Video Game / Honkai: Star Rail

There will be unmarked spoilers from Honkai Impact 3rd and its supplementary materials, so read at your own risk. You Have Been Warned.

"May this journey lead us starward."^note Counterclockwise from center: Stelle, Caelus, March 7th, Welt Yang, Himeko, Dan Heng

"In the near future, you will encounter all kinds of perils and hardships, but you will also have many wonderful experiences. You’ll meet companions who treat you like family, and embark on surreal adventures with them. At the end of your journey, all that perplexes you and troubles you will resolve."

— Kafka

Honkai: Star Rail (崩坏：星穹铁道, Bēnghuài: Xīngqíong Tiědào) is a Science Fantasy Space Opera Free-to-Play Turn-Based Combat game developed by miHoYo. It is also their fourth entry in the Honkai franchise after Zombiegal Kawaii (also known as Houkai Gakuen), Guns GirlZ (also known as Houkai Gakuen 2), and Honkai Impact 3rd. It was officially announced at the end of the "Starfire Sonorant" live concert for the 5th anniversary of Honkai Impact 3rd, and is the first Honkai entry with an English and Korean dub, along with the usual Chinese and Japanese dubs.

You are the Trailblazer, an Ambiguously Human vessel for a Stellaron, a mysterious object also known as the "Cancer of All Worlds" that has the ability to cause planet-wide devastation. You were awakened by Kafka, a wanted interplanetary vigilante from a group called "Stellaron Hunters", who instructed you to join the Astral Express crew for some undefined greater purpose. Having no memories other than that of your name and Kafka herself, you join March 7th, a perky pink-haired girl with amnesia, Dan Heng, a quiet and stoic boy with a Dark and Troubled Past, Himeko, a red-haired scientist, and Welt Yang, a seemingly middle-aged man. You adventure with them on the Astral Express, a spaceship in the shape of a train created by a god-like being, travelling to various locations across the galaxy.

Sharing similarities to Honkai Impact 3rd and HoYoVerse's fantasy title Genshin Impact, you can play up to 4 characters in a party with a Turn-Based Combat system in place, and level them as well as weapons (called Light Cones) and equipment (known as Relics) up like in other traditional RPGs. Playable characters are sorted into a one of the seven Paths — their alignment to which denotes their role in combat — in addition to one of the seven (damage) Types. There is also the gacha mechanic "Warp", from which you can get new and potentially rare characters and Light Cones by spending "Star Rail Passes" or "Star Rail Special Passes" (which can be acquired slowly or bought by Stellar Jade, the in-game currency that can be either acquired through open-world exploration and completing game content or bought by real money).

The game launched on April 26, 2023 and is available to play on PC, iOS, and Android. A PlayStation 5 version of the game was eventually released on October 11 in the same year.

You can visit the official website here.

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Please refrain from adding leaked content on any and all sub-pages. While it's understandable that a sub-set of the Honkai: Star Rail community relies on leaks to prepare for upcoming characters and other future content, troping the leaks themselves is against TV Tropes policy and any entries involving leaks will be removed. For more information, visit the Content Leak and Creating A Work Page For An Unreleased Work pages.

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The game contains examples of:

