>>108148235I like HSR story overall but the pacing is really fucked, like I cannot imagine someone trying to play it from the start as a proper game cause it's just hours and hours of talking. It's designed with the assumption that the average player is constantly staying caught up because you have like 6 hours of story every month and a half and then a bunch of RPG sidequests to fill the rest of the time. I genuinely think Genshin is better paced, the dialogue is not as labyrinthine and purple prosey (downside of this is Paimon gets pretty annoying with how she's constantly stating the obvious) and there's more focus on actual gameplay and open world exploration. So I guess HSR is a "may as well try it if you're interested in the setting" but I feel like most new players will burn out by Penacony and not even get to Amphoreus. I'm only able to stick with it because I'm already caught up.
Playing something like Trails is honestly a much better use of time because it may also be long as fuck but at least the games are paced normally and have endings. Gacha games can be cool but you start to notice how much they're padding it because they can't design content fast enough to keep people playing. It's often the case that the 1.0 patch feels like a real game with a bunch of cutscenes and boss battles and stuff to do because they had all that time to work on it before launch, then they start adding stuff at a glacial pace and you watch them stretch things out.
