Honkai Star Rail

Pom-Pom Is Sadcore

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Good Morning Friends! I figured I would talk a bit this morning about Honkai Star Rail. I’ve continued to play it in the background but have not really talked about it in a while. I’m still finding this an extremely fun game even though I am mostly playing for however long it takes to complete the daily activities and spend down my activity currency. I wish there was a bit more meat on the bones here, but we are in somewhat of a holding pattern for the next major story drop to land. I’ve contemplated picking back up Genshin Impact as my friend Ace has done, but I find just the concept of trying to ease back into that game overwhelming. There is so much content that I missed and it feels weird trying to find a place to even start.

I pulled Silver Wolf off the current banner and immediately adapted my default team to include her. The whole mechanic of being able to make encounters weak to abilities that they were not already weak to seems extremely strong. Natasha though is doing the heavy lifting of this team. Right now I only have one healer and really wish I had a second. Right now that would be Bailu… which is a five-star and not on a banner yet. The next banner is for Luocha, which is a character that I have no thematic interest in at all… but might still try and get just to have a second reliable healer. I’ve reached the point where I need to attempt to maintain two teams in order to keep pushing some of the content and whichever team does not have Natasha on it… struggles quite a bit. As far as my lineup of spare 60s goes… I have Bronya, March, Asta, Gepard, and Serval. Essentially I tend to make a super shield team and then give the healer to the other team and it MOSTLY works.

Right now in lieu of story content, we are getting several events happening in the game. The best of these is a sim game where you take over management of the Everwinter City Museum. It took me 71 turns to complete all of the activities which is probably a bit long, but there were several turns where I let my current actions ride just to build up the resource used to fund renovations. Essentially someone looted the museum and you are helping out Pela track down the culprits and replace the items. You also spend some time tracking down volunteers and convincing them to help be docents at the museum. All in all, it was a really fun event and I am sort of sad that I am done with it.

Another game that is cycling off in just a few days is the Starhunt Game which is associated with Silver Wolf. You are essentially tracking down graffiti that she tagged the space station with, and decoding it. This involves going through some mini-dungeons and completing very specific objectives. There is this cool mechanic where the boss of the encounter is too powerful to be defeated, so you have to find a specific tag somewhere in the zone that will reduce its level significantly so you can take it down. The biggest thing gained from this event though is a Light Cone that is themed for Silver Wolf and the ability to power it up significantly. It was fun, but nothing really to write home about.

The event that started this week is a “research” event where you just supply the researcher with some basic materials. So far nothing they have asked for has been a challenge and are items I have hundreds of sitting in my vault. These sorts of events tend to be a way of removing some resources from the economy, and if you have played for any length of time you tend to have plenty of whatever the resources are. The rewards are nice even though the event itself is rather boring. I can always use more blue materials to either synthesize into purple materials or to power up characters.

Honkai Star Rail, while largely in maintenance mode for me… is still something that I enjoy doing each day. It maybe takes thirty minutes to complete everything for the day, and then move on to whatever my gaming main course for the evening. This is just enough time to feel like I accomplished something, without the game really overstaying its welcome. I do however look forward to the next batch of story content dropping, and I am enjoying the little daily interludes that take place over the in-game text system. I should probably spend some time trying to farm the Space-China currency so I can pick up the remaining Eidolons for Fire Traveller. I’ve almost completed the battle pass for the month as well, so it still feels like I am making constant progress. Honkai Star Rail is one of those games where it was really fun to mainline it until I caught up with the content… and then still fun playing it in daily maintenance mode.

AggroChat #437 – The Lost Should Stay Lost

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! We start the show with the dangers of bowling in a fursuit and then dive straight into the Not-E3 shows.  The entire crew has finally watched the Dungeon and Dragons movie so we talk a bit about how damned good it was. Tam and Bel talk about Knights of the Old Republic 2 and how maybe not all of the content in the restored patch should have been restored.  Thalen talks about how faithful of a remaster System Shock is and how Nightdive is doing great work.  Bel talks a bit about his experiences with Diablo 4 Endgame and how it is not that great.  Tam talks about playing Wizorb on the Steam Deck and Bel talks a bit about the Honkai Star Rail patch.  Finally, Kodra finishes the show with some talk about Co-Op games that allow players to share the cognitive load of problem-solving.

