Honkai: Star Rail (2023)

Finally dropped this. The thing that finally pushed me over the edge was the new boss in 1.6. They just keep making the game harder and harder to the point you have to fight bosses with certain types of teams. But unless you play the game religiously, there's a good chance you don't have the right kind of characters built. Compound this with the fact it can take weeks (or even months if RNG is especially bad) to build someone decently... The game isn't worth that type of time investment.

After ragequitting the boss I decided to do some of the character stories for my favorite characters I'd been neglecting. Turns out those were trash too. Fu Xuan's story isn't even about her and Kafka's story is 3 minutes of janky dialogue forcefully dragged out with a bunch of pointless fights. There have been good companion quests, but they're few and far between at this point. It'd be great if you could actually learn something about the character's in question when doing their quest.

TL;DR: This game is too hardcore for me and doesn't have a good enough story to compensate.

it's a good phone game but not a good game game, ya know? like auto-battle IS really nice for a phone game. doing my dailies in genshin takes a non-zero amount of brain power and this game takes absolutely none. click button, wait, profit. the problem is just that ultimately, the brain power requirement is what makes games video games and not like... podcasts.

which, hey! sometimes star rail is actually a great podcast. my least favourite missions are the ones that involve the main character talking because it messes with me being able to put the story on auto and go do a load of laundry.

but the combat is, at best, vaguely satisfying in the way that else play a song you know how to play on piano is satisfying. watching someone else play a video game IS a thriving genre of media, like if i can enjoy watching someone else stream genshin then i can also find some enjoyment in watching auto-battle win or lose fights for me. if the only thing I wanted out of combat is pure stats-focused outcomes that i can minmax, then i'd be content. but for all but the hardest of content, auto-battle essentially asks me whether i want to experience the fun for myself while knowing that i could have a robot do it for me and go only slightly slower? just its presence makes any fight you do yourself feel like something you are inflicting on yourself to prove a point. and, well, when you DO play yourself, it's not like there's any mechanical skill to master. There aren't movement techs or even decisions that must be made quickly, with the exception of using ultimates. And auto-battle even has a function where the computer will do everything except use ultimates for you, so you can do the 1 component of combat which requires timing yourself and experience the exact bare minimum of the experience.

This problem spirals because of the format. Were star rail a singular linear experience, auto-battle would have drastically less of an impact. You could do the exact same amount of required actual play as are in the current main quest lines, which encompasses a few low level enemies and all major story-relevant fights, in a linear game and feel like you had a good balance of the 2 modes, that you had experienced the important moments of the game in real time. More importantly, you could build for those fights. By fights being one-time only, the number of turns it takes you to complete them would matter infinitely more. But as it is, when you include the tens of fights it would take you to go through a day's energy, the balance of auto to manual becomes less of a feels less like 75:25 and more like 98:2. And so when, the VAST majority of content I am playing on a regular basis is A. repeats of fights I've already had and B. auto-battle-able, building your teams as tanks instead of for quickness makes way more sense.

And so it spirals, because now when I do want to play for speed, I have to build and prioritize in a way that is antithetical to what actually makes the game easier 98% of the time.

Maybe (probably?) this will level out over time. AR 59 genshin is hugely different to even AR 35. I'm at 53 in star rail with a current max of 70, so presumably once i hit the experience ceiling and find myself months and months away from the last increase in difficulty instead of days, the need to prioritize resources will be much less extreme. As far as I'm aware, content creators are only just beginning to be able to clear the hardest content in the game and I don't know if that even extends to free-to-play yet. And I do want to enjoy this period of time in which the game is harder, as it's ultimately going to be more satisfying, especially in a game where combat itself isn't as engaging.

So at the end of the day I'm persevering. I am loosely enjoying the story and auto-battle makes consistently using my juice for materials really easy. I have never played honkai impact so I'm excited to see how Hoyo tells a story with a more central main cast.

Also, to be honest, the combat being the least appealing part of the game makes enjoying its gacha elements way easier. Genshin makes you want to play the characters you like. I don't know what the word is for this genre, if there is one, but it's a game with Systems. it's a game where your impact on the world.. matters? like it rains, yes, but it's not just something you see happen, it's something you interact with and which influences your experience. From making any cryo team a freeze team to making some puzzles just unsolvable, it has an impact (ba dum tsh). And it's a bunch of different things, some of which include:

• character voicelines reacting to the environment (alhaitham voice Curses. There's Sand In My Shoes.)
• designs and clothing all centered around movement and looking good from behind. all vision bearers are required to have an interesting view from the back :) and their clothes must have at least one object capable of flapping in the wind or ELSE.
• unique movement abilities. like really what i'm getting at here is that whatever genshin has, it's what makes me want to pull for scaramouche just so i can nyoom around the map with him. star rail doesn't have that. as far as i can tell, the biggest non-combat benefit of getting a character is looking at the back of their head as i spend as little time in the overworld as possible and in.. getting texts from them. and like, i guess maybe if they were really good texts?? but i like seele as a character! she is fun and i don't mind hearing more about her, her character was clear enough from just the main story to make me like her, etc. but at no point has anything she's texted me made me go wow im glad i got to experience that. i 100% just like that she kills shit wicked fast.

which is, ultimately, a good thing. for my wallet and my long term account strength lol