Honkai Star Rail

Bonus as in "given to you without doing anything", but if you can have her on first pull that’s good too I guess.

I've gotten two 5-stars off of the standard banner now... both copies of Sleep Like The Dead. Combined with the Herta Bonds shop I now have three 5-star light cones for The Hunt, and only two characters of that path in any usable state. God fucking damnit

Edited by Hylarn on Jun 1st 2023 at 3:23:16 AM

If you don't have him, Sampo (4* Wind Nihility) is one of the characters you can buy this month in the Starlight Exchange. You can also get a copy of Natasha if you want to upgrade her Eidolon. Both are 140 Starlight each.

Edited by ScubaWolf on Jun 1st 2023 at 12:40:48 PM

Ha ha, Silverwolf’s trailer has some nice Honkai fanservice.

Although damn… No wonder Bronie migrated to HSR if she can’t even get past her own tutorial stage in Honkai lol.

If you ask me, I think it's still far too early for the Stellaron Hunters to be playable when they were just introduced as one of the main antagonists. At least let them go through some type of redemption arc first because this honestly feels like they're being rushed out the door for the sake of satisfying fan gacha cravings as early as possible.

As silly as this sounds, I'm not going to pull for Silver Wolf yet until the story has her undergo a Heel–Face Turn of sorts, because she is the one responsible for baiting the Antimatter Legion to Herta Station in the Prologue, which lead to some researcher deaths.

Edited by VintageEmma on Jun 2nd 2023 at 10:12:15 AM

This assumes that only morally upstanding characters should be playable. An assumption Which I disagree with.

If one doesn't want to play as them that's of course one's prerogative but it's not particularly justified to say they're being rushed out. There's nothing wrong with making antagonistic or outright villainous characters playable. Who we bring in our party is inherently non-canon anyway so it's not like there's a narrative issue with it.

With Sampo in the shop, I've now completed my 4* collection. Now if the game would start letting me roll 5* characters...

On Silver Wolf, I have no problem with playing as antagonists, but I would like it if she'd had more of a role in the story

The Hunters are not exactly antagonists... they seem more enablers than anything, Nanook is the Big Bad. And as stated in the MSQ, they are essentially mercs given orders to do X thing and they don't even know why or how the result will turn out. If anything I expect them to be the troublesome rivals that go too far sometimes trying to get us to turn into the Trailblaze Aeon and absorb or destroy Nanook.

And I am almost positive that Luocha is going to be the Arc's Big Bad.

Edited by Memers on Jun 2nd 2023 at 8:34:18 AM

miHoYo antagonists being playable is nothing new; in fact, the prominent antagonistic factions in their games (like World Serpent for HI3, the Fatui for GI) have believable endgame goals that dispel the notion of Black-and-White Morality, which is why it's interesting to see where they go.

I don't think anyone raised an eyebrow when GI's Tartaglia became playable as soon as v1.1 and Chapter I, Act III dropped; an act in which he ends up being an antagonist and a boss fight.

It's not really the morality of villains being made playable that bothers me (heck, I love to play as villainous characters just to see their POV in the story), but rather the context of them being playable. For Silver Wolf and the rest of the Stellaron Hunters, they're being made playable because "gacha", which is just a weak reason to make them playable after they're first introduced as villains with kill counts potentially in the billions (if the IPC report of them destroying planets is true and not "Blind Idiot" Translation). This makes Silver Wolf's inclusion in the player's party very jarring. Why would she join the Trailblazer at all?

I don't want to go off-topic here, but Childe from Genshin is a playable gacha villain done right. Yes, he still serves the Tsaritsa and is a ruthless Blood Knight who is not afraid to get his hands dirty, but when he was made playable, it made sense because his release coincided with his boss fight at the end of the Liyue chapter along with his Story Quest, which has him develop a friendly rivalry relationship with the Traveler. The context alone would help to justify why Childe would join the player's party despite still being a villain. For Silver Wolf, she has no such justification (at least not yet), and I hope to be proven wrong about this in the future.

Admittedly, this is down to my personal bias against Gameplay and Story Segregation, but as someone who played non-gacha RPGs in the past, I take story justifications very seriously, so apologies if I made it sound like I'm ignorant about the gacha way of things.