Tropes A to D

• Aborted Arc: Ostensibly, Welt's purpose for being here at all is to stop the Sky People from raiding other dimensions for their Honkai energy. This is never addressed in-game, with Welt stating that he is mainly focused on finding a way home.
• Abstract Scale: The Rating Pistol is a Curio in Herta's collection that gives a rating from 1 to 100 for whatever thing it's pointed at. Problem is, no one is sure what metric the Rating Pistol abides by, so to most people the given ratings feel completely arbitrary. Interacting with it as various characters will cause it to spit out an arbitrary score for most of them save for a select few. Uniquely, it completely refuses to rate some characters, including March 7th, Sampo, and Jing Yuan.
• Achievement Mockery: Some of the achievements you can receive include getting ambushed to trigger combat for the first time, getting One-Hit Killed by an enemy when at full health, and having a character drink the Vomit Inducing Agent^note An item that causes the character it's used on to lose 99% of their max HP.
• Achievement System: There are various in-game achievements and rewards for completing gameplay-related activities or milestones.
• Action Bomb:
  • Automaton Spiders will often attempt to blow themselves up, which will do big damage to your party. If you manage to kill them before that, they will still explode...but damage their own allies instead.
  • To a lesser extent, the Illumination Dragonfish explode when defeated which damages their allies, but unlike the Automaton Spiders, they don't weaponize this against your party so there's no real urgency to take them out before they can act.
  • Internal Alchemists have a unique take on this trope where they'll apply the Spur of Thunderwoe status effect on your party members first, so that whenever they're defeated, the explosion they create will damage affected party members while leaving unaffected ones unscathed. Of course, if you defeat them before they can apply the status effect, their "explosion" will do nothing.
• Action Initiative: Mechanics like Advanced Forward and Delayed Action can instantly affect the turn queue by moving the unit up or down respectively, the Speed stat determines how frequent can a unit have its turn, there's also an Extra Turn mechanic, and Ultimates can be prompted at any time and force the unit's turn to rise on top of the queue. All of these can be combined and manipulated to ensure that somebody can have as many turns as they can possibly have before the opposition could even act.
• Actually Four Mooks: While only one enemy shows up to represent an enemy group in the overworld, a random encounter with them can have anywhere between two to five mooks.
• Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Character, Light Cone and Relic upgrades become more costly as their levels go up.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • One of the stories you can get from Youci is a What If? scenario where Qingque is the real General of the Xianzhou Luofu and supreme tactical genius who runs operations from the shadows and both Jing Yuan and Fu Xuan merely operate under her orders.
  • Another of Youci's stories turns Hook into a Lord Ravager of the Antimatter Legion who reawakens the frozen troops after the Eternal Freeze on Belobog subsides.
• An Adventurer Is You:
  • The game's answer to character classes are "Paths", which currently number seven and correspond to an Aeon's philosophy and a particular playstyle.
    • The Destruction: Generalist damage-dealers who don't pursue a particular niche in the manner of the two following Paths, but are more durable to compensate.
    • The Hunt: Single-target damage specialists. They usually have the highest Speed of the seven Paths, but are also the frailest and lack area-of-effect damage.
    • The Erudition: Multi-target damage specialists who can apply medium damage widely; this allows them to easily manage group encounters but makes them struggle against strong single opponents.
    • The Preservation: Defenders who mitigate damage by applying shields or drawing enemy aggression to themselves. They are among the most durable characters, but have low damage output.
    • The Harmony: Supporters who buff ally stats, generate Energy, or manipulate turn order to improve offense. However, they do little to improve defense and are basically useless on their own.
    • The Nihility: Able to debilitate enemies by lowering stats or applying Damage Over Time effects, their precise role is the hardest to describe. They excel at battles of attrition where breaking weaknesses is a tough task, but aren't your guys if you need immediate results.
    • The Abundance: Healers who restore health and/or remove debuffs. The reactive counterpart to the Preservation, they can actually fix instead of merely mitigate, but have even weaker attack power.
  • Like the characters themselves, Blessings in the Simulated Universe are separated into Paths based on the specific nature of their Blessings. While you can mix and match Blessings as you go, you have the ability to choose a specific Path at the start, which will raise the odds of seeing that Path's Blessings and grant additional advantages for stacking multiple of that Path's Blessings.
    • The Preservation: Revolves around Shields, offering ways to grant Shields to characters as well as bolstering the effects of Shields and Shielded characters as well as gaining the ability to convert Shield effectiveness to damage output.
    • The Remembrance: Focuses on inflicting the Freeze status. Blessings from this Path enable ways to afflict Freeze and grant benefits from inflicting Freeze and attacking enemies with the Freeze status.
    • The Nihility: Boosts the effects of DoTs, increasing their potency and effectiveness while also further debuffing afflicted foes.
    • The Abundance: Benefits healing, powering up characters who heal HP as well as granting benefits for having HP healed or making it easier to heal multiple allies.
    • The Hunt: A pure offense Path that powers up Crit Rate/DMG, enhances the party's ability to gain initiative and massively benefits allies whenever an enemy is defeated.
    • The Destruction: A risk-reward Path that grants incredible boons at low HP, offering ways to deplete the user's HP and powering up their offense in turn.
    • The Elation: Strengthens Follow-Up Attacks, attacks dealt by allies outside of their normal turn order.
    • The Propagation: Added in "Swarm Disaster". This Path revolves around consuming Skill Points, benefiting characters who are able to use Skills without ending their turn and making it easier to recover Skill Points to fuel their actions.
    • The Erudition: Added in "Gold and Gears". Boosts the efficacy of Ultimates and Area of Effect attacks, making it easier to use Ultimates consecutively and use crowd control with devastating effectiveness.
• After the End: The planet Jarilo-VI was not only victim to a full scale Antimatter Legion invasion, but also suffered a seven century long ice age that devastated the planet and has left only a single populated city, Belobog, on the entire planet. They're still stuck in that same ice age and it shows no sense of ever stopping. Even worse, Fragmentums are beginning to spread across the planet as well, continually spawning an infinite horde of monsters... and slowly, inexorably, Fragmentums are beginning to manifest within Belobog's otherwise-impervious walls.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • Zig-zagged with the Belobog robots. Many of them, especially those who serve Svarog, will not attack humans indiscriminately unless ordered to or are put on guard mode. However, malfunctioning robots lose their ability to tell the difference between friend and foe, and have a high likelyhood of going rogue and attacking anything on sight. One sidequest in the Silvermane Guard Restricted Zone even has you investigate a case of defective robots running amok because of suspected poor quality control from Belobog's Technology Division.
  • Played straight with the Entranced Ingenium enemies and the Aurumaton Gatekeepers on the Xianzhou Luofu. Unlike the Belobog robots, the Luofu robots are built by the Artisanship Commission to act solely as guards and lack any sapience of their own, meaning that if something goes wrong with their programming, they will attack anyone on sight and cannot be reasoned with.
• Alertness Blink: In the exploration maps, the enemies will initially have a question mark over their heads if they detect you within their line of sight. Linger enough and that icon will turn into a red exclamation mark as they chase you. It will eventually revert to the previous one if you manage to flee from them far enough to reset their aggro.
• Alien Sky: The skybox of various locations on the Xianzhou Luofu shows that the ship is in orbit around a massive gas giant planet that can be seen just off the horizon, and it's more visible at the Exalting Sanctum, Divination Commission, and the Artisanship Commission where it's nighttime. From some locations like Starskiff Haven, you can even see that the gas giant planet has a smaller gas giant moon.
• The Alliance: The Xianzhou Alliance^note or "Immortal Ships Alliance"; see Lost in Translation below is this, natch; it's a fairly loose confederation between six great world-ships with common cultural roots and a shared devotion to Lan the Hunt as a patron deity, with the six sharing military personnel between each other commonly and maintaining unified trade and foreign relations policies, but otherwise allowing each ship to manage its own affairs and government as it sees fit. The internal politics of the vessel we do see, the Luofu, features a government made up of six "Commissions" that oversee various aspects of daily life (the Skyfaring Commission for transportation and trade regulation, the Cloud Knights for internal and external security, the Divination Commission for planning and investigation, et cetera) and are run on a mixture of meritocracy and internal democracy.
• Allohistorical Allusion: There's a synthesis material called "Phlogiston", whose Flavor Text describes how several different genius figures tried to either prove or disprove its existence. In Real Life, phlogiston used to be a theory that described the composition of fire, before it's disproven with the discovery of oxygen and oxidation. The game, meanwhile, takes place in an Alternate Universe with different advancements in science.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: At the start of the game, the Antimatter Legion invades Herta Space Station, where the focus of the first Trailblaze Mission is to clear them out and defeat the Doomsday Beast leading the charge. Even long after the initial invasion is quelled, some remnants of the Legion still take hold in isolated parts of the station.
• Alternate Universe: The game takes place in a parallel universe to Honkai Impact 3rd with retro-futuristic aesthetics. Some familiar faces from the previous game such as Himeko, Seele, and Bronya are present in this universe, albeit with different characterization and personality. Meanwhile, Welt is the exact same person as he was in HI3, having been embarking in this journey to a new universe parallel to his own (as shown in one of the supplementary comics, Alien Space).
• Alternative Calendar: In-game lore states that two different calendar systems are followed: the Trailblaze Calendar, which is used by the Astral Express and is roughly analogous with the real-world Gregorian calendar, and the Amber Era, which cycles each time the Aeon of Preservation Qlipoth swings their hammer and varies drastically in length, with a single Amber Era lasting anywhere between 76 and 240 Trailblaze Years.
• Always Check Behind the Chair:
  • Some treasure chests are well-hidden behind other objects in the overworld maps.
  • Readable items are presented as books or pieces of paper that you can collect in the overworld maps, but they can be easily missable due to their small size. Thankfully, there's a hand icon and some visual shine that lets you spot them.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different:
  • Shortly after arriving aboard the Luofu and receiving accommodations for the night, the Trailblazer attempts to get in contact with Dan Heng with no success. The game then shifts to Dan Heng's perspective from a few hours ago, where he decides to board the Luofu alone and catch up with the rest of the Astral Express crew to warn them about the danger that the Stellaron Hunter known as "Blade" poses. This is subsequently followed by optional challenge stages where you can continue following Dan Heng, Sushang and Luocha as they make their way throughout the Luofu.
  • Similarly, during "The Cat Among Pigeons", the story alternates between the Trailblazer's POV and Aventurine's POV as he attempts to uncover the secret behind Robin and Firefly's murders. During this time, however, the player's team is left intact, with the exception of the first member of the team, who is replaced with Aventurine himself, unlike the Dan Heng segments which forcefully change the team to Dan Heng, Sushang, and Luocha. There are also a few sections of Acheron's POV, which follows her and Welt.
• Animesque: The main art style of Star Rail is 3D animesque in the same vein as its two predecessor games Honkai Impact 3rd and Genshin Impact.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • For each area, the Navigation map interface tracks the number of Treasure Chests (found and total). It also remembers the locations of Formidable Foes that you've encountered but not yet defeated, and optional puzzles that you've found but not yet solved. These quality-of-life features are useful just in case you need to backtrack and find those points-of-interest later on again.
  • You're allowed to see what enemies are in a enemy group before attacking them, along with what elements they're weak to, which makes it easier to switch out teams if necessary.
  • Should you fail a story-related battle, any cutscene leading up to it can be skipped to help you save time on your next attempts.