Topics Discussed:

  • Not-E3 Shows
  • Dungeons and Dragons Movie Finally
  • Knights of the Old Republic 2 and the restored content
  • System Shock
  • Diablo 4 Honeymoon Over
  • Wizorb was Great
  • Honkai Star Rail Patch
  • Sharing Cognitive Load in Co-Op Games

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Luofu Caught Up

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So when I wrote yesterday morning, I was lamenting whether or not I would actually be able to catch up in the story for Honkai Star Rail by the time the next content drop happens on June 6th. Then last night… I apparently caught up. The conflict on the Xianzhou Luofu has not completely resolved itself, but I did manage to get a massive story drop that ultimately concludes with the game telling me it is time for an intermission. I am certain there are still a number of side quests that I have to catch up on, and I need to do more daily content on the Luofu to be able to gain enough of the shop currency to purchase the rest of the Eidolons for the Fire form of your main character. This is probably a good thing honestly because it means I can likely rip through the content remaining in an hour or so… rather than needing to mainline the game.

What I did not expect was to care so much about some of the characters. There are some storylines that just hit you right in the feels. That is something that I did not really remember from Genshin… actually caring about any of the characters. There were a bunch of storylines that were “cute” or “entertaining” but I never really felt like I had any actual emotional connection with those characters. Most of my choices were because I liked the way certain abilities felt or the way specific characters looked. I love how side missions are presented in this game, through text messages from the characters because as you meet new people you are teaching them how to join this global network that all of the planets are connected to. It is allowing extended stories to roll out slowly over time and fill in the details that took place after the main conflict involving those characters was resolved.

The other thing that I am deeply enjoying about this game is how Hoyoverse seems to be making some very specific statements about things. Like yesterday I talked about their characterization of “Space China” as a large inefficient bureaucracy. The more I think about this, the more certain I am that this was very purposeful. For example above is an example of them making comments about ChatGPT, and there are other places where they have thrown digs at the “Metaverse” as a concept. One of my favorite tropes is the fact that March 7th… keeps pointing out every time we are walking into a situation that seems like the beginning of a horror movie. At first, I thought this was a single throwaway line… but she has pointed something like this out like three times so far. The characters in Honkai Star Rail feel so much more vibrant than what I remember from Genshin Impact, and I think in part that is what is making this game so enticing for me.

In other news… since I own Diablo IV and it was given to me as a gift… I figure I am going to go in for this madness and see if the game has improved or gets better as it approaches the end game. I have the game installed and ready for the launch this evening. Blizzard can play the game by saying the launch date is the 6th, but really it is launching today and this early access nonsense is really just penalizing players who would not pony up the extra bucks to play it. Anyways I am not overly positive about this game but I am also a sucker for anything actively in the zeitgeist so… shocking to no one I will be joining the madness. Of my immediate circle of AggroChat friends, I fully expect I will be the only one save for maybe Eliyon who is way more of a “Blizzard gamer” than the rest of us. I know my friend Cylladora is really excited for it, so if nothing else I hope to spend some time hanging out with her.

I am a glutton for punishment and plan on rolling another Barbarian, because at the end of the day… that is really my class of choice in most Diablo games. If the Crusader existed, I would probably play that but for the moment I am loosely planning on leveling as Upheaval since I enjoyed that fairly well during the last test period and it also gave me some ranged gameplay options for fights when I could not stand in melee. I fully expect to recreate something close to this beefcake murder hobo from the last testing round. I’m hoping there have been some significant changes since the last round of testing, but I am not banking on it. My personal preference would be to bip around the map doing all the side content and leveling myself up… to over level the content and then steamrolling the story. However, Diablo IV doesn’t exactly work that way and all that seems to do is serve to make story fights more annoying. So I will likely mainline the story at least until I have consumed everything in the first area… then spend some time catching my level up doing side content.

If we are mutuals on any social platform, feel free to add me to your friend list. My Battle Tag information is over in the sidebar of this blog under the Diablo III graphic, or you can go to my one size fits all rarely updated list of game account information here. If you use a name that I don’t recognize however you might expect a “new phone who dis” message from me.

Riding the Astral Rails

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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.