As the first game released by HoYoverse after the massive success of Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail improves on the earlier game in a few ways.
Summary
- Honkai: Star Rail improves on Genshin Impact's farming system by allowing players to farm any materials on any day, without waiting for specific days of the week. Fast travel also speeds up the process.
- Star Rail offers the ability to replay past events, allowing new players or those on a break to experience the story and gameplay, even with reduced rewards.
- While both games feature gacha systems for characters, Star Rail's Light Cone gacha is better than Genshin's weapon gacha, as it features a single five-star Light Cone, making it easier to obtain desired items.
As HoYoverse's first major release after the success of Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail has many gameplay conventions that are the same or similar to Genshin. However, being the newer game, some of the ways in which Star Rail handles characters, story, gameplay, and gacha mechanics are notably improved from its predecessor. As HoYoverse looks to another major release in Zenless Zone Zero, it's worth taking a look at the ways in which Star Rail has improved upon many of GenshinImpact's systems.
Despite being in notably different genres, with Star Rail's turn-based combat being a large departure from Genshin's open-world exploration, the two games also have a number of similarities. Like most other gacha games, for example, farming materials for strengthening characters is limited by a stamina system in both games, meaning that there's a limit on how fast players can progress (unless they pay for more stamina). Likewise, both Genshin and Star Rail handle character levels similarly, with characters in both games having a level cap that can be raised through spending certain materials to ascend them up to a certain point. However, with Star Rail having released almost three years after Genshin, some of the game's features are improved.
8 Farming Materials
Although Honkai:Star Rail's model for farming materials follows the same general format as in Genshin Impact, Star Rail has one significant improvement over Genshin. Unlike in the earlier game, where certain materials for improving character talents or ascending weapons are only farmable on certain days of the week, Star Rail instead allows players to farm any material on any day. This means that players can immediately begin to farm for newly acquired characters or new ascension levels as soon as they become available, instead of potentially having to wait for the correct day. Additionally, unlike in Genshin, players can fast travel to any farming location, speeding up the process.
7 Events
Like Genshin, Star Rail has so far had a number of limited-time events with varying levels of story relevance and reward. Unlike Genshin, however, Star Rail includes the welcome ability to replay some past events, meaning that newer players, or players who took a break from the game, can still experience the story and gameplay associated with the events, albeit with reduced rewards. So far, the Boulder Town Super League remains playable through the Conventional Memoir tab in the Travel Log, and presumably major events with story relevance, such as the Everwinter City Museum, will also remain available once they have ended.
6 Weapon & Light Cone Gacha
While both Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail's gacha revolves mostly around each game's wide cast of characters, they both also include a secondary gacha system - weapons in Genshin and Light Cones in Star Rail. Genshin's weapon banners, however, have a notable problem in that they feature two five-star weapons, meaning that even players who win the 75% chance to get a featured weapon may not get the particular weapon that they want. While Genshin's Epitomized Path helps the issue, Star Rail's system is still better, as Light Cone banners will only feature a single five-star Light Cone, meaning that they take significantly fewer pulls on average to get
5 Simulated Universe
Matching Genshin Impact's Spiral Abyss, Honkai: Star Rail's Memory of Chaos serves as the game's endgame mode, being a series of battles with certain conditions to encourage the use of specific playstyles. However, Star Rail also has a mode with no (permanently available) Genshin equivalent in the form of the Simulated Universe, which emulates the gameplay of a roguelike. Simulated Universe offers a distinctly different experience from normal gameplay, allowing players to create unique builds with the buffs offered after every won fight, and allowing them to fight stronger versions of the game's bosses and mini-bosses.
4 Character Use In Combat
Owing to Honkai: Star Rail's turn-based combat system, many of its characters get more time to shine than in Genshin Impact - particularly the game's supports. Genshin's combat system means that players can only have one character active at a time, meaning that, outside of setting up elemental combinations or buffs from support characters, combat will mostly center around controlling the main damage dealer of a team. On the other hand, as a result of Star Rail's turn-based nature, the game can afford each member of a team relatively even screen time, giving character with more support-oriented kits more of a chance to shine.
3 Companion Mission
While both games have quests centering around certain playable characters - Hangout Events in GenshinImpact and Companion Mission in Honkai: Star Rail - the latter's implementation of the feature is somewhat better. Unlike Genshin's Hangout Events, which rely heavily on a sort of choose-your-own-adventure format, Companion Mission in Star Rail usually tell a more complete and cohesive story about the character that they center on. As an added bonus, completing a character's Companion Mission gives them a chance to randomly visit the Astral Express, which adds a nice layer of interactivity and world building.
2 Mascot Characters
Paimon serves as Genshin Impact's mascot character, but also can have an unfortunate effect on the game's story - essentially, Paimon in many story scenarios will speak for the player character, needlessly repeat exposition, and generally be an intrusive presence in the story. While Honkai: Star Rail has a similar mascot character in Pom-Pom, their story presence is (so far) relatively minor, and most story exposition and dialogue is instead spoken by more regular party members. As a result, Pom-Pom gets to hold onto the status of being an endearing mascot, instead of the flying nuisance that many Genshin players tend to see Paimon as.
1 Main Characters
Although the main characters of Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail mostly serve the same purpose as silent protagonist, default characters, Star Rail's Trailblazer improves on Genshin's Traveler in a few different ways. The Trailblazer, for example, has notably more involvement with the world of Honkai: Star Rail than the Traveler does with Genshin Impact, interacting more personally with many other characters through selectable dialogue options. Additionally, while the Traveler falls almost completely to the wayside in terms of gameplay as players gain better characters to use, the Trailblazer remains fairly useful, especially in the Preservation variant.
