Friends… I have been playing an excessive amount of Honkai Star Rail. I realize that I am about a month late to this particular party… but at least I eventually made it here. I’ve talked a bit about this game in another post, but one of the points that I want to underline again is how much better of a game Star Rail is than Genshin was at launch. I mean it makes sense, at this point Hoyoverse has more than one major hit under their belt… but everything about this game really shows the lessons that they have learned. The narrative is extremely solid, and I would put it up there with other greats of the RPG genre. I made the hot take the other day that this is at least as good as Final Fantasy VII with zero digs meant towards either game in that equation.
Right now I have landed on a primary party of the fire incarnation of the Traveller, March 7th and Dan Heng… largely because I have become attached to both of them as characters, and Natasha is another character that I really love… but I’m mostly using her because she is a healer. All of these characters are given to you by the game as you wind your way through the story. I have a handful of characters that I have pulled through the Gacha system, but I wound my way around to just using this four-star team and I don’t really feel like I am missing out on anything. It feels like there is a really strong synergy between abilities, and wide enough elemental coverage to get weakness breaks in most fights. I did not feel nearly this strong while using only stock characters in Genshin Impact for example, and honestly think the free characters there were fairly awful compared to what you could get through pulling.
That said I feel like it is also important to talk a bit about how generous this game is. Right now I would be what you would term a “low spender” in Gacha games. I bought the $5 monthly pass because those generally give you a ton of pull currency over time and other side benefits. However, the game itself seems to just be constantly throwing pull currency at me and I’ve pulled the slot machine enough times to get three pity five stars. At the moment I am saving up my currency because I know a new banner is coming soon that is probably going to have a few characters I might want on it. I picked up the chase 5-star Jin Yuan seen above, while also picking Tingyun and Sushang while getting enough dupes to take them to 3 and 5 eidolons respectively. This just feels WAY different than Genshin Impact did, which makes me wonder what other lessons they learned from that game. At least as an outsider, it certainly seemed like they had trouble sustaining widespread interest in it.
The other thing that I think is interesting about Honkai Star Rail is that it is honestly much more mobile-friendly than Genshin ever was. Touch controls are not great at replicating a controller and doing complicated combat, but they are really good at letting you complete turn-based actions. This puts Star Rail in this weird hybrid category of allowing you to move around freely but when the action really matters… you are able to strategically work your way through combat in a strict turn-based system. A lot of the reason why I never played Genshin on mobile is that I just did not feel that I could trust the touch controls to get me through anything other than the most simplistic of combat scenarios. With Star Rail I can happily play this while sitting in the backyard on my phone because it isn’t like I am concerned about the limited range of motion of touch controls will screw me over.
The first two acts of the story so far have been phenomenal. Essentially your tutorial takes place on a Space Station and after you resolve that core conflict, there is a constant dribble of side missions that let you get to know those characters far more over time. The second planet Belobog is equally rich and has this whole… Firefly meets Wildarms meets Frostpunk. This also serves as the planet that lets you see the dire consequences of a Stellaron gone out of control and brings you further into the central conflict. It also introduces this wide cast of characters that you legitimately come to love, even though they are largely just playing bit parts in the tale. This makes it all the more rewarding when one of these characters reaches out to you over the in-game “text message” system asking for your help again.
I am working my way through the third area of the game, and it is effectively “Space China”. So far I am not the biggest fan. Generally speaking much like Liyue it is a grossly inefficient bureaucracy filled with a lot of annoyingly self-important people who care way more about appearances than they do about doing the thing that needs to be done. After seeing this setting effectively playing out in two different Hoyoverse games… it does make me wonder if there is a bit of a thinly veiled political statement being made here. I’m hoping that the deeper I get into this story, the more engaged I will become with these characters… because at the moment I would be fine with pushing them all off a pier into the sea. If you have a game about planet hopping… they can’t all be winners and so far the first two were amazing so I guess they are due for a stinker.
I think what has impressed me more than anything, is that I am still having fun with the game when I have effectively bumped up several times against hard barriers. Like Genshin Impact or Tower of Fantasy, there are some hard daily progression caps where you can only really make so much progress in a single play session. I’ve been bumping up against this barrier of needing to increase my Trailblaze Level in order to be doled out the next chunk of the story. If you played Genshin you would be familiar with this quandary of needing to keep increasing your Adventure Level. The thing is… even though I have been stalled for a few days, I am still finding things that I want to pop into the game and do, and there is enough fun to be had in activities that don’t have some sort of daily limiter on them. I am not certain how long that will hold, but for the moment it seems to have more staying power for me personally than Genshin did at launch.
I realize that I am coming into this game a month late, but my hope is that I can catch up in time for the first update. Last week there was a bit stream that announced the 1.1 Patch called Galactic Roaming which will be launching on June 7th. Essentially it adds new storylines to both Jarilo-VI and the Xianzhou Luofu. Then there will be two different sets of banners, one for Silver Wolf the hacker you meet very very early into your story, and Luocha that you meet during the Xianzhou area during a side story with Dan Heng. I have no real interest in the second character, but I am absolutely stockpiling currency now in a vague attempt to pull Silver Wolf. I dig the retro arcade-looking effects that they showed of her attacks.
Mostly I am hoping to get caught up enough to be able to participate in all of the new events. I’m also hoping that the team that I have chosen will effectively be good enough to get me through all of the content. So far the only thing I struggle with are the challenges that require you to kill things within a certain number of turns. My team is extraordinarily tanky… but not necessarily the fastest at destroying things unless wildly over leveling the enemies.