Briathrail // Albert 2MNG

I just started playing it a few days ago, and so far… it’s complicated, but I like it.

I started to get a tiny bit bored a week ago while grinding away with the last Fate Grand Order event, “FGO Learning With Manga Collab: Serial Mythological Theater – Mississippi Mythicizers” (yeah, long-ass name). I finished it in time as the parts were released daily. I grinded for almost everything I could get in the event shop. The Dig Shop part, I got to past 30 resets with no box left behind. I got Mary Anning to NP Level 5 fast too as I had like 400K Friend Points and I spent 100K to get her NP level completed quicker. I also got lucky with the event pickup summon and got Daikokuten’s mouse envoys as a Servant early, so for the final grinding spot with the best all-round item drops, I upped it to Level 85 with the monthly grail cast, and paired it with Xuanzang and Caster Altria to clear the grinding spot within 4 turns.

But the next major event, “Lostbelt No.6.5: Realm of the Thanatos Impulse, Traum – Life and Death of an Illusion“, was to start on May 13, and by May 6 I was bored AF. I already went past 40 resets with the Dig Shop, and my grinding lineup was too efficient and it was getting too repetitive. I tried replacing Caster Altria with Alexander’s common yaoi pair (Lord El-Melloi II / Waver Velvet) and the run wasn’t as efficient as Caster Altria’s ATK+30%NP skill was perfect for the setup. The Event Shop has been ransacked already of its valuables, and my Antique Reel items already exceeded 2K. I decided to just stop and just do the dailies, and let the event expire in a few days. When I say dailies, I meant “run 3 things at random for the 30 Mana Prisms, look to complete the weeklies, collect the free FP Summon rolls, general maintenance”. I do them diligently, so much, that most of my low-star Servants have been maxed, including their Append Skills and NP Levels.

So while waiting for Lostbelt 6.5, I decided to experiment with a new online mobile game as a secondary, see if it sticks. I already experimented with some online mobile games in the past to see if they could be my secondary to Fate Grand Order, and they all faltered after some time.

A few years ago, I tried Konami’s Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Links around the time before I downloaded FGO. Truthfully, Duel Links was meant to be my primary and FGO was to be the secondary. At first I was like, OK, I like card games. I’ve dabbled with TCG before. I knew the rules well. Perfect fit, right? For a while, yeah. After a year, I dropped it. At first, things went well. The card pool was very familiar, as it had the “Duel Monsters” early YGO sets, the rules aren’t too complicated yet and the card pool wasn’t stiflingly deep. That meant I could plan my deck very carefully. When Konami started to expand more and added more cards from later series, and introduced more concepts, my deck-building started to be more complex. But I was also starting to have less fun. Around the time they added the animated film’s world into the game, I was ready to quit. I then started playing FGO (I only downloaded it, I never ran it that time as YGO was fun) and it became more fun to me than YGO, so I played YGO less and less until I stopped. It’s still on my phone, though.

Another one I tried was the Pokemon TCG Live mobile game last year. Some FGO events were horribly spaced out, and there was a weeklong block between an event I already ransacked of valuables and the next big event, so I thought maybe I should try this TCG out. But this time, two big factors manifested themselves.

First, the app was very terrible for my phone at the time last year. I bought an iPhone SE 2022 around January 2023. Small factor iPhone with the fingerprint button I dearly like. FGO still ran on it decently. But man, when I first ran Pokemon TCG, it almost burned out my phone after almost an half-hour of playing. It ate my battery like a motherfucker, and heated my phone to a concerning degree that I immediately shut off the phone forcibly. I guess some devs never took SE phones into development considerations anymore, they just develop for the best-spec phones and just plead SOL for the rest.

So by June 2023, I went home to the Philippines to look for possible phone upgrades. Shockingly, the best deal I got was when I got back in Singapore. Someone sold me a barely-used iPhone 14 for a low price of 800 SGD, box and charger included on August 2023. I did check everything, and the battery’s at 98% capacity, no scratches, bought in 2022, and was only used for mobile software testing according to the owner. They had iPhones for testing, and they were selling some to get funds for iPhone 15. The best deal I found in the Philippines that June for the same model was at least 40K PHP (around 930 SGD).

Second, I re-played Pokemon TCG Live with the new phone, and found it to be too complex and slightly interface-wise obtuse for my liking. I had high hopes for it as it was an Asian-developed game (I believe it was Creatures that developed it) and most Japanese, Korean and Chinese mobile apps are developed with Asian tastes and sensibility. FGO is Japanese-made, and even though there are clear concessions towards Western gaming, it is abundantly clear that this was designed by and for the Japanese first and everything else was second in priority. Not this Pokemon game. It was HEAVILY geared towards Western gaming first, second and third. The only thing that was clearly Japanese in origin was the cards. Everything else is Westernized. It felt off to me. No offense to the thousands, perhaps millions, who liked the game, godspeed to them, but for me it seemed the game wasn’t to my liking or very specific UI preferences. Tried playing more rounds to see if it grew on me, and sat on it. After a few days of playing, I just dropped it in favor of the new FGO event and moved on.

