Another Free-to-play game that shows a lot of promise! (Honkai: Star Rail thoughts!)

 Hey friends! I know I've written about Genshin Impact at some point, so you probably already know just how much I've played that game with friends, so I was excited when I heard about a new game from them that is a turn based RPG! I normally am not crazy about RPGs, but recently there have been quite a few to catch my attention, including Sea of Stars, and of course the Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door remakes that are coming up pretty soon, so I've been in more of a mood for them than I usually am. I should also note that I am typically not a big fan of "Free to play" or "Gacha" games, that rely heavily on microtransactions to maximize profits, but this game, Honkai: Star Rail, is actually a lot of fun, and I've really enjoyed it so far. Today, I invite you all to hop aboard the Astral Express and we'll talk about the wonders of the universe in this new game from Hoyoverse. Before I begin, I should tell you that I've played everything so far without dropping any money on the game for microtransactions, and I've gotten two five star characters so far (not counting the main character that you start with)! There's a lot to do in this game, but like Genshin Impact, there's a good bit of grind included.

An Intergalactic Adventure!

    I have to say that this game has a much more flashy beginning than Genshin had from what I can recall, but it makes sense because this is a very different game. The older title by this studio had a much more laid back opening, since it's much more based on exploration, being essentially a Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild type game, while Honkai: Star Rail is much more action based. The game begins with a mysterious woman playing air violin to a recording of Pachelbel's "Canon in D" while a bunch of enemies attack a space station. That's the opening of this game, and it doesn't get much less mysterious when it comes to the two characters that we begin playing the game with, Kafka and Silver Wolf. These aren't the main characters, by any means, in fact, as far as I can tell, they're similar to antagonists, or at least antiheroes. The main character that you play as gets a celestial mcguffin called a Stellaron put inside of them, and I don't really understand how that happens or what that even means, but these two villains are somehow behind it. Your character (called the Trailblazer) inherits some incredible ability from this Stellaron, including being able to attune himself or herself (since you can choose the gender) to a different element and a different path, meaning they become basically an entirely different character in your party, which is pretty cool from a gameplay perspective, and the way that it's achieved is much more interesting than how it works in Genshin Impact. I feel like it's just much more attached to the story, and I like that a lot. I also like the personality of the Trailblazer a lot, since there are actually some options to what you can say that don't amount to the same thing, and some of those are legitimately funny! The story is pretty interesting so far, and leads to many different locations, all of which are pretty cool, and I also just love the idea of a train flying through space, so I was already in from the beginning. I'm still relatively early on in the game however, from what I can tell, so I won't say much more about the story for now, but I've really enjoyed the character interactions with all of the different locals of the planets and look forward to more of them!

How does it play?

    So I mentioned briefly at the beginning of this post that Honkai: Star Rail is a Turn-Based RPG, though I should mention that it's definitely not as complicated as Final Fantasy or Chrono Trigger from back in the day. Your party is made up of 4 characters, each of which has a normal attack, an ability, and an Ultimate attack that you can use when the meter is charged up. It's a much simpler system, and I think it works here really well. The combat is pretty fast paced, and it's easier to understand what your characters can do thanks to the combat notes that you can pull up by clicking in the left stick (at least on PS5, which is the version that I've been playing). Each basic attack builds up a Skill point, which allows a character to use an ability by expending one. Of course, each character has a different type to it, whether it's a healer, a tank, DPS (Damage Per Second), follow-up attacker, support unit, the list goes on and on. All of them definitely have their place, and the best way to have an effective team is to have different types mixed throughout. I certainly understand the mechanics better in this game than I did in Genshin Impact, though I'm not sure if it's because the game is just simpler or it does a better job of explaining things. While we're talking about differences between the two games, though, exploration is a big one. In this game, there's no climbing, and there's not even a jump button. You're much more railroaded this time around, relying on the set paths in the different areas instead of having the open-world feel of Genshin. You can break crates to get more resources, health, or energy which you can use in the world to allow different characters to take different actions. My main 5-Star Character, Jingliu, for example, puts out a ring of ice energy for a short time, and any enemy that enters it before we go into battle gets frozen, making for an easy opening to get a first strike in. 

    There are quite a lot of side activities to grind, just like Genshin Impact, which should come as no surprise. There are Caverns of Corruption which house different artifacts, there are Calyxes that have different level up materials, Echoes of War, which give different special resources that are mostly used for ascension materials to make your characters even more powerful, and that's just the start of it. There are lots of ways to get things, which is good, but the activities laid out can definitely get pretty stale after a while. Grind is pretty annoying, and I'm not going to lie, more than once it's what has prevented me from being incredibly active within these types of games. I would love to get a good build up for my characters, but it requires so much homework. Who wants to do research on what combination of artifacts and light cones will be best for your characters? Not me, certainly. I have done it, don't get me wrong, but I'm never very happy about it. It is fun to see characters get more powerful, I will say, but I wish it didn't require so much work.

    There's a lot to love in this game, and I have genuinely been enjoying it so far, though I will again caution people with gambling addictions or addictive personalities that this game may not be great for you, since there is a lot to the Gacha mechanic, and hoping that you'll get someting that you want, to the point where one may spend some money on the different materials that allow you to get whatever character that you're hoping for. This is the same exact system that was used in Genshin Impact, so it's not too surprising to see that the company is using the same model, and it definitely adds something to it, but it also makes it much harder to recommend it to people with the aforementioned issues. I will say that the algorithm for giving you cool new stuff is pretty good, but that could be because I still haven't been playing for very long, with the PS5 version just coming out on October 11th, making this post relevant for the game's first month, as the first milestone is upon us. I will say that I still haven't been able to do a lot of the events yet because I have to catch up with the story first, which is annoying, and seems to be a pretty unforgiving model, since the game just came out. It's not a major thing, but it's definitely an annoyance, and leaves quite a few Stellar Jades on the table (which you spend to buy rail tickets, the Gacha currency). Hopefully I'll be able to get to that sometime soon, but I can't really speak on that right now. 

    I don't have a whole lot to say about this game so far, other than just to say that it's a lot of fun, and I hope you all try it out! It's free to play on PS5, Mobile devices, and PC, so I definitely encourage you to check it out as long as you don't have an issue with microtransactions or anything like that. I am certainly looking forward to seeing where the adventures of the Astral Express crew will take them as the game continues to be updated over time, and I hope it'll continue being as much fun as I'm having with it right now!

    Thanks so much for reading my post about Honkai: Star Rail, friends! Have you checked out any of the Hoyoverse games? What are your thoughts on them? I would love to hear about them somewhere online, and maybe somewhere down the road, I'll be able to put out a more complete list of thoughts about this game, once I get all caught up with the lore and story. I hope you all have a great week, and thanks again for all the support! Until next time, I'm a Self-Proclaimed Trailblazer, and I'll talk to you again soon!