Trivia / Honkai Impact 3rd

• Acting for Two:
  • Fu Hua and Fischl share the same Chinese voice actress Mace.
  • In the Japanese voice dub:
    • Yukari Tamura voices Theresa Apocalypse and the ELF: Blood Embrace.
    • Minami Takayama voices Fu Hua and the ELF: Jingwei's Wings.
• Approval of God: miHoYo enjoys many of the fandom's creations, particularly MikuMikuDance videos and bilibili gags such as "WTF! Honkai 3". Their official YouTube channel also leaves comments on fan videos such as this one.
• Ascended Fan Nickname: The Herrscher of Sentience is often called Senti by fans as a shorthand to her name. It ends up being used as an actual name by Kiana and her friends when addressing her.
• Colbert Bump:
  • Genshin Impact did this for Honkai Impact 3rd in the Western community, as HI3 was mostly unknown or under known before the release and explosion in popularity of Genshin. When Version 4.9 introduced the Genshin crossover event and a playable Fischl in this game, it naturally encouraged Genshin players to try out HI3 for the first time.
  • When Honkai: Star Rail was freshly-released, the pages of Kafka, Natasha Cioara, Bronya Zaychik, and Haxxor Bunny on the Official Honkai Impact 3rd Wiki all received a sudden boost in popularity due to these HI3 characters having alternate versions or counterparts from Star Rail (Kafka, Natasha, Bronya Rand, and Silver Wolf). HSR is the first Honkai game of many gacha gamers on 2023, and has quickly eclipsed its predecessor on the Internet; Honkai newcomers were evidently curious of the previous counterparts of their favorite or anticipated characters.
• The Danza: Yae Sakura is voiced in Japanese by Sakura Ayane, though Yae is the character's surname instead of her first name.
• Fan Community Nicknames:
  • In the official game news updates, and in social media sites like YouTube, the developers address the Honkai Impact 3rd fanbase as "Captains".
  • In the Chinese server particularly, top/veteran players are often called "dalao" (大佬), meaning "gang boss". In-game, there used to be a predefined message "serve tea for dalao" which denotes respect towards another player.
• He Also Did: Hanser, Bronya's Chinese VA, is far more known in China for her VUP work and Bilibili singing than voice acting.
• Inspiration for the Work:
  • An interview with miHoYo's co-founder, Forrest Wei Liu, confirmed that Devil May Cry and Bayonetta were two classic action games that served as gameplay inspirations for HI3; they developed this game in order to bring the top-tier 3D action experience of those two IPs into mobile phones. This also explains the obvious references in the Valkyries' movesets and abilities.
  • From this interview video, Guilty Gear Xrd was cited when miHoYo studied how 3D cel-shading worked as they are making HI3. But overall, Neon Genesis Evangelion was also influential for this game and its two predecessor Honkai games, just as how miHoYo started their first game, Fly Me 2 The Moon, out of inspiration from "Fly Me To The Moon", the ending song of Evangelion. Some of the game's Eva references are also confirmed to be intentional by that interview, from the similarities in terms of general story themes and world-building, up to designs such as Kiana's White Comet battlesuit being inspired by the plugsuits.
• Late Export for You: Honkai Impact 3rd was released first in China in 2016, in Japan and Southeast Asia in 2017 and globally on March 28, 2018.
• Meme Acknowledgement: After Bronya's Herrscher of Reason was released, there was a fan-made animation that features her and the memetic "Deja Vu" song popularized by Initial D. Later on, Bronya's Chinese voice actress, Hanser, made a cover version of the song.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The special "Bronya" trailer, like the "Reburn" animation video before it, doesn't seem to take any place in the actual story.
• Newbie Boom: Since 2019, the announcement of Genshin Impact and its comparisons with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild caught the eye of several gaming news outlets, and brought miHoYo's name into a wider radar within the gaming community. When the company gets mentioned, its background and list of previous games get brought up as well, which includes Gun Girls Z and Honkai Impact 3rd. Gamers from various online platforms like YouTube were then curious of why HI3 is associated a lot with Genshin, and that interest boosted the popularity and fanbase of this game, even more so after Genshin was released in 2020.
• No Dub for You:
  • The game is translated in its international releases, but it doesn't go with English and Korean voice dubs unlike Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail. The voice in international servers by default is set in Japanese.
  • On another note, Asuka is voiced solely in Japanese, and retains it even if the language spoken by other characters is switched to Chinese.
• Promoted Fanboy: miHoYo's key members such as Forrest Wei Liu, were fans of Neon Genesis Evangelion when they were young, and that series was also confirmed to be an inspiration while they were making this game. So when the Honkai Impact 3rd x Evangelion collab came about, Forrest Wei Liu summarized the event's concept as "Public fanboying with company funds", and admitted that it's an experience they had been "working towards over the years".
• Shrug of God: In a 2018 Q&A session, some plot-critical questions were dodged (because answering them at that time would've given spoilers for future story development), such as a fan asking whether the Herrscher of the Void would change back into Kiana.
• Staff-Created Fan Work: One of the game's artists (usually for the sillier events) draws a series of unofficial Yon Koma that makes fun of the game's mechanics and story.
• Troubled Production: The team ran into a hiccup while transitioning from making 2D games to 3D as it was their first time doing the latter. Kiana Kaslana is the first character created for the game, but it took six months just to polish her, from the artwork, model, and animation... and then after a test run, they decided to axe the prior work and "restarted from scratch to establish the current system".
• Voiced Differently in the Dub: Chinese Kiana has a medium-pitched voice, and her voice actor can portray her with different tones to go with Kiana's penchant for "acting". Japanese Kiana, however, is voiced with a high pitch that Rie Kugimiya is known for using (although she uses a slightly lower register after Chapter 10, when the character becomes more serious).
• What Could Have Been: Forrest Wei Liu, miHoYo's co-founder, actually would've liked for HI3 to be more international from the start, but it simply wasn't possible early on (especially given the original state HI3 launched in China and miHoYo's capabilities in 2016).
• Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things: A particularly nasty example. When miHoYo announced an anniversary update that will include a Playboy Bunny outfit (with even a promotional video of them dancing while wearing it), the Chinese fanbase went on a massive uproar when they learned that the particular outfit isn't going to be available in their country of origin, and as well as deeming it "inappropriate and out of character". The situation got so bad that one fan even attempted to assassinate one of miHoYo's founders, before he is arrested by the authorities. miHoYo since then released a public apology for this incident and removed said outfits from the global version.
• Word of God: Prior to Genshin's release, miHoYo confirmed during a stream that the worlds of Honkai Impact 3rd and Genshin Impact are indeed connected through the Imaginary Tree, or rather, both are worlds that exist on different branches of the Tree, but close enough to each other that Otto Apocalypse could briefly peek into Teyvat during a quantum experiment regarding the Imaginary Tree. The CG cutscene eventually made its way as The Stinger of Chapter 17 in HI3.

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