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Everything about this game aside from graphics and sound are just okay. Nearly bog-standard anime gacha RPG with a bloodthirsty monetisation scheme. If you don't care about PvP or spend a light amount of money on the game, you'll have a good time, but a good time is something a thousand other gachas can already provide.
Ultimately it's not that special. Plenty of PvE to slog through, enemies scale extremely quickly, so and such.
Also I'm sure this game would put me on a watchlist if I happen to play it in public. Which I don't. Whoever designed Levia (?) is a freak. An absolute freak.
As of the latest patch version, the developers have completely banned players from certain regions without prior warning, announcement or justification, and implemented LIAPP to prevent players from downloading from other sources.
This is an extremely incompetent move to combat cheating, as it also punished a huge portion of innocent players, more than it did cheaters. I'm not sure if this kind of action is even legal but what can you do I guess, it's not like the players will go out of their way to sue them. I'm just sad I lost my account, potentially forever, when I'm a paying customer and also have never cheated or tampered with the app.
This is hugely disgraceful from the developers.
I normally don't do mobile game reviews because there usually isn't much to talk about, but this one is an exception. Not for how extraordinary it is, but for how painfully mediocre it is after being hyped up as one of the biggest game releases of the year.
Do I like this game? I'll be very honest: No. And there are a couple reasons why. Well, a lot of reasons why.
Honkai Star Rail started off very strong for me. I loved the visuals, I ADORED the music and the game would seemingly stick with me. External factors are incredibly done at first sight. Controls are well-established, and it ran smooth for me at least. After the initial hour though, everything started falling apart. This game left a sour taste in my mouth and is one of the most glaring example why you should never shoehorn an open-world into every game, or your story into the players' head.
Let's start with what is possibly the weakest point of the game. The open-world quite literally adds no positive value whatsoever to the game play experience. Sure, it is nice to go around looking at the new zones for the first time around, but other than that, it makes the game such a slog to go through. It trounced every good impressions it made by being so tedious to the point I fell asleep from trying to get around in the world. I honestly think this design choice is just to ride off the open-world trend. Sadly, as did many other games, Star Rail failed to encapsulate what makes an open-world interesting: player agency and exploration. Instead, the open-world in Star Rail only serves to make everything you do take longer, and you don't really have a choice to explore, because there is nothing to be explored. Random chests scattered around the map is not exploration, it's treasure-hunting; and incentivizing exploration by premium currency takes the fun away from exploring. The world at least has some form of livelihood for itself without your involvement, but this is immediately cancelled out due to how poorly arranged and designed the events are. There are too many examples but if I have to give one, it would be the Hide and Seek quest with the Moles. Seriously, who made this? Who gave it approval to pass through into the actual game?
To sum it up, the open-world is merely an opulent showcase of what Mihoyo can do, and how much digital land size they can put into a game, but they have a very long way to go to properly make the open-world an enhancing factor for the core gameplay.
As for gameplay, it's the second weakest point. It's uninspired, sluggish, dry and poorly balanced. To start it off, the break system is one of the most egregious break/poise/shield designs I've ever seen in my life, and I've played countless Dark Souls ripoffs. This just takes the cake completely for limiting the break meter to units whose elements (combat style) the enemies are weak to. This design choice is so cynical it seems like Mihoyo is actively limiting the ways in which you can build teams and heavily forcing you to use their content-proof formula: 1 ST damage dealer, 2 supporter/healer and 1 AoE damage dealer, however the damage dealers necessarily need to have the ability to break to do decent damage. Right of the bat, Dan Heng himself is the unit that exposes this design choice. He does very decent damage towards enemies who are weak to Hunt, but barely shows any number to the enemies who aren't. I'm fully convinced they made it this way to force you to roll for at least 2 units for each combat style and when your free resources would finally run dry, you will spend.
