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Honkai: Star Rail — First Impressions

guess i gotta write something here to break the ice. can you call something a "first impression" if you've already caught up with the main content so far? anyway,

god i fucking love hsr. it's so fun. i blew through belobog in less than 3 days. finally i can be free of waffling on whether or not to re-download genshin just to have something to do since star rail really highlights how much of a slog genshin is to play in the first place. time to finally put the dirt over that bitch's grave 'cause i have no interest in going back :)

just some random observations and thoughts i had:

• music? absolutely god tier. i set embers to my parlor car music as soon as i unlocked it
• the designs for characters are the same complicated messes you'd expect, but (most of) the aeons look amazing. it's pretty cool to see the character designers go ham once the shackles of "must be an anime pretty boy" get to come off
• also re: the aeon's designs — nanook, the destruction, and the main antagonist so far, favors(?) anger and destructive behavor and is very clearly a dark-skinned dude. the only dark-skinned character of note so far is arlan... who's on the destruction path. hmm.
• do i need to play honkai impact 3rd to get any extra understanding of wtf is going on??? star rail uses the same element system (i think), impact!bronya and star rail!bronya are aus of each other, welt is straight up a transplant... i played a little bit of hi3 but do i need to go back????
• i'm really curious to see yaoshi's side of lan eternally hunting her(?) down. i don't know where on the sliding scale on "everything said is 100% true" to "if something says the sky is blue you need to check for yourself" the overall lore is, so unless i missed something or if there's more info that hasn't been shown yet, it kinda looks like the long-life races got their blessing from yaoshi and are now trying the ultimate gatekeep from that blessing by killing her???