A Little Train...as a Treat
Oops! Got into another gatcha game!
In February, I wrote about Love and Deepspace: the newest, hottest fictional man delivery service that had started recently blowing up in the West with the most recent update at the time ( a BDSM-tinged Valentine’s Day banner and the addition of a period tracker). And I’ve kept playing in the eight months since; honestly, I’ve had more incentive to keep playing as the months passed between the booth at Anime Expo and (most of) the banners that have kept releasing since…especially the new myth banners.
I was plenty happy with my delusion-inducing, money sink of choice. Hell, I can’t really count my first proper gatcha experience (put a pin in that) as a money sink since I’ve mostly stuck to being a free-to-play player. But, alas, sometimes it does not take just one delusion-inducing money sink to satisfy the hole created by deleting Twitter off one’s phone. And that is why I’ve gathered you all here today. I have gone down the black hole that is Honkai Star Rail.
See, my first two weeks on the job required me to take an hour-long commute on the metro one-way. When gifted with a lot of time and not wanting to waste your phone’s battery, I default to people watching and phone-screen-snooping. Lo and behold, I saw a higher proportion of passengers of all ages had mobile games in lieu of social media: Candy Crush and its bretheren, those mobile games with the wack ads, and ESPECIALLY gatcha games. While I certainly did not have the balls to play the dating simulator on the crowded train I am easily influenced and decided to go back down a rabbit hole I once escaped from: miHoyo.
As I mentioned in my last embarrassing gatcha game admission, miHoyo/HoyoVerse has been the force behind the big boom in gatcha games over the last five years. And when Genshin Impact was riding its first wave of success I tried hopping on. Key word: tried. I played the game for about two weeks, heavily persuaded by some friends at the time and bored to death during the hybrid phase of college classes, and hated it. Part of my distaste was a pure skill issue since I was running the game on a really janky laptop that would threaten to explode if I so much as had a Word document open—much less a massive application like Genshin. The other problems I had that kept me from ever trying it, or any miHoyo games for that matter, were just as petty but lacked an easy solution. I never cared for the open world or dungeon crawler modes of gameplay, and I care for them even less when they’re not on consoles.
That all being said, I did keep finding my way back to miHoyo’s games for better or for worse. It is kind of hard to avoid them if you’re in any anime fan space nowadays. I took the sign of watching other people play it on the train to try again. However, I opted out Genshin again, the aforementioned open-world gameplay is still a massive turn-off, and avoided Zenless Zone Zero because it just generally looks unappealing to me (except that new character…but that’s it). That left Honkai Star Rail, the latest in Hoyo’s flagship Honkai semi-series, as my train game of choice.
It was a bit easier to get in the groove of Honkai Star Rail. Much like Genshin, the controls on mobile are a built-in trackpad on one corner of the screen. Blessedly (or not), there’s no jump button or stupid gliding mechanics so the movement overall felt a lot smoother as well. The battle mechanics are more like a traditional turn-based RPG, which I wholeheartedly prefer as my style of gameplay, with little mini-modes for debates, puzzles, and resource management thrown in. I think the general balance between battle, story, and mini-games is fine and definitely good for passing time on long train rides without getting bored. The fetch quests are always hellish, but they’re at least partially mitigated by good character writing and the gorgeous background graphics that miHoyo games are known for.
The writing and story quests are largely why I’m enjoying Star Rail much more than I did Genshin. As much as I do enjoy high fantasy, the world of Teyvat simply lost its luster far too quickly; there are so many rolling hills one can run up and down on a quest before it gets boring. Star Rail, as the name semi-implies, has a much more sci-fi lean which amounts to a lot more variation in the worlds. I wouldn’t say it amounts to as much variation as there could be in character designs, but that is a consistent problem across all of miHoyo’s games. However, what these characters do have is a sense of humor. While the writing for each story can be quite devastating or deep, there is plenty of humor imbued from the smallest of side characters to the player character. Finally, a player character with personality! I missed those! I’m a person that prefers my games dialogue-heavy, but it’s always nice when there’s well-written jokes and gags thrown in between lore drops and devastating character growth moments.
Now I’m officially back in what I like to call the “blorbo acquisition cycle” as I reach the third out of four available worlds. The “blorbo acquisition cycle” is what I call my process of getting latched onto a character that happens to cross my path and becoming an nightmare about them for an undetermined period of time. The characters I’ve had my eye on for a while were Blade and Kafka: a Shadow the Hedgehog coded guy who wants to die so bad and his coworker that is the epitome of the phrase “women’s wrongs”. However, most of the playable cast of characters have their own appeal either visually or in their narrative. I am not above just being thirsty for some pixels though. Big fan of whatever Dan Heng’s dragon forms, Anaxa, Mydei, and Jing Yuan got going on personally.
The long and short of it is Honkai Star Rail is a fun time, especially for my new normal of long train commutes. I hope no more gatcha games decide to release cool looking characters that horrifically appeal to me, for the sake of whatever dignity I have left.