The anime art style may or may not appeal, and the old school random monster encounters might irritate or feel like coming home, but at least it won’t cost you anything to find out. It’s so huge you couldn’t hope to finish it and even if you could, as a live service game, it continues to change and evolve as it updates. It’s practically impossible to review Honkai: Star Rail. Levels are full of loot and there’s an underlying need to feel as though you’ve ticked off every day’s login bonus and freebies, but it’s all done with an aplomb from which Western devs could learn a thing or two - the most recent catastrophic update of Supercell’s Clash Royale being a useful and ghastly case in point. Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom had a year of polish to remove bugs reveals Nintendo Its systems, which initially feel so complex and arcane you can’t conceive of finding your own way through them without continual prompts, eventually start to make perfect sense. Its story feels like an unstoppable juggernaut that you can live with as long as you want, provided you’re okay to level up your party enough to keep knocking your way through more content. That sense of functional endlessness permeates everything about Honkai: Star Rail. It’s not fine literature, but there’s something oddly comforting about the sheer volume and incomprehensibility of it all. Listening to your party witter on about the hugely convoluted plot point almost evokes an ASMR sensation, with conversations about god knows what going on so long you can barely believe someone went to the trouble of writing all that nonsense. It’s a strange choice, but the net effect is almost hypnotic. In common with Genhsin Impact there’s exposition all over the place, from odd little asides with non-player characters, to a plot that’s often utterly impenetrable for its weird complexity and references to names and organisations that you’ve either never heard before or are so dimply aware of that they’re effectively unknown to you. Then there’s the dialogue, of which there is a near obscene amount. Provided you’re not facing tough opposition, auto-battle makes light work of those moments, but against more powerful foes it’s almost always worth doing your own fighting. Naturally, that grind helps levelling and stat growth, but it also supplies a steady flow of fights that can feel pretty same-y.

It's just as well fighting feels good, because random battles are as much Honkai’s stock-in-trade as they were in early Japanese role-players.

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