  • Regardless of how much health your party members have beforehand, they will always be restored to full health every time you start a Simulated Universe run. This helps ensure that you won't have a rough start.
  • With Stellar Jades as rewards, the player is incentivized to discover and select new Blessings and Curios to fill up the Index. Fortunately, the game helps the player to accomplish this by displaying a book icon on the upper-right corner of Blessings and Curios that they haven't tried out yet.
  • Star Rail also borrows a bunch of core quality-of-life features from miHoYo's other games, especially Honkai Impact 3rd and Genshin Impact:
    • The tasks in the Interastral Guide – Operation Briefing section are retroactively tracked, thus eliminating the hassle of repeating them from scratch. Any progress that you've already made is remembered even if you can't view the future tasks just yet. This can allow you to claim the new tasks' rewards as soon as you've unlocked their respective page.
    • As soon as you unlock the related content/modes, the Interastral Guide will show you the locations of Calyx buds, Caverns of Corrosion, Stagnant Shadows, and Echoes of War that you haven't activated yet, thus eliminating Guide Dang It! frustration. The interface also provides instantaneous teleportation to these points-of-interest once you do activate them.
    • Equilibrium Levels have the same Dynamic Difficulty effects, Level Cap feature, and quest-related conditions as the World Levels in Genshin. Raising it increases the levels of the Pre Existing Encounters in the maps, unlocks harder versions of battles that consume Trailblaze Power, and generally improves the item drops and rewards that you can earn. However, it's not an automatic change as you first need to complete a Trial of Equilibrium. You can opt to tackle the Trial at a later time.
    • Just like the Alchemy feature in Genshin, the Omni-Synthesizer tool allows you to convert materials into their higher-tier equivalents, thus cutting down on the need and hassle to manually farm enemies on the maps for their rare item drops.
  • On the other hand, Star Rail has its own improvements and QoL additions over similar gameplay features that were in Genshin Impact:
    • When you need to do Alchemy crafting in Genshin, you have to go to the nearest Crafting Bench. Here, the Omni-Synthesizer is accessible through the phone menu.
    • Addressing a common complaint about material farming in Genshin Impact, all currently available resource farming content, such as Calyxes and Echoes of War, are always available on every day rather than being restricted to specific days of the week.
    • Like Genshin, most characters can only be in one place in the game world at a time. Unlike Genshin, if a required NPC for an in-progress Mission is being occupied by a different Mission, you can simply call that character to the current Mission instead so you do not have to stop whatever you're doing and jump to a different questline to make that NPC available.
    • Unlike Genshin, where the Traveler must interact with a Statue of the Seven to change their Element, the Trailblazer can change their Path at any time as long as the Character menu is accessible.
    • Like in Genshin, the player gains the ability to exchange unneeded relic pieces for ones from a set of their choice. Unlike Genshin, the player can not only pick which set they want but also which piece, avoiding the frustration of sacrificing a lot of resources just to get pieces in slots that are already filled. Not only that, it's even possible to pick the Relic's main stat, though it requires Self-Modeling Resin which can only be acquired by reaching level 40 in the battle pass.
    • While Equilibirum Levels act near identical to World Levels in Genshin, one major difference is that it never levels up automatically and can only be raised by completing the Trial every 10 Trailblaze Levels compared to Genshin raising the World Level every 5 levels, half of which happen automatically upon leveling up with no Trial required. This not only gives players enough time to get used to the new enemy levels, it also prevents players from accidentally raising their Equilibrium Level and being ill-equipped to deal with the higher difficulty it brings.
    • Like Genshin, the game constantly keeps tabs on where you are and what you were doing. This is handy since being a mobile game, being able to pick up more or less exactly where you left off is handy. This also has the benefit of if the game unexpectedly quits for some reason, the most progress you'll lose is restarting a battle if you were in one.
    • The "Lab Assistants in Position" and "Penacony Food Fest" events are superficially similar to "Marvelous Merchandise" in Genshin, where the player must turn in common materials to an NPC once per day over the course of 7 days to get a reward each day. Star Rail's version offers the ability to "stockpile" the rewards for days you missed, unlike "Marvelous Merchandise", meaning that even if you forget to check in you will not miss any of the rewards so long as you remember to go back before the end of the event period.
  • You can retreat from battle at any time, with the state of your characters reverting to the point before the battle started and you'll end up usually at the last Space Anchor you touched. This includes boss battles. The only thing you lose is any consumables you used before the battle. Though for certain modes, such as Simulated Universe, running away instead finalizes that mode and you exit it with whatever score you have at the moment. If you're fighting multiple rounds of a Calyx and retreat before you finish them all, you'll still get the materials from the waves you manage to clear.
  • Planar Ornament farming doesn't require beating a Simulated Universe world in full to claim your Planar Ornaments, so there's no real risk of losing everything should you lose a battle or decide to leave.
  • The game gives you at least one character for each element for free as you progress through the story, that way you have a way of dealing with the different elemental weaknesses of your foes: your first Physical character is fulfilled by the Trailblazer, and you can get another Physical unit, Natasha (who is also a healer), much later in the story. March 7th is your first Ice character and you can also get Herta when progressing through the prologue. Dan Heng covers your need for a Wind element. Asta, a Fire character, is obtained from the mandatory Warp tutorial, and the Trailblazer can eventually switch their fighting style into a defense fire-based one. Qingque, a Quantum character, is recruited when you reach Trailblaze Level 21 and complete Forgotten Hall Memory Stage 3. Players can also get the Lightning unit Serval via mail, albeit as a pre-registration reward. From version 1.2 onwards, players can obtain Yukong, an Imaginary-type character, after completing A Dragon Gallant, Its Ocean Distant and Memory of Xianzhou Stage 1 of the Forgotten Hall.
  • Some Achievements are tied to using a specific character (or a group of them), including ones that are from the limited gacha. Thankfully, for most of them, borrowing said character as "Support" from a friend's account (or using a "Trial" version of the character provided in some quests and events) also allows you to get the achievement.
  • Version 1.5 allows players to use consumables in the base Simulated Universe when they previously cannot, though they have to unlock the final node (as part of the update) in the Ability Tree first.
  • Prior to 1.6, the Simulated Universe 'Expansion Packs' like Swarm Disaster did not give points towards the weekly Simulated Universe reward tally despite being much more intensive in time and difficulty and requiring multiple clears to get all rewards (which include very valuable things like whole new Paths that you can use in all Simulated Universe modes), resulting in players basically having to choose between spending their time grinding out the expansion pack rewards or the weekly points and Planar Ornaments from regular runs. 1.6 solved this by making it so Expansion Pack runs give a lot of points (including on defeat), enough that a successful run could fill up your bar in one go, making them far more efficient than regular worlds and allowing players to progress through the exclusive rewards more easily.
  • Adventure rooms in Expansion Modules will offer a free Downloader so you can get a character on your team that is suitable for the challenge.
• Anti-Grinding: Pre Existing Encounters need time to respawn after you've defeated them, so you'll have to wait for some real-time hours or the daily reset time before you can farm their item drops again. This is to prevent the player from quickly maxing out their character and Light Cone upgrades.
• Anti-Hoarding: You can only hold up to a maximum of 8 Immensifiers. From Equilibrium Level 2 onwards, you easily earn up to 4 of these per week, so the game expects you to keep on consuming them for the Immersion Devices' rewards at least on a bi-weekly basis.
• Anti-Wastage Features:
  • Within the character progression systems, the Auto-Add button lets the game automatically select all available EXP materials to increase the level of a character, Light Cone or Relic up to its current Level Cap. Should the total EXP added somehow overflow, the game will convert and refund the excess as new EXP materials.
  • There are no limits to the number of playable characters that you can collect aside from how many of them are already in the game. You don't have to worry about storing them, and any "duplicates" you pull from the gacha are automatically converted into Eidolon Resonance upgrade materials to make them stronger.
  • Whenever you obtain high-rarity (4★-5★) Light Cones, they are automatically locked in your inventory to reduce the risk of them being accidentally scrapped or used as EXP fodder. This is on top of the other quality-of-life feature that lets you manually lock any Light Cone or Relic of your choice. The small annoyance of having to unlock these Light Cones to superimpose them was rectified in Version 2.1.
  • If you aren't ready to increase your Equilibrium Level to break through the soft Trailblaze Level Cap, your accumulated Trailblaze EXP can go past said cap. Once you raise your Equilibrium Level, the "overcapped" Trailblaze EXP will be automatically used to fill its gauge, potentially raising your Trailblaze level as well. Once you reach the hard cap (level 70), accumulating Trailblaze EXP again will do nothing, but you'll instead gain more Credits from activities that would grant you Trailblaze EXP.
  • 1.3 not only upped the cap of the amount of stamina that all players can hold, but it also added a system in which stamina is 'stored' when it regenerates over the cap (though at a slower rate) that can be redeemed at any time, up to a maximum of 2000, which is enough to fill up the stamina almost ten times over.
• April Fools' Day: For April Fools Day 2024, official media posted a "trailer" for "SHOWDOWN! COSMIC TRAILBLAZE SAGA OF HEROES", an Affectionate Parody of Toku in which a Kaiju-sized Pom-Pom fights a titanic HOMU, a mascot from Honkai Impact 3rd, complete with Pom-Pom transforming into a Humongous Mecha called "Ultimate Decisive Battle Weapon Paramount Supreme Mobile Trailblaze Warrior Ultima Primus".
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Parties can only have up to 4 characters at once.
• Arc Words: "Trailblaze" and variants thereof, referring to the Path that the Astral Express and its crew have chosen to walk on.
• Armor Meter: The Shield status buff is visualized as a white gauge layered over a character’s HP gauge.
• The Artifact: At the end of Natasha's Companion Mission, the Trailblazer and Natasha run into a Fragmentum enemy for no particular reason when pursuing Vache and kill it before continuing the story without so much as a mention as to how or why it was there. This is due to said encounter being a remnant from the original writing of the Jarilo-VI arc where Vache's fate differed from the final release, but was subsequently left in despite the rewrite and no longer having any plot significance beyond implicatory levels.
• Artifact of Doom: Stellarons are not only poorly understood entities, but they are widely believed to cause natural disasters and tear apart the very fabric of reality around them, and are generally a source of misfortune for any planet they happen to be on. Even worse, Stellarons apparently have wills of their own and will tempt people into doing their bidding.
• Artifact Title: Unlike previous Honkai games, the titular Honkai are irrelevant to the plot and don't appear within the context of the story. They only get a passing mention from Welt regarding his past exploits defending Earth from the Honkai. The Stellarons, however, are superficially similar, being cosmic objects which can suddenly appear on a planet and cause ecological or societal collapse.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • The Auto-Battle A.I. is far from perfect as it can notably "mistime" by letting your character unleash their skill or Ultimate against an enemy protected by a Barrier buff. Typically in this case, the player would've manually used a basic attack to dispel the Barrier first.
  • In general, the AI really loves to use Ultimates the moment they become available as opposed to saving it later or using it more tactically to put an enemy at a disadvantage^note Like removing an enemy's revival buff with Luocha's Ultimate. This can often result an Ultimate being wasted on an enemy who is close to dying when a basic attack or skill can finish them off instead, or the Ultimate not reaching it's highest damage potential when not used at the appropriate time^note Such as waiting until enemies have a lot of DoT effects applied then detonate them with Kafka's Ultimate, or allow Jingliu to enter her special state granting a huge crit rate bonus before firing off her Ultimate. The exception to this are Ultimates with "Restore" tags, i.e Natasha, Bailu and Lynx, as the AI will use them if any party member falls to low health.
