Honkai: Star Rail — From a Forgotten Shooter to the Game That Rewrote Gacha
HoYoverse built one of gaming's most profitable franchises on a concept that almost nobody wanted in 2016. Here's the decade of decisions — and the anime DNA — that made Star Rail possible.
Into Gaming History
In 2016, a small Shanghai studio called miHoYo released a mobile action game on the Chinese App Store. Honkai Impact 3rd was fast, stylish, and built around anime girls fighting an apocalyptic enemy called the Honkai. Critics outside China mostly ignored it. The western gaming press had never heard of miHoYo.
Seven years later, the same studio — now rebranded as HoYoverse — launched Honkai: Star Rail. In its first month, it generated over $200 million. Its 1.2 version update drew more concurrent players than most PC titles. It became, in the words of market analysts, the fastest-growing gacha RPG ever made.
To understand how Star Rail happened, you have to understand what the Honkai universe actually is — and where the obsession with its world came from.
The Honkai: A Force, Not a Game
Most game franchises are named after their protagonist or setting. Honkai is named after its antagonist — an abstract, entropy-like force that appears throughout the universe to destroy civilisations at the peak of their development. It has no face, no motivation, no negotiable terms. It simply arrives, and worlds end.
This concept — borrowed loosely from Chinese cosmological ideas about destruction and renewal — gives the entire HoYoverse catalogue its backbone. Whether you're playing Honkai Impact 3rd on Earth, building a nation in Genshin Impact's Teyvat, or riding the Astral Express across star systems, the same invisible threat pulses underneath everything.
Honkai: Star Rail, Genshin Impact, and Honkai Impact 3rd are separate games with separate stories — but they share DNA. Characters from Honkai Impact appear in Star Rail as different "versions" of themselves across timelines. The Herrscher system from HI3 echoes in Star Rail's Stellaron Hunters. HoYoverse builds universes, not just games.
Where the Anime DNA Comes From
HoYoverse's founders — three graduates of Shanghai Jiao Tong University — built their studio around a specific aesthetic obsession: the visual language of early 2000s Japanese anime. The original Honkai Impact was explicitly modelled after games like Neon Genesis Evangelion in its catastrophe scale, and Sword Art Online in its mix of action and emotional stakes.
The character designs in Honkai Impact 3rd draw from a clear lineage: Kiana Kaslana's white hair and rebellious attitude, Bronya's stoic loyalty, Mei's tragic grace. These are anime archetypes — recognisable, legible, and emotionally efficient. Players know how to feel about them within seconds. That legibility is a design choice, not a limitation.
But the team was also watching something else: the turn-based JRPG revival. Persona 5 (2016) had proven that a slow, stylish, narrative-heavy RPG could generate extraordinary loyalty. Fire Emblem: Three Houses (2019) showed that complex character relationships could carry a game. HoYoverse had already demonstrated with Genshin that they could learn from Breath of the Wild. What would they learn from Persona?
We don't make games for the market. We make games we want to play ourselves.
— miHoYo co-founder Liu Wei, 2018 interviewThe Road from HI3 to Star Rail
What Star Rail Actually Is
The Astral Express is a train that travels between stars. Its passengers — the Trailblazers — are caught in the fallout of a universe-scale phenomenon called the Stellaron: seeds of Honkai-like destruction embedded in living worlds. Their journey takes them from a space station governed by a war between gods to a planet where everyone remembers their past lives, to a world where death itself has been outlawed.
The setting is space opera. The combat is turn-based RPG, closer to Persona or Octopath Traveler than to HI3's action slasher. Characters have elemental types and paths — archetypes that describe how they engage with the world (The Hunt, Destruction, Harmony, Nihility) — and battles are built around elemental weaknesses and follow-up mechanics.
Real-time action combat. Earth-based apocalypse. Established the Honkai lore, the Herrscher system, and HoYoverse's character-first storytelling approach.
Turn-based strategy combat. Multi-planet space opera. Same emotional storytelling, same Honkai threat — but designed for players who prefer thinking over reflexes.
The shift to turn-based was a deliberate expansion of audience. HI3's action combat required skill and time investment. Star Rail could be played strategically, at a slower pace, by players who had never touched an action game. It was HoYoverse opening a door they'd kept half-closed for seven years.
The Characters That Made It
Star Rail's characters follow the same design philosophy as the rest of HoYoverse's output: deeply specific aesthetic identities that carry immediate emotional weight. But with turn-based combat freeing the designers from action animation constraints, they could make characters whose personalities were more granular.
Kafka — composed, manipulative, and genuinely terrifying — became an immediate fan favourite before players could even use her. Blade carries a death wish that the game takes seriously, not melodramatically. Jingliu is a tragic hero whose power comes from consuming her own lifeforce. These aren't just gacha units. They're the kind of characters that sustain fandoms for years.
Why It's More Than Genshin in Space
The lazy take on Star Rail — and it circulated widely at launch — was that it was just Genshin Impact with a space skin and turn-based combat. That reading misses what makes the game's narrative structure different.
Genshin Impact is an open world. You arrive in Teyvat, explore, and gradually learn what went wrong. The story unfolds around you. Star Rail is linear by design. The Astral Express takes you where it's going. You're a passenger, not an explorer. That changes the emotional contract completely: instead of discovering a world, you're experiencing a journey — and the relationships you form on that journey accumulate meaning in a way Genshin's wandering protagonist never quite achieves.
The Persona influence shows here. Persona games work because the characters you spend time with grow in response to you. Star Rail borrows that structure: the Express crew has a chemistry, a history, and ongoing reactions to everything that happens. The train is a found family, and the Honkai is the thing trying to take them apart.
Star Rail proved that a gacha game could be about something. Not just a collection mechanic with lore attached — a story you actually want to finish.
— GamingMorWhere to Board
Honkai: Star Rail is free on PC, iOS, Android, and PlayStation 5. You do not need to have played Genshin Impact or Honkai Impact 3rd — it is designed as an independent entry point into HoYoverse's world.
The early hours are generous with resources and deliberately paced to introduce the game's systems without overwhelming new players. By the time you reach Jarilo-VI — the second major planet, set under a permanent blizzard — the story has already given you two or three characters worth caring about.
If you come from JRPGs: the combat will feel familiar immediately, with enough depth in follow-up mechanics and break systems to stay interesting at endgame. If you're new to turn-based games entirely: Star Rail is one of the most accessible entries into the genre, with auto-battle options that handle routine content so you can focus on the narrative.
What miHoYo started in 2016 with a mobile shooter nobody noticed finally found its ideal form in 2023: a train moving through an infinite cosmos, with a crew worth spending time with, chasing a threat that has been building across a decade of games. The Astral Express doesn't have a final destination. That's the point.