Edited by VintageEmma on Jun 2nd 2023 at 12:46:40 PM

As I said, party comps aren't canon. That's how you can have a party composed of Natasha, Bronya, Asta, and Gepard despite all of them being leaders who presumably have better things to do then galivant the galaxy messing with trash cans.

A character becoming playable is not at all a reflection of their role in the story, it's a gameplay conceit first with everything else a distant second.

There's nothing wrong with not wanting to play as them because one prefers canonical part comps but I wouldn't call it cheap.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Jun 2nd 2023 at 9:27:01 AM

Keep in mind the joke bad ending in the prologue heavily implied that the Stellaron Hunters will join forces with us at some point or another, so us getting them playable now doesn't bug me. Getting Cocolia as a playable character would bug me.

Canon party composition in a miHoYo gacha wouldn't make sense as Spartan stated, as only the devs themselves can tell how the direction of the story goes. And what happens if a character you picked happens to be Killed Off for Real later down the line? With that mindset in HI3, one wouldn't even be using Murata Himeko, Kallen Kaslana, Yae Sakura or all of Fire MOTH given they're either long dead or die within chapters of the story.

Edited by AnoBakaDesu on Jun 2nd 2023 at 1:29:47 PM

There are a few characters that they wont make playable, usually the scum of the earth and not endearing at all characters. Cocolia and La Signora for example.

Childe is just a Punch-Clock Villain but always looking for a challenge and will help us out when he is off the clock... but also has a little brother who follows him to Liyue thinking he is super cool and such.

For the Chinese age ratings the games have I am not sure they can make someone who is killed off playable in Genshin and Star Rail. Honkai Impact's Age rating is way higher than Genshin and Star Rail so they can do that.

Edited by Memers on Jun 2nd 2023 at 11:49:02 AM

Which is a shame, I would've rolled for both instantly.

Yeah Cocolia's hot. I'd be cool with her as a playable character despite her role in the story.

At least Coco has the excuse of being corrupted by the Stellaron, unlike Signora.

<nods>

She also has a distinctive design (and I don't just mean this in the sexual sense) and has a full move set. She's even more blatantly a potential character then Signora was. It's like Mihoyo is mocking me

It was entirely just in background lore but Signora does have a sort of Freudian excuse, her lover died centuries past and Venti did nothing thus ensuring her enmity against the Gods. The Tsaritsa also saved her from an eternity as a molten witch-monster which led to her joining the Fatui and seemingly embracing their ideology wholeheartedly.

Really the main difference between her and Cocolia is that the story actually bothered to focus on the latter's tragic fall.

Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Jun 2nd 2023 at 5:21:40 AM

Out of all the battle themes in SR so far, I feel that the only one that isn't pulling its weight is the first Luofu battle theme (the one that plays during regular enemy encounters in Cloudford and Stargazer Navalia). It's not bad, but it's far too chill and low-key to feel like a battle theme at all, and it only briefly ramps up in intensity with increased percussion midway through before descending back down to the mellow vibe afterwards. Considering every battle theme so far are really good bangers which capture the tone of an actual fight perfectly, it only makes this one stick out like a sore thumb by comparison.

Agree. Especially when you put it next to the Xianzhou challenging foe equivalent in "Thundering Chariot", which is strikingly similar to Genshin Impact's "Rapid as Wildfires".

Once SR maintenance finishes later today, I will briefly log off from TV Tropes to avoid new spoilers on the SR page. I have a feeling 1.1 will continue the Luofu arc.

It won't, they confirmed its contents a while back and story quests weren't in it.

Oh, really? I haven't watched the livestreams because I want to go through SR blind this time. I thought SR will follow Genshin's exact schedule of releasing each story piece per update.

The update is literally just events for Luocha and Silver Wolf (plus their Lightcones.), companion missions for Luocha, Silver Wolf, Bailu, and Yanqing, and a few events/event missions. No story stuff as far as we know.

Well, the Companion Mission "Punklorde Mentality" is a prerequisite for the ongoing Silver Wolf-themed event, and it's one hell of a Gambit Pileup between Silver Wolf and Screwllum and Herta.