First Impressions Honkai: Star Rail Versus Genshin Impact

Honkai: Star Rail has been out for a few weeks now, and as someone who jumped on it the night of release because I was so excited to play it, I wanted to share my thoughts on how it compared to Hoyoverse’s most popular title.

Coming into Honkai, I was weary. For every game I start, I dread the tutorial section. Genshin’s tutorial was awful for me. It felt like 4 straight hours of following quests and being retold what just happened by an annoying flying pet.

GENSHIN

I was talked into starting Genshin Impact by a close friend, Tess because they had been addicted to playing this fun mobile game she had found. After suggesting it a few times, I decided to give it a try and downloaded it on my PC to play for my next Twitch stream.

My first Genshin stream was just days after completing my playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Breathe of the Wild, and I was told that this new game had a lot of those same concepts. I came in thinking that this would be the perfect game to get more of that same gameplay style that I had been craving since the end of Zelda.

Oh boy, was I wrong. My streams at the time were typically around 4 hours long, and this first Genshin stream was no different. I created my character, got talked at by Paimon, got a few free characters, and fought a dragon. All of this seems pretty interesting, but to me as the player, it was beyond one of the most boring experiences I have ever had with the beginning of a video game.

This first impression left a terrible taste in my mouth and I put the game down for a while. Tess later managed to get our friend Taylor to try the game out and this sparked my interest to give the game another shot. I was just coming off the high of playing what is still said to be the greatest game on the Nintendo Switch, so comparing it to a free-to-download game from a company that I had never heard of at the time seemed a bit harsh. I also had to remember that the first few hours of games are always the most boring because that is when the game shows you how to play and sets up the story.

So, after giving it another shot I ended up enjoying myself and ended up playing it weekly on my stream before falling off right before the release of Sumeru.

HONKAI

News of a new Hoyoverse game didn’t begin circling in my friend group until a few months ago. We began hearing more and more about this new turned-based game that was in closed beta at the time. This time, I was actually the one to ask Tess to try the game out. After seeing how amazing this game looked, I knew I had to give it a chance. I did the pre-registration for the game and downloaded it the night before the official release. I streamed my first few hours of the game that night and was actually super happy when I wrapped up my stream.

I had watched video after video to see what I was getting into with this game, I wanted to see what the 5 stars looked like, what they could do, and figure out who I was going to be saving up for first. I wanted to see which 4 stars would be viable in a team and which would be non-viable for me (surprise, most of them work in some type of comp). And I wanted to get a look at how the gameplay was going to go. I already knew that the game was going to look great, that is one thing that I will give Hoyoverse, they make beautiful games paired with beautiful music.

I was coming into Honkai with the expectation of a long and tedious exposition on how our main character is woven into the story, but instead, I was thrown into what felt like the middle of a story and my character was just as clueless as I was as to what was happening and what our goals were.

The tutorial might have been long, but the dialog was actually really funny and the characters had such great personalities that I didn’t mind it. The back and forth between March 7th and Dan Heng felt like a real dynamic of two people who have been friends for a while and it made me want to keep them on my team because I had grown to like them over the course of exploring space ships and frozen lands together.

COMPARISONS

I will say that the first 10 hours of Honkai: Star Rail feels a thousand times better than Genshin Impact’s.

Honkai also felt like it gave you more characters to work with right from the beginning. Even though the main games will only give the player around 5/6 free characters, Honkai gives you more for doing less. Each character (especially the two you get right in the very beginning) is extremely useful in combat and can be used well into the game.

Genshin’s beginning free characters are people who you will bench as soon as you get a new character from the banners. These characters are basics that can get the overworld jobs done but are not that effective at combat, and even less fun to actually use in your rotations.

Genshin’s Amber is victim number one for someone who will get benched as soon as you get someone new and she will ONLY be pulled out if you need pyro and have literally no other option. Honkai’s March 7th on the other hand, is great because of her high defense from the start, her strong shield that also increases the shielded character’s taunt value therefore protecting the other characters on the field, but also her counter move that causes her to strike back at any enemy who hits a character protected by her shield.

The difference is non-comparable at which first free character is better, Honkai seems to be a more polished game that the company knew would do well off the back of the massive success of Genshin, so they were able to flush out more features with their characters and their combat.