Courtesy of Hoyoverse
The 3.7 Version’s cover of “Honkai: Star Rail” contains all characters released this year.As a reward for having finished my second-semester finals, I decided to allow myself a few hours to play a video game: “Honkai: Star Rail” by Chinese gamemaker Hoyoverse.
Immediately, the portrayal of characters caught my eye. It was at the moment when crimson crystals rained from the sky and one of the main characters, Mydei, blocked the attack of the enemy, Flame Reaver, I knew I would become obsessed with the game. I didn’t know it would also give rise to improvement of my artistic skills and my frequent engagement in the gaming community.
As a player of “Genshin Impact” and “Tears of Themis” from the same company, I started playing “Honkai: Star Rail,” a cross-platform turn-based video game, right as it launched in April 2023. In a turn-based system, a single human player controls several in-game characters who take turns battling enemies. To win, it’s important to come up with strategies for team optimization.
Unlike other competitive games, it focuses more on shaping plots and characters with flashy skill effects and exquisite graphic designs, such as Phainon in Amphoreus and Aventurine in Penacony, in which players act as trailblazers to explore different planets and solve problems to help the local people.
Courtesy of Hoyoverse
As the world collapsed, Phainon and Cyrene uncovered the truth behind Re-Creation that was their ultimate target to save Amphoreus.
But when I didn’t find a character I liked very much, I stopped playing the game in June 2024.
Then last January, the production team released seven updates that made the storytelling more compelling, establishing one or two emotionally richer characters per update. Hidden by lots of details, there are foreshadowing elements for players to analyze, which was much different from the original plot style.
I started playing again and now obsess over two characters named Phainon and Mydei, who are saviors of the planet Amphoreus; as important roles in the plots, they express their attractive personalities. I even create fan works and engage with the fan community frequently.
While I have previously made many fan works based on other games, for this game I trained my artistic skills with my sister’s help and learned to use a new video editing application called Alight Motion, which allowed me to create more refined works that would usually take me around 20 hours to make on another platform. For instance, I draw the character with separated body parts and then use video editing software to animate them and create the background. Some of them focus on visual effects with rhythmic music, while others have context or plots.
My works also extend to non-digital fields. I have worked with clay and pipe cleaners to create chibi-style characters. As for collectibles, I own at least one of every official piece of merchandise released for Phainon and Mydei; for the ones I really like, I buy multiple copies, decorating my room and shooting videos or photos.
Posting them on social media earns me lots of likes and allows me to discuss the game with people who have similar interests. In the past six months, I have posted 40 works about “Honkai: Star Rail” on my account, which has about 1,300 followers. I also spend one to two hours a day browsing other fans’ delicate works — in short, these days my life is filled with content related to this game.
Online, many players comment that you can criticize anything of Hoyoverse, but not its music. HOYO-MiX, the musical studio by Hoyoverse, produces and releases a lot of high-quality works that occupy my playlist, from instrumental music to vocal music. The production team not only utilizes them in every portion of the game, but also holds a concert every year at anniversaries of the game release (this event is high on my bucket list!).
With some justification, video games get a bad rap for being a huge time sink and have little real value in the real world.
For me, though, video games mainly provide emotional value, they also help me develop creativity and skills of making various artworks when I participate in the gaming community. For me, spending my time with this game is not a waste of time : I not only find great pleasure in playing it and generating content, but also strengthen my abilities that support my daily life.
