Honkai: Star Rail rekindles memories of absolutely banging PS2 RPGs

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Are you, like me, a gross little nerd that’s still grumpy about turn-based JRPGs being slowly relegated to mid-budget or handheld titles after the PS2 glory days? Do you miss being rewarded for getting through a tough section with a pre-rendered cutscene? Do you wish the only exploration you had to worry about was picking the dead end at a junction in a corridor to find a treasure chest? Does the very thought of Final Fantasy 16’s complicated real-time combos and parries and blocks make your fingers hurt? Excellent news. HoYoverse has followed up its unimaginably successful Genshin Impact with one of the best turn-based JRPGs in a generation.

Honkai Star Rail is a lavishly produced, immaculately localised and perfectly designed celebration of each and every single aspect of the genre. It’s a blessedly linear, solidly written adventure through fantastical sci-fi locales filled with interesting characters and engaging boss battles. It’s refreshingly old-fashioned, and if you miss this sort of thing being done with this sort of scale and polish, it feels like a godsend.

The game has a set-up that lends itself to the somewhat episodic structure of classic JRPGs (wait, are we still calling them that?) that involve moving from town-to-town, and solving their local problems that all tie into a larger narrative. You are the latest passenger of the Astral Express, a cosmic passenger train locked on a never-ending odyssey across the stars. You have mysterious powers, a foggy memory, and an overwhelming impulse to fight evil. It’s some real bread-and-butter JRPG business, and if it’s the sort of thing you’ve been missing, it’s delicious. Each stop the Express makes means a new world with its own characters, aesthetic, and adventure.

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