Honkai: Star Rail

Losing all my gamer cred by going to bat for a gacha game

I have a tendency to describe things as “confident” - it gets scrubbed out of a lot of early drafts of my reviews, one of those words I’ve gotta stop falling back on lest it lose meaning. It’s a shortcut to describing a more nebulous sensation - a potpourri of smaller factors coming together, instilling the notion that the creators genuinely enjoy what they’re making and don’t need any extra tricks to win over the audience.

Honkai: Star Rail is surprisingly confident.

I’m not sure if it’s the result of them being 4-5 games deep into the series (depends on who’s counting) or the result of their last game being bigger than God. Maybe it’s that the game is already such an obvious improvement over Genshin in so many ways.

Most obvious are the shifts in setting and plot structure - HSR trades a single, sprawling world for a planet-hopping space opera, and it’s clear that this works better with miHoYo’s style of storytelling. Genshin's scattershot subplots had a tendency to overplay their hand and lacked any real stakes, while HSR’s compartmentalization - assigning each planet its own story - allows for a more focused approach that lends plot beats much greater credibility. It’s almost certainly made easier due to the smaller “zones” comprising each planet in HSR: There’s no need to accommodate a Genshin player’s decision to fuck off and pick mushrooms on a different continent mid-climax if there’s nothing for them to forage. The broader plot is mostly miHoYo playing the hits authored by better works of fiction - sometimes, though, the tune is catchy enough that you don't mind the cover band.

miHoYo is still hooked on giving 1 page of character development for each 10 they devote to overexplaining very simple plot events, but that character development does a better job of placing each person within the world they inhabit. They still write the most annoying children on the planet, but there are good stories for the adults of HSR. Among the dry, white bread story beats Bronya gets during the main plot of the first world, it’s easy to skim right over characters like Natasha, the first character I’ve encountered from miHoYo that feels like they actually believe something. It’s not groundbreaking stuff, but it did catch me off guard - her story is one of planting trees whose shade you may never enjoy, and the whole thing is stained with regret in a way that made Midgar Jarilo-VI feel larger than the player's screen. It’s reflective of a shift towards “maybe character exploration shouldn’t be locked behind so much time and effort” that ends up making the cast of HSR a lot more interesting to listen to than Genshin’s 100-strong cadre of schmoozers. It’s not a perfect success - miHoYo still wants you to roll for these characters, so there’s a limit to their flexibility - but it’s a step in the right direction.

On top of trading out the open world, HSR also gives up Genshin’s real-time action for turn-based combat. You’re still matching elements to an enemy’s weakness, otherwise there’s very little in common with HSR’s older cousin. Playing this, it’s obvious that miHoYo has a much better understanding of how turn-based combat should work than they do for real-time action. Character abilities in Genshin long suffered from a lack of mechanical complexity, with “skill expression” for most team lineups taking the form of rotating through the characters and mashing their skills as quickly as possible before rotating back to your carry. The turn-based nature of HSR asks you to think much more carefully about how your party interacts with one another, because your enemies will get a turn and you will have to respond to them. The restriction of weapons (“Light Cones”) to certain archetypes limits creativity, but I’m not too bothered by that when there are so many other ways to change up your party. The character kits are fine, too, and efficient use requires some thought - there’s nothing on the level of playing baseball inside a fighting game but I’ve been having a lot of fun accompanying my tiny mahjong goblin on the road to nuking entire teams.

I’ve already spent too long talking about a gacha game, so let me sneak one last thing in before I wrap this up - “Trailblaze Power”. Genshin players know it as resin, it’s the currency that regenerates with time and is used to claim valuable rewards. The good news is that you’re no longer going to be sitting on your hands for three real-life days waiting for the right dungeon to come around just so you can farm the one item you need. Just roll up to whatever portal gives you the resource you need, and do it when you have the time, no need to wait for a specific weekday. The bad news is that you’ll probably feel short on currency far more frequently than you ever did before, since you’re never going to have that forced downtime. I think it’s a favorable change. I’m not going to schedule my life around Genshin dungeons.

I want to be clear and say that HSR is not the product of a completely new formula - many concepts, ideas, and even characters have been tried and tested in miHoYo’s previous games. If you developed a distaste for Genshin on a fundamental level, this is not going to win you over. But as someone whose complaints with Genshin were largely problems with the structure and ankle-deep plot, I’m pleased to say that I came into this game wearing my hater goggles and I’m drafting this review after hitting player level 31 in a single weekend, having found very little in the way of disappointments. I think it’s fine to find the style, gameplay, plot, or monetization off-putting, because it’s not top of the class in any of these fields. It’s an improvement in almost every way over its predecessor, though, and I won't lie - I can't help but smile at a pleasant surprise from the developer I was most skeptical of. Maybe I’ll come back later and find something to be sour about (especially as more content is added), but I want it to be known that I’m cautiously optimistic for now - high 6 to a low 7/10.

Edit: Did a lite review one year later, available here. In short, aside from some boring story beats in the Luofu and the occasional bad puzzle, it's improved in every way that matters

i been playing this game since launch and while its fun at times its just become a combat simulator like Warframe but turn-based for me now. Even then, the gameplay is awfully repetitive and the only thing that really saves it is that i think Kafka is kinda hot.

Looks fairly nice and is fun at first but it's very repetitive and really just a timesink. Honestly, just do something more productive.