Honkai Star Rail. Monster Hunter Now, Final Fantasy 7 Ever Crisis images with Dot GOTY Mobile 2023 written over them

Image via miHoYo, Niantic, Square Enix. Remix by Dot Esports.

Dot GOTY: Mobile Game of the Year 2023

What won the top spot for gaming on the go?

Kacee Fay

and

Adam Newell

Published: Dec 23, 2023 08:15 am

This article is part of Dot Esports’ Game of the Year 2023 series. The Dot Esports team have voted for their favorite games this year across a range of genres, including sports, indie, and fighting games. You can check out the other winners here.

Dot Mobile Game of the Year 2023: Honkai: Star Rail

March 7th, the Trailblazer, and Dan Heng. — Humor is one of the game’s best features. Image via miHoYo

MiHoYo worked its signature gacha game magic to deliver another impactful and engaging game with Honkai: Star Rail, Dot Esports’ official Mobile Game of the Year 2023.

The Astral Express arrived to pick us up when Honkai: Star Rail released on April 26, 2023. Expectations were exceptionally high for another miHoYo gem with the massive success of Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail far surpassed these expectations by delivering a vibrant world rich with humor and lovable characters.

This game has a wide scope and allows you to choose how you spend your time. You can work on leveling up your team, take on formidable bosses, get to know characters better throughout their quests, farm for critical resources, explore various worlds, solve complex puzzles, and so much more.

Honkai: Star Rail is a great mobile game as it offers limitless possibilities in a captivating world and frequent content updates to consistently keep you engaged.

The devs are constantly churning out new content to delve into with a rigid update schedule featuring fresh updates every six weeks, banner changes every three weeks, and events sprinkled in throughout. There’s never a shortage of content to explore, which means there’s always something to do, making it the perfect game to jump into anywhere at any time.

One of the main reasons Honkai: Star Rail excels as a mobile game is its turn-based combat style. Battles can sometimes be clunky and frustrating in other mobile titles, but the turn-based mode in this one is incredibly engaging and challenging while also cutting out all the usual frustration.

Four Aetherium Wars contestants posing and preparing for battle. — The colorful cast of characters shine both in and out of combat. Image via miHoYo

This RPG has had us on our phones, eagerly anticipating the next adventure we’d take with the Astral Express crew all year, and we weren’t the only ones captured by it. At the time of writing, Honkai: Star Rail sits in the number four spot in the Adventure category on the Apple App Store and has accumulated a score of 4.6 out of five from over 22,000 ratings.

Whether you’re hunting down every trashcan in Belobog, receiving strange text messages from playable characters, or dealing with the teleporting toilets on Herta Space Station, there’s always something to look forward to. Honkai: Star Rail dominated in an already expansive field of gacha games, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon with many more characters, worlds, and other fresh content on the horizon.

Honorable Mentions

Although Honkai: Star Rail reigned supreme as our pick for Mobile Game of the Year, two other games also deserve some recognition.

Monster Hunter Now

Monster Hunter Now is great, but didn’t quite earn our top spot | Image via Niantic

Monster Hunter Now is probably one of the best mobile games Niantic has produced in recent years (which isn’t really saying a lot). A fun mobile Pokémon Go-like experience, which isn’t heavy on microtransactions, it’s as good a 1:1 Monster Hunter mobile experience as you could hope for. While it might be lacking a bit in content currently, it’ll hopefully get better as time goes by—so long as Niantic actually commits to supporting it.

Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis

Final Fantasy VII: Ever Crisis is an updated twist on a classic in an easily accessible format. A retelling of the events that unfold in Final Fantasy VII and the compilation of Final Fantasy VII titles in the franchise, Ever Crisis presents a fun balance of memorable moments from the past with an updated look and feel you can easily engage with while on the go. It’s a gacha and RPG title just like Honkai: Star Rail, and while it certainly has a big nostalgia factor, it ultimately wasn’t enough to claim our top spot—but it’s still one of 2023’s biggest mobile hits.

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Author

Kacee Fay

Staff Writer at Dot Esports covering new releases and a wide array of topics including Minecraft, Disney Dreamlight Valley, Phasmophobia, general gaming, streaming, and more. She has been avidly writing and gaming her whole life and now spends her time combining the two. Kacee graduated from San Diego State University in 2021 with a Bachelor’s Degree in English and a Certificate in Creative Editing and Publishing. She then joined Dot Esports as a Freelance Writer in 2022 before transitioning to a Staff Writer in 2023. In her spare time, she enjoys buying more books than she can read, gaming alone or with friends, drinking too much tea, attending concerts, fangirling over movies and television, listening to music, and spending time with her family, friends, and pets, who are the most important parts of her world.

Author

Adam Newell

Assigning Editor. In 2015, Adam graduated from the University of Aberystwyth with a bachelor's in Media and Communications. Working in the industry for over ten years. If it has anything to do with Nintendo and Pokémon chances are you will see me talking about it, covering, and likely not sleeping while playing it.