My Honkai Star Rail Review After 150 Hours: 

150 hours. That's more than your usual $60 JRPG. As a live service game, yeah, it's a game to play on your phone. And it's great for that. If you also play Genshin... You really won't have time for much else as a working adult, especially if you have a social life too lol

Star Rail is like a small rain puddle but we want it to be as deep as a pool

super pumped for the D4 content glad you are doing it baby!

Super awesome of you to acknowledge that you just might not be built for gacha games and move on to games that suit you better, will be watching you regardless of what games you cover. Been watching since d2 so it's nothing new for me.

The problem with building several heroes is we just don't have the resources to do so, I hope they do tend to this issue

I support you branching out into non-gacha game content on the channel! I'm in the same boat with Honkai - I very much enjoy the game but there's just not much to do right now. I would love to see some Diablo 4 content from you - I'm planning on jumping into some D4 at launch.

I agree about how that is not much to be done after story, and about how we can simply "brute force" bosses. But hey, the game is new so it will need time to add more content. I hope that Hoyoverse can expand the game to the right direction, and learn from the already well-established gold standard turn-based game (E7, SW, FGO)

I'm with you on Diablo4 bro. Will be waiting for your guides and gameplays!

i feel you on this one brother been addicted to this game but ive basically ran out of everything now its just a slow daily grind

My biggest critique of Genshin and now Honkai are that the energy systems feel more like they don't have enough faith in the longevity of their game without it. I would love to mix/max all of my units at max level and play with a lot of different teams but because the assumption is "we aren't sure we've made good enough content to keep users long term" you have to focus specific units and that just feels bad to me. Genshin has FAR too much content and FAR too many characters to keep the current resin system and it just feels bad as someone who loves both games.

Great Honest Video Mtashed! I'm a bit bias but I love the grinding in HSR... for now. I do NOT spend much time in Memory of Chaos (@ Phase 4, TL52 and BP-spender). The Game is AS I expected before I start playing it and it's Perfect... for me. I grind HSR 1.5 hours a day and I Grind/Play Genshin 30-60 min a day (Story, Side quests, Events). I also laugh watching Mtashed, Tectone and others @ Twitch/YT. Most of my time I spend though with my Loved Ones. 🙂

Well, that's the 'problem' of being a full time content creator. I'm a working family man and I have an hour free for gaming each day. I just finished HSR's main story a few days ago and I now spend half an hour doing dailies and running around solving puzzles, maybe 1 side quest, and Simulated universe if I have the time. I still have 10+ side quests to go through. The game has enough content for me to go through for months, or at least keep me interested until the next update, but I totally understand that it doesn't have enough for people that play 5+ hours each day.

Personally, I find the story and universe of Honkai: Star Rail to be really interesting (end of Belobog currently) and while the combat may not be the best turn-based combat I've experienced, it is quite well done and enjoyable to play through (at least for now). Character personalities and designs are great too. It is incredibly surprising how much quality is packed into this game which is both free and playable on a mobile phone.

I'm not really sure this is a game review - it's more about how the game failed or met your expectations... I'm sensing that you'll face the same issues as Genshin so acknowledging that Gatcha games aren't for you is probably a move in the right direction.

I think of it like this, in Genshin if you look at Mondsadt vs the newest area Sumeru the areas are very different. Sumeru being extremely vibrant and full of life and things to look at while Mondsadt is honestly pretty baron in comparison. I really think it's all about the money they have for the games and since Hoyo made SO much on the release of Honkai Star Rail I guarantee you we will be seeing a ton more content and areas and the areas will be so much more fleshed out and beautiful with more things to do. We can even see it with just this upcoming update with how fleshed out it is. So I'm fairly hopeful about the upcoming content with it being better and better. I also think with the game furthering there will probably be more complex and interesting bosses to fight and therefor more complex and interesting situational characters. But since the game is still early game they're trying to make all the content playable even if you don't have certain characters built so it's not surprising that most of it is DPS check.

7:31 I love the music in the Simulated Universe menu. It's nice.

