i love how every time this image is reposted the papyrus roleplayer is like "fuuck i shouldnt have done that" but everyone else is like "yeah if papyrus told me not to kill myself i wouldn't."
Seeing these references of Sans replacing someone who’s been erased really makes me see Sans’ shop in a different light. It’s Grillby’s, but his name has been erased, and Sans just slapped his onto it. Oh my god. It was in front of us the whole time.
To me Gaster is not evil in the same way that we are not evil for playing the No Mercy route . He's simply a being who is above it all, recognising the nature of this world that he presides over and or created.
In fact I think it's very likely he is who Sans refers to here.
people still believing "jevil went insane because he knew they were objects in the lightworld" drives me nuts. not only is it terribly cliche, but multiple darkners display this knowledge and arent anything like jevil
no joke, the terror in deltarune/undertale genuinely makes so afraid cause these universes and characters makes me so happy and good, but under that happines there's something TERRYFING GOING ON AND THAT MAKES ME SO NERVOUS
a personal recipe for enjoying hsr:
1/ whatever you think of it, internalize that it’s a story game first and everything else is downstream of that; if you don’t enjoy the narrative, the game is a hard sell, imo - and since it shares so much of its dna with visual novels, i tune in whenever there’s a new “episode,” then freely tune out during the down period
2/ the other big part of hsr’s dna is shared with… idle games. that’s not accidental. despite gachatwt laughing at it for that sometimes, hsr is on purpose designed as THE convenience game with the lowest maintenance threshold
the game actively makes itself easy to keep up with when you’re doing other stuff. for example, i’m on vacation right now, spending most of my day at the beach, and when i’m bored in the evenings, which game do you think is the easiest to run on my phone and play for 30 minutes to 1 hour? it’s not genshin or wuwa or any other open world game-job lmao, no shade to them
3/ internalize that (most) events in all gacha games are fucking slop. do i really want to run a stupid restaurant when amphoreus is fighting for its life? hell no. do i want to bother myself with undercooked and simplified racing mechanics in wuwa? nope. do i want to play a somehow worse version of icy tower in genshin? nah, i’m not 12 and bored during IT lessons at school anymore. do i want to spend half of the patch clearing 20,000 pointless events that zzz copied the gameplay for from some random indie games just to get the rewards? also no.
4/ if hsr is by design an episodic game that goes out of its way to give you space to do other stuff between patches, then… well, i listen with intent and just go do other stuff. if i wanna play, i play another game! or do whatever, really - i actually value the game a lot for that. for me personally, it’s one of its biggest upsides.
but i feel like some players go around expecting a game that’s designed like a bike to serve the same functions as games designed as cars or buses just because they all have wheels… if you catch my drift
having said that, the game can make many improvements, of course
for example, after seeing how well endfield runs on mobile, i believe that hsr is too conservative when it comes to how much system requirements limit what can be done with graphics and especially story presentation
they already revisited that in 4.0 and dropped support for old devices, and some small improvements can be seen throughout planarcadia but that’s still not enough
with 7.0, genshin is now a confirmed annual cadence when it comes to visual improvements and wuwa has been leading the market with what seems like a quarterly schedule for engine upgrades. yes, there are performance costs associated with that - but hsr doesn’t have to go for the same level of fidelity so they can be managed. i’m just stating what others are doing
and after playing a bit of nexus anima’s beta, which technically is a new generation game, i don’t think that lesson has yet been internalized by the honkai teams bc, well, hna feels at most like hsr+, and sometimes not even that, like an equal… despite the years that separate both games
based on that, it’s perfectly fine to expect more
—
a separate (and unrelated) issue is that the game doesn’t reward long-term horizontal investment enough, and no, i’m not talking about three-team endgame
as we keep pulling over the years, we naturally collect and build more and more units on our accounts. three-team endgames require 12; after years, i have almost 50 characters. it doesn’t feel good for so many of them to be benched
genshin has imaginarium theater which requires over 20 units to be fully cleared and encourages + buffs whacky out-of-meta combinations. some people mald about the mode because of its high barrier of entry but personally, i’d like something like that in hsr too