Riding the Astral Rails

Friends… I have been playing an excessive amount of Honkai Star Rail. I realize that I am about a month late to this particular party… but at least I eventually made it here. I’ve talked a bit about this game in another post, but one of the points that I want to underline again is how much better of a game Star Rail is than Genshin was at launch. I mean it makes sense, at this point Hoyoverse has more than one major hit under their belt… but everything about this game really shows the lessons that they have learned. The narrative is extremely solid, and I would put it up there with other greats of the RPG genre. I made the hot take the other day that this is at least as good as Final Fantasy VII with zero digs meant towards either game in that equation.

Right now I have landed on a primary party of the fire incarnation of the Traveller, March 7th and Dan Heng… largely because I have become attached to both of them as characters, and Natasha is another character that I really love… but I’m mostly using her because she is a healer. All of these characters are given to you by the game as you wind your way through the story. I have a handful of characters that I have pulled through the Gacha system, but I wound my way around to just using this four-star team and I don’t really feel like I am missing out on anything. It feels like there is a really strong synergy between abilities, and wide enough elemental coverage to get weakness breaks in most fights. I did not feel nearly this strong while using only stock characters in Genshin Impact for example, and honestly think the free characters there were fairly awful compared to what you could get through pulling.

That said I feel like it is also important to talk a bit about how generous this game is. Right now I would be what you would term a “low spender” in Gacha games. I bought the $5 monthly pass because those generally give you a ton of pull currency over time and other side benefits. However, the game itself seems to just be constantly throwing pull currency at me and I’ve pulled the slot machine enough times to get three pity five stars. At the moment I am saving up my currency because I know a new banner is coming soon that is probably going to have a few characters I might want on it. I picked up the chase 5-star Jin Yuan seen above, while also picking Tingyun and Sushang while getting enough dupes to take them to 3 and 5 eidolons respectively. This just feels WAY different than Genshin Impact did, which makes me wonder what other lessons they learned from that game. At least as an outsider, it certainly seemed like they had trouble sustaining widespread interest in it.

The other thing that I think is interesting about Honkai Star Rail is that it is honestly much more mobile-friendly than Genshin ever was. Touch controls are not great at replicating a controller and doing complicated combat, but they are really good at letting you complete turn-based actions. This puts Star Rail in this weird hybrid category of allowing you to move around freely but when the action really matters… you are able to strategically work your way through combat in a strict turn-based system. A lot of the reason why I never played Genshin on mobile is that I just did not feel that I could trust the touch controls to get me through anything other than the most simplistic of combat scenarios. With Star Rail I can happily play this while sitting in the backyard on my phone because it isn’t like I am concerned about the limited range of motion of touch controls will screw me over.

The first two acts of the story so far have been phenomenal. Essentially your tutorial takes place on a Space Station and after you resolve that core conflict, there is a constant dribble of side missions that let you get to know those characters far more over time. The second planet Belobog is equally rich and has this whole… Firefly meets Wildarms meets Frostpunk. This also serves as the planet that lets you see the dire consequences of a Stellaron gone out of control and brings you further into the central conflict. It also introduces this wide cast of characters that you legitimately come to love, even though they are largely just playing bit parts in the tale. This makes it all the more rewarding when one of these characters reaches out to you over the in-game “text message” system asking for your help again.

I am working my way through the third area of the game, and it is effectively “Space China”. So far I am not the biggest fan. Generally speaking much like Liyue it is a grossly inefficient bureaucracy filled with a lot of annoyingly self-important people who care way more about appearances than they do about doing the thing that needs to be done. After seeing this setting effectively playing out in two different Hoyoverse games… it does make me wonder if there is a bit of a thinly veiled political statement being made here. I’m hoping that the deeper I get into this story, the more engaged I will become with these characters… because at the moment I would be fine with pushing them all off a pier into the sea. If you have a game about planet hopping… they can’t all be winners and so far the first two were amazing so I guess they are due for a stinker.

I think what has impressed me more than anything, is that I am still having fun with the game when I have effectively bumped up several times against hard barriers. Like Genshin Impact or Tower of Fantasy, there are some hard daily progression caps where you can only really make so much progress in a single play session. I’ve been bumping up against this barrier of needing to increase my Trailblaze Level in order to be doled out the next chunk of the story. If you played Genshin you would be familiar with this quandary of needing to keep increasing your Adventure Level. The thing is… even though I have been stalled for a few days, I am still finding things that I want to pop into the game and do, and there is enough fun to be had in activities that don’t have some sort of daily limiter on them. I am not certain how long that will hold, but for the moment it seems to have more staying power for me personally than Genshin did at launch.

I realize that I am coming into this game a month late, but my hope is that I can catch up in time for the first update. Last week there was a bit stream that announced the 1.1 Patch called Galactic Roaming which will be launching on June 7th. Essentially it adds new storylines to both Jarilo-VI and the Xianzhou Luofu. Then there will be two different sets of banners, one for Silver Wolf the hacker you meet very very early into your story, and Luocha that you meet during the Xianzhou area during a side story with Dan Heng. I have no real interest in the second character, but I am absolutely stockpiling currency now in a vague attempt to pull Silver Wolf. I dig the retro arcade-looking effects that they showed of her attacks.

