Great review. I wish all this was a single player game. I wouldn't mind filler dialogues, aesthetics to me worth it.
Several god **** gachas are genuinely good games but the monetization and always-online facet can really bog down a perfectly fine singleplayer experience. For example, the Octopath Traveler gacha recently got converted into an offline singleplayer game and it looks good. Hope more devs follow suit.
Great review. I wish all this was a single player game. I wouldn't mind filler dialogues, aesthetics to me worth it.
Several god **** gachas are genuinely good games but the monetization and always-online facet can really bog down a perfectly fine singleplayer experience. For example, the Octopath Traveler gacha recently got converted into an offline singleplayer game and it looks good. Hope more devs follow suit.
I have been playing Octopath 0. So far it has been an overall good experience devoid of the currencies, but the story isn't as entertaining as in other gachas and the music has been forgettable. It also has a tuning problem where it is easy to overlevel and thus the fights stop being challenging.
Honkai Star Rail review
Posted: December 12th, 2025, 21:03
by Havitner
I'm still angry about the Oblivion horse armor DLC, so I don't think this game is for me.
Honkai Star Rail review
Posted: December 12th, 2025, 22:33
by J1M
Is this in the right forum? Seems like it would belong somewhere more people would see it.
Honkai Star Rail review
Posted: December 12th, 2025, 22:40
by J1M
Never mind, I got confused because it is also a (global?) announcement. (Thought it was in Adventurer's Guild.)
Excellent review but I still cannot be persuaded to try gacha unless it literally sucks me off to completion while the game is downloading
Most of the bigger Gachas dont really push the gacha in your face, they dont need to.
I would recommend you check out Wuthering waves, reverse 1999, Chaos Zero Nightmare, Where Winds meet, to a lesser extent HSR.
Excellent review but I still cannot be persuaded to try gacha unless it literally sucks me off to completion while the game is downloading
Most of the bigger Gachas dont really push the gacha in your face, they dont need to.
I would recommend you check out Wuthering waves, reverse 1999, Chaos Zero Nightmare, Where Winds meet, to a lesser extent HSR.
Where Winds Meet actually got me to install it but I only played it for 15 minutes so far
Excellent review but I still cannot be persuaded to try gacha unless it literally sucks me off to completion while the game is downloading
Most of the bigger Gachas dont really push the gacha in your face, they dont need to.
I would recommend you check out Wuthering waves, reverse 1999, Chaos Zero Nightmare, Where Winds meet, to a lesser extent HSR.
Where Winds Meet mildly annoyed me because you pick a character preset at character creation like the blonde guy wearing the feather coat, and then you get spat out into the world with black hair and then find out you have to spend $45 to get the feather coat and blonde hair.
Excellent review but I still cannot be persuaded to try gacha unless it literally sucks me off to completion while the game is downloading
Most of the bigger Gachas dont really push the gacha in your face, they dont need to.
I would recommend you check out Wuthering waves, reverse 1999, Chaos Zero Nightmare, Where Winds meet, to a lesser extent HSR.
Where Winds Meet mildly annoyed me because you pick a character preset at character creation like the blonde guy wearing the feather coat, and then you get spat out into the world with black hair and then find out you have to spend $45 to get the feather coat and blonde hair.
There is one way to be blonde without paying, and thats using the f2p hair and dying it blonde.
That said, yeah, their entire monetization is around aesthetic stuff.
Excellent review but I still cannot be persuaded to try gacha unless it literally sucks me off to completion while the game is downloading
Most of the bigger Gachas dont really push the gacha in your face, they dont need to.
I would recommend you check out Wuthering waves, reverse 1999, Chaos Zero Nightmare, Where Winds meet, to a lesser extent HSR.
Where Winds Meet mildly annoyed me because you pick a character preset at character creation like the blonde guy wearing the feather coat, and then you get spat out into the world with black hair and then find out you have to spend $45 to get the feather coat and blonde hair.
Okay but that's the genuine real-life Asian experience.
Most of the bigger Gachas dont really push the gacha in your face, they dont need to.
