Not monetarily or in becoming a whale, mind you!
No, rather, completing the story content of Wuthering Waves 2.0 has left me with a taste for more. With Wuthering, I’m essentially in the phase of play where I’m primarily burning through my energy for character and team progression, with a side of, uh, side quests to totter my way through as the whim strikes.
Enter: Honkai Star Rail.
My first impressions of Honkai (back when it launched) were… not positive… Honkai Star Rail, the game so ‘good’ I could nap while playing. And did. I think it took me near on two hours to complete the introductory parts of Herta’s space station, due in no small part to said nap times.
Suffice it to say, I bounced off it.
Reflecting on that now, this shows a bit of an emerging theme with me and gacha games. Wuthering Waves I also bounced off initially (albeit perhaps not quite as hard, as no sleep was involved), and only recently revisited to give it another shot.
Coming away from Honkai that last time, my belief was that the game was overly simplistic to the point of ridiculousness. So far as combat is concerned, each character has a basic attack, a skill, and an ultimate.
You get a team of up to four characters on the field at a time, and that’s… that’s about it.
Unlike the rest of the turn-based JRPG genre Honkai is based around, you do not gain access to an ever-growing roster of spells and skills. Whatever you have when you unlock the character is it.
Kinda.
And also… Missing a large part of the point, as it turns out.
And also, also… Not even entirely correct. There are talents, other enhancements from the skill trees, and effects from weapons (aka Light Cones) and gear (aka Relics), all of which combine to build up a character.
And that’s before even beginning to look at the team build and synergies, and what ‘sort’ of team you might want to lean into. Follow-up Attacks (attacks that trigger when criteria are met) seem to be what I like most at the moment.
All to say, in my initial snooze-fueled 2-hour impression session with Honkai at launch, I came away with a mistaken view of the game.
Right now, I’m just working my way through the main story, and have just completed the first planet, Jarin-VI and the city of Belobog. Weird sounding names aside, the story here was pretty good! I didn’t expect that. It was complete with set piece battles set to songs, anime cutscenes of pivotal moments, and character development of the like I was just recently praising Wuthering Waves for nailing in 2.0.
Honkai Star Rail isn’t without its issues. From what I hear it has some of the most aggressive Power Creep in the genre, with certain once-primo 1.x characters no longer being able to compete at all in the top of the current end game.
Certainly not a practice I’m happy with, and may well end up colouring my long-term stay (or not) with the game, but I’m so far away from that being a concern at present. For the time being, I’ll just take the ride with the story and enjoy it for what it is.
I also bounced of Honkai Star Rail but for the exact opposite reason: I found the combat too complicated and awkward right from the start. It’s a problem for me with all modern video games that make any kind of a deal of fighting because I’m just flat-out not interested in all that detail, particularly where it’s one thing relying on another thng and everything incrementing in percentage points. It was a trend I found annoying in MMORPGs even twenty years ago and it’s just gottern worse over time. Honestly, what I would appreciate the most is one set of abilities that I could learn in the tutorial and which just grow in power in a straightforward, linear fashion so I could forget about them. Sadly, almost everyone esle seems to equate entertaining combat with having to DO a lot of things and THINK all the time, neither of which has ever remotely appealed to me.
In Wuthering Waves I get by quite well by just button-mashing, which isn’t ideal but at least I don’t have to think about it much. In Honklai Star Rail I was having to think about what I was doing in fights almost from the start and I wasn’t having it. Other than that, it looked like an interesting game.
I wonder how a return visit might go for you at this point. If the issue was fundamentally just the combat itself before getting back into the kit mechanics at all, then I guess likely nothing will have changed.
But on the other hand, if a big part of it was the character progression, need to level/ascend characters and the like, you might be shocked how much you’ve picked up during your time with WuWa. As the systems are — specific item naming and nomenclature aside — pretty much identical.
From your recent post though, I know you’re already having trouble settling into your current gaming list, so perhaps a future project. Could be a neat one to hear about though!!