In the highly formulaic numerical feast of “Honkai Impact 3: Star Dome Railroad”, the comparison between Blade and Black Swan is not just a simple juxtaposition of character strength, but a collision of thinking modes: one is the representative of “instant feedback output”, and the other is the embodiment of “time delay control”.

When we put these two characters on the scale of public opinion, the player’s preference, like a lever that has long been tilted, is undoubtedly pressed on the Blade side.

They say: “Blade is strong, Black Swan is fancy and useless.”

This is not a problem with the game content itself, but a deviation in the player’s cognitive mode.

Let’s first pull out Blade for analysis.

Blade is a “half-blood god of war” character with self-damage blood recovery, stable cycle, and extremely high panel as selling points. His design philosophy is very clear: relying on high-frequency combat skills and talents to trigger each other, to achieve a perfect closed loop of “I hit myself and I hit you”. He is the spokesperson for fast-paced combat and the orthodox successor of violent aesthetics in the “Star Iron” system.

Black Swan is a typical core character of the nihilistic strategy – she does not rely on kicking down the enemy by herself, but relies on the “Soul Breaking” mechanism to slowly lay out, and often even needs other characters such as Kafka and Silver Wolf to pave the way for her, in order to truly complete a complete set of “continuous damage closed loop”.

So the players naturally came to the conclusion: Blade is stronger. Because “I only need to bring Blade and Nursery, and I can finish the game in three rounds”; while Black Swan “needs to hit, speed, and match Kafka, why bother?”

That’s the problem.

This is actually a typical “instant feedback preference” trap.
In the minds of most domestic players, especially mobile users, the strength of a character often depends on the following points:

Is the operation simple and direct?

Can it fight alone?

Can it deal high damage in a short time?

Can it bring a sense of accomplishment like a second kill in racing or memory?

Under this evaluation system, Blade is undoubtedly an all-rounder. He doesn’t need too much cooperation from teammates, nor does he need you to use your brain to arrange the rhythm. He can charge forward with blood line, so that you can get “satisfaction” from the first round. This is a tribute to “immersive violence” in design, and it is also “instant positive feedback” in numerical value.

But Black Swan is just the opposite.
She is the representative of slow-paced narrative. She is a combination of systematic mechanisms. She requires you to carefully match the team, control the speed curve, and monitor the number of soul cracking layers. She doesn’t let you blow up the opponent instantly, but let you watch the opponent “collapse layer by layer” in the fifth round, and you control the rhythm of the whole game.

But this is a burden, not an achievement in the player culture of “efficiency first”.

So we will find:
Even if the upper limit damage of Black Swan has exceeded Blade in some abysses, even if she can achieve a terrible burst clearing effect in a specific void pendant team, players will still say that she “lacks practicality”.

Why?
Because their brains have long been bound by the judgment template of “fast, accurate and ruthless”, they can no longer understand the value of a “cultivation-based combat” role.

This is not a problem with the game mechanism, but a regression of “player aesthetics”.

If we look back at the comments section after the early launch of Black Swan, we will find an extremely unified voice:

“Too slow.”

“I can’t play the Nothingness team.”

“It’s a matter of how many blades she hits, she needs to stack five or six layers before she can burst.”

This is actually a collective misunderstanding of the “slow feedback mechanism”. Players have long been unwilling to wait or think. What they want is “one knife 9999”, not “segmented DOT construction + pendant linkage + burst attack”.

This leads to the potential compression of the entire game mechanism. No matter how rich the mechanism is and how meticulous the design is, if the Nothingness character is not accepted by the “mainstream fast pace”, it will become a “second-tier character”, even if their actual damage can be comparable to the burst flow character.

Blade-style thinking has been deeply embedded in the collective subconscious of players.

The role of Black Swan, which requires “preparation”, “construction” and “multiple output periods”, is like a long novel that requires you to calm down and read, and is completely speechless in the era of short videos.

This trend is dangerous.
It is killing the diversity of games.
It forces the design space of numerical values ​​and output methods to shrink to a narrow dead end of “whoever hits faster is right”.

If we do not reflect on the players’ misunderstanding of the continuous damage role, and do not re-examine the value of “rhythm control” and “pendant system”, then Black Swan will only be the first designer to be marginalized, not the last.

She should not be just a “pendant serving Kafka”, she should be the “central axis controlling the entire battle situation”.
But we only want to see the pleasure of “rushing up and slashing”, and are unwilling to manage tactics and spend time to understand the rhythm.
In such an environment, characters like Blade are naturally favored, while characters like Black Swan can only be misunderstood, excluded, and eventually put into the cold palace.

It’s not that she is not strong enough, but that we no longer have patience.