Honkai Star Rail 4.0 Is A Good Step Forward From Amphoreus

With more than a cumulative decades worth of storytelling under their belt, it's hard to not wisen up to the HoYoverse style of storytelling. Honkai Star Rail has always stood out as one of the cooler examples of this- and the new 4.0 update brings us well back into the land of space fantasy that made the Astral Express so enthralling to begin with. 

While Amphoreus was good explicitly because of how it locked you into a closed room with its setting, my early time with the new planet Planarcadia felt more like a follow up to the Penacony storyline. 

Here, the galaxy is huge- and every character is simply a token of their faction's agenda. The game is simple: a competition is underway, a battle royale to be granted audience and the power of an Aeon- but only for a minute. 

It's this kind of setup that I absolutely adore. After all, the new planet is themed around The Elation- one of the more chaotic of the game's pantheon of cosmic paths. In other words, Aha, The Elation is a jerk, and that means nothing's off the table. 

Preview content is based off a Beta version of the game, some content may differ from the release version

Moving Forward With The Story

But while Penacony was about introducing you to more faces from the galaxy, Planarcadia does a good job of reminding you that time does indeed pass on the Astral Express. There is a general air of things not being quite the same after the defeat of Iron Tomb, both inside the Astral Express and across the galaxy, as the IPC seeks to strengthen alliances across the galaxy.

 The Planarcadia arc also gives chance to explore more on both Welt and Himeko, with Himeko being a native of the clown show of a planet. It's a fairly good change to the HoYoverse formula, one I quite like. Instead of having yet another mysterious stranger come in and be the local, the game builds on its cast of regulars and uses them to check out a new locale. 

The story lets you check in with these characters, all of which by now have had their own major arcs, and show off how much they've changed. Not just by Dan Heng having a million forms like a Dragon Ball character, but by them actually getting to ask questions about where they're at in their personal journeys. 

It also combines something else I really like: battle royale stories. With the Phantasmoon games underway, the patch's story deals with chasing down masks- required to be in the running to become an Aeon for a minute. Having a strong cast of characters already setup helps keep the battle royale story itself fresh- it's much more threatening to already know what characters like Sparkle (and by proxy, Sparxie) are capable of since you already see her shenanigans in Penacony. 

Combine that with the factions- to whom Elation is no laughing matter- and you've got a recipe for a powder keg of tension. Penacony was about every major faction vying for the Watchmaker's Legacy, and you get a nice callback to that with the Phantasmoon Games, as many of those same factions are now trying to get their foot in the door to attaining near-unlimited power. 

City Of Laughs, Are You Laughing Just For Me

On top of that, Planarcadia in general is just a lot of fun as a locale. The metropolitan city is full of pretty locales, filled with drawings-made-real and minigames. It's silly and irreverent in the best of ways, and seems to be firing at 50 memes-per-minute making it a real delight to just grab screenshots and see if HoYoverse really was referencing some niche thing on the internet. 

Honkai Star Rail 4.0 is available now if you wanna check it out yourself- if you're a lapsed player and just wanna check out the new content, the game lets you skip straight to the new planet. Admittedly, you'd be missing some of the story's biggest strengths, specifically its showing of character growth. But even if you just wanted to explore a new locale with a new playable path, you're sure to have a lot of fun in the Phantasmoon Games.