So back to a few days ago, I started to look around the App Store to see if anything checks my fancies. One did stand out quickly – Honkai Star Rail, by miHoYo. It’s fairly new – it released April 2023 – and the aesthetics are all very anime-ish but the design philosophy is very much East Asian gaming. I’ve seen Genshin Impact gameplay before, and it’s clear to me that miHoYo designs their games with a mix of both Japanese and Chinese modern sensibilities.

I watched some gameplay videos of HSR on YouTube, and it’s the same thing but with a modern space fiction flair. I liked it on the spot. So I downloaded the hefty-ass app (I had to hook to a Wi-Fi connection to avoid draining my mobile data plan) and played it without looking up anything like guides or walkthroughs.

So the game started with introducing the gameplay loop, with two characters, Kafka and Silver Wolf. I didn’t really read the tutorial popups too long, as I was going for first impression more. Luckily, the devs made their game easy to pick up, so after a few rounds, I got the gist of how the battles run. But what got me really excited was the prospect of running around silly looking and finding stuff lying around. Treasure boxes, travel encounters, adventure logs. Even when I was running the initial story with Kafka, I was running around everywhere trying to look and see shit. Then the important stuff came – I had to choose the Trailblazer.

Of course I chose the female avatar. The dude avatar looked like a shy bottom, and I normally never choose the dude avatars in games I play. Even in FGO, my avatar is Gudako. I named the avatar as “Reia”, and I put in the tagline I always like to use – “Play for fun. Always.” – as it’s my constant mantra for games. Why play when you’re not having fun? ;P

Once I got in control of the Trailblazer, I started to progress the story while learning the mechanics more. The more fights I got in, the better I got. Rush the enemies, exploit the weakness elements, strategize between the skills as needed. But generally, I spent the first few hours going from room to room – exhausting NPC dialogue, unknowingly triggering events, collecting lots of things, looking around, goofing around. It’s sheer pleasure to run around and see what the devs sprinkled on the place. Small whimsies here and there. Especially the bubbles.

At that point, I got the Trailblazer, Dan Heng, and March 7th. Asta came later in my first gacha pull. I got Herta soon after. So I had a good set of options. I ran the Trailblazer, Dan Heng, M7 and Herta in my very early fights. Later I found Serval in the mailbox as well, so I keep getting more options.

Pretty soon I ran into tougher enemies. I knew because some of the enemies were starting to get spongier, and some big-looking enemies were in front guarding a big-ass treasure chest that screams “there’s good shit in here”. And I got my ass whooped. So I thought, OK, game’s upping the difficulty now. What else is in the game to help me? Fortunately, some.

The Store had some nice items to offer beginners. Good deals at nice amounts. So to kick off the shit, I bought the Oneiric Shard x1980 option that offered to add 1980 more shards as bonus for first purchase for around 40 SGD. Then I went to the Contract Shop and bought the Herta Contracts I thought might be beneficial – the “Trailblaze Aid”, “Fuel Refill” and “Quest Sharing”.

Event Notes had some things that allowed me to use some of the items I accrued, especially the Star Rail passes. The Warp menu had the coveted “Departure Warp Banner”, which I exhausted as the Departure Warp banner guaranteed a 5-star character within 50 pulls. After running it fully, I got nice 4-star light cones to cover the majority of my mains, a lot of 3-stars (and I enhanced them and used Superimpose on duplicates), and some characters to use:

• Welt
• Natasha
• Arlan
• Sushang

Out of the ones I managed to pull, Welt and Natasha were great. The newer Light Cones I got also helped massively, and soon after I managed to beat the tougher enemies. I continued to run around until I managed to fully exhaust what the game allowed me to get inside the Herta Space Station. I got to grind a lot as well.

So by the point where Himeko asks if I want to board the nice magical space train, I was already at Trailblazer Level 13. At that point, I knew from my JRPG instincts that I am hitting a certain point where repeatedly fighting puny tutorial mobs aren’t yielding the amounts I need to get to the next level, so I have to progress the story more. I then acquiesced to progress by boarding the magical space train. One nice story snippet in the train and meeting Pom-Pom and its rewards, I was on Jarilo-VI en route to some snowy shithole.

But before I went on my way, I fiddled with the menus and found Strategic Training inside the guide menu. It had chunky rewards for the trainings, so I completed them all in a jiffy. Then the Operation Briefing also had rewards for specific progress points. Very very nice, I can do those. After clearing them as much as I could in a few days of playtime, I got my Trailblazer level to Level 14. The goal was to get to Level 15 so I can ascend the characters to higher levels and maybe make grinding a whole lot easier.

By that point, I am already fully certain I found my secondary game. So I divided my game attention. Mornings, I go in FGO and do the dailies. By 12PM, collect the rewards and do the free cheap roll. Afternoon, all HSR. Evening on the train, double-check FGO and depending on Lostbelt/Event, do stuff to progress the thing. Hour before sleep, run HSR to check/grind. I can manage 2. I won’t be able to look after 3.

