Anime Honkai: Star Rail - It sucks almost as much as mods changing titles

[MadMaxHellfire]

I bit the bullet and tried this, with all the unconditional praise it's receiving I felt like I was missing out.
This is a 1:1 conversion of Genshin Impact into a JRPG. This means that it has all the grind and milking, same growth but managed to take equipment away, but also maps are narrow corridors and there's no exploring, your manual skill is taken out of the equation and it's all about numbers, so shit characters are even more shit (main character apparently is among the worst of the bunch) and overpowered paid characters are even more overpowered. Puzzles are retarded, "no one ever accessed this remote area, you have to walk through these tiles only once each, such impossible, so impossibility, wow!". Fights are overly long, I had one with a same-level boss go on enough to have me shoot 25 or 30 "ultimate moves"; there's this one character's ultimate which has him cut the planet in half, and then deal pitiful damage to the opponents, so now you know these moves are also of the worst kind. Graphics are rather bad, but they fit the style.
It's not sci-fi. It's not. It's fantasy in space. I told you it's a Genshin Impact 1:1 conversion, minus all the things it actually did well.

 

[Hammer Of The Heretics]

This game pretty much lost me with the words "freemium" and "gacha". Nothing good has ever been described with those words - they describe a business model built on deliberate psychological manipulation of addictive behavior, instead of on providing a fun experience for their players.

 

[Norfleet]

I can't imagine why you thought weebshit would be good in an MMO. Weebshit isn't good, and MMOs aren't good, so combining the two guarantees a shit sandwich. The only way to get anything decent out of an MMO is when it's based on something that's capable of carrying the load of being an MMO, because being an MMO is a tradeoff of quality for longevity: You trade a better experience for a longer, worse one. Playing an MMO alone is shit, playing weebshit is shit, playing a weebshit MMO is doubleshit.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

but genshin was good. you could do the entire content easily enough with starter (which was decent) and free stuff, the map was huge, full of stuff to discover and try, the interaction between elements was fun and often tactically relevant.
here there's no dodging to keep yourself out of harm's way, there's no tactical choice, all elements do is damage, all the encounters are is dps check, no exploration, no discovering secrets by being clever, the learning curve is just a flat line on zero, graphics are bad, dubbing is irritating, ui is based on abstract icons with no meaning scattered through the screen, there's more currencies than i can count, it has only downsides and bad aspects.
this game is so terrible and badly developed that i unlocked and added to my party the character who in that very cutscene was chasing my party. and then they fought too.
and it makes me furious these damn chinks are also trying to steal the concept of galaxy express 999.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

genshin was good

From my time playing Genshin when it launched, I would have to disagree. The game presents itself as a AAA JRPG, but then flaws expose themselves fairly quickly. The English voice acting was usually mediocre. Long unskippable cutscenes and NPC dialogue that you can't just click through. Your story progression becomes gated by increasingly longer and longer grinds, to the point that by the time I grinded enough to progress the plot, it had been so many hours since I last did the story that I forgot what was happening or who these characters were and why I should care. A boring gameworld filled with copypasted ruins and dungeons. Combat was very tedious as the enemies are damage sponges and each fight takes several minutes and the world is padded with hundreds of the same monsters. You never feel like you are travelling with the characters, since your other party members do not appear on the field. You only control one character and unimmersively teleport/swap that same character with the other party members. The cast is entirely made up of babyfaced teenagers. The only positive things I have to say about Genshin is that I liked the animated clouds in the skybox, and some of the music was nice.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

completely disagree on most of that, and i could call the bullet sponge part a blatant lie since i usually 1-2shot trash mobs. sometimes i even 0shot them, managing to involve them into elemental effects i applied to bigger mobs. even the weekly megagiant ice wolf boss, the second hardest encounter in the game, was a matter of 5 minutes or shorter. hell, daily bosses were a matter of a couple minutes, reaching them included. and being a strict f2player i wasn't either overleveled or owned particularly strong characters.

 

[Lucumo]

genshin was good

From my time playing Genshin when it launched, I would have to disagree. The game presents itself as a AAA JRPG, but then flaws expose themselves fairly quickly. The English voice acting was usually mediocre.

It was bad. The worst part was that you had to watch the opening in that preset for some reason, before being able to switch to good voice acting (Japanese in my case). The localization of the text into my language was absolutely atrocious. When they released that new area with the ninjas etc, I called them out on the official forums for it and got banned there, lol. Decided to just ask them for a deletion of my game account in return. Fuck them.
Imagine earning tons of money and then producing localizations that are below elementary school level.

The good parts of Genshin for me were the exploration aspect and the story/character stuff.

 

[Morenatsu.]

kawaii plushie mascot rabbit thing hmmmm

 

[vibehunter]

I tried this game purely because it was turn-based and turn-based JRPGs are my preference. Never played Genshin. It was fun for about 15 hours, until I unlocked the daily quests and battle pass system. Then you see the game for what it is: a daily grinder that will wear away at and inconvenience you until you cough up cash. Things will undoubtedly be gated behind having a bunch of different systems leveled up, all of which require a million different resources. I guess I was a fool for expecting anything different from a gacha game.

