ally. The 5 star's hair is really adorable (especially in the back...), although they're once again testing me with the anime bangs. I don't like the colorway of the set but it has a cute shaman/nature theme that they've never really played with before. It's cute and I think it'll be a good wardrobe addition, especially in more natural and neutral colors.
The ally though oh my god... This is where they went all out with the woman on top Lilith reference and I respect that!!!! First time I really want the ally in my possession, so that I can make it my profile background ingame lmaooo. My current bg is Roy kissing the mc's legs which is also pretty great but I've had it for too long!
Anyway, I can't decide on anything yet, truly. I need to review these once they come out, and I really need to see how they're styled. These types of sets should be right up my alley, but I'm keeping my guard up until I see the textures well. I was really hyped for the phoenix at first but then lost interest once I saw just how much ON FIRE the set is literally, and the fire textures etc weren't even that good, compared to the corpse bride set. I genuinely think they have a less skilled team working on their 6 stars this whole year.