Honkai Star Rail

Might as well start a thread since the game is starting soon.

A new entry in the sci-fi/fantasy Honkai franchise, featuring Welt Yang from Honkai Impact 3rd with plenty of new characters and "new" characters.

This time we’ve got a turn-based RPG on our hands! Which is a genre I’m not really fond of, but I think I’ll try the game for a few weeks at least.

Official website here.

I've been waiting for this one for a while. Couldn't get into Genshin, and hoping this one is good enough without requiring insane amounts of gacha.

I may try to keep up with the story stuff online, but Honkai Impact 3rd is too much of a time/money sink for me to try to actually get into this one.

Pre-download is now available. Already plenty of guides online to prepare for early game, let’s see how this pans out.

I tried Honkai and Genshin but both turned out to be too much of a timesink for me to stick with them.

Let's see if this one is any different.

I tried Honkai for a bit but fell off. Never got into Genshin because I'm still waiting for the Switch version. We'll see how Star Rail turns out though I have a bad habit of dropping gacha games pretty quickly.

I’ll probably be on-and-off on this one at best, unless it manages to really hook me on turn-based, somehow.

Problem is, I’m already playing 3 gacha (Honkai, Genshin and PGR), and Wuthering Wave is around the corner… I’ll have to ditch one or two at some point…

Curse you, 24-hour days.

Edited by Lyendith on Apr 23rd 2023 at 1:23:30 PM

HSRGRANDOPEN 1

HSRGRANDOPEN 2

HSRGRANDOPEN 3

Star Rail codes for when it launches

For one thing, I'm curious if Star Rail would induce Continuity Lockout to those who were not up-to-date with any of the old Honkai games, and especially to those who have this game as their first Honkai game.

I admit that while I played Honkai Impact 3rd for years, taking several breaks from that game make me forget some plot/lore details in the long run. I also haven't finished reading the supplemental HI3 manga spin-offs, so I'm not sure if missing out on them would affect how I would take in the story of HSR.

Might as well post this here too:

In short, no, you don’t need to know HI3’s story − the characters are only lookalikes and the universe is distinct, with the exception of Welt Yang who is the same character we know from HI3.

I suppose reading the Alien Space manga can help on that last point, but I don’t doubt HSR will give all the explanations needed anyway.

Edited by Lyendith on Apr 25th 2023 at 10:06:02 AM

And it's on.

The game has a pretty strong start, with some broad mimmick playing the violin with classical music plays in the background while evil mooks invade and presumably slaughter a space station.

Edit: King Solomon, what the Hell are you doing here moonlighting in a Honkai game?

Edited by OrangeBun on Apr 25th 2023 at 11:44:13 AM

Two more codes:

HSRVER 10 XEDLFE

STARRAILGIFT

Edited by Kiefen on Apr 26th 2023 at 10:23:22 AM

Alright, I played up to the first boss.

Obviously it’s a visual treat, even during the dialogue the characters feel much more expressive than in Genshin. I appreciate the significant reduction in loading times too (no more loadings to change your team comp! Although you can’t change your team comp at the beginning it seems…)

Seems like they’re trying to build more of an ensemble cast, I like it. I picked the female Trailblazer (I just like her design more), and while she isn’t showing much personality so far, I really love her husky English voice. While Genshin’s Traveler remains a perpetual outsider who helps others along her journey, the Trailblazer is gonna be a full part of that little community it seems.

Now regarding the gameplay… It is more fluid than I expected, and I managed to get some nice combinations here and there. I just wonder if there’s a way to decide the order of attack for my comp, because sometimes a character takes their turn before or after I’d like them to… Still, the class and skill system is relatively intuitive. I have no way to compare it to other turn-based games though, since the last one I played was fucking Jade Cocoon…

I'm decently far into it. Haven't unlocked the caverns of corruptions (I'm assuming this is how you farm relics?), but otherwise I think I've encountered most major mechanics at this point

It's clearly built on Genshin's skeleton, but I think it's generally better. Backstory is more interesting, character writing is better, there's a main cast beyond the mascot character, grinding is mindless. Main complaint is that having characters consist of a skill, ult, and passive means that there's not really a lot of battle strategies you can take with a single team

Noticing the system slowing down quite a lot after a while. Might be a memory leak on the game's front, but before it started doing this it was running really smooth. I just ended after unlocking Warp (the gacha).

Edited by ScubaWolf on Apr 26th 2023 at 8:13:11 AM

Played as far as Welt's introduction and I'm liking it so far. Not sure what my final team's going to look like (I'm really only playing the story.)but I know I want to pull for Bailu and Bronya. Hopefully I get at least one of them. Does March 7 feel weak for anyone else? For a defensive healer she sure goes down easily.

A lot of the gameplay mechanics, features and gameplay tropes are obviously lifted straight from Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact 3rd (to the point wherein a troper can easily "copy" several tropes listed from those two games' pages, paste them in the trope page of Star Rail, then tweak accordingly to fit this game's context).

And even if they are reworked to fit in the new setting, the similarities can still be inevitable. I had a conversation with a friend and when we forgot the actual name of the gacha currency of Star Rail, we just referred to them as "Primogems"... It wouldn't be surprising if many other miHoYo fans thought the same.

There are some differences and improvements but yes.

It’s nice they don’t throw gear at you till level 15. The gear leveling ui is far better too.

Edited by Memers on Apr 27th 2023 at 3:07:12 AM

The game has so many little Qo L changes I wanted in Genshin for years, I've said "Oh look what's suddenly possible!" like a broken record yesterday.

• auto-adding xp books and getting change if you overspend
• auto-adding multiple weapon refines
• chaining multiple battles for leyline battles
• dailies not needing me to tp to an npc to redeem the final reward

In fairness, it actually is way harder to add those things to a game that is ongoing.

Considering how the code of most game is a nightmare, I'd bet good money myHoYo tried adding all those things to Genshin and it just kept breaking.

They’re also not the same type of game. From what I’ve seen so far, HSR has far less emphasis on exploration, so there’s no need for things like a stamina bar or forcing you to move around.

So, has the game addressed the actual "Honkai" part?

Not yet.

One thing I like is that they put a little more effort into the dialogue choices to make them, well, choices. No choice between "Of course" and "Naturally", at least so far.

I do wish the choices in the text message conversations were handled better though. Sometimes the options are so long you don't see what is being said in full so it's a gamble what you're going to get if you pick that particular option.

What's everyone's team like so far? Naturally I'm keeping the player character, who I've named Caelon, on but my party also consist of Asta, Qingque (Got her on my second or third 10 pull rather than the event going on for her.), and Dan Heng. Aside from March 7 who's one of the main trio I also have Serval, Herta, and Hook. I know I want to add Bronya or Bailu if I ever manage to pull either. Does my current team sound good? Aside from Herta and Hook everyone is Level 13. I'm thinking of switching Dan Heng out for with March 7 or someone else but I dunno how good an idea that is. For reference I've only just finished chatting with everyone after boarding the train for the first time (Spent awhile doing the revival sidequest. Only done the first Simulated Universe as well.). Asta and Qingque are definitely permanent members of my team for now though. Just not sure who to switch Dan Heng for.

I've only met Sampo Koski two hours ago, but if anything happened tp him I'd kill everyone in this room and then myself.