Honkai: Star Rail
Year: 2023
Rating: T
Time Played: ~4,700 minutes / ~78.33 hours
Having played Genshin Impact by MiHoYo, I thought I’d give their next game—a sci-fi based adventure—Honkai: Star Rail a try. While Genshin Impact is more of an open-world adventure akin to Breath of the Wild, Honkai: Star Rail is a turn-based RPG similar to early Final Fantasy games. Both follow the “gatcha” mechanic for obtaining new characters, so a lot of the consumables had similar uses for powering up the characters, just with different names in each game. Surprisingly, while I liked the exploration in Genshin Impact, the ability for Honkai: Star Rail to run automatically made me like it more.
Since most gatcha games try to get you to spend money to get good characters and spend even more time grinding materials to upgrade these characters, I can appreciate how I only needed to get one set of the traditional RPG roles to max build out before I could let the game play itself. Grinding in the action-based Genshin Impact actively required me to play the game, but grinding in Honkai: Star Rail is something I can have running on my phone as I do something else like watch TV or play other video games.
That being said, as I progressed through Honkai: Star Rail’s story (or even special events), I found it a lot more fun to fight in these turn-based battles with characters that had max stats instead of banging my head against a wall for not being skilled enough. The little cut scenes for the characters’ special powers were always a neat little exhibition of their power, and there were plenty of interesting characters to choose from—to where I could auto-grind and build up more characters to swap out from my core team of a healer and tank. Because, after all, the easier I can just collect characters in a gatcha game, the more likely I am going to enjoy myself.
A great low-stakes turn-based gatcha game, I give Honkai: Star Rail 4.0 stars out of 5.