  • The Auto-Battle is also notably inefficient when it comes to more complex characters or enemies with specific gimmicks:
    • The AI has no idea how Tingyun works. Tingyun's Skill, Soothing Melody, applies a buff for three turns to a target ally that boosts their ATK and allows them to deal additional Lightning damage when they attack. However, the buff can only be applied to one ally at a time and will disappear if reapplied to a different ally. Auto-battle does not know this and will continue re-buffing characters even if their buff timer hasn't expired, wasting Skill Points and damage in an incredibly inefficient way. At least in 1.3 the developers have improved the AI's logic for using her, making this situation less likely.
    • Imbibitor's Lunae's gimmick is that his basic attack can be boosted and upgraded using his skill, which can use one, two, or three skill points in one turn - this, predictably, screws with the AI a lot, as it will attempt to maximize damage by always using as many skill points as possible, leaving the other party members starved of skill points.
    • The AI holds off Bailu's and Lynx's healing ultimates until the last possible moments, even though they both have useful features beyond merely healing a low-HP ally (Bailu's gives a buff that heals upon taking damage, and Lynx's works as a mass Anti-Debuff).
    • The AI's logic for Argenti is unique, considering his unique mechanic to charge his Ultimate to a 2nd level: if the party is fighting multiple enemies, he will use his Ultimate immediately whenever it's charged to the 1st level, and if there's only 1 enemy remaning (such as bosses), he will keep charging his energy to full before using his full-powered Ultimate, whose extra damage can reach great heights when used on a single target. While the latter is at least optimal, the former isn't necessarily so.
    • The AI does not take into consideration of battle or enemy mechanics that punishes characters for unleashing skills and/or ultimates, such as Aurumaton Gatekeepers, who can buff themselves and summon Illumination Dragonfishes, and can do so sooner if player units attack with skills/ultimates.
• Art Shift: Certain story moments are depicted in a 2D Visual Novel format as opposed to the usual 3D art style the game usually relies on.
  • The promotional advertisement video for Penacony takes it on a whole different level, as its art style is clearly inspired by early rubber hose cartoons from the 1920s-1930s.
• Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence: It is explained that at least some of the Aeons were originally ordinary mortal lifeforms who managed to find a way to ascend to their current godlike existences.
• Assist Character:
  • Once the Trailblazer unlocks the Path of Preservation during the final battle against Cocolia, the Engine of Creation changes control to the Trailblazer's side. In battle, performing actions with the party charges up Energy for the Engine of Creation, and once full the player can command it to crush Cocolia and her minions with a mighty punch, inflicting massive HP and Weakness damage.
  • Imbibitor Lunae works the same way in the confrontation against Phantylia. After a scripted attack in Phase 2, Jing Yuan calls upon Dan Heng to unleash his power, cueing a gauge to appear at the right of the screen. When it's full, the player can activate it to call Dan Heng to strike, nuking the battlefield for massive Imaginary damage.
• Awful Truth: Alisa Rand, the first Supreme Guardian of Belobog who was credited with driving back the Antimatter Legion from Jarilo-VI seven centuries ago, was also responsible for the Eternal Freeze, having awakened the Stellaron and asked for its help in defeating the invaders. Her successors covered up the truth, and it wasn't until the Trailblazer's arrival and Svarog being convinced to give his account of the events that some people were able to learn the truth. Moreover, all of Alisa's successors have since struggled to resist the Stellaron's whispers, tempting them to stray from the Path of Preservation, having nearly succeeded with Cocolia. So awful was the truth that, upon Cocolia's defeat and the Stellaron's sealing by the Astral Express, her adopted daughter and heir apparent Bronya ultimately chose to keep it a secret between her, Seele, the Trailblazer, Dan Heng, and March 7th, knowing that loss of faith in the government and the resulting societal collapse are the last things she and the whole world need.
• Backtracking: Many quests require you to return to previously-visited areas in order to make progress, though this is fortunately alleviated by the Space Anchors that let you quickly teleport to specific spots in the overworld maps.
• Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic: The Warp gacha system is entirely identical to Wishes in Genshin Impact in structure with all of the same safety nets. It guarantees 4★ items for every 10 pulls, and 5★ items at 90 pulls. The coin-toss pity system from Genshin is here too. There's a 50% chance the first 5★ you pull from the limtied-time banners is the featured one for Characters, and 75% for Light Cones. So if you fail to get the featured item/character when you pull a 5★ from these banners, the next 5★ is guaranteed to be the featured one. Also, the Pity counter and coin toss carry over between featured banners so players who did not get the featured item within the limited period will have a better/guaranteed chance at getting the next one.
• Baleful Polymorph: In "Foxian Tale of the Haunted", the "Suppression: Incarnate Morph" Exorcismic inflicts a random number of enemies with the Incarnate Morph status, which temporarily transforms them into a Warp Trotter and causes any attack inflicted against them to always be Critical.
• The Battle Didn't Count: A rare protagonist example. Luka challenges Svarog to a Hopeless Boss Fight in his companion mission, and after being soundly trashed, he revives, heals up and demands another round. Twice.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • It's established early on that a Stellaron is likely the cause of the Eternal Freeze plaguing Jarilo-VI. However, it's later revealed that Alisa Rand, the first Supreme Guardian, accidentally triggered the calamity after she was forced to implore the Stellaron to help her defeat the Antimatter Legion. It did so by trapping the planet in an Endless Winter, which halted the Legion's advance but also made the planet nigh-uninhabitable.
  • Played straight with Elixir Seekers, the ancestors of the Xianzhou Alliance, but inverted with the Denizens of Abundance. The former originally set out into space to find the secret to immortality, and their search took its toll on their people, while the latter came from backgrounds of loss, plague, and destruction. Thus, when Yaoshi blessed them with immortality in the form of the Ambrosial Arbor, the Alliance suffered from more problems than it solved, whereas the Denizens flourished. When Lan left its mark by firing an arrow and felling the Arbor, the Alliance decided to dedicate their lives to Lan's Path in exterminating the followers of Yaoshi.
  • The "Ambergris Cheese" Curio details the story of a robot who turned some Ambergris of Abundance (an uncommon Synthesis Material) into cheese to sate his master's never-ending hunger. Unfortunately for the duo, the cheese suddenly began to relentlessly self-propagate, so much so that neither of them could eat the cheese faster than it could multiply. They wound up hailing some Mourning Actors to help and immediately booked it into space via gondola, leaving the planet to become overwhelmed by magic cheese.
• Begin with a Finisher: Any accumulated Ultimate energy is carried over in between battles, so it's possible for a party member to enter a new fight with a readily-available Ultimate on their first turn. There's even an achievement to have all four current party members unleash their Ultimates on the first turn.
• Big Bad Ensemble: There are two prominent villainous factions who serve as major overarching antagonists in the game: the Stellaron Hunters, a criminal organization that seeks to find and use Stellarons for their own mysterious gain; and the Antimatter Legion, a horde of aliens who seemingly follow Nanook, the Aeon of Destruction, with the sole goal of ending the entire universe. It's made clear from the very start of the game that both factions are in direct competition against each other and have enough power to devastate entire planets in their wake for their causes. This also isn't factoring in the Fragmentum, an eldritch phenomenon caused by the power of the Stellarons themselves that corrupt anything in its vicinity.
• Bilingual Bonus: Luka's Companion Mission, "Mo Cuishle", is Gaelic for "my love" or, more literally, "my pulse". In addition to being a Shout-Out to Million Dollar Baby, a boxing movie, it also lends toward the characterization of Luka in the same mission. At the end of the mission, it's revealed that Luka's self-imposed trials is actually him being Vicariously Ambitious for a girl named Margie, a Delicate and Sickly girl who dreamed of being just like him but succumbed to the illness plaguing her all her life. His attempts to keep her dream alive goes hand-in-hand with Luka valuing everyone more than himself. His pulse, his reason for living, is to help others fulfill their dreams.
• Bigger on the Inside: The Astral Express looks the size of a normal train when you look at it from Herta Station’s platform. Inside, it’s absolutely huge with an entire living room, large windows that let you admire the landscape and several personal rooms that are fairly spatious.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: You know that sweet blind alchemist lady, Dan Shu, who is helping you translate the Sanctus Medicus medicine recipe? The one who made you medicine as a thank you for helping out that blind little girl? Well it turns out that she's the Master of Sanctus Medicus all along. Played With in that she genuinely considers you a friend and even though she gave the Trailblazer a drug that would have turned them into a Mara inflicted monster, she genuinely thought she was doing them a favor by 'freeing' them from their mortal shell by trying to turn the Trailblazer into a Mara Struck.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: In the quest "Pillow Whisper", gacha mechanics get parodied: the Trailblazer opens 10 chests to obtain nothing but differently-named trash, and then opens 10 more chests, obtaining... the legendary golden trash.
• Bittersweet Ending: At the end of the Jarilo-VI Trailblaze Mission, even though Cocolia is defeated and the Stellaron that had caused the planet centuries of grief is sealed away, the Stellaron has been active for a very long time, and the effects it had on the planet are going to take a similarly long time to revert. On the other hand, Bronya is willing to shoulder that burden to bring the world and its people a better tomorrow, alongside Seele.
• Blessed with Suck: While Xianzhou citizens were "blessed" with immortality, they don't consider this a good thing due the endless problems it has caused them. This hits even harder for Xianzhou citizens who are born with birth defects because the nature of their immortality means their bodies will always revert to their "natural" state, undoing any surgical procedure meant to treat their conditions. For example, when Dan Shu attempted to cure her blindess by implanting prosthetic eyes, her natural eyes attempted to regenerate around the prosthetics, causing her significant pain and forcing her to remove them.
• Block Puzzle:
  • A sidequest chain on Belobog involves a mysterious girl named Cyrille, who is being metaphysically impeded by a series of sliding box puzzles. The Trailblazer helps push the armory boxes around to free Cyrille and help clear her memories. At the end of the sidequest, it's revealed that Cyrille is the deceased 8th Supreme Guardian of Belobog, who was brainwashed into a subservient Puppet King by her associate Stefan Marquez. Her lingering grief manifested in the form of box puzzles because she was killed by being shoved into an armory box and thrown from a cliff to her death.
  • "Aetherium Wars" has a few of these as part of their Victory Zones, a possible reference to the common Strength puzzles seen in Pokémon.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • While bringing along healing or tank characters may crimp your offense a bit, they are absolutely crucial for any content outside of farming. Unlike Genshin Impact, the turn-based nature of Star Rail means that taking damage is inevitable, and unlike most other turn-based RPGs, dodging attacks in Star Rail is not a thing; as a result, players require at least some form of mitigation. Unless you're absolutely sure your damage is more than enough, not bringing any defensive characters is a surefire way to get killed very quickly.
  • The Data Inflation Custom Dice in Gold and Gears plays nearly identical to the Combat Extrapolation Custom Dice in that you want to maximize combat encounters as much as possible, except Data Inflation tones down the infamous RNG of the mode by allowing the player to obtain massive buffs that are multiplicative with player stats without much effort. Being able to consistently obtain all 6 buffs before a boss, by far the most difficult aspect of the mode, substantially reduces the odds of failing. It's notable that you need to complete Gold on Gears on most of the other dice before unlocking Data Inflation.
• Borrowing from the Sister Series: If the rest of this page is any indication, Star Rail recycles a vast number of mechanics and game design choices from Genshin Impact but in the shell of a turn-based RPG with a more linear game world compared to the open-world action RPG that defined the other game. This includes everything from gacha to game progression to Freemium Timer and items.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Elite Foes are non-respawning enemies that can be found in dungeons or zones, often guarding something precious like a rare chest. These enemies are significantly tougher and higher levelled than the random encounters found in the same areas.