 

[Fedora Master]

Who the fuck plays Gook MMOs other than braindead bug people?

 

[Morenatsu.]

Gacha games aren't even mmos

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

It's not sci-fi. It's not. It's fantasy in space.

Wait until you get to the space elves, space dragons and space fox girls.

Gacha games aren't even mmos

They're better. MMOs are garbage. If I wanted to interact with bored teenagers all day, I'd go onto reddit or visit the WotR thread here.

But yeah, should probably be in JRPG.

Things will undoubtedly be gated behind having a bunch of different systems leveled up, all of which require a million different resources.

The hard gate is the trailblazer level, but that's easy to level up with daily quests. The soft gates are worse though. You need to be a certain level to get past certain story content (which is a good thing, really), but that requires either grinding for items or buying them. And you don't just need to level characters, but relics and light cones.

It's definitely not a game that's designed for a free-to-play, no-life grind to completion with roadblocks like this. The people who want to no-life it are the people will probably pay money.

The quests are fairly boring ftmp, but they put a lot of effort into interacting with characters and giving them a backstory, so that almost makes up for it. Almost.

I find the simplistic turn-based combat kind of addictive, and that and the sunk cost fallacy of having sunk 20 hours into this thing already that keeps me playing. Same as Genshin, really, but I stopped playing that after a while.

I would recommend Fate/Grand Order before a game like this discount Final Fantasy stuff. At least FGO is doing its own thing, and the writing is better once you get to Camelot.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I guess I was a fool for expecting anything different from a gacha game.

You may want to consider checking out GBF. Granblue Fantasy doesn't gate the main storyline behind grinds or timegates or paywalls. You could start an account now and just blaze through 10 years of story as much as you want. There is a deprecated energy mechanic but you never run out of energy going through the story. The story is never too difficult that you have to stop and go grind for higher levels/better gear/characters. There are grinds if you want but they are for the optional hard mode raids. Granblue also gives you the story characters you are adventuring with through the story, unlike Genshin where you are adventuring with Jean and Dilluc but you inexplicably can't play as them unless you drop money. GBF is also really generous in that they have three events each year Christmas/New Years, anniversary event in March, and then the August summer event) where you get hundreds of free draws. I have 375 characters just from these free draw events, have not dropped a dime. I have more favorites than I can possibly fit into my parties. GBF also started the pity mechanic that other gacha games have instituted, and GBF's is the most generous. You can pretty easily save up 300 sparks to buy the specific character you want, whereas in Genshin it could take a very long time just to save up enough to get one character. The game also has an official English translation and is fully voiced acted (in Japanese). The soundtrack is by Nobuo Uematsu and his protege, Tsutomu Narita.

Biggest issue is that it is an old game and ofcourse doesn't have the same level of production values as mihoyo's stuff. The first story arc isn't that gripping, so it's hard to tell someone "be patient and go through hours of this visual novel! It gets better later on, promise!" when there are hundreds of other games or movies or books they could be enjoying that is good from the get-go.

 

[InD_ImaginE]

I enjoyed this. Game is structured like some PS2 era JRPG for better or worse with ample character interactions.

Combat is waaaaay to simplistic though.

Music is pretty nice.

 

[vibehunter]

I guess I was a fool for expecting anything different from a gacha game.

You may want to consider checking out GBF. Granblue Fantasy doesn't gate the main storyline behind grinds or timegates or paywalls. You could start an account now and just blaze through 10 years of story as much as you want. There is a deprecated energy mechanic but you never run out of energy going through the story. The story is never too difficult that you have to stop and go grind for higher levels/better gear/characters. There are grinds if you want but they are for the optional hard mode raids. Granblue also gives you the story characters you are adventuring with through the story, unlike Genshin where you are adventuring with Jean and Dilluc but you inexplicably can't play as them unless you drop money. GBF is also really generous in that they have three events each year Christmas/New Years, anniversary event in March, and then the August summer event) where you get hundreds of free draws. I have 375 characters just from these free draw events, have not dropped a dime. I have more favorites than I can possibly fit into my parties. GBF also started the pity mechanic that other gacha games have instituted, and GBF's is the most generous. You can pretty easily save up 300 sparks to buy the specific character you want, whereas in Genshin it could take a very long time just to save up enough to get one character. The game also has an official English translation and is fully voiced acted (in Japanese). The soundtrack is by Nobuo Uematsu and his protege, Tsutomu Narita.

Biggest issue is that it is an old game and ofcourse doesn't have the same level of production values as mihoyo's stuff. The first story arc isn't that gripping, so it's hard to tell someone "be patient and go through hours of this visual novel! It gets better later on, promise!" when there are hundreds of other games or movies or books they could be enjoying that is good from the get-go.

I seem to recall that GBF doesn't have a Western release. What's the easiest way to get it in English ?

 

[InD_ImaginE]

I guess I was a fool for expecting anything different from a gacha game.

