Been playing the funny horse game recently, and I found it funny comparing the story presentation in that game compared to Star Rail.
Star Rail’s production values are objectively more expensive, sure: a fully-rendered 3D map will always take more time and money than a 2D backdrop. But because HSR’s maps are fully rendered, they leave nothing to the imagination, which makes the emptiness of the map all the more obvious. Meanwhile, the backgrounds in Uma are so abstract, it doesn’t FEEL lifeless. It’s like the game is honest about the backgrounds not being 1:1 with where the characters actually are, so your imagination fills in the blanks. You can imagine there’s more background NPCs in the scene than are actually depicted, or you can imagine a room is more decorated and filled with props than it actually is.
The character animation meanwhile, is WAY more lively than Star Rail’s. I don’t think the Umas have THAT many more poses than HSR characters do, but it helps that they actually change their pose once every 1-2 lines, so it feels like they’re actually DOING stuff while talking instead of just droning on in the A-pose or the hand-to-heart pose like a mannequin.
Best part? No black screens. When they want a character to do something they don’t have an animation for, they just have a quick dialog box saying “She did this thing”, instead of interrupting the scene by fading to black, showing a single line of text, and then fading back in the span of 10 seconds.
TL;DR: the HSR devs need to learn that sometimes, less is more. ZZZ sure as hell did; that game’s conversation system is WAY more interesting.