Honkai: Star Rail sends a train between planets styled on real cultures
A steam train running through the stars comes straight out of Kenji Miyazawa's Night on the Galactic Railroad and the manga Galaxy Express 999. miHoYo borrowed the image for Honkai: Star Rail, a turn-based role-playing game whose crew rides the Astral Express from a frozen, Russian-styled world to a starship built on Chinese fantasy.
Released worldwide for Windows and phones on April 26, 2023, and for PlayStation 5 that October, the game is the fourth instalment in the Honkai series and a spiritual successor to Honkai Impact 3rd. Development began in 2019 with a team of about 500, and it was miHoYo's first try at turn-based combat, a genre the studio felt was easy for newcomers to pick up despite worries that it might seem old-fashioned.
Players assemble a roster and field up to four characters at once. Each has a combat type, a role called a Path, and can equip a weapon known as a Light Cone, which unlocks extra effects when its Path matches the character's. New characters come from a gacha system, spending a premium currency called Stellar Jade that can be earned or bought. Critics liked the story, characters and combat, but were divided on progression and monetisation.
In the fiction, Paths are cosmic ideals presided over by godlike Aeons. The Path of Destruction regards civilisation as a cancer and spreads Stellarons, objects that devastate any planet they reach. The hero, an amnesiac called the Trailblazer, wakes with a Stellaron implanted inside and is taken in by the crew of the Astral Express, who follow the vanished Aeon Akivili's creed to explore, establish and connect.
Each world takes around a year to design, and each draws on a distinct real aesthetic. Belobog, the snowbound town on Jarilo-VI, is modelled on Russian architecture. The Xianzhou Luofu has been called silkpunk. Penacony channels the Jazz Age and Classical Hollywood across twelve dream worlds, and Amphoreus leans on Greco-Roman myth and Neoclassical building.
Source: Honkai: Star Rail
