As a kid, my parents sent me to weekend classes to learn Punjabi, the language my father’s family speaks. I didn’t speak a word of it, but all the teachers and students were conversing in it, having spoken it at home from birth. I would sit in class, trying to absorb what I could, but barely understood anything. Right now, if you asked me to speak Punjabi, I could say ‘I love you’ and also ‘elephant’, but that’s it.
That’s what playing Honkai Star Rail feels like - I have no idea what’s going on, but I keep showing up in an attempt to figure it out. All the characters are talking about Stellarons and Voidrangers and Fragmentums, and I’m going along with it. I get the gist, sure, but you’re extremely wrong if you think I’m going to scour the game’s lore drops and website to try and cobble together a better understanding of the world I’m playing this game in. It doesn’t help that every bit of lore it has to offer me is written in such dense prose that I’ve completely lost the patience needed to parse it. Sometimes even character dialogue is so impenetrable that I start skipping through conversations.
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But I still like it, and that’s the confusing part to me. There are a lot of things that appeal to me about Honkai Star Rail, even though writing is very important to me when I choose which games to play. It’s not that the writing is bad, necessarily - the game is incredibly flexible with its tone, and the majority of interactions you have with the world (well, worlds, multiple) and the characters in them are entertaining and tell you a lot about the game’s setting. But the lore is impossible to read, and I suspect that’smore of a translation issue than anything- lore takes a lower priority than dialogue because it’s less visible, but it perpetuates its lower priority by being so convoluted that I don’t want to look at it at all.
It’s also fun to upgrade my characters, and because it’s turn-based and has an auto-battle function, it’s easy to grind. It’s easy to keep open on my phone, letting it automatically run through battles and collect resources for me while I’m doing my morning routine or watching Succession. It doesn’t require my attention, and I can look at it every ten minutes to restart the grind, so it doesn’t feel like a huge investment to log in every few hours and clear a few missions or check on my assignments.
And it’s not a chore to clear missions. They’re short, easy, and require very little skill or focus. If I’m lucky, I get treated to some character development, or I get extra resources, or I get to see the world my character inhabits get built out. The NPCs in the game feel very alive, always seeming to be doing some shit in the background while I’m off fighting monsters on other planets. No matter where I am, friends I’ve made are sending me messages asking me what’s up, or telling me about their lives, or asking me for advice. I get to help my friends, which feels weirdly satisfying. I don’t like that I’m the kind of person to run errands for anime girls now, but that’s where we are.
Of course, the hathi in the room is that it’s designed to be addictive. That’s the real reason why it has me in its grip, and there’s no point denying it. I fell for the bait despite knowing it was bait, because I am weak in spirit. I don’t spend money on the game, but only because I haven’t had a reason to yet. If I ever do feel the urge to do it, I’ll probably have to delete the app, because that means I’m too far gone. It’s a gacha game - everything in this game is designed to keep me invested and playing every day, so that one day, I might decide to give it my credit card details. It withholds its most powerful characters from me, forcing me to play more to have a better chance at pulling them, and when I run out of missions to play, who knows how fast my stellar jade (another nonsense phrase) will dry up?
Right now, I’m still playing because of force of habit, because it’s easy, and because I like the characters I’ve befriended along the way. I get to be sweet, or rude, or silent to the people I meet. I like the political intrigue aspect of the game, not really knowing what people’s motivations are or what part I play in their plans. But at some point, my progress might slow to a crawl, and I’ll start thinking about how to speed it up. At least I know what it’s trying to do. I can only hope my future self won’t take the bait.