I would recommend you check out Wuthering waves, reverse 1999, Chaos Zero Nightmare, Where Winds meet, to a lesser extent HSR.
Where Winds Meet mildly annoyed me because you pick a character preset at character creation like the blonde guy wearing the feather coat, and then you get spat out into the world with black hair and then find out you have to spend $45 to get the feather coat and blonde hair.
Okay but that's the genuine real-life Asian experience.
Only for $45 you could get a real coat.
Honkai Star Rail review
Posted: December 13th, 2025, 09:26
by Luckmann
Actually ******* neat. And a great review.
Too bad it's gacha, because it's aesthetically fantastic.
I have no regrets abandoning this game (this after finally getting a good healer, Hyacine). The only turn based gacha game that I'm slightly interested in is Sea of Remnants (hopefully no colorful UI and effects), otherwise HSR had dampened my expectations and interest in similar games.
Massive roster of playable characters to mix and match your favorites from to run around with a full party of people you really like. Most box purchase RPGs have the problem of a small cast but only maybe one or two characters you might like (ie, Yuffie in FF7, Garrus in Mass Effect) and then you have to put up with filling the rest of your party with characters you don't really like. Only a small handful of box purchase RPGs like Suikoden or certain Trails games have a huge pool of 40+ playable characters to pick from (and in the case of Trails, you can only do so for the Reverie Corridor/Marchen Garten segments, not the normal campaign).
The characters tend to be likeable (uncommon in Western games).
Because these games are usually free to play and thus have to compete with all of these other games, the artists have to work harder to catch your eye. So they usually have better than average aesthetic quality in terms of imaginative environments or character designs or battle animations, etc. Music also tends to be better than average too. A lot of the art directors for gacha games were either former Final Fantasy art directors (ie Hideo Minaba for FF9 before making Granblue Fantasy), or were Pixiv Fantasia veterans like Lowlight who went on to make Arknights. I made a GBF artpost in the art thread last year.
The game gets updated regularly. Granblue Fantasy has a new novel's worth of story every two weeks. The big budget 3D Chinese gachas put out a new patch with a new zone and boss fights etc every 6 weeks. This has caused a lot of consternation in communities for subscription MMOs like WoW and GW2 when people have to pay a $15 monthly sub only to get a patch once every 5 months, when the Chinese can give you a patch once every 6 weeks for free.
The story usually hooks people. The Japanese gacha game industry got started in part because the visual novel industry and the Japanese novel industries collapsed due to bad economics (tldr: despite people dismissing visual novels as being "cheap" games, they are in fact extremely expensive to produce. But the among of young people in Japan with spending money to buy those VNs has decreased too much for them to remain profitable, so most VN studios went under or went to mobile). The quality of the Japanese gacha game stories is better than your average game, as they are being written by experienced writers, a lot of whom were filtered through writing contests or book awards. Gachas like Granblue Fantasy and Fate/Grand Order became notable for being one of the very, very few games where there are fulltime writer positions (typically for a game, it does not make sense to hire a fulltime writer because they only need to work for a bit and then they are done, so another dev is appointed to do the writing so once he's done he can go work on other things). Gachas can do that due to the pace at which they release patches.
Unfortunately, the 3D Chinese gacha game industry has had no such roots in a Chinese visual novel industry or industry or writing awards scene. So a lot of the writers there like Shaoji are amateurs, and the story quality is a lot poorer. They can still come up with interesting ideas but they botch the execution.
The 3D Chinese gacha games have very high production values and a lot of polish. See these menu animations for Arknights Endfield. Notice how transition animations are different depending upon the order in which you flip between different menus. ZZZ also does this. Etc.
The only turn based gacha game that I'm slightly interested in is Sea of Remnants
Heard good things of Reverse 1999 and limbus company.
I've yet to play Limbus, but let me tell you that Reverse 1999, besides some of the character art, has a salad of a story, mixing philosophies around the world in a most ridiculously way. I've abandoned the game when, supposedly, was starting to get good (according to certain people on internet), but I couldn't bare the goofiness in story telling and mixing stuffs and names, mathematics, numbers, occult etc. How much can you mix before it gets silly ?
Hope more devs follow suit.