I Love Star Rail…

I’ve seen people feeling pretty down about HSR lately, so I thought it might help to look back and share my positive experiences with Star Rail, and how it became my favourite game of all time. I don’t know how many people will read this, but I thought it might be a nice change of pace to see someone ramble about how much they love the game 😅😅

in November of 2023, I was scrolling the PlayStation Store for ANYTHING I could possibly play, and stumbled upon HSR. up until then, my experience with gacha games was about 15 hours of Genshin before I got bored. if I’m being honest, I even looked down on them a little. regardless, I decided to download this game expecting to laugh at it for an hour and probably delete it.

entering my first battle, I learned that this game has turn-based combat. turn-based RPGs have always had a soft spot in my heart, so this came as a shock to me… I genuinely assumed this game was Genshin in space, and wasn’t expecting a different genre. I played for an hour or two before I went to bed. I decided to log in again the next day and found myself invested. I think I played almost 11 hours that day.

I was getting this weird feeling of déjà vu I got when I played Breath of the Wild for the first time. I knew nothing about Zelda, but that game was like love at first sight, and I fell down a rabbit hole of obsessing over the Zelda series. I had almost 50 hours by the end of my first week in Star Rail, and pulled Huohuo as my first 5 star.

the one thing I WASN’T that engaged in was the story. it wasn’t bad, but it didn’t really stand out to me. eventually, I made it to the end of the Jarilo VI quest, and had my fight against Cocolia… OH. MY. GOD. that moment took me from “this is a good game??” to “I love this game 😭😭” REAL QUICK. the music, the atmosphere, the story, the FIGHT… it all hit me like a wave, and I knew I was cooked.

by this time, I actively started engaging in the story and lore. watching trailers and videos, I discovered the character “SAM”. he was merciless and badass, he also had a super cool mech suit. he was apart of the group of cool bad guys, and I decided then and there that I was gonna build the best team I could for him.

I made an in-game friend and he started telling me about the upcoming character Ruan Mei, saying she would be a good character to pull. hearing she was good, I decided to go all out for her, to make my SAM as good as possible. which, in retrospect, was pretty lucky cuz she’s a Firefly BIS 😭😭 anyways, I made my first purchase and pulled E1S1.

as the early Penacony trailers were rolling out, I unfortunately found out that SAM was Firefly. I’ll admit, I was a little disappointed… I wanted a big cool man, but it’s this random girl? I decided to look into her backstory to verify if it was true, and was absolutely blown away. I immediately took it all back, now I was even MORE obsessed with this character. from that point, I started debating E6S5.

the Penacony trailers drove me insane. it was a rare excitement I only get from a couple video game plots. on release, I stayed up till 3am running through the story, and only made it half way through. I was enjoying every second of it, and getting to see Firefly in action made me love the character even more. again, the music, characters, story, worldbuilding… it was all perfect.

by the time 2.1 rolled around, I found myself so invested in Aventurine’s story, I almost cried. I still think about how amazing that patch was, and how they made us spend more of it as Aventurine than the main character. I ended up pulling E1S1 Aventurine for my Firefly team… and he ended up not being needed 🥲🥲 regardless, I was super happy because he was interesting, and he got me my first 3 star in MOC 12!!

when Firefly finally got drip marketed, I spent hours reading people’s reactions. going into her banner, I was slightly worried. I had been warned by friends that E6S5 could make the game boring and too easy, but I decided to go through with it anyways. maybe it’s just me, but I love how strong she is. being able to breeze through lots of content is really fun, HOWEVER… the game is still really hard at times 😭😭

my ass STILL can’t beat Gold and Gears… Simulated Universe kinda throws the OP-ness of E6 characters to the side because it’s focused around the blessings or sceptres. for the longest time, Firefly was my only OP team, so I still had a challenge with the endgame content. eventually, I pulled E6S1 The Herta, and it’s STILL fun and challenging. I spent 2 hours trying to 0-cycle MOC in some of the most fun I’ve had with the game in a long time. I almost got my ass handed to me by Nikador because I decided to run sustainless.

by this point, I fully accept that Star Rail has hit what I thought was the once-in-a-lifetime experience that I got with BOTW. Star Rail has become my favourite game of all time, alongside BOTW.

the engaging side quests, the fun and intricate combat, collecting new characters, the deeply woven lore, the wonderful main story, the amazing visuals, the beautiful music, the fun puzzles, the abundance of replayability and new content … everything blew me away. yes, Honkai: Star Rail is not a perfect game, I don’t think any game is. however, at least to me, it does so much right. my only MAJOR complaints at the moments are the excessive black screens with text during the main story and lack of dynamic camera angles and expressions from the characters during dialogue sequences.

I’ve managed to log in every single day for the past 440 days (in all of which, Seele hasn’t had a single rerun), yet I still find myself looking forward to the next day. 720 hours and every single one of them was a blast. I’ve run around and collected every chest and book for the bookshelf and I anticipate the release of new books to collect. this isn’t meant to deny anyone of their complaints. in fact, I embrace the complaints to make my favourite game even better. I just wanna share some of the joy Star Rail has brought me during these more negative times 😁😁 I know some people may hate the things I like, but that’s what makes it interesting.

if I were to encourage any comments, I think it’d be nice if people could share one of their favourite memories with the game, and a complaint on what they want improved. as I said earlier, I would like to see the story presentation get a little more budget.