Mtashed I would love to see you becoming a variety streamer honestly dude, you have great insights on a lot of stuff and can do a lot of theory crafting but for some reason you limit yourself to such a small pool of games. I think you would do so much better stream wise etc if you tried a lot more games WoW/FF14/Shooters whatever, I'm loving the d4 coverage but at some point it's going to end up being the same where it stagnates, but if you hoped around to a bunch of other games did fun stuff, and then came back to these games when more content come about I would like to see that more. Either way, been watching you since 2020, always love seeing new Mtash content, keep up the hard work buddy :)

Ur such a brave person good job, and hopefully ur content thrives❤

So excited to hear you’re making Diablo content! I’m planning to grind the hell out of that game :D

Thanks a lot for the content!

I think this is a really fair review and I hope you know that you've earned a long term viewer. I'll be on the lookout for your takes on any future games you play! Thanks bud

imagine a boss trying to force you to use a charecter just to counter it's mechanic otherwise you kind of lose, man being forced to build a charecter for that sucks

I don’t think brute forcing units are an option unless you have units like Seele. I have two accounts. One with Seele and one with Jing Yuan and it’s WAYYY harder. Also not having welt on the second account really hurts too. I see people like Grimro Gacha talking about new meta but all of the team comps require Bronya and Tingyun and damn near everyone clearing memory of chaos has a Seele.

Great video! Thank you!!

Gacha games like HSR are really not meant to be played for long hours at a time but as little increments for a prolonged period of time (FGO and summoners war plaher here btw) and the experience gets a lot better if you have another game to pair with it after finishing your energy. For me HSR is a very comfortable game: it doesn't gate keep you and memory of chaos is not really that big of a priority for me since I know that It is basically impossible for underlevelled accounts to complete with a lot of roles in our boxes (for example another healer if you didn't get Bailu). The gacha is not that bad, you can basically play the game without pulling after a certain point so you can save for any unit that you want (for example: I have a enough crystals for 3 ten pulls and I have pity at 80 rn)

Imagining if stamina system is not a thing, we may get the old "Mtashed whole day farming for Spare Ration" kind of video.

Just play what you enjoy, viewer will also enjoy more the streams when you are having fun. I know sometimes one has to stick with games for more time due to the $$$ it brings in and maybe balancing it with another game that you are also exited helps, but unfortunately during these recent years there have not been any big games that capture a lot of viewers that are not gatcha.

I hate that you mentioned Raid as a valid example tho, that's a p2w ass game with hellish, almost unfair mechanics which is the reason I quit it especially when the new super hard dungeons came out which is kind of a lazy buffed version of the normal dungeons imo, thankfully as f2p so they got no cent from me! lol Plarium is one of the worst companies out there, literally a gambling casino company. At least Mihoyo isn't exclusive to gacha, they're more of a major multi-media entertainment company with an animation, music and even a philanthropic/public relations arm as well.

Will admit, got hooked on your channel because of your Genshin videos. I do enjoy it when all of you and chat are enjoying the content so I think it's best to give gacha games a break once in a while and focus on the game that you'll truly have fun in the long run. Then maybe cover Star Rail and Genshin for little bit when a new content comes out. Regardless, giving you all the love and respect man!

Looking forward to your Diablo videos! Love your content

Sounds good bro I'm excited for Diablo 4 myself and I'll for sure be watching your videos on it

I like how the MC can be absolutely vicious with their dailogue. There is a random side you can do where get to option to sign as Heinsenburg for a hotel room review. XD

I think Mtashed needs to tamper his expectations towards Hyv's games, just anime/ J RPGs or Gacha games in general. Both HSR and Genshin Impact are story-focused games, the part which he always speed runs. I consider myself pretty deep into Hyv games because I'm Captain lvl max in Honkai Impact 3rd, AR 56 in Genshin ( Quit Genshin months ago ) and HSR TL 52. What Mtashed wants is a game which is " Talk of the town, have hard content which is grindable for several hundreds of hours or more but doesn't become redundant and make countless videos on it". Some people say HI3 has endgame and yes, but only a tiny bit because it is another Story-heavy game. There's 2 Endgame modes, Abyss (compete against players in your bracket for rewards) & Memoria Arena ( Compete with players in your server_ be it NA or SEA over Boss Scores). A rouge-like - Elysium Realm which is a different version of Simulated Universe_HSR. All those 3 take you less than 5 hours per week even if you try to get your score as high as possible and the rest are just small events. Resource farming takes even less time than Genshin because it lets you get everything in one click + 1-2 manual gear-farming runs everyday. From what I've seen, even Zenless Zone Zero is likely to be considerably casual like Aether Gazer instead of having a grindy late game .There are quite a few anime / J RPGs out there which fit the description but they aren't as nearly polished as Hyv games and not popular enough. An exception is Punishing Gray Raven , which he dropped because it's not popular enough and daunting at first. Its Bible Tower difficulty can be raised to the point of depressing, with enemies and bosses which you need to spend time and learn the mechanics to beat them. You're already rich enough, to just do whatever makes you happy with your content, Tashedman.