Besides the particularly bad break system, the other factors of the game play are nothing special. It is indeed just turn-based and nothing else, apart from the aforementioned gorgeous visuals. Stealth hits have been done better before, by Mihoyo themselves too. Elemental resistances and bonuses have the same multipliers as every other gacha game. Normal hit & skill & ultimate & passive, bog-standard. To be fair, it is hard to be innovative and unique in a very saturated market that is gacha games, but the way they put their spin into the game very severely hinders their potential. Star Rail could have had great gameplay, many beta testers like myself have had plenty suggestions, but we ended up with an extremely mediocre and lazy battle design. For how extremely hyped and advertised this game was, Mihoyo did not deliver. I am disappointed even though I didn't have high expectations already from playing CBT3.
The story is weak, barebone and it's not thought-provoking by any means. It shoehorned topics that the writers did not know how to write properly, and also threw a ton of exposition at your face. They just spell it out for you at every turn, not letting the players have any sort of theorizing before already being met with the conclusion. The drip-fed Cocolia lore is an example: they manufactured the conflict and told us where the conflict is right away. There is no subtlety. This is standard for a gacha game - to have a story just for the sake of having a story - but other games do not force you to endure their stories. I have absolutely no attachment nor did I feel any empathy or sympathy for the characters, despite Mihoyo's efforts at trying to conjure emotional reactions. The story is a merge of tried and true fictional tropes that did not glue together. And the story lost me when they mishandled the vagrant - miner conflict. Never have I seen such an on-the-nose, black-and-white plot being thrown at my face and never have I been forced to swallow that. It was so one-dimensional, in the sense that it was openly pejorative towards the vagrants - it was apparent they were wrong. There was no substance nor subtlety whatsoever. Poor writing aside, I personally feel that a lot of the dialogues are cringeworthy. They were trying too hard to be hip and cool just for it to backfire. Some moments were genuinely funny, but the rest are quite insubstantial, even for a gacha's standard. And what's more is that you are forced to read all of this. I won't get to the misrepresentation of science and astronomy as a whole but I feel like it's only a problem for nitpicky people, a layman wouldn't care if the science is entirely made up of jargons. But keep in mind, you still have to read all this.
Oh the gacha system. 0.6% for an SSR/5★/whatever you want to call them. 90 for pity and 50/50 for rate up unit. Make of that what you will.
After all that, what do we finally have? A game whose world structure, gameplay, story and user experience are all at best mediocre and generally woeful, fully carried by visuals and audio quality, yet those are normally not the factors for player retention. Do I absolutely hate the game? No. But I found it tedious, sluggish and boring to play. I absolutely love the external factors, but the core factors either need heavy optimizations or full on reconceptualizations. I desperately hope Mihoyo listens to the feedbacks and make large scale overhauls to make the game better because it's such a waste for how good it looks and sounds.
I overall have not enjoyed my time with Star Rail since CBT3 until now. What I want changed is already suggested by others. My final thought is that Star Rail broke my heart because of how disappointing it is compared to what it could have been.
After a few days playing, I must say this game is one of my favorites. The graphics are superb, the soundtracks/BGM are worth dancing to, the game play for me is entising and it's not just a boring turn-based blow exchanges. With the variety of decision making you can make for every skill use and/or every time you recover DP based on multiple factors like enemies count, priority enemy, type advantage/disadvantages, character switch, break timing, overdrive timing etc... it is quite interactive. Sure that it is still turn-based but the character skillsets and level designs are already good enough to justify a supposedly boring type of game play. In fact I enjoy it quite a lot more than most other turn-based RPGs.
As expected of Jun Maeda and Key, the visuals are amazing and the story is engaging. Well of course you'd miss the story part if you cannot read/listen to Japanese, but regardless, the level of investment is very huge (almost every line is voiced except for narrative lines) and this will give you an enjoyable experience nonetheless. The story's setting is a bit weird for my taste but after going through it all, the Cancer - Seraph settings are mostly auxiliary, while the character-to-character interactions and dialogues take the main spotlight for the story.