• Boss-Only Level: Echoes of War immediately have you fight against a boss that you've previously defeated in a main story Trailblaze Mission. They mostly serve as venues for farming rare Trace upgrade materials.
• Brain Uploading: Whenever people pass away on the Xianzhou Luofu, their consciousness gets digitally uploaded into the Hall of Karma, a secluded location on the ship only the Ten-Lords Commission has access to, although it's framed more as "sending souls to the afterlife" for cultural and spiritual reasons. This can even extend to outsiders who are not native to the Luofu, as demonstrated by Chengjie's late master Ryan. Unlike most examples of the trope though, the purpose of the Hall of Karma isn't so much to pursue transhumanism, but rather to act as a makeshift tomb for the "souls" to rest. During the sidequest "A Teacher and a Friend: Continued", Chengjie contacts his dead master by using an Aurumaton Gatekeeker as a vessel to briefly transfer Ryan's consciousness from the Hall of Karma in order to clarify some suspicions about his master's Starskiff manuscript being flawed.
• Break Meter:
  • The game's combat revolves around Toughness Gauge, which is displayed as a white gauge above enemy health bars. Enemies have one or more type-weaknesses, and attacking them with an type they are weak to depletes their Toughness Gauge in addition to their HP. If the gauge is fully depleted, "Weakness Break" occurs, and the enemy suffers from Break Effect depending on the type of the attack that depleted the gauge: taking big damage, suffering from type-specific Status Effect, and having their turn delayed; increasing the "Break Effect" stat will also strengthen all of aforementioned effects. While the gauge is depleted, they'll also take slightly higher damage from incoming attacks. Upon their next turn, the enemies will recover their gauge.
  • Gepard (Complete) has a unique mechanic from Phase 2 onwards where he will summon allies then surround his party with a unique shield that protects them from all damage. Inflicting damage to any enemy reduces the shield's HP, and once the shield's HP reaches 0 it breaks, instantly inflicting Weakness Break on Gepard and his minions and dealing immensely high damage.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall:
  • The Rock Crab eating competition has a gem of a line about the lack of a certain feature.^*This is actually a hint for how to win the competition, which is to skip through all the text in under 20 seconds.
    The third bite... these stupid additives. You feel thirsty and nauseous. You also complain internally about having no option in the settings to speed up the text display.
  • After beating Dunn in his Silvermane Guards boot camp mission, he commends your strength since he last fought you, to which you can claim "I only have two abilities" or "After that, I gacha'ed loads more".
  • In a text conversation with March where she asks what the Trailblazer is up to, one of the responses is "I'm grinding Calyxes".
  • In "Jolted Awake From a Winter Dream", one of your possible dialogue options to March is "My relics all have speed attributes."
  • The lack of a jump button is referenced in some dialogues where the Trailblazer complains about the inability to jump.
• Brick Joke: In the beginning of the "Jolted Awake From a Winter Dream" mission, Topaz wanders through the Belobog museum and is admiring an exhibit of a Snow Plains bear when she wonders if she can meet one but assumes they're extinct. At the end of the mission, as she and Numby trek across the Snow Plains, they stumble upon a napping Snow Plains cub and she smiles.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • As usual for gacha games, you can spend real money for more Stellar Jade, giving you more chances to get the characters and Light Cones you want from the Warp gacha, or allowing you to replenish your Trailblaze Power to have more quick chances of playing and redeeming rewards from the Calyxes, Stagnant Shadows, and Caverns of Corrosion.
  • The "Tears of Dreams" ascension material (which you can use to ascend light cones and level up traces of any path) introduced in Version 1.6 is only available for real money, either by purchasing the Nameless Honor or a Herta Contract.
  • The Pom-Pom's Fried Fowl item is an upgraded version of the Fruitwood-Grilled Shantak Moa Drumettes that boosts the party's Fire DMG by 16% and ATK by 18% for the next combat. It is the only Omni-Synthesizer recipe that is tied to a real-world event, that being the "Time to Feast! Astral Express" global collaboration event that required purchasing a meal set from a participating chain restaurant (based on location).
• The Butler Did It: The Companion Mission "The Dragon Returns Home" sees Bailu be set upon by assassins that seek to remove her from the picture so Dan Heng can become Imbibitor Lumae once again. It turns out that the mastermind behind the hit was Bailu's own maid Huanxi, who makes one last attempt on Bailu's life before getting killed for her efforts.
• But Thou Must!: This is typically the case, with a handful of exceptions. The game will allow you to choose options that lead to slight variations in dialogue, but you must still progress the story.
  • You have to accept Himeko's offer to join the Astral Express crew in order to progress. Amusingly you actually can decline, which leads to a unique ending showcasing what happens if you do, with credits rolling in like it was a movie of sorts in the end, before it boots you back to the title screen and right at the moment before you talk to Himeko.
  • There's a particularly brutal instance in "The Trees at Peace" Adventure Mission. If you (playing the role of an unnamed IPC personnel) refuse Dudley's order to launch a Fantastic Nuke that will obliterate 24 habitable planets three times in the emoscape, he will execute you on the spot and restart the scene, calling another worker to do the same thing. This will continue until you finally comply with the order.
  • Subverted with Kafka's Companion Mission. You can refuse to help her when she asks, and if you decline enough times you can leave, skipping the quest entirely. You still gain all the rewards you would have obtained from doing the quest normally.
• Capitalism Is Bad: The whole deal behind the "Aurum Alley's Hustle and Bustle" event is that the IPC wants to take over the Luofu's Aurum Alley, a famous night market and cultural landmark, for the purposes of the dock that it's connected to. Aurum Alley's popularity has faded over time and is not pulling in enough money to be sustainable, but the residents fear that if they sell out to the IPC, the market's identity will be destroyed and the IPC will force out its residents and convert the street into a standing warehouse. The Trailblazer is pulled in to help Aurum Alley get back on its feet without bending the knee to the IPC, proving that it can stand on its own without compromising its ideals.
• Capture Balls: As part of their Phonýmon parody, the "Aetherium Wars" game involves capturing "Aether Spirits" (live holograms of various overworld enemies) with a disc-shaped device called "Aether Coins". When you want to capture a wandering Aether Spirit, you point the Aether Coin towards them, which will emit light that hits them and initiates battle; after you win the battle against them, they'll be "captured" in the coin.
• Casting a Shadow: While it may not look that way in terms of its nature, the Quantum element is the closest thing the game has to a darkness element.
• Cast Herd: For storytelling purposes, the nature of a gacha game having dozens of playable characters means that they will have to be grouped according to their factions or affiliations (i.e. Astral Express crew, Herta Space Station, Stellaron Hunters), the planets where they are introduced in (i.e. Jarilo-VI), a combination of both (Overworlders and Underworlders of Belobog), amongst other examples.
• Casting Gag: Several Star Rail characters are alternate selves or expies to their counterparts from the older Honkai installments. miHoYo even went through the effort of casting the exact same Chinese and/or Japanese voice actors who played those "counterparts" to reinforce such references here. For instance, Kana Asumi voiced Bronya Zaychik and her Alternate Self Bronie in Honkai Impact 3rd. Here, she voices Bronya Rand and Silver Wolf, both of which are references to Bronya Zaychik.
• Casual Interstellar Travel:
  • Galactic transportation is made possible by the existence of the titular star rails, a network of routes spanning the cosmos originally created by the deceased Aeon Akivili. Incidentally, the network starts and ends at what is presumed to be Akivili's home planet, which is why Himeko and the Astral Express are following it to send the Astral Express home and seek answers about Akivili's fate. Unfortunately, the process of travel is impeded by the presence of Stellarons, malevolent artifacts that have been scattered across the universe and not only cause havoc but also prevent the Astral Express from moving forwards, forcing its passengers to travel down to the planets and interfere in the locals' business to retrieve and neutralize the Stellarons (and possibly save a few worlds in the process).
  • It's also made clear, especially in collectable books and other side-lore, that other star rail routes were created following Akivili's journey, with some implication that similar-but-not-precisely-identical means of travel have been devised since (most notably, the grand world-ships of the Xianzhou Alliance, and their support vessels and skiffs, are capable of interstellar flight, and the Interastral Peace Corporation also possesses means of interstellar travel and is one of the largest interstellar polities), but how exactly it all works, and how the rails were "laid" without Akivili's help and now extensive the "rail network" is, hasn't been elaborated on fully. The Astral Express is also able to detour off of Akivili's precise route, as shown when they go to the aid of the Alliance's Luofu world-ship.
• Central Theme: Fate and free will. Decisions can affect how the game stories would turn out in the end and how things like fate and free will interwoven with each other as every playable characters is determined to either avert their destiny or just accept it with open hand, with each people have their own philosophies on life and their path represents their view on their life, fate and free will in general. Even when an ending is set in stone, there are many paths one can take which they can freely decide on. Stellaron Hunters call themselves "Destiny's Slave" and act upon Elio's premonitions to find the best possible outcome against Nanook, and they've planted the Trailblazer onto the Astral Express to that end. Also in original Chinese (and Japanese translation), the word that means "Path" more directly translates to "destiny"; it's also said that the Aeons' destiny and way of thinking become restricted to the Path they create the moment they ascend.
• Challenge Run: Warring Expeditions have bonus objectives that reward Stellar Jade upon completion. These include finishing battles within a given number of turns, ensuring that your party members aren't knocked out too often, or entering a battle without the guards being alerted, etc.
• Character Select Forcing: Specific game modes and activities may implement a "Special Mechanism" passive effect on the stage which is beneficial only to some characters, thus encouraging the player to build their party around taking advantage of it to make the fight easier. For example, Physical-type characters deal 75% more damage on the "Cavern of Corrosion: Path of Gelid Wind" stage.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • One of the obtainable Curios in Simulated Universe is Punklorde Mentality, a game cartridge-esque device that afflicts enemies with an additional Weakness corresponding to your team for 3 turns upon entering combat. This Curio later becomes the subject of Silver Wolf's Companion Mission, "Punklorde Mentality", where the Trailblazer and a cybersecurity manager named Leonard are tasked with tracking down traces of Silver Wolf's interference on the Herta Space Station and ultimately locating the Curio itself.
  • This trope gets referenced in the Dreamtour Handbook regarding Clockie's appearance if you pick a certain dialogue option.
    The gun that showed up in scene one has to go off in scene three, right? You might just be right. In this universe ruled by causality, not a single encounter is without significance.
• Chemically-Induced Insanity: After the Trailblazer helps Dan Shu rescue a blind girl, Dan Shu decides to give the Trailblazer a strange medicine as a thank-you present. Assuming they ingest the medicine the Trailblazer begins to feel unusual and returns to the Seat of Divine Foresight to find mara-struck swarming the building. After fighting off the mara-struck, the medicine's effects disperse and they realize that whatever they took caused them to hallucinate Cloud Knights as hostiles. They eventually conclude that the Stellaron inside their body repelled the effects of the medicine before it afflicted permanent damage.
• Cherry Tapping: There is an achievement named "Mission Impossible?", wherein the player must use Huohuo's Basic Attack to deal the defeating blow to Phantylia the Undying. While the player has probably used Basic Attacks to deal the defeating blow to bosses a few times already at this point, what makes the achievement this trope is Huohuo's Basic Attack animation. Essentially Tail pushes Huohuo at the enemy, causing the frenzied girl to swing her white flag - which normally symbolizes surrender - at them, somehow hurting them.
• Choose a Handicap: In the Simulated Universe, Error Code Curios initially offer debuffs or gameplay disadvantages, but can then fix themselves to offer benefits instead after you win the next three battles. The "Implement of Error" Event gives you the option to pick one of three Error Code Curios. However, this can be subverted since you can just refuse the selection offer.
