Currently taking part in the Nexon PEAK Post Challenge

What kind of games do you usually enjoy?

I mostly play collection-based, subculture-style games, or games where you can dress up your characters~!

But if a game is only about collecting, it gets boring pretty quickly, right?

I’m the type who really enjoys a game when both the account and the characters themselves have room to grow

Among those, MapleStory, Lost Ark, and Honkai: Star Rail all put a big focus on making your characters stronger,

but they also share something else in common: they make your next challenge very clear

Isn’t it interesting that even PC and mobile games can share that kind of structure?

In MapleStory and Lost Ark, I usually challenged bosses I couldn’t clear before by improving my gear or overall account progression

In Honkai: Star Rail, on the other hand, there’s a real sense of fun in how high-difficulty clears can change depending on your party comp and relic setup

So in this post, I want to briefly look at how these three games present your next power-up goal, and why that process keeps players coming back.

ⅠTable of ContentsⅠ

① Power-up goals, why do they matter?

② Growth goals by game

③ The moments when I felt a sense of achievement

1. Power-up goals, why do they matter?

Even if you keep building up your character in a game,

if it’s not clear

where you’re supposed to use

that newly strengthened version of yourself,

the whole process can start to feel like repetitive busywork,

and it becomes pretty easy to lose interest.

└ Bring me something harder and more fun next time

For example... once you’ve finished all your dailies and there’s nothing left to do,

you end up like the people in town who just keep hopping left and right

└ The people who keep jumping around in town..

On the other hand, if there’s a boss or piece of content

that you’ll clearly be able to challenge once you get just a bit stronger than you are now,

then gearing up and raising your character

starts to feel meaningful, and that becomes a reason to keep logging in over time

More than simply increasing an attack stat,

I tend to enjoy the power-up process much more when there’s a concrete goal,

like clearly beating the next boss,

or earning rewards from high-difficulty content

It’s basically the same thing as a horse running with a carrot hanging in front of it.. ㅎ..

2. Growth goals by game

2.1 - MapleStory

In MapleStory, there’s a very clear progression loop:

you steadily build up your level, gear, and core enhancement,

then challenge the next tier of boss.

You can actually see that in the boss UI too,

since it shows the required entry level

Bosses that used to end with tons of HP left, a death-count out,,

or just a timeout—

when I finally managed to survive without death-counting out, cut down the clear time,

tighten up my damage windows, and ultimately take the boss down,

that was the moment I felt the results of powering up most directly

That was when it really clicked for me

And there’s also that feeling of finally stepping up to a boss

you couldn’t even enter before, after powering up..

└ Of course, you still have to chug a ridiculous amount of potions..ㅎ..

2.2 - Lost Ark

Lost Ark shows a very similar pattern too,

especially since, like MapleStory, it’s also an MMORPG.

If you look at the Legion Commander raid matching UI,

it lists the entry level there as well

2.3 - Honkai: Star Rail

In HSR, it’s not just the strength of a single character that matters,

but also which characters you bring together and how strong your relic stats are,

and that all affects whether you can clear the content.

└ My Kkyurang, who I couldn’t get a signature Light Cone for..

Even with the same character, battle results can change depending on relic main stats and substats, speed, raw values,

and party composition, so the process of adjusting combinations and

tweaking your setup itself

can end up feeling like a kind of progression in its own right

3. The moments when I felt a sense of achievement

Across all three games, the moment when I felt the sense of achievement from powering up the most was ultimately

when I finally cleared content I hadn’t been able to clear before.

Game	Power-up goal	Power-up goal (shared)
MapleStory	Clear the next-tier boss	Earn more rewards than before
Lost Ark	Enter new raids and deal damage more consistently
Honkai: Star Rail	Break through high-difficulty content through party comps and relic setups

When content that used to feel difficult

finally becomes clearable after improving your setup and upgrades,

that’s the moment you can clearly see that all that progression wasn’t just numbers going up

In the end, I think powering up is fun because your character, and your account, really have become stronger,

because that growth turns goals that once felt impossible into possible ones,

and because, in the end, it lets you earn more rewards than before.

That’s where I’ll wrap up this post.

I’ll be back next time with another story (๑>؂•̀๑)