I have zero complaints, there's no bugs or glitches, there is little to be improved. One that I can think of is the interactions tied to SP recovery skills, but it's a very minor detail and it's not even a concern for most. SS characters are also way stronger than S characters, but S characters have up to 10 breakthroughs so it's not a big deal at all. Gacha is expensive, but you don't need overpowered characters to play a single-player game. Gear progress may be a bit slow but again, it doesn't matter very much.
Overall it's definitely a top-tier game. For me it's worth playing, and all the expectations I've had since 2020 are already fully satiated
I don't know what kind of flashy gameplay people even expected on a story-heavy game. Most of these people reviewing in English here just don't know Japanese and don't feel like translating it, so they miss out the literal essence of the game and focus on the game play, which by the way is not the main thing. For some weird reasons, it received negative reviews because they literally don't get it? Like is it even the game's fault that you signed up for something that wasn't designed for you? I could say the same about how FGO offers shit tier anything and still gets applauses out of thin air because of the franchise.
EX skills? Ultimste skills? Why? Unnecessary. If you want to get a kick out of high-paced action go play PC games or something. This is an atmospheric game where you're supposed to discover their stories, not masturbate to skill animations. Also please, you wanna put your phone to overload with heavy animation? Up to you, but a lot of people don't take them risks because it would be stupid.
The story has 9 chapters, with a bunch of quests and quest stories, character stories even, and y'all play for 2-3 days then proceed to complain while not even trying to discover all of it. I bet a bunch still struggle with the menu navigation. The game tells you to "read", not play through and skip like a wind blowing through a pond. If you read the tutorial you'd know the aims of these but let me be real, I don't think peabrains can bother.
Ah, the money issue. Yes. Get a damn job perhaps. Maybe that would help since you pay nothing and expect it to flood you with freebies. The currencies aren't even that expensive.
And pity on gacha? For real? And for what? If you feel like you love gacha that much you can always reroll for 2B or A2 or 9S, even 063 if you're a fan of him. 3★ characters are beyond usable enough.
I'm not saying the game play is great either. Simply stating that criticizing their game play and say something like "copying game abc" or "gacha this gacha that" is nonsensical. Both literally aren't the focus of this game. It's like giving a student grade C because they had a fault irrelevant to the main points.
![[不滿]](/cdn/img/transparent.png){kind=spacer}
but keep on being disappointed at things that were literally told to you. You made the choice to play it so at least make a sensible argument on something that actually matters.
Cheers
Immortal Adventure: Wukong | Global
2.4Voice acting is nice, graphics and character arts are quite nice. Everything else is at best mediocre and at worst absolutely stomach-churning.
The monetisation scheme is completely obscene, packs packs packs, packs everywhere. Buy this, buy that, buy all of them, 1000% value! And this is definitely, undoubtedly extremely P2W. Too many activities relying on PvP, which facilitates a large monopoly of the game's sect (guild) rewards belonging to 2 or 3 top sects per server. It's completely insane. I'm at 2m power. Top server guys are now probably near 20m. Almost all of them are in 1 or 2 top guilds. I can beat players up to 2.5m power but that's because my lineup has an almost complete elemental synergy.
Monetisation is necessary for free games but the discrepancy in this game is too massive, and feels immensely impossible to catch up, even if you play for years to come. 400 multies (4000 single) pulls for Mythic heroes, which are OP beyond comprehension. I mean, Legendaries are strong, some are *very* strong (Taibai, White Dragon, Wanderers,...) but nothing comes close to the ones above them. The only Mythic unit who doesn't break the game is The Emperor but he's still phenomenally stronger than lower-tiers due to visibly higher base stats.
It also doesn't respect your time, busy people will be missing out on crucial progression items like Rank Up tokens which are massive power boosts. And even if you participate in these events, it still doesn't reward you crap. You have to AUCTION the rewards after you participate in server-wide activities, which last for only a few moments across the day.
I don't recommend this unless you're a massive whale, because the dopamine *hits* when you see the numbers in this game. Or a big fan of Journey To The West/Chinese mythos, for that matter (I'm this type).