• The Chosen Many: While anyone with a strong enough willpower is stated to be able to draw power upon the Paths of the Aeons, the Aeons themselves may mark some beings and turn them into Emanators - essentially avatars of the Aeon who represent the totality of their path. The Emanators of Destruction in particular are feared due to being more than capable of wiping out planets they attack.
• Closet Shuffle: One bizarre event in Belobog involves the Trailblazer willingly stuffing themselves in a dresser and then convincing themselves that they are going to launch a surprise attack on the "hotel devil" (AKA jumping out and scaring the poor room service fellow). Following the dialogue chain through to the very end grants a Praise of High Morals.
• Citadel City: Jarilo-VI's last remaining city, Belobog, only survived the disastrous ice age thanks to being built like a fortress, with its massive walls keeping the cold out and the heat inside. However, they are also besieged by the Fragmentums, which continually spawn monsters.
• Cognizant Limbs: In order to directly damage the Doomsday Beast, its Antimatter Engine, Disaster's Right Hand, and Dawn's Left Hand must all be destroyed first. Each of these parts has its own health bar, and destroying them will hinder the boss's usage of specific skills. They will be restored during the second phase of the fight, requiring you to repeat the process.
• Collection Sidequest:
  • In the Simulated Universe game mode, you gradually receive bonus Stellar Jades from the Codex menu if you discover enough Blessings for a given Path. Similarly, newly-discovered Curios each reward 30 Stellar Jade. The game also encourages the player to keep on collecting many of these items because several achievements can be earned by filling up your Codex.
  • There are achievements for collecting enough readable items within a given location.
  • There are also achievements for collecting all other types of miscellaneous interactible objects, such as the Memory Bubbles in the Herta Space Station, or the Astral Express crew's wanted posters in Belobog.
• Color-Coded Elements: Due to their importance in the gameplay mechanics, the seven elements are each associated with a certain distinct color; Physical is white, Fire is red, Ice is blue, Lightning is violet, Wind is green, Quantum is indigo, and Imaginary is yellow. These colors are also prominently used as the font colors of damage values during battle, or the background color of the character's Ultimate icon, and so on.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Missions and their waypoint icons are color-coded to help you distinguish their type. Main story Trailblaze Missions are colored gold, character-related Companion Missions are purple, Daily Missions are light green, and sidequest-type Adventure Missions are light blue.
  • The "Calyx" buds are appropriately named and color-coded. "Calyx (Golden)" reward EXP items, Credits and materials for general character progression, while "Calyx (Crimson)" reward Path-specific Ascension and Trace upgrade materials.
  • In the Navigation map interface, most points-of-interest (such as Calyxes, Caverns of Corrosion, Stagnant Shadows, and Space Anchors) that you've already activated and can teleport to have light blue-coded icons, while the Echoes of War have red-bordered icons. Any "undiscovered" ones have gray or muted colors instead.
  • Special breakable objects may contain green or purple essence that respectively restores your party's HP or Technique points.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: In the menus, icons and graphical user interface, the rarity of a character, item, Light Cone or Relic is denoted by a color; from gray (1★), green (2★), blue (3★), purple (4★), to orange (5★).
• Colossus Climb: At the climax of Jarilo-VI, Cocolia takes control of the Engine of Creation, a Humongous Mecha that was left behind by the Old World. After it harasses the party for a while, the heroes attempt to stop it by having the Trailblazer ascend its body, using each others' abilities to launch them higher until they reach the head.
• Combat and Support: The seven character classes each fall under one of these two categories.
  • Combat: Destruction, The Hunt, and Erudition.
  • Balance: Nihility.
  • Support: Preservation, Abundance, and Harmony.
• Combat Stilettos: Nearly every playable female character and some plot-important NPCs with unique models (ie: Cocolia) wear high heeled footwear and they can still fight exceptionally well in them without being hindered by their impracticality. The designs of each female character's high heels can vary, ranging from traditional pumps (Himeko and Asta), to heeled or ankle-height boots (most of the Belobogian females), to heeled sandals (Tingyun). The only female characters who don't wear high heels are Lynx Landau, who wears practical cold-weather boots, Silver Wolf, who wears high-laced chunky boots, and those with small build models like Hook, Clara, and Bailu (the former two are literal children while Bailu is a Really 700 Years Old reincarnating Vidyadhara with a child-like body).
• Company Cross References: There are easter eggs and references to miHoYo games set outside of the Honkai franchise, such as Genshin Impact and Tears of Themis.
  • The Traveler's Wind Glider can be spotted among the Curios that Herta keeps in her personal collection aboard the Herta Space Station.
  • Attempting to access a locked map transition cues a reference to Paimon's infamous "How about we explore the area ahead of us later?" line whenever players try to go outside the overworld's current bounds, as does a Cloud Knight blocking a path in Starskiff Haven on your first visit.
  • When discussing The Adventurous Moles, Julian expresses his desire to go on a grand adventure in a fantasy world of magic and swords, complete with his own emergency food. The latter line alludes to a Running Gag about Paimon being jokingly treated as emergency food.
  • The Trailblazer can also jokingly tell Pom-Pom that they would use them as emergency food in a dialogue.
  • At the end of the "Natasha's List" readable item is a paragraph of her observations on a little boy named Timmy who's obsessed with "pigeons." This is a reference to a same-named boy from Genshin Impact who can be found feeding pigeons near the main gate of Mondstadt.
  • Pela's phone cover features minimalistic icons of the male leads from Tears of Themis.
  • In the second chapter of the Tales of the Fantastic event, the Trailblazer is tasked with several trials by the Statue of the High Elder. One dialogue with the statue has it recounting the tale of Dan Feng, leading into the line "They say that before he set out, he spoke these words-". One of the possible replies is "I wish not for dominion, yet I cannot watch the common folks suffer!", referencing Zhongli's famous line from his Genshin Impact character trailer.
  • In Luocha's Companion Mission, the Express crew are given a page with writing on the back. The note contains a spoiler for the in-universe book The Angler Mystery, revealing the novel's killer as the nephew of Chang the Ninth, referencing the NPC of the same name from Genshin Impact.
  • In the "Aurum Alley Hustle & Bustle" event, the story has parts where you have to debate with the story characters, refute their points and present relevant evidence, similar to the gameplay in Fontaine's Archon Quest where you attend 2 different trials in the story. The difference is that there, you also have to collect the evidences yourself, while here, your acquaintances have already collected them for you. Given that Star Rail's Version 1.3 came 2 weeks after Genshin's Fontaine update (4.0), this might've been intentional.
• The Con: The sidequest "From Xianzhou With Love" involves a message line called the "Foxian Beauty Chat" based on the Xianzhou Luofu that is currently getting the men on the Herta Space Station in a tizzy, with some of them even sending gifts to the supposed Foxian beauty named Daiqing on the other end of the line. Asta is worried that the line may be a scam that is negatively affecting her staff and sends the Trailblazer to investigate. After attempting to send Daiqing a ludicrous amount of Credits, the Trailblazer and Qingque eventually discover that "Daiqing" is actually an average-looking Vidyadhara man who wanted to make undesirable people like him happy over the internet even if it meant duping desperate men out of money from time to time. The Trailblazer has the option of turning him in to the Realm-Keeping Commission for fraud or allowing him to continue under the condition that he stops asking for money.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Aetherium Wars sure took cues from Pokémon alright. Rules that don't apply to the enemy AI include —
  • Having an infinite amount of skill points.
  • Needing less energy to use their ultimates than you do.
  • Being able to have more than one of the same Aether Spirit on a team.
  • Being blatantly more powerful than what you have access to, such as enemy Voidranger Reavers not needing to expend health to attack, Silvermane Lieutanents creating shields twice as strong as your own, and the Voidranger Trampler getting free turns whenever any Spirit dies, rather than just when any of yours do.
  • The Final Boss Hook can use multiple Overlord Aether Spirits at once, when you're restricted to just one.
• Content Warnings: Just like how it was done in the previous PC-ported miHoYo games, the PC version of Star Rail briefly opens with a lengthy disclaimer stating the game has scenes and Epileptic Flashing Lights that may trigger those with photosensitive epilepsy.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Most of Welt's dialogue on the Astral Express and personal information in the Data Bank touches upon his various goings-ons throughout the events of Honkai Impact 3rd, A Post-Honkai Odyssey, and the web manga Alien Space (which directly precedes the events of Star Rail) in some fashion, although he keeps things brief in order to not overwhelm the Trailblazer with long stories. It's also mentioned that when Welt was rescued from deep space that there was another with him, heavily implied to be Void Archives.
  • The concept of the "Imaginary Tree" (which Otto Apocalypse described in Honkai Impact 3rd as something that branches out "into an infinity of worlds") has its own entry in the Data Bank of Honkai: Star Rail. In this world, it is a theory widely accepted by the modern scientific community, and its tree-like structure is described to house the various worlds existing in a different space-time.
  • The protagonists allude to their presence in Belobog as "variables" that Svarog didn't factor into his calculations. When you return to the Robot Settlement to meet Clara and Svarog after defeating Cocolia, Clara will refer to the Astral Express trio as "The variables".
  • In the Belobog Underworld, you can find a Senior Minecart Operator and his apprentice trying to work out their differences and can help them out by completing a series of minecart rail puzzles. Later, on the Xianzhou Luofu, you can meet Master Gongshu in the Artisanship Commission who wants the Trailblazer to test his new experimental weapon, the Luminflux Pyxis, via a series of light beam puzzles. Complete enough of his puzzles and Master Gongshu will claim that he had a dream of being a minecart rail operator with an apprentice.
  • The "Stellar Shadowseeker" event has March 7th having a problem with her camera's pictures being corrupted, having odd shadows covering her pictures. It's a reference to the Trailblaze Continuance chapter "A Foxian Tale of the Haunted", where one of the sub-missions deals with a heliobus haunting March's camera because it was fascinated with the pictures she took, damaging the pictures as a side effect.
  • Several of Acheron's red text lines are allusions to events and characters surrounding Raiden Mei during the story of Honkai Impact 3rd.
• Cosmetic Award: You can unlock additional profile pictures for your Trailblazer Profile by exploring, accomplishing certain in-game milestones, or by completing certain quests.
• Counter-Attack:
  • March 7th will counter an enemy attack with Ice damage when an ally with a Shield is attacked. This can trigger up to twice per round and recharges fully at the start of her turn.
  • Clara has her Talent, Because We're Family, where taking direct damage will cause Svarog to mark the assailant with Mark of Counter and retaliate with a single-target Physical blast. Her Ultimate, Promise, Not Command, upgrades her counter to activate whenever any ally is attacked and boosts Svarog to powerful Area of Effect blasts up to twice per round. (Thrice with high enough eidolon level)
  • One of the ban and punishment gimmicks a Guardian Shadow can impose allows it to attack you in retaliation if you attacked it first.
  • A Silvermane Lieutenant can put up a defensive stance with his shield when using his "Shield Reflect" ability. When attacked, he'll then counterattack with a series of painful stabs. He can be prevented from countering if you inflict Freeze, Imprisonment, or break his Toughness Gauge.
• Crapsack World: Jarilo-VI has seen better days. In the centuries following the Eternal Freeze, the once lush and green planet has been reduced to an icy husk of its former self. There is only one hospitable place for humans, and even then the city of Belobog has been divided into two parts, the Overworld and the Underworld, with the latter being cut off from the former for a decade with supplies beginning to dwindle and various factions breaking out into fights over supply and demand. To make matters worse, the Fragmentum is beginning to encroach into the city both above and below, causing parts of the Lost Bastion of Humanity to be closed off by the Silvermane Guardians. But the worst part is that the person in charge of the city and who is supposed to be leading the fight against the Fragmentum and its monsters is actually under the thrall of the very thing that caused the Eternal Freeze itself.
