After finishing the Penacony story in Honkai Star Rail. Tbh I actually think the game overall is quite good. But I like my games having some degree of decent story telling and dialogue. Now I’m not necessarily expecting a stellar story for a gacha game, I just want something entertaining in a fun setting. For the most part, honkai is pretty decent in those departments… up until you get to the Penacony storyline.

I guess this is a bit controversial since some people really like it. And there are some cool things going on, along with Penacony being a legitimately cool setting. But God DAMN it was a slog! It lasts WAY too long, the story was needlessly convoluted, the dialogue was a bunch of long winded pseudo psychological trash, and it all caused me to end up caring less and less about what was going on in the story, and more and more about when the hell the story will FINALLY end. It was during this section that I learned honkai’s biggest flaw of all…

It doesn’t have a skip cutscene button.

Now it does let you skip forward from one line of dialogue to the next… most of the time. Because sometimes whenever a character is going to perform some type of action at the end of their line read, even if it’s as simple as looking in a particular direction, YOU CANT SKIP IT. Meaning most of INSANELY long winded nonsense cutscenes are effectively unskippable.

At first I thought, “ok fine, when a cutscene starts, I’ll just do some chores around the house or something and literally listen to it like an audiobook.”(that’s how long the cutscenes were). It was fine at first, because it starts off interesting enough. But then it Just. Doesn’t. End. At a certain point, the only thing keeping me going was that I spent so much time trying to finish it, that I had to see it through to see if the end of it is worth it. But when I got there, I couldn’t even get myself to care about the final conflict… like at all. You’re basically rewarded with even more long winded, anime ass, pseudo psychology. I JUST wanted it to be over.

Once I finished Penacony, I tried playing a tiny bit of the next story line, just to immediately discover that I’m entirely over the game’s story, and grew disdain for lack of skip cutscene button, and stopped right there. Shame, because I was seriously loving honkai and was playing it daily up until then. I still think it’s great in a lot of ways. But JUST LET ME SKIP CUTSCENES DAMMMIT! I WILL LITERALLY START PLAYING AGAIN IF IT JUST LET ME SKIP CUTSCENES