Honkai: Star Rail, unscheduled

[flatrute]

The first week

All screenshots made by me in this thread will be in Vietnamese since I love my mother tongue and like reading Sino-Vietnamese words. Also I am the maker of a discussion thread for the game hence the signature seen below my name at the top right.

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I wanted this to be a day one impression post but I am too lazy and I need to take (a lot of) time to enjoy the game first

Anyway, HSR is a gacha game made by the Chinese game company miHoYo with turn based combat as its core gameplay. Initially I did not care about the game at all until a few month before the release of the game when I got in love with the character named March 7th (seen below) who also acts as the game face icon.

The game is available for pre-downloading on April 23th and is scheduled to open its live service on the 26th at 02:00 UTC. The 4 servers opened at around 30 minutes before the schedule though so I got in early and became one of the first 65536 Asian accounts in the game

Although once the trained jumped into the bright space all I got was a black screen. It turned out I used Windows N edition and forgot to install Media Feature Pack I will not spoil the story for now but in short it is a journey about the Trailblazer (avatar of the player seen at the top of this post, chosen at the beginning of the game) along a crew named Astral Express on a space train. Do not get put off from this summary though since I am bad at explaining and also the writing of this game is quite goofy with lots of Western media references

As for the gameplay, you form a team of 4 characters with each of the character following one of the 7 Paths:

• The Destruction: General DPS
• The Hunt: Single target
• The Erudition: AoE
• The Harmony: Allies buff
• The Nihility: Enemies debuff
• The Preservation: Tank
• The Abundance: Healer

and 9 Elements: Physical, Fire, Ice, Lightning, Wind, Quantum, Imaginary.

then fight against enemies with the main objective being to empty their Break Point using characters with Element they are weak with (seen below is Seele, a character with The Hunt Path and Quantum Element against monsters with Quantum weakness.)

Each characters has a basic attack which add 1 Skill Point (seen left to the "Q" button), a Skill attack (the "E" button) which use 1 of it and an Ultimate attack which can be activated over the current turn after getting an amount of Energy from attacking and being attacked (the "1" and "2" are fully charged Ultimate while "3" and "4" are not). There are also effects affecting stats of characters and enemies but I do not have time to explain them

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TODO: Should I explain the basic of gacha?

About the gacha aspect, you have 2 types of pulls: Star Rail Special Pass for time-limited banners and Star Rail Pass for non-limited ones, each costs 160 Stellar Jade seen on the top right. Seen below in order are: limited character banner, limited Light Cone (an item tied to a certain Path boosting power of characters equipping it) banner, non-limited character/Light Cone banner. There is also a Starter banner which limited to 50 pulls and are aimed at starters.

A special character can also be selected after pulling 300 times on the non-limited banner:

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TODO: More personal opinions, please.

As for me, I feel stupid for not spending time reading the stories I did not bother reading for the free Jades since they are a source of emotion rollercoaster. Maybe I should replay the game again on the Taiwan/Macao/Hong Kong server

[flatrute]

The second and third week

My 5* in the second and third week on normal and limited banners respectively. Yanqing in this case is converted to an Eidolon since I had him before in the starter banner and Seele in particular came at around 47 pulls which is quite soon compared to the average of 60-70 pulls.

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I am at the losing side of the fight against laziness when it comes to writing such forum posts Anyway, I am now at the Trailblazer Level 46 thanks to the daily grinding of "farm" contents and my first purchase in a game ever. I do not feel like repeating the game mechanics explainations so here are some summary images.

Mission page showing 2 types of missions: Trailblazer Missions which are locked until achieving TL 34 and Adventure Missions which are basically side quests. There are also Companion Missions which are quests related to characters in story and Daily Missions for "Daily Training" shown below.

"Daily Training" screen showing a bar with 5 resource gift checkpoints, 2 unfinished and 2 finished missions with Activity Points to fill the bar and a counter telling when the tasks are reset.

"Survival Index" is a teleport screen to certain areas of the universe to use up the Trailblaze Power and Immersifer (at the top right corner, respectively) to gain level-up resources for characters. The latter is only used in Simulated Universe which I will talk about at a later date

"Nameless Honor", the "battle pass" system where you also do some tasks to fill up a bar and get resources in a row called "Nameless Gift". As I mentioned before, I actually paid ~US$17.50 (for a third party since it is a bit cheaper than paying ~US$19.18 without tax directly) to unlock the second row called "Nameless Glory" and get some time-limited profile icons

[ashifter]

Very interesting. I try to keep myself away from gacha as I can get pretty impulsive (don't ask how much I spent on Overwatch skins) but it does look like a pretty interesting game. The visuals are pretty nice.

This got me curious about miHoYo, reading the story of their founding and explosion into the mainstream was really interesting. I wonder what it looks like running such a massive business in China from the very top.

[flatrute]

Very interesting. I try to keep myself away from gacha as I can get pretty impulsive (don't ask how much I spent on Overwatch skins) but it does look like a pretty interesting game. The visuals are pretty nice.

The gacha aspect of the game can be kept at zero cost of real world money if you know what you are doing. There is a story of a whale who burned over 3000 USD to basically ruined their enjoyment almost instantly so one should just enjoy what the game is to offer at the moment. As for the visuals, when I first stumbled across its W3 site at an unknown time (maybe it was the Closed Beta Test 2 period?) I initially cringed at the art of March 7th About a year later and somehow she grew on me and I have been a simp for her ever since

This got me curious about miHoYo, reading the story of their founding and explosion into the mainstream was really interesting. I wonder what it looks like running such a massive business in China from the very top.

I remember downloading their Houkai 3rd back when the company was just like any other gacha game companies sometimes in my senior middle schooling. My touchphone was crap and so I could only played like less than half an hour of its gameplay but I could already feel something is different compared to other mobile games that I had played. Somehow, I was only like "huh" when I realised how massive the company is nowadays.

[flatrute]

So, it has been like 2 and a half weeks since I last posted a "review" of the game...

Lets just say that I am now more interested in the effort to run the game offline for dissecting the inner of the game since, well, this is a forum about "moddin' games" after all and there are ban waves to people who played the game on Linux due to a third party client made to easily setup a Wine environment for the game bypassed its anticheat. There is a Java FOSS reimplementation of Genshin server called Grasscutter so I am looking for the team who made the software to do the same for Star Rail.

I will however continue doing my "review" of the last 3 weeks this weekend, covering the second gacha phase of version 1.0 and other stuffs before the 1.1 release in HE 12023-06-07 but until then, here are screenshots of me rolling to maximise Eidolons of my little March