And after a decade we still know almost nothing about the Sentients. Like I don't even know if a battalyst is a person or some kind of self-directed gun. We've only ever met, what, Hunhow, the Lotus, Erra, Nira, the owl dude, the wolf dude, and maybe Pazuul? Sorta? Hunhow and the Lotus both seem to have massively powerful minds; The Lotus seems to be able to be many places at once, coordinating activity all over the system as though she was personally present, while Hunhow seems to have some degree of direct control over all of his fragments or drones. Erra? I have no idea, he just kind of shows up out of nowhere and no questions are ever really answered. And the Archons are just totally inexplicable, I have no idea who came up with them or how they're supposed to fit in to the story, doubly so since they're all recognizably based on animals when the Sentients kind of famously don't look like humans or animals or really anything else.

Like I really wanted some kind of plot where the Tenno and the Sentients sit down and are like "Yeah I know there's bad blood but look we're really on the same side here, we should coordinate our efforts to dismantle the Grineer and the Corpus so we can liberate the Origin and then have a nice picnic."

There isn't even any real explanation of where the New Wars sentient fleet came from. Did they travel from Tau? Have they been in the Origin system since the end of the war and were hiding in deep space or something, and returned when Tyl woke Hunhow up? Wtf? Why was Erra ever putting up with Ballas' shit in the first place? What was with all the weird Narmer shit? That seems very on point for Balls-ass, but not for the Sentients. Like what could Erra, controlling a massive and completely unstoppable war-fleet, gain from Ballas? I don't think they ever out-right state that Ballas had a back-door in to Erra's systems that could take over his mind as seems to have happened with The Lotus. And where the fuck has Ballas even been for thousands and thousands of years?

idk, the new Wally stuff looks neat, but I don't really care about it. Wally is just another boring "oooh spooky eldritch abomination wants to eat our souls because it's made of evil!" baddy. I wish they'd have stuck with the political side of things and the overall state of the Origin system. Or like the Zariman? Wtf? That was something that happened a long time ago as an establishing plot device, it didn't need to come back, and it certainly didn't need to come back for absolutely no clear plot purpose. Same thing with Duviri. Just what the entire fuck was Duviri? Were they just bored and wanted to do it for fun? idk. And like everything else it's a total content island that doesn't seem to relate to or bare on the story at all.

And now we're in the Entrati's basement taking orders from a fish. I guess I'm just not as excited about the story anymore. The New War was kind of the payoff of the whole arc with The Lotus and Hunhow, but aside from the culmination of the Tenno's and Lotus' story and kind of Lotus' arc of becoming a "real person" in her own right, and the relationship between the Lotus maturing from that of a tool to actual friends and allies, the actual story parts just didn't do much for me. Erra's goals just weren't explained, we still know almost nothing about Sentient culture and society. We don't know anything about Tau or if the Sentients in the Origin system are even in contact with Tau. idk what the hell is going on with Hunhow. And again, the Wally stuff, while visually cool, just doesn't interest me. "Magic hell demon invades our reality which is bad for some reason but no one will actually say why" is so over done. I never found the Void interesting or needed it to be more than the excuse for our bullshit magic powers. i also don't like hwo the story has been drifting hard away from weird sci-fi in to space fantasy, with more and more emphasis on spooky magic stuff and less on, like, laser beams and robots. Not because there's anything wrong with fantasy, but because they're not tying the fantasy in to any actual material realities. Like the grineer and the corpus have clear understandable motivations in seeking wealth and power as quasi-fascist capitalist empires. The sentients almost make sense in that there was a real, concrete slave revolt where the slaves were trying to over throw the distant imperial power to protect their homes. But like Wally? Well, as near as I can tell he's lonely and bored and you can't really get much out of lonely and bored. Duviri's problem is that since it's a story book, even if the people of Duviri are actually sentient and have some measure of will, they're still trapped in teh context of their story and haven't moved beyond it. Like Duviri hasn't made contact with the Origin system at all afaik. And we know Teshin is in there but we haven't done anything to pull him out of there. It's not like its hard we should be able to just fly there with the railjack and pick him up, Duviri is in some kind of contiguous space with the Zariman.

It also bugs me that the void has always been empty prior to the Duviri stuff. There was never anything there, it's jkust a big swirly blue place where Orokin towers are stuck and that we fly through. Like I know it's because they've been writing and re-writing the story as they go, but why didn't we ever run in to any of this shit in the Orokin towers? Vor showed up to yell at us sometimes and that kind of fits, but that was just Vor being a crazy dickhead. All the other Corrupted units are supposedly being mind controlled by the Orokin Neural Sentry protecting the tower. But then why do void storms zap random people in to corrupted?

Like look, I don't want bullshit star trek technobabble, but i do want some explanations. What the hell was Erra's war goal? Where were Erra and Ballas all this time? Why the fuck didn't anyone know there was all this goofy shit running around in the void the whole time when we're in and out of the void constantly? Like Lua was buried in the void for thousands of years, why isn't it all weird and freaky? idk. I just feel like the plot holes and the inconsistencies and the changes in direction have really derailed the plot. Now we're going back to 1999 for some reasoon? I always really liked that the Orokin Empire was an unknown distance in to the past and we had no idea at the relationship was between the modern day and the Tenno era. We were just in this undefinable far future era where the nigh-unto-magic technology of the ancient and long dead Orokin Empire could still maintain a breathable atmosphere on FUCKING CERES which definitely should not be possible, to say nothing of open-air habitats in the insane hard-radiation deathscape of Jupiter's upper atmosphere. I can't imagine anything at all being added to the story by tying in to the 90s.

I just want to go back to the "helping the people of the Origin System" plots where we were good guys pursuing an understandable goal of beating back the space fascists using our magic ninja bullshit. : | Now we're taking orders from an asshole fish.