You may want to consider checking out GBF. Granblue Fantasy doesn't gate the main storyline behind grinds or timegates or paywalls. You could start an account now and just blaze through 10 years of story as much as you want. There is a deprecated energy mechanic but you never run out of energy going through the story. The story is never too difficult that you have to stop and go grind for higher levels/better gear/characters. There are grinds if you want but they are for the optional hard mode raids. Granblue also gives you the story characters you are adventuring with through the story, unlike Genshin where you are adventuring with Jean and Dilluc but you inexplicably can't play as them unless you drop money. GBF is also really generous in that they have three events each year Christmas/New Years, anniversary event in March, and then the August summer event) where you get hundreds of free draws. I have 375 characters just from these free draw events, have not dropped a dime. I have more favorites than I can possibly fit into my parties. GBF also started the pity mechanic that other gacha games have instituted, and GBF's is the most generous. You can pretty easily save up 300 sparks to buy the specific character you want, whereas in Genshin it could take a very long time just to save up enough to get one character. The game also has an official English translation and is fully voiced acted (in Japanese). The soundtrack is by Nobuo Uematsu and his protege, Tsutomu Narita.

Biggest issue is that it is an old game and ofcourse doesn't have the same level of production values as mihoyo's stuff. The first story arc isn't that gripping, so it's hard to tell someone "be patient and go through hours of this visual novel! It gets better later on, promise!" when there are hundreds of other games or movies or books they could be enjoying that is good from the get-go.

I seem to recall that GBF doesn't have a Western release. What's the easiest way to get it in English ?

The Japanese game has English language choice.

And this game (Star Rail) is probably better in JRPG thread. Game is purely single player with 0 MMO part besides having to be online coz its f2p gacha game

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I seem to recall that GBF doesn't have a Western release. What's the easiest way to get it in English ?

As aforementioned, there is a set language option at the bottom of the login page. https://game.granbluefantasy.jp/#top

 

[Reinhardt]

the only decent part of the game is that rogue-lite mode, where you can break combat system in so many different ways.

 

[Reinhardt]

I guess I was a fool for expecting anything different from a gacha game.

You may want to consider checking out GBF. Granblue Fantasy doesn't gate the main storyline behind grinds or timegates or paywalls. You could start an account now and just blaze through 10 years of story as much as you want. There is a deprecated energy mechanic but you never run out of energy going through the story. The story is never too difficult that you have to stop and go grind for higher levels/better gear/characters. There are grinds if you want but they are for the optional hard mode raids. Granblue also gives you the story characters you are adventuring with through the story, unlike Genshin where you are adventuring with Jean and Dilluc but you inexplicably can't play as them unless you drop money. GBF is also really generous in that they have three events each year Christmas/New Years, anniversary event in March, and then the August summer event) where you get hundreds of free draws. I have 375 characters just from these free draw events, have not dropped a dime. I have more favorites than I can possibly fit into my parties. GBF also started the pity mechanic that other gacha games have instituted, and GBF's is the most generous. You can pretty easily save up 300 sparks to buy the specific character you want, whereas in Genshin it could take a very long time just to save up enough to get one character. The game also has an official English translation and is fully voiced acted (in Japanese). The soundtrack is by Nobuo Uematsu and his protege, Tsutomu Narita.

Biggest issue is that it is an old game and ofcourse doesn't have the same level of production values as mihoyo's stuff. The first story arc isn't that gripping, so it's hard to tell someone "be patient and go through hours of this visual novel! It gets better later on, promise!" when there are hundreds of other games or movies or books they could be enjoying that is good from the get-go.

also good thing about gbf iirc is that past events can be replayed by new players unlike most other gachas where if you joined game late you missed lots of free shit.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

also good thing about gbf iirc is that past events can be replayed by new players unlike most other gachas where if you joined game late you missed lots of free shit.

Partially true. Events older than 2 or 3 years are made permanent and are added to the side stories tab. Any event from within the past 3 years, though, is usually not available outside of a week long window of opportunity called a rerun, which might only happen once or twice before it is added to the side stories tab permanently. This can be pretty irritating if you are trying to follow a long side storyline like the popular Dragon Knights, where you're able to do chapter after chapter up until SIEGFRIED, and then there are 3 more chapters after that you can't do yet and might not be able to do for another 2 or 3 years. But there are only a handful of long running side storylines. Most events are one offs or two parters.

 

[Morenatsu.]

guise this chinese is frying my brain

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

also good thing about gbf iirc is that past events can be replayed by new players unlike most other gachas where if you joined game late you missed lots of free shit.

I hear nothing but good things about GBF's mechanics. IIRC, they don't even have an action point system. Unfortunately, I don't actually care enough to try it. Maybe some day.

 

[Rean]

It's a great tool to wash your eyes and cleanse your inner being after some contemporary soul-crushing lesbian orc Pathshit vomit.
Just like back in the day when Final Fantasy provided a reprieve from the depressing sewage of Baldur's Gate.

Weeb games add years to your life.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

Weeb games add years to your life.

This really isn't a weeb game. It's a chink game. So basically a weeb game, but more formulaic, and with more censorship.

Close enough comparted to Tranny Finder though.

 

[Reinhardt]

but more formulaic, and with more censorship.

and more greedy.