i agree with both ur pros and cons of the game i feel a lot of people are in the honeymoon phase and especially if ur a more casual player, u wont see the game's shortcoming that much, but nonetheless ive been having a blast with the game (maybe cause i was so bored of genshin lmao) a lot of people say oh it's a f2p gacha liveservice game there's only so much content u can do but u gotta remember that us asking for small features that can make the game infinitely better from a billion dollar company is deserved. Anyhow, good vid :) I hope to see this game last longterm and actually change up SU and MOC as we progress but who knows

Im a grinder and i love grinding, that is what i consider fun. So i do understand a lil bit of how you feel if not entirely cz im at a point where im shocked that now i hv to really think who to upgrade for 1 skill level up in a day.

It’s nice to see you’re doing fine and enjoying other games. With Genshin at the end, you sounded like in a really bad place. Good luck to you Mtashed, and have fun !

"want the boss that can heal itself". Just wait for the deer boss (the boss that follows the abunance path). It hasnt been released yet for some reason, bu we'all have been experienced the battle during the storyline

At current stage having boss that required spesific team comp is bad. We are dry building just 1 - 2 team for MoC. Now having to build extra unit just for 1 boss with our current grinding model sound very bad.

I agree with you in many aspects but I would like to comment: 1. Brute force works the same way in genshin, yelan C 6, raiden C 2, weapons, hyperbloom, although now it is more viable to take a healer before it was not even necessary. 2. Genshin is currently better than Honkai SR because of the exploration and the beautiful settings of the genshin, but have you noticed that the game, in its version 1.0, has already brought us more content of end game fights than the genshin itself in its 3.7 It is evident that this game will focus more on that aspect in the future because the tcg and the housing do not make sense here. I still understand your frustration and I hope you keep doing HSR content.

Mtashed made a video, great now lets wait for Teccys 34 reaction videos on this

i feel like if mtashed is a youtuber a couple of years before he previously start, he would be pretty hooked by brave frontier, and he would be pretty hardcore about it, damn miss those years, (2013-2014)

Tbh all of this is true, I’m just sticking with since it is only the first patch and unlike Genshin it isn’t exploration like you mentioned, so genshin’s honey moon phase could last a lot longer.

Since I want to only use gimmicky teams... please don't ask for more difficult gameplay lol. I want to have fun using my weird quirky teambuilding

1:02 LETS GOOOO

To be fair ive played alot of mobile turn based character collecter games such as galaxy of heroes and marvel strike force for years. They all follow the same gameplay loop basically grinding for resources on a daily basis only difference with those games is you have raids and arena to participate in for rewards and compete against other players. I think honkai would benefit from some sort of pvp or at least events you could play with others

People are now finally coming to realize that the fundamental issues of HSR are really not that different from Genshin's. MHY struck gold with Genshin's casual-oriented formula and they'd be stupid to change that. Looking beyond the different coat of paint and different combat system, HSR is just yet another implementation and further optimization of their gacha-design philosophy, which also allows them to milk Genshin players twice.

Been playing several hours a day since launch, and just finished the main quest. Several character and side quest still to do. As a working adult, the amount of content isn’t bad at all especially if you want to play other games as well. As a content creator I understand your frustration trying to main the game however. That is like trying to play Persona 5, and stretch it out till Persona 6.

PLEASE HELP WITH UR OPINION, I know u prob won't see this, but i have a question, so im saving for Blade, he should come out either on July18th or August 8th, now i have 175 pulls so far, i buy the 90jades pass daily always, so ill have some by the time he comes, now i wonder is it better to Pull for Luocha when he comes and risk not getting Blades Lightcone, or just save everything and assure i get Blade and his Lightcone, at the end of the day, question is, is it better to have Luocha and Blade, or Blade and his weapon and just fill the rest of the team randomly?