Mostly I am hoping to get caught up enough to be able to participate in all of the new events. I’m also hoping that the team that I have chosen will effectively be good enough to get me through all of the content. So far the only thing I struggle with are the challenges that require you to kill things within a certain number of turns. My team is extraordinarily tanky… but not necessarily the fastest at destroying things unless wildly over leveling the enemies.

Interstellar Boxcar Heroes

Hey Folks! I thought I would take a detour from my usual ARPG nonsense to talk about something else I have been playing the last few nights. I realize that practically everyone has been talking about Honkai Star Rail, but I’ve also dipped my toes into those waters. In truth, I started playing shortly after the game launched but apparently did not play long enough to save my progress. This was a little weird to me but it seems you have to complete the entire first tutorial segment… which is not exactly short… before the game actually saves your account. I am not exactly certain at what point this takes place, but my guess is once you’ve defeated the first boss and been presented with the choice of staying on the station or riding the rails.

As a result, I have a much high UID in the sequence than I thought I did, because my account was not actually finalized until over the weekend. I need to install the game on my phone to see how well my roughly five-year-old device handles it. In order to do that I will probably need to uninstall a bunch of junk that I am no longer playing. I have this bad habit of randomly installing games when I am bored… playing them for a day or two and then wandering away like a bored toddler. I think this game will probably work much better as a mobile game than Genshin did for me, given that everything is turn-based and high-speed inputs are crap on a touchscreen device. I remember when Genshin launched there was talk of a Switch version… and I really wish that had come to fruition because I also feel like Honkai Star Rail would be a perfect fit for that device. I suppose I could sort out how to launch it on my Steam Deck because there is very likely a solution for that just like there is for Genshin.

Anyways if you are playing feel free to friend me up: UID – 604908816

I think what I dig the most about Star Rail so far is that it feels like a really good turn-based JRPG. You can definitely see how far Hoyoverse as a company has come since the release of Genshin. Admittedly I have not played Genshin Impact really since maybe the first or second major content area was added to the game. The last region that I explored at length was Liyue and I never really got into the big mountain region that they added after that. I am sure that likely Genshin has also improved its storytelling, but from someone who heavily played that game at launch and then walked away… Star Rail feels like a massive boost in quality levels. The combat and designs are also pretty great and so far I am pretty happy with the default cast of characters that you get handed to you along the way.

I am not very deep into the game and have just landed on the first planet after the tutorial space station. So far I am digging the story enough that I would probably keep playing the game just for that alone. I am also really enjoying the turn-based combat and setting up combos that feed off each other to try and burn through encounters quickly. I do however wonder if part of the reason they decided to go turn-based with this game was so that they could add the ever-present mobile game auto-battle option. I’ve not turned that on so I have no clue how successfully it actually does at managing combat. What I really dig is that the game is a TRUE turn-based, and not that active time battle type system that Final Fantasy games shifted to. You can sit there mulling over your next move for as long as you like and the game does not seem to hurry you along in the process.

Combat is flashy as heck, and this goes for your moves as well as those of the enemies you are fighting. This makes everything feel sufficiently epic, and I really dig the main character this time. Pretty much the entire time playing Genshin Impact I was using a cast of side characters and never actually using the default Traveler. The game gives me enough options in the dialog to feel like I am having some impact on the type of character that I have chosen to be, without getting bogged down doing so. I also really like that I am a melee… but that is probably not going to sit so well with my finger-wiggling friends out there. You can of course create a party NOT including the main character just like you could in Genshin but you will ultimately have to wait until you get enough side characters to make that functional.

I think ultimately my fate with Honkai Star Rail will be determined by if I can manage to play it casually. I do not want to spend any significant sum of money on this game, which means I will be relying on the slow drip of cash shop currency and free pulls in order to get additional characters. I’ve picked up a few new options but so far none of the much coveted five-star champions. I think my frustration with these games in general is the power difference between getting a five-star and sufficing with the much more common four-stars. Since you spend so much time and resources in leveling characters up in a game like this… getting a very powerful character early on really improves your overall experience in the long run.

If I can manage to play this as a casual story-driven turn-based RPG… then I think I will be happy. However, I have this bad habit of trying to go deep into the game as I did with both Genshin Impact and Tower of Fantasy, and when that happens… I get frustrated by the artificial walls that are put up as barriers that require you to dig into your pocketbook in order to get through them. So long as I can keep the mindset that this is like a Final Fantasy single-player game… I think I might just be okay. It does not really FEEL like an open-world loot-grinding game which probably helps my enjoyment. We will have to see what this game looks like once I have depleted the main campaign for content. I noticed there is a similar system to Genshin in that you can only do so much in a given day without paying for additional turns, so we will see how badly that impacts my progress.

