nicki

i completed the first world in honkai star rail and had a good time, but i think i'm already enjoying the second world more in comparison. it's future china but what if spaceship flotilla. very cool concept. the mihoyo environmental artists really know what they're doing. i've barely proceeded with the story because i wanna run around and look at everything and talk to everyone (i would do this anyways admittedly, but...).

i also unlocked the "add-ons" to relics last night (relics being the equivalent for genshin's artifacts) and am not too happy, lol. artifact grinding is by far the worst part of genshin, so honkai having a similar system is already a big thumbs down, and then adding even more to it? 😒 it's not like i didn't expect there to be similar systems, but i hope they would have "refined" them... alas.

i got lucky and rolled both seele and bronya already, so they've been destroying everything together (yay girlfriends!!). i spent the rest of my tickets on getting seele's light cone so she can be even more broken. i'll build my first team around her and that should let me get through the other modes efficiently. i'm happy to have a nice starting team! 🦋

also: cocolia. stockings that expose the hips/upper outside thigh?? inspired. gorgeous. (i am also a fan of shenhe from genshin for this reason.)

ok time to be annoying about #HonkaiStarRail here because i have opinions and i have like twitter is a bad place to actually talk at length about anything in any capacity, so yeah

i'm still on the first world, although i've made it to the "underworld" so the second area, because instead of continuing with the msq (i'm ff14-brained) i decided to go back to the first area, the research space station, and run around to find the chests because i saw on the map i could see how many i had left in an area. in the process i picked up side quests and decided to do those too since i would be running around, encountering them naturally.

so far my opinion is that the writing in honkai is so much better than genshin. it feels like with the success of genshin, mihoyo utilized their funds and connections to hire a proper translation and localization team. there are "meme-y" jokes, which i wouldn't normally like admittedly (sorry), but in this it helps the characters feel more human, particularly in the side quests, like the scientist who is researching insomnia and winds up finding out about ASMR and cat purring videos. there's another side quest that's incredibly bittersweet with a sci-fi twist, and one of the character's in it calls you "bro" the entire time (even if you play a female character).

the few "negative" things i've noticed is that occasionally a character will repeat themselves, as if the editing team forgot to cut one of the lines of dialogue, or a phrase won't be quite right, like for example a character saying "as you say so" instead of "if you say so", or saying an object is "glued in space" when it should be "glued in place" (unless they're trying to make a space joke because... this is a space game...). i could also complain that the concept of "aeons" and the more sci-fi specific terms aren't fully explained, but there are the equivalent of codex entries you can pick up that go into more detail, and there are characters you can talk to around that explain things more in depth as well, so it's not like there's absolutely nothing else there. i do wish/hope they will explain the world more as the story progresses, and much earlier on than genshin tried to.

mmm, well that's my thoughts thus far. at the end of the day, this is a free to play game that will likely fall into the same issues that genshin had, and i don't expect the quality of writing to be maintained. it depends on if they try to push the monthly events as hard as genshin does, i suppose? they've already introduced the artifacts equivalent (relics) in this game, and that was the worst part of genshin for me (i hate anything rng stats-based), so yes, we shall see....~