This is the first gacha game where the eidolons/constellations are purely stat sticks and dont change the gameplay like genshin does. Meaning if you get a character youre not missing out on any gameplay with them. This also means when i spend money its not for resin its purely to get the character and the lightcone. Even if the lightcone is most of the time a stat stick, there are a fee lightcones that change gameplay. For example getting bailus lightcone turns her from a healer to a soloq DMG carry in the SU. Using her light cone you can heal over and over and over again with only one abundance buff that restores your action points every time you use her skill or ult. Meaning everytime you heal her light cones adds an extra dmg buff on your next attack. Meaning you can infinitly stack this buff to one shot with bailu for as much dmg as you want.

The difference btwn this game and Genshin is that this is a honkai game. There’s already more end game that Genshin and there will be more end game added in a Honkai game. It’s only 1.0 and I’m still on the Hopium that they will add more.

TNX TASH MAN cant w8 for teccy to react to this

Same i feel exactly same I really love the gameplay but there isn't much to do after like lvl 50 or so.

Adding extra difficulty to the bosses, or whatever boss mechanic you suggest at 4:00, will make things even harder for FTP. The game is currently balanced in that whatever you get as a FTP, you can manage with, whatever you suggest will only make it so that it's more of a PTW game. Not to mention that the game is very freaking expensive as is.

the game got super boring really quick, but i'm glad because that means i can stay f2p without missing much

My starting character has an ultimate that apparently can switch between a single target mode and an AOE mode - but HOW do you switch between those two? my character keeps auto-using the single target variant of that attack

Personally i have trouble clearing halls of chaos and the final boss stages of simulated universe on difficulty 3, but i haven't put resin into farming resources and have literally done no relic farming at all, so my builds are far from amazing. I keep pushing off relic farming until i max out traces for my 8 primary units, but the moment i finally finish with all that I've reached next trailblazer level and have to start the process all over again. Plus upgrades now are so expensive that it massively slows my grind, especially since I refuse to use my stellar jade for energy refreshes. I wanna build my roster and I haven't had much luck with pulling like you have. I have Bronya, Seele, and Jing Yuan (all of which I went all the way to pity for) and a single pulled 5* light cone (which despite me liking I would have preferred a new character after going to 90 pulls) Hopefully my luck improves and once I reach level 80 for characters I will finally be able to start relic farming and build my characters much more effectively. I think the game has some definite flaws, but overall I greatly enjoy it and find it much more fun than Genshin. I'm planning on sticking around for the long run, or at least until the game starts doing the same sub par updates Genshin did for a long time

Hm, well overall im really enjoying the game i dont mind waiting for the updates, etc. I ve been going everyday doing everything i can like kill every mob on the map and stuff and i just kinda enjoy playing the game or going around on the game even when im not doing anything specific. Gotta give it also to simulated universe, I really like the rogue like style it gives and its kinda a game mode that, for now, doesn't feel repetitive, I like it. So i feel like for the most part the game is still challenging for me as a free to play and get really satisfied whenever i can go throught an obstacle via team build changing and stuff. It feels really good. Idk if you are a p2p but since you say things like simulated universe are easy on 6.3 when I just got past 6.1 like 2 days ago I kinda feel you spent some money on the game and if you did theres kinda the answer the game got so boring all of a sudden for you.

Did Mtashed stream Elden Ring or Returnal? I'd love to watch him play those. Elden Ring especially, my favourite game in years

Fuckkk I use to watch this guy back when the division 2 and destiny 2 released. Time flies forreal

Love you bro

Used to love Genshin but can now safely say I’ll never touch a live service gacha game again… happy to watch whatever gaming videos you create, even if I’m not playing it myself (:

I just started playing and I'm going to be honest I've been looking for the next brave frontier and to star rail seems like the closest thing I have seen

I mean, you played for 150 hours in a single month. I understand you're a content creator and it's your job is to grind games faster than us plebs, but that is still a lot of content you went through in a short time. I've been playing the game since release and I'm still on the 2nd planet. Tons of adventure missions and companion missions. I haven't even unlocked the boxing event yet. I play several games. Not just Genshin and Honkai. And look at all the other games that have come out? Just recently it was RE4, Star Wars, and Zelda. Hell, it took me about two months to get through Elden Ring. Also 150 hours. Also, are you done with character guides for the game? I always liked your guides.

