This is a follow on to my original impressions posting (where I mentioned I would continue playing for the first week). Since then, I now have a better feel for the game at Trailblazer Level 28, along with more characters in my roster (the following is as of this posting).
My first 5-star came via the guaranteed one at 50 pulls; that was Bronya. My next 5-star came at the 10th pull on Seele’s banner where I got Seele. So having these two strong 5-stars early on (and my only 5-stars to date) as part of my main team, made lot of the combat easier. Since then, my RNG with pulls has gone flat (outside of the characters you unlock for free from the story/events, the only other characters that I’ve gotten from pulling are Tingyun, Sampo, and Pela).
Additionally, I recall the following cinematic trailer for Honkai Impact 3rd where the younger versions of Seele and Bronya have this strong friendship in that universe (so it was sort of nice having these two characters from nearly the get go).
Bronya’s character model in Honkai: Star Rail (HSR) is based on her Herrscher of Reason model in Honkai Impact. But again (since I only played Impact for a brief time), I’m very unfamiliar with a lot of the details of the lore, and know miHoYo has ulterior motives with using HSR to get uninvested folks like myself, more engaged with the Honkai franchise (given how long Honkai Impact has been out). But it is interesting seeing how Bronya and Seele’s relationship unfolded in this alternative universe as alternative older versions of the originals. Yes, there are a lot of throwbacks (like the orphanage aspect as one of many examples), but there are also a lot of twists that telegraph that these characters from the original Honkai Impact universe, aren’t the same ones (even Bronya’s last name is different in HSR).
As I leveled up and unlocked more systems, the thing that began to stick in my mind is how large parts of HSR is sort of a re-skinned and partially simplified variant of Genshin Impact. As noted in my initial impressions posting, HSR borrows heavily from Genshin Impact for most all of its systems (just different naming and graphics), but without the real time combat or massive open world environments. It’s actually a shrewd move (reusing already developed backend designs) where some of the most production intensive parts (for the player facing parts of the client), were simplified in HSR.
The game world for example are a lot of map instances with restrictive pathing (thus no climbing, jumping, or gliding); basically the exploration component is rudimentarily distilled in HSR. The Light Cones (graphically depicted as cards with artwork on them) are weapons (but don’t require the need to come up with unique weapon design visuals like in Genshin). Furthermore, the combat damage is calculated almost identically to Genshin Impact (according to theory crafters who delved into that). The turn based combat also reduces the need for a lot of the real time visual animations and effects (since combat is graphically depicted as mostly still frames with a few animated sequences in them).
My initial concern was that the MSQ wouldn’t be enough to overcome my personal dislike (now) of turn based combat. As it turns out, the story (along with really strong Japanese voice acting) has been good enough to keep me playing (completing the first planet Jarilo-VI). That plus most non-story critical combat can be auto’d at 2x speed.
This overall familiar character/account progression system that is borrowed heavily from Genshin Impact, means there isn’t a whole lot of completely new concepts to learn. Similarly like early Genshin, you are struggling with the lack of resources to level up your characters (so it helps when you get decent pulls early on), their traits (like Traces which are akin to Talents in Genshin), Relics (Artifacts in Genshin), and Light Cone. Like Genshin, I can see this being a casual “filler” game (hardcores have already completed all of the content including completing Simulated Universe World 6) like Genshin Impact and Tower of Fantasy are for me (these are pretty much what I’ve been playing outside of ArcheAge Unchained which I know I will stop playing after my subscriptions expire in September since Kakao Games Europe intends to perform a server merge in August; but this is really meant for another post).