Before I got to Jarilo-VI’s chunky area, I encountered the Calyx outside the Outlying Snow Plains area, and the obtainable rewards included 50 Trailblaze EXP. Sweet! So it took me a few rounds of grinding (after all, I was just 300 points away) and using my Trailblaze Power points to finally get to Level 15. Sweeter that it came with a lot more rewards and obtainables. And thanks to me running around, grinding, and taking all items I could, I had more than enough items to level up a lot of Traces. By the time my characters first met shady Cocolia, I felt my characters were quite fortified. I confirmed it while running the Backwater Pass parts, I breezed through it with decent speed, enemies were dying when I applied full strategy when to do singles or AoEs. All enemies purged promptly, with the Bronya boss fight presenting only very minor difficulty. Even later when some of the bosses started to require more complex strategy, I just end up figuring out how to solve it then keep whacking. I later found more Calyxes, which was fun.

And then I got into a new town, Boulder Town. Basically the underground forsaken place by the overworld. Dank place. After I got through the Fight Club, I finally unlocked the Daily Training section of the Guide. Good call on upgrading earlier, as I breezed through the activities quickly. Each progress part gave mad big points, so as of this writing, I am now at Trailblazer Level 19, and just finished off the minor Arlan side quest (the “An Unexpected Turn of Events” part).

What’s my verdict so far about Honkai Star Rail? It’s very very great.

I didn’t have to do a whale splurge to get real good shit – the only one I spent on, a SGD42 shard purchase, was a strategic investment for materials – and I was able to get to progress a lot without needing to beg for it. The devs ensured the first experience for HSR was solid, and it was for me. The monetization wasn’t too in your face, is what I’m saying. No “please buy this so we can buy the CEO more margaritas for his yacht” kind of desperate monetization that you’d see in some Western games. I don’t foresee me spending anything more for many many months, unless they offer Kafka for mad cheap. I’m good. I have lots of items.

Also, this is an underrated aspect for mobile games, but for me it’s important that games should be intuitive. Easy enough for players to pick up on what’s what, without digging thru tutorials and memorizing shit. FGO and HSR are excellent with this aspect. I was deliberately skipping or not reading the tutorials, I wanted the game to teach me with practical lessons. And it did. It accounted for my lazy shit. That’s good design right there. Their design helps the player to know how to play the game without insulting their intelligence.

The environments so far were also great. It’s a pleasure to run around and see things. It’s also peppered with materials and treasure chests, so it wasn’t a waste to go through. Lots of NPCs, and some with nice things to say. There’s grinding spots that’s convenient, and starting players like me will never be starving paupers with mediocre materials. The game is generous with starting players so people end up playing through longer and more, which is what I am now. It definitely scratches my BOTW/TOTK exploration itch as well. I plan to do another Zelda run maybe near December. But for now, HSR will do.

The story so far has been good too. Very nice writing. The NPCs all have something to say, the city areas were populated with them, and some of them were involved in side quests. The environment also helps with the dialogue and character design, as some things won’t work if those don’t align. I mean, for example, Svarog’s settlement fightables were robots and punk-ass settlement miners. Also, some of the plot points really stand out in terms of writing. Even some of the little fetch missions’ writing can be quite… like, pause a bit and reflect on it. Deep stuff sometimes. Thank God this game was made by Asians, or else God forbid we get Western trends shoehorned into the plot.

And I haven’t mentioned the characters’ design and writing yet. Man, I like it a hell of a lot. They look good. The girls all look pretty and cool. The men all look good too. Although, the yaoi part of my brain was checking out the dudes. This dude a seme or uke? Welt’s a manly top, by the way – the glasses, eyes, and sharp features decided it right away. Arlan is a shota bottom… I mean, he has a puppy, for starters. He’s also shy and feature-wise he has bangs that cover half of his eyes and he looks like a tsundere boy. Well, maybe if the story proves otherwise I might strip the tsundere label off. Dan Heng is a tween – he can be a top or a bottom depending on the paired man. For the girls… I’ll need to see first but so far, Kafka is the only riba I’ve seen. For stereotype categorizations, March 7th is a walking disaster-mouth cute gal, Serval is the cool rock girl, Natasha is the mommy onee-san type, Asta is the class president type, and Herta’s the nerd loli. Not played Sushang yet, seems I got her very early. Maybe after I clear the Belobog thing.

To be clear, I also did the yaoi–yuri categorization while playing FGO, but with the rotating set of artists and evolving lore, plus ascension costumes, I tend to make temporary designations for some. But FGO is shamelessly Japanese (which is a good thing, by the way) so some characters were clearly defined. I mean, Astolfo’s clearly the trap of the roster. And some characters are clearly wish fulfillments as well. Big-boobed mommy figure, shy librarian, cocky god figures (well, some of them are literally gods), wrestler onee-san, suave old daddy figure, loli obaa-san, walking American stereotype, shota-fied historical figures… well, lots. Name a trope and it’s likely there. The only milquetoast character in the whole FGO roster is Holmes, IMO.

Honkai Star Rail is definitely my new secondary game. Clear-cut and very much a niche fulfiller. Definitely can use my time whenever FGO’s events run off a tad too long. I’ll play it in very short daily bursts. Maybe I’ll add updates in later blogs to see if this stays with me as long as FGO does.