Mtash's kuru kuru just made my day

I think the problem is the energy it has always been energy for hoyo games. If u had more energy and can actually farm more stuff, lv more units, more light cones. give more traces and relices. the game could be so much more. and enjoyable to play / grind on. At the current energy recharge is more like 5 mins of gameplay if ur farming traces and u logout and wait for more energy... start of the game was so fun with quest and world to explore. 40+ begins the slow grind and its kinda boring in that sense it too much of a jump I would say.

I think it would be dumb to put to many boss mechanics into the game at this point like it already is quite difficult to build two teams due to lack of resources,needing to build more characters just for one boss in the game would be kinda annoying at least for now but they should introy new boss mechanics later into the game

Hey just food for thought, maybe u should start doing like patch reviews too around the end of each patch.

im gonna need a recap for the latter half of xianzhou bc i had no clue what was happening tbh i was tired when i was palyign through it all

good review !

Just other perspective, how would you feel if boss had some mechanic that you couldn't beat bcs you didn't get character that can deal with that mechanic? The example with healing that could pela strip is perfect for that. You arent guaranteed to get pela so what would you do with that bossfight without her? I just feel that it would be bad game design to make somethink like that... Ofc solutions for that could be that the healing wouldnt be that strong but then you are back to just simply overdamaging it...

"Boss with insane healing and if you don't shut down that healing you can't beat it" Sounds to me like the deer boss that we fight in the main story Also, "it would be good if each enemy needed a specific team comp to be beaten", well dude that's probebly what they'll do in the future, they'r just holding back right now because they know most players don't even have two teams properly built yet so it would be unfair for them to create such advanced mechanics so early in the game. "For most bosses, yeah you can bring elements to weekness break them but for the most part if you hit hard you win" yeah but the only people who are able to hit that hard are either those who spent a lot of money or those who got extremely lucky like this F2P god account. I'd like to see you manage the same stunts with an account with average luck. "I thought the unit that you use would matter more", dude you are using the single must busted dps unit in the game with her lightcone, the existance of that unit in itself breaks game mechanics, if you weren't using her you wouldn't be that far in the memory of chaos, so that sounds to me like the unit you use DOES matter a LOT. One final thing, if you liked simulated universe and are missing it, let me tell you that in the patch 1.2 or 1.3 we will get an expansion of it

I do think you will enjoy games like Diablo 4. I know as soon as I can I am going to be playing it. I have taken my time in Honkai Star Rail, and from what I seen for people who at Trailblazer level 60 I am glad I have. If you do play any future Hoyoverse games I would recommend not rerolling and just rolling with the one account, that way you don't get too bored too fast. I would love to see what you think about Diablo 4. Honestly from the beta, the Necromancer and Sorcerer are the two strongest classes. I hope that the Druid and Barb got buffed, and a slight buff to the Rogue.

I'm racking my brain thinking about what systems other games have that allows people to grind nonstop all day without making it feel like a requirement. I think it's the diminishing returns system - loot drops are high to begin with and then the more times in a day you do it, the more they fall off. I love those systems, because you don't feel bad for spending hours grinding it, but you also don't feel bad if you don't. It would be great if this game had something like that, but instead we have resin refresh, which is diminishing returns, but it's a diminishing returns on your money rather than your time - you don't get the option to take part in that system if you don't spend, which is really frustrating and defeats the purpose. I feel like a great workaround with their current system would be if the leylines had two options to "extract" rewards - one being with resin as usual, and another one that you can do x times per day for free, that falls off to zero. I think that would be a great way to incentivize spending more time in the game instead of running 3x leylines at 60 energy on auto and then logging out for the day.

A healing boss will be coming. The abundance boss.

Star Rail is a great game as long as It isn't your main game, will always be rooting for you tashed, thankfully having Diablo 4 as your main focus and putting HSR as more of a side thing is a lot more sustainable for the future, and If youre enjoying both more as a result, the content will only get better as a consequence. I've been personally loving HSR, with limited time due to army duties, but im hitting the wall myself after a month or so, all that's left is just waiting for the new update.