• Creator Thumbprint: The four-pointed star symbol is used prominently in Star Rail, just as how it's been a recurring symbol in miHoYo's older IPs like the previous Honkai games, Genshin Impact, and Tears of Themis. In this game, it's the symbol used to denote the rarity of items, Light Cones and Relics, it's the icon of the objective indicators, it's found in the visual "borders" when you move to an adjacent map, it's in Welt's "Synthetic Black Hole" Ultimate, etc.
• Credits Gag: If you choose to take the Non-Standard Game Over near the start of the game, or near the end of Penacony's Trailblaze Mission in 2.0, the ending is capped off with a fake credits roll with all of the characters listed as "actors" and production staff like a movie.
• Critical Hit: There are Crit Rate and Crit DMG stats that respectively gauge the Critical Hit chance and Critical Hit damage of attacks. Some status buffs also temporarily increase these stats during battles, and some characters' Traces may also modify these stats (in fact, a character like Yanqing is built around landing critical hits). Successful critical hits are visually indicated with a larger text font.
• Crosshair Aware: The "Lock On" status debuff is visualized as a red crosshair icon on top of a character's portrait, signifying that said character is being prioritized by the enemy for attacks and would be receiving more damage.
• Cross-Popping Veins: When your units are being afflicted with enemy taunts to force them to attacking a specific enemy instead of their friends, they will have anger veins above their head. This also happens if the enemy is the one affected with Taunts (i.e. from the Preservation Trailblazer's skill).
• Crystalline Creature: According to a research note called "Species of the Galaxy: Tottonid" on Herta Station, the Tottonids were an alien species of living crystals who originated from the planet Totton, a Death World plagued by violent storms, and they can communicate with each other by sending electric signals to their cores. They were hunted down to extinction by organic creatures following their collaboration with Rubert the Emperor during the Mecha Wars, with the only remaining remnant of their existence being the Curio "Unbearable Weight"; an imperial crown once worn by the Tottonid emperor that supposedly gives the wearer wisdom and knowledge.
• Cut and Paste Environments: The stages for the Simulated Universe and Forgotten Hall game modes are recycled from the "open-world" exploration maps. The major difference comes from the inclusion of map borders that reduce the stages' boundaries.
• Cyberspace: The Simulated Universe is a digital recreation of the real universe housed entirely within Herta's office. Because it is a mirror of the real universe, it also contains digital recreations of the Aeons that control aspects of the universe, which are otherwise next-to-impossible to meet normally. The idea is that by uploading themselves into the Simulated Universe disguised as Akivili and beating some enemies inside, the Trailblazer can attract the attention of the digital Aeons, which will allow Herta to extract information on them as if they were the real deal. Incidentally, Herta also tries to gamify the Simulated Universe to make the experience more fun and engaging for the Trailblazer as opposed to simply going in and beating everything to a pulp until the Aeons appear.
• Damage Over Time: The Burn, Shock, Bleed, and Wind Shear status ailments deal lingering damage per turn. In the Simulated Universe, the Path of Nihility also specializes in inflicting and taking advantage of these DoT effects against your enemies.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: For PC players who had also played Genshin Impact, they would recognize the many familiar UI and features carried over from said game to Honkai: Star Rail. However, the hotkeys used to quickly access a specific menu in Honkai is different from Genshin, having been swapped around, which some players may need to get used to. The only hotkey that remains consistent between the two games is F3, which brings up the Warp (gacha) menu.
• Dark Is Not Evil: The Destruction is characterized by a desire to bring an end to all things; the Aeon of Destruction, Nanook, and his minions, the Antimatter Legion, are a major antagonistic force. Despite this, a few playable characters walk the Path of Destruction and are purely heroic, including the Trailblazer themselves.
• Dark Reprise: "If I Can Stop One Heart From Breaking" gets a somber Lonely Piano Piece arrangement during the scene immediately after Firefly is murdered by Something Unto Death.
• A Day in the Limelight: Companion Missions are side quests focused on a specific playable character. They're essentially one of the game's additional ways to flesh out said character's lore and backstory, and at least for some of them, you can get Visitor Verification after the mission, where said character will pay the Astral Express a visit. Like in Genshin Impact, you can also play their "trial" version for this mission. Played with in that in some Companion Missions, some other character may have equal or more prominence than the supposed "companion": Arlan's CM has you follow Asta for most of the story to find the missing Arlan (whom she suspects to have some disappointments towards her), while Dan Heng and March's C Ms have Bailu and Fu Xuan respectively as the other major character; for the latter, Fu Xuan even gets to visit the Astral Express after the mission's finished. It's also played with in case of Luocha's and Yanqing's missions, in that you don't accompany them - the actual Luocha is always offscreen, and you only see him through photo and video footages as well as when March tries to "act" as him to deduce his motives; Yanqing only leaves behind a recording that showed his activities in trying to look for Blade, meeting Jingliu along the way, and you'll be playing as Yanqing inside said recording.
• Dialog During Gameplay: Depending on the fight's context, some voiced dialogue lines will play during the Turn-Based Combat. For example, Cocolia has a scripted line and a cinematic just before she drops a meteor on you. However, many instances of this trope can be seamless, such as March 7th suddenly talking about fruits when the Abundant Ebon Deer grows a fruit-bearing plant during its second phase.
• Didn't Think This Through: The Unshackled intend to preserve endangered species... by turning them loose wherever, at best resulting in hilarity when the life forms released by competing members eat one another and at worst disrupting local ecosystems when released where they do not belong.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: A flashback during Yukong's Companion Mission reveals that Caiyi died while being held by a grieving Yukong after the former was grievously wounded during combat.
• Disc-One Final Boss: The Disciples of Sanctus Medius turn out to not be the main players in the Stellaron incident on the Luofu and were simply manipulated into bringing the Stellaron aboard. Upon defeating their leader Dan Shu, the "Tingyun" that had been accompanying the party for the majority of the questline is revealed to be Phantylia, one of the seven Lord Ravagers of the Antimatter Legion who devised a scheme to make the Xianzhou Alliance implode upon itself by inflicting total societal collapse. The attention then turns to defeating Phantylia in order to prevent further damage to the Xianzhou Luofu and contain the Stellaron outbreak.
• Discard and Draw: In the Simulated Universe, the Shining Trapezohedron Die replaces all Curios you currently have with random Curios, and Fool's Mask does the same with Blessings.
• Dead Person Conversation: In the sidequest "A Teacher and a Friend", Chengjie, a student at the Artisanship Commission, attempts to live his late master Ryan's dreams by trying to complete an experimental starskiff project after the Trailblazer and Qingque accidentally damaged the manuscript during combat. After a failed attempt at reproducing the design, Chengjie decides to ask the Divination Commission to summon Ryan's soul from the Hall of Karma, which the Trailblazer and Qingque are able to fast-track after running a favor. Upon showing the temporarily resurrected Ryan in an Aurumaton Gatekeeper vessel the damaged manuscript, he reveals that the design is flawed and promptly destroys it, suggesting to Chengjie that he follow his own career path rather than trying to force himself to be good at starskiff engineering.
• Death by De-aging: At the end of the sidequest "Todd Riordan's Academic Research", Todd discovers that he made a fatal error in the deaging experiment passed down to him by his mentor Scholar Bernini in that he cannot stop the deaging process once started, and realizes that Bernini must have shared the same fate. If the Trailblazer chooses to report his crime, Blade appears to lament his fate at the very end, while if they choose not to they fulfill his Last Request to accompany him for one last tour of the Luofu and embrace the simple pleasures that he never got to experience as a child before he turns into a baby and disappears.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: Losing all four active party members in battle will not result in a Game Over but will merely respawn you at a nearby Space Anchor, which will then replenish your party members' health bars. Subverted in Simulated Universe, where getting a total party KO will end the run (except for when you have aquired a curio that can prevent the run from ending from such occurrence, which have limited uses).
• Defeat Means Friendship: During Jarilo-VI's penultimate story mission, you knock out Dunn, a captain of the Silvermane Guards. He texts you afterwards, declaring your friendship to have started after his battle with you, and invites you to lead his troops in a training exercise.
• Denser and Wackier: While the rest of miHoYo's repertoire aren't for want of humor, Star Rail cranks up the amount of stupid, comical, and sassy dialogue and flavor text by a noticeable degree. The game's humor is often compared by players to Disco Elysium in terms of how ridiculous it can get, such as the Trailblazer's habit of ponderous meditations over trash cans.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • While playing Aventurine's POV in Penacony, the player can still free Origami Birds from their hiding places. Despite this, Aventurine can't see them, as his dialogue indicates he can't see or hear them. Of course, only the Trailblazer can perceive these birds.
  • It's possible to brute force the nightingale statue puzzle, not paying heed to Dr. Ratio's suggestion to check the side room. Doing so gets you unique dialogue from Aventurine and a berating from Ratio for being stubborn.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: In-universe; the Trailblazer has the option of spying on Bronya's dreams while exploring the Golden Hour. When doing so, they hear dialogue from her that sounds vaguely suggestive towards Seele, causing them to get excited. It later turns out that Bronya and Seele are talking about moving boxes, making the Trailblazer frustrated at the plot twist and hanging up.
• Door to Before: During your map exploration, you may come across doors, gates or passageways that serve as shortcuts to previously-visited spots.
• Double Unlock: It's going to take a while before you can equip Planar Ornaments, let alone farm them. The Relics system (which make up a bulk of your party members' stats) are available after you reach Boulder Town, but the last two Relic slots (the Planar Ornaments) remain locked until after you defeat Cocolia. You are then given a pair of starter Planar Ornaments for the sake of the tutorial, but the reliable places of farming them are only available after you beat World 2 of the Simulated Universe.
• Downer Ending:
  • The sidequest "Silent Yet Shining" has a doozy: Kluzer, the boxer you've brought the Fragmentum armor at his employer's request, is suffering from corrosion symptoms and loses in the Fight Club, but despite this is coerced by his boss to go out there and find another, bigger Fragmentum armor if he wants to be hired again. The Trailblazer arrives to save him from the monster, but he dies anyway from the corrosion, rendering all of it pointless. To twist the knife in, it's later revealed that Kluzer was the one sending the various gifts to Natasha's clinic earlier in the questline, and was trying to earn more money so he could keep doing it.
  • Bailu's Companion Mission "Evanesce Like the Morning Dew" ends as this, with Banxia succumbing to Mara-sickness before she could meet her lover Liangmu. However, thanks to Bailu's treatments, the nurse is still able to retain her sanity, but she's mutated so badly that Liangmu doesn't even recognize her and the last thing she sees is him fleeing in terror. The Trailblazer and Bailu then subsequently have Mercy Kill Banxia and track down Liangmu. Then, they find out that Liangmu never truly loved Banxia and was only using her to try and secure an Elixir of Immortality, and his only reaction to her death is disappointment that all his effort into conning her was wasted. Thankfully, you do have the option to give the asshole a savage beating he completely deserves as a form of catharsis, with Bailu agreeing with you and giving him several years of hiccups as an extra punishment.
• Draw Aggro:
  • The Taunt status debuff forces the victim to attack the caster for as long as it's active. Should this happen to a party member of yours, they won't be able to select other targets.
  • Some moves have the ability to increase the chance of being attacked, such as Clara's Ultimate or March 7th's Skill. While this doesn't guarantee that they will be attacked, it can improve the odds even if the enemy is resistant to Taunt.
• Dynamic Difficulty: Similiarly to Genshin Impact before it, the game has an 'Equilibrium' mechanic that raises the difficulty of all enemies in all worlds once you reach a certain Trailblazing Rank, but also upgrades their loot to compensate. Thankfully, it's not an immediate change as the player has to first beat a trial to unlock the new Equilibrium rank, but you must do it if you want to progress through the main plot. When first told about this mechanic by a mysterious voice, the Trailblazer can even outright ask if this is Dynamic Difficulty.