Ultimately this is like every other one of these Gacha games in that they are free-to-start, but likely not free forever. We will have to see just how much FOMO is baked into this particular game, and how hampered I feel by things that I can ultimately gain for free. It isn’t that I mind spending money on games, I just don’t like the sort of spending that is attached to gacha mechanics. I would rather a game like this launch with an honest $50-$100 price point that allows you to feel like you have everything you need in the game. That is unfortunately fundamentally against the design of this type of experience because they are “Gone Whaling”. So instead my mindset has been to try and get as much fun out of them as I can until I hit that paywall and then wander off for a while, maybe to return at a later date to gobble up more free content.

Like I said above, if you are also playing this game feel free to friend me. Not sure if there are any passive interactions between players like there are in something along the lines of Pokemon Go or not. I can’t guarantee to be terribly active because this is absolutely a side game for me right now.

AggroChat #335 – Viking Summer Camp

Featuring:  Ammo, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we start off some discussion about the unseasonable weather that has caused a few of us to experience negative 15 fahrenheit days.  From there we discuss BlizzConline and how we went into it with extremely lowered expectations.  We discuss the things that were announced namely Diablo 4 new class and Burning Crusade Classic.  From there we venture forth into a discussion about Valheim a game that Bel has played for awhile but failed to recruit other players into until Tam and Kodra did this thing.  The entire AggroChat crew seems to have reached a critical mass and is exploring this norse land of mystery.  Finally we briefly talk about WandaVision and how weird the show must be if you don’t at least have a summary understanding of the characters.

Topics Discussed

  • Thawing Out from Hell Freezing Over
  • BlizzConline
    • Anduin is the Arthas?
    • Diablo 4 Rogue
    • Diablo 2 Remastered
    • Burning Crusade Classic
    • Lost Vikings Returns
    • Diablo Immortal
      • Mobile Game Woes
  • Valheim
    • Survival Done Better
    • Low Fidelity but Gorgeous
    • Building a City
    • Adventures and Shenanigans
    • Bel Ruins Everything
  • WandaVision
    • Zero Spoilers – What is this like if you don’t already know the characters?

Bel VS Mobile Gaming

The Eureka Moment

FalloutShelter_ScreenShot

I just had a moment of realization while checking on the progress of Vault 816…  I am not a mobile gamer.  While I really enjoy the idea of playing Fallout Shelter, I always have the same thought I have with any mobile game.  “Man I wish I could play this on my desktop or through a web browser.”  There are games that I enjoy the idea of playing… like Fallout Shelter, Alphabear, Dragon Coins, or Final Fantasy Record Keeper.  The problem is I get frustrated by the imprecise controls.  Using your finger to move objects around the screen feels so much more cludgy than doing it with a nice tight mouse pointer. Granted if I were a smaller person I would probably not be having any of these issues.

Sausage-Like Fingers

AttackOfSausageFingers

I am 6’4” and have huge hands…  I can palm a basketball. Attached to these huge hands are useless sausage-like fingers that have the fine motor skills of sleepy toddler.  The more I think about it… this fact has gotten in the way of my enjoyment of almost every mobile game I have played.  At first I thought the bulk of my problems would be resolved were I simply playing on a larger device.  However as I graduated from my iPhone 3s to a Samsung Galaxy S2 to a Samsung Galaxy S5…  each time the screen size increased sizably but the difficulty never went away.  When I finally got my own iPad I still felt like throwing it across the room anytime I was asked to do anything that required a modicum of detailed movement.

I realize there is such a thing as a stylus, but then I am having to fiddle with an awkward device on top of an already awkward control scheme.  The problem is…  there really are games that I want to enjoy on mobile devices.  Fallout Shelter for example takes two things that I have loved in the past…  the Fallout Franchise, and Sim Tower like gameplay.  During my pre-college and college years I spent silly amounts of my free time playing both of these games.  I spent enough time playing Sim Tower to be able to build freaking airports at the top of my towers.  I have played each of the Fallout franchise games multiple times, and even though I rarely play the original…  I feel like I could pretty safely pick it right back up and meld into the nostalgia nicely.  So I am the core demographic of this game…  except for the whole control scheme problem.

I honestly have no clue why I felt like I needed to write this post, other than having my own little Eureka moment.  For the longest time I thought my dislike of mobile gaming was more about the game experiences that you have on a mobile device.  Now I realize that is wrong… there are plenty of “gamerly” experiences available.  My problem is that I struggle to get any sense of control while playing a mobile game.  Finger based movement against a slick screen always feels chaotic to me.  It reminds me of how frustrated I get when trying to use a trackball.  I guess I am just accustomed to the mouse, keyboard and controller…  and when it finally comes down to relying on my own digits to make things work…  I find the experience frustrating.  I am wondering if anyone else out there with sausage-like fingers suffers from this same issue?  We should totally form a support group or something.