You're a real one bro

My brother in Christ, I don't think you took in to account the fact that you're absolutely cracked.

I would recommend Mtashed to play PGR. I recently quit genshin and star rail and got into PGR, due to its pc client release, and its really fun. Most of the content in the game doesnt require serum (stamina equivalent), there are many game modes to grind on, the combat system is a lot better and the game actively encourages skill expression as the best rewards in events are locked behind the hardest content, unlike genshin where u get all the primos for simply participating. There are also multiple ranking systems and honestly all of it feels playable for long term. It is probably the least gacha-like gacha game I have ever played.

Man, I wish you were wrong, but I'm feeling this so hard. In Genshin, since it's open world, there is much more to just explore and vibe in the world, but HSR is just an extremely typical JRPG hallway. The puzzles are lackluster. The grinding is pure autobattle. I don't really feel like I'm doing anything anymore, I just set some autobattle grinding while eating breakfast and I'm done for the day unless I want to do a Simulated Universe run... and even that has plateaued on progression given that I only want The Hunt Light Cone. And 1.1... is a FILLER patch with no more story progression. I'm hoping these events are fun, but I want a bit more JRPG in my JRPG.

To be honest i like that i can stay up to speed by just playing 10 mins a day. Especially after coming from black desert mobile where u gotta grind 24/7 to if u want to actually move up in the game.

Why I'm not even surprised.

im having fun. i got other things to play thats not hsr and still got time to login and do dailies

where did you get the destiny sweater that you're wearing

Lol I played Raid for a year and a half, I never loved the fact that you needed 1 specific unit to be good at 1 dungeon, it makes progression only based on luck if you pull that character or not.

I will say this without showing my biases towards Honkai. (Hopefully.) So far, I found this game quite interesting. Well, at least to me as I didn't want to speed through content. The fights were epic and reminded me a bit Shin Megami Tensei, persona, and any other turn based RPG I've played. What I am not trying to do is kill my enjoyment and make it the only game I play, so I try to balance things out and do other things. I've played some Genshin as of now. A little behind, but I'm super interested in Fontaine. I want that hydro archon.

Gosh, i think we need a games for streamers specifically now Kappa

Only wish you could bring 5 units. Ive played numerous turn base/ strategy games and i gotta say 5 units is the sweet spot for these types of games

see you in diablo mtashed my man

This changes everything

The fact that you don't like gachas is more healthy than anything. In the least, it means that you don't become addicted to it and you're able to restrain yourself from it on the money side of things. Besides, there are far better games out there that you can dive into for dozens - even hundreds - of hours that don't act on FOMO and shady, predatory systems.

"Im quitting genshin impact ver. 2.0"

Because you just can't wait

Im gonna watch even if you update diablo dont have the game because moneys tight but ill watch you play so i have a direction when i eventually start

I think you forgot about svarog as an enemy. Because he has the BEST or one of the BEST mechanics out of all the bosses the reason is that it's not just healing, shielding, or even dealing a lot of damage because once he summons an arm and you failed to kill it then you know you're toast and sometimes even if you do kill it if he summon again even if you have seele are you sure you can 1 shot the arm

I think what could make the game a lot better for players that are into grinding, would be to able to exchange 60 of your energy for one fuel(maybe cap it once per day) . Your overall energy would stay the same but after a week or two you can go all in for farming and it would feel like you can play more. Also you could be able to plan for upcoming units and save your fuel and go crazy on a new banner.

Took me 4 days too do all the puzzels and quests xD really does not take that long. Took me 6 weeks to do that for Genshin from 1.1-1.3

Would like to see Mtashed react to Chyna f2p content vid that can clear up to MoC lvl 7 Is it cuz they were lucky or cuz they made use of teams /mechanics Mtashed didn't thought of

Just hitting the same wall of only playing 15 minutes every day. I'm excited for Diablo IV it's just the right time. Nothing to do in Genshin and nothing to do in star rail. I'll be watching your D4 content. I already made arrangements with the wife to get one day of full neckbeard mode playing on early access release. 🎉

Thanks for the video, but just to say your audio is quite poor. Might be worth experimenting with. Sounds almost like a phone call that is automatically excluding background noise.

"if you hit harder or survive long enough, you win". My brother in christ, that's every game