Honkai: Star Rail

Honkai Star Rail rides the line of being a perfect introduction to Hoyoverse games with easy-to-follow and oh-so-stylish turned-based action, while also delivering an infectious gremlin anime protagonist energy with its colorful cast of characters. As a former Kotaku writer (and current writer for Genshin Impact) once told me, “Hoyo’s strength is that they are weebs who understand what other weebs like.”

Like seriously, if you can conjure up a specific anime character archetype, HSR likely has a character that fits the bill with flying colors. Do you like the doting relationship between the Fate/Stay Night anime’s Illya and Berserker? Here, have HSR’s adorable daughter-robo-father duo, Clara and Svarog. Enjoy mysterious characters like Chainsaw Man’s Makima (that’re probably detrimental to your health)? Look no further than HSR’s Kafka. And so it goes on.

By far my favorite feature in Honkai is that it lets me send and receive texts with the characters. Aside from adding an extra layer of characterization to personalities I might otherwise not choose to include in my party, HSR’s texting feature also breaks RPG conventions of protags being dry and one dimensional by letting me send brutally honest messages back and forth with characters about how mundane a fetch quest mission feels to play or how I find characters’ hobbies, like Welt’s affinity for tokusatsu shows, to be rad as fuck. — Isaiah Colbert

Playable On: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows, Mobile

Rough Average Playtime: 18.5 hours