Honkai: Star Rail is the latest game from developer HoYoverse, the studio behind the beloved action-adventure Genshin Impact. Where Genshin invites Travelers to step into a fantasy world full of magic, otherworldly creatures and mystery, Star Rail offers a journey through stars aboard the Astral Express. As you go through the game, you will meet a cast of memorable characters, new faces and alternate versions of Honkai Impact 3rd heroes alike.
It has been a couple weeks since the release of the game, and plenty of Trailblazers have gotten their fill of in-game activities: reaching Trailblaze level 40+, unlocking Memory of Chaos after beating the Forgotten Hall Memory Stages, finishing up Herta’s Simulated Universe on the first difficulty setting and moving to harder challenges and more.
Having spent an embarrassing number of hours poking around everything the game offers, here’s the wish list of things we hope to see around when Honkai Star Rail rolls out more versions down the line!
SKIP / DELAY TURN OF THE ACTIVE CHARACTER
Honkai: Star Rail moved away from the action-like combat of its predecessors Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact 3rd and instead embraced the turn-based battles. Those who have played any oldschool jRPGs such as the early Final Fantasy games would feel right at home in Star Rail.
However, one of the things you will notice early on is that the game has no option to skip or delay the turn of your active character which is a staple of turn-based RPG gameplay. Additionally, you can not use any items in-combat, be it potions, scrolls or whatever else that you can craft, delegating those to the open world only.
Sure, you can always have your character use their basic attack to restore a Skill Point so it is not completely a waste, but in certain situations it would be advantageous to delay a character’s turn so that your other characters have their chance to do their buffing/debuffing magic to set up a careful attack. Especially if your supports had been imprisoned or had their own turns delayed, messing up the “natural” order of actions.
AN OPTION TO SKIP ANIMATION OF THE ULTIMATES
No Star Rail wish list would be complete without mentioning this! Honkai: Star Rail gives players an option to speed up the combat animation so that battles don’t take too long. While it is a thoughtful feature, it can use some additional tuning. Such as an option to skip or really shorten the animation of characters’ ultimates so that it more or less matches the duration of the animation for basic attack or characters’ skill.
While a glorious sight, after seeing it for a 100th time (sometimes all in one long boss battle in SU, even), I am honestly just over it already. Especially when it comes to the flashier characters such as Serval or Seele. Especially Seele!
MORE VOICE LINES DURING COMBAT & ULTIMATES
“This Sanctuary is but a vision… BREAK!”, “Disappear among the sea of butterflies”, “Rules… are meant to be broken!”, “LANCE… POWERED!”, “TIME TO TWIRL” – I know you just heard all of those in your mind’s ear and so did I.
While I usually avoid comparing games between themselves just for the sake of comparison, HoYo’s other project – Genshin Impact – has a number of lines used by characters when they activate their skill or ultimate, get hit by a light or a heavy attack, get knocked out and so forth.
With turn-based combat ensuring you will be activating Es and Qs left and right, pretty soon you will start getting haunted by certain lines, depending on your party’s composition. For the sake of players’ sanity, we need more lines or an option to turn ultimate lines off together with the animation. Pretty please?
AN OPTION TO CANCEL ULTIMATE USE
Have you ever miss-clicked an Ultimate or triggered one prematurely – say, activating Natasha’s healing Ult when you saw her dip dangerously low, only for her to use her passive and top up almost back to full health – and then got stuck with a pending Ultimate that you no longer want to use but have no way of backing out of it? Yeah.
You can cancel using a basic attack or swap it for the skill or go and use Ultimate/Path Skill in SU ahead of it, but nothing will help with that one triggered Ultimate unless HoYoverse does something about it.
RELIC LOAD-OUTS
A story as old as time, Gacha players asking for better inventory management such as the relic/artifact/weapon loadouts, a variety of filters, a search function and more. Both Genshin Impact players and Honkai: Star Rail enjoyers have asked HoYoverse for this feature, especially with protagonists being able to swap between multiple elements and characters trying out various niche builds and comps (for Genshin, for example, Raiden National/Hypercarry vs Raiden Hyperbloom which utilizes completely different stats).
At least in Genshin the Traveler’s weapon doesn’t become unusable if you switch Elements and forget to swap artifacts accordingly.
“CONDENSED RESIN” ANALOGUE FOR THE TRAILBLAZE ENERGY OR EXPANDING IMMERSIFIER USE
At this precise moment, your Trailblaze Energy is likely scarce as you are attempting to bring your chosen party or parties of characters up to speed in terms of level, Traces and gear. However, there will likely come a time where you are not as pressed for upgrades or can’t log into the game for a while.
In Genshin, there is a system to alleviate the issue. The game uses Resin as an analogue of energy used up to run domains, activate Ley Blossoms and more. If you feel like you have no time to do the chores this particular day or the domain you need is active another day (which Star Rail does not have, all the domains are open all the time), you can transform some of the Resin into the Condensed Resin and later use it the way you see fit with the exception of bosses.
At the moment, you can re-roll Trailblaze Power into Immersifiers, with one Immersifier = 40 Trailblaze Energy. It can be used in Herta’s Simulated Universe for the Planar Ornaments after a victory over the local elite/boss of the world. But, while it does allow you to prevent your Trailblaze Powers from going poof! completely, it would be great if Immersifiers could at least expand their usage to the Caverns of Corrosion (Relics), which also cost 40.
HOUSING
The Astral Express members – Himeko, Welt, March 7, Dan Heng and maybe even Pom-Pom – all have their own personal spaces on the train. It’s time to add Stelle and Caelus to the family and provide them with their own room where you can proudly show off your trophies and put up pictures on the walls or whatever else.
While we are at it, can we get some kind of friendship system to show where we stand with certain characters?
CUSTOMIZATION
A repeated complaint when it comes to Genshin has been the game’s poor offers in terms of character customization. So much so that it is completely absent for the protagonist, the Traveler, and barely present for other playable characters.
Let’s wait and see which path Star Rail will choose: that of Genshin or that of its older sibling Honkai Impact 3rd when it comes to skins and other customization options. At the very least, let us set up Trailblazer’s phone image on the back of the device!
MULTIPLAYER / CO-OP OPTIONS
At the moment, your interaction with other players is limited to using their characters as Supports while farming Calyx Flowers, Stagnant Shadows and other repeatable content and adding them to the Friend List once you are done.
There is no chat or any kind of co-op content to speak of yet. While personally I am alright with Honkai Star Rail remaining a practically perfectly single-player game, the community has expressed its opinion: players want more interaction with other players.
Is there anything you’d like to add? Let us know in the comments below! Check out the official site to learn more about the game or star playing now if you haven’t yet.
