Honkai: Star Rail is the follow-up to Hoyoverse's successful open world darling Genshin Impact. With tons of unique and lovable playable characters to add to your arsenal in Genshin Impact, the developers earned a sizable following. As soon as Star Rail was announced, players kept their eyes open for what was to come next.
Although both games play in vastly different ways, some game mechanics and systems have shifted over onto the brand-new Star Rail, giving fans of Genshin Impact something familiar yet different enough to warrant a new game and countless more hours sunk into grinding for the newest characters.
8 Art Style
Genshin Impact is known for having beautiful character designs and Star Rail doesn't fall far behind. Maintaining the Anime-inspired art style that made Genshin so popular, in addition to flashy and particle effect-filled animations for Ultimates, make Star Rail an incredible game to gawk at.
Even looking past its characters, the locales found in Star Rail can be quite similar to the ones in Genshin, albeit giving them a more futuristic approach to the architecture. If you take out the whole frozen over due to the Stellaron business, Jarillo-VI is just Mondstadt.
7 Gacha System
If you thought you could leave Genshin for a game where you can get any of the playable characters by just playing the game, well then, good luck, because Star Rail is not that. The same gacha system from Genshin Impact is found in Honkai: Star Rail. You'll have to spend your hard-earned in-game currency to pull for some of your favorite characters and possibly real-world currency if you can't wait to pull Seele already.
Luckily, the early game provides you with plenty of pull tickets to get you enough characters for you to progress through most of the content, but we all know that what you really want is that shiny five-star Bronya. You're better off saving your Stellar Jades for her banner though.
6 Battle Pass
One of the most popular trends in live-service games in the last decade is the glorious battle pass, and Star Rail and Genshin are no different. Like most games, the battle pass (named Nameless Honor/Glory and Gnostic Hymn/Chorus in Star Rail and Genshin Impact, respectively) includes free and paid options, with the paid options having the better rewards of the two.
If you are not too sure that you want to commit the money, that's okay. The battle pass allows you to progress through the levels with your daily missions and whenever you are ready to purchase it, you will unlock all the previous levels you had passed already.
5 Gear System
Just like in Genshin Impact, Artifacts, named Relics now, make an appearance in Honkai: Star Rail. The Relics work in the same way that they did in Genshin.
They all carry a specific buff that can be amplified or unlock bigger bonuses if paired with Relics of the same classification. Not only are the farmable Relics present in Star Rail, but the weapons from Genshin Impact are replaced by art cards known as Light Cones that perform the same duty that weapons did in their game.
4 Currency
One of the biggest hurdles to get over while playing Genshin Impact for the first time is the sheer amount of different types of currency found in the game. From Primogems to Mora to Intertwined Fates, the currencies and their interchangeability can be a bit daunting.
Sadly, the same amount of types of currency can be found in Honkai: Star Rail with a slew of fancy new names for you to learn. Who are we kidding? We all know the only one you care about is Stellar Jades though.
3 Gameplay Loop
Both Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail are story-driven single-player games, but at their core, they are grindy mobile games that encourage you to log in daily to perform a set of tasks. From daily missions and setting up expeditions to grinding out EXP materials from Calyxes the gameplay loop is almost the same when comparing the two games.
The only major difference between the two is the combat system. While Genshin Impact is a vast open world with action real-time combat, Honkai: Star Rail opts for a more traditional turn-based system.
2 Stamina System
Most gacha games limit how many missions you can perform daily with a stamina gauge that can be refilled using different in-game items. The same applies to both Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail.
Although not as restrictive as other gacha games, the stamina system in the two games is there only for quests where you can grind materials needed for enhancing your characters. You can easily refill your stamina with Primogems or Stellar Jades, but both games offer plenty of other quests and activities to tackle while your gauge refills automatically.
1 Character Progression
Being gacha games, you are bound to pull duplicates of characters once in a while, and while it might be a bummer when you encounter your fourth copy of Natasha, that character can get much stronger by having multiple copies. In Genshin Impact, this system is known as Constellations, while Star Rail refers to it as Eidolon.
The Constellation and Eidolon levels can be increased with the materials obtained from pulling a character that you have obtained in the past. Increasing these levels grant bigger buffs to your characters only available to this system, so if you really want to max out your characters get ready to dish out some Primogems.