Tropes E to H

• Early Game Hell: The Simulated Universe plays out in this manner. You start out with only three Paths available (Preservation, Remembrance and Elation) with limited options for Blessings and a fairly challenging difficulty curve that isn't all that different from the base game, but as you progress, you slowly unlock more buffs and gimmicks that will make later worlds more managable. World 2 unlocks the Path Resonances (which grant additional buffs for the amount of same Path Blessings accumilated), World 3 unlocks the Ability Tree and Curios, and you'll gain full access to all seven Paths by World 5 with Abundance being the last to unlock.
• Earn Your Fun: Expansion Modules add new Paths to the Simulated Universe, but if you want to unlock the Paths for use in the base Simulated Universe you must complete the entire Expansion Module and see their endings.
• Easter Egg:
  • Staying on the character select screen for the Trailblazer at the start of the game for an excessive amount of time will cue additional voice lines of Silver Wolf nagging Kafka to hurry up and pick one.
  • In the Cosmodyssey event minigame, assignments require the player to pick from a pool of nine random characters (divided into 3 rounds) to handle a task together. Normally the result dialogue is fixed and the character names are ad-libbed into their slots, but picking special trios will elicit unique text; for example, picking Silver Wolf, Blade and Kafka will change a mention of Blade's name to "Bladie", and picking Huohuo, Sushang and Guinaifen will add an extra line framing it as the escapades of the Ghost-Hunting Squad.
• Eldritch Abomination: Aeons exist in a state that transcends all known laws of physics, and their motivations and thoughts are utterly alien and unknowable. They are also ridiculously omnipotent such that they hardly pay heed to mortal affairs, only very rarely giving the most exceptional among them a brief glance (which alone significantly powers them up) before moving on. The seemingly sole exception is Akivili, Aeon of the Trailblaze, who preferred the form of a human mortal and personally traveled the stars with their entourage, the Nameless, aboard the Astral Express.
• Eldritch Location: Path Space, which appears to be some higher plane of existence upon which the Aeons reside. The Trailblazer has entered it due to the Simulated Universe or due to attracting the glance of an Aeon. March once entered it while struggling against the Garden of Recollection's Messenger for hints about her origin.
• Elemental Powers: Apart from Paths, all playable characters fall under one of seven damage types: Physical, Fire, Ice, Wind, Lightning, Quantum, and Imaginary.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Surprisingly Averted. Despite having well-defined elements, the elemental weaknesses of the enemies are not based on the elements they use, and they tend to have more than one Elemental weakness. While some of them might be logical, such as a creature made of ice being weak to fire, they can also be weak to another element that isn't mutually exclusive. Also notably, playable characters themselves, barring any special traits or skills, aren't any more or less resistant to one element over another and there aren't stats for defending against specific elements.
• Emotion Control: In Penacony's dreamscape, the Trailblazer learns how to perform a technique called Clockwork that allows them to directly tamper with the emotions of other dreamers. Certain NPCs can be influenced in this way by changing their emotions to Calm, Angry, Happy, or Sad with the Emo Dial, with each emotion providing unique dialogue and exposition for each character. In addition, some characters' Emo Dials have been damaged due to the interference of memes; the Trailblazer can use Clockwork to repair them using Emo Gears and restore their lost emotions, opening up new sidequests that elaborate on their situations and backstories.
• Enemy Mine: When Blade forces Dan Heng to reveal his true identity as the High Elder of the Vidyadhara Imbibitor Lunae, Yanqing resolves to bring them both to justice and powers up to fight them simultaneously. Blade and Dan Heng wind up teaming up to quell Yanqing's assault before they can go back to killing each other.
• Equipment Upgrade: Light Cones and Relics can be leveled up by giving them specific EXP-boosting items or other spares, with each level increasing their base stats. There are also additional systems regarding equipment upgrades:
  • Light Cones also have level caps that can be raised through Ascension. There's also a Superimposition feature that allows you to upgrade a Light Cone's passive effect by feeding it with a duplicate of its own.
  • Relics can gain additional or improved substats the higher their upgrade level becomes, with each substat upgrade occuring at every 3 levels.
• Epic Fail:
  • One of the Frigid Prowler's special moves is to devour an Everwinter Shadewalker mook to charge up for a powerful attack. However, if you defeat all of the Everwinter Shadewalkers before the Frigid Prowler is able to consume them, the move drops the Frigid Prowler's DEF instead, making it easier to fight. There's even an achievement for doing exactly this.
  • Similar to this is the Decaying Shadow, preparing its strongest move "Liberation of the Golden Age" with an array of 9 projectiles fanned out behind them that are destroyed one at a time when they're attacked. Inflicting Weakness Break will stop the move cold, but they will simply attempt to cast it again once they recover. Attacking them 9 times without inflicting a Break, however, will destroy all the projectiles and cause the move to fail completely, netting you an achievement.
• Excited Title! Two-Part Episode Name!: All the quests in the "Aetherium Wars" event are named as such, in keeping with the Phonýmon aesthetic.
• Extreme Omnivore: Some "food" you can obtain is clearly not meant for consumption by organic lifeforms despite the game classifying them as food items. There is an event on the Xianzhou Luofu where you obtain a collection of anime, video games, and porn that was thrown out by a man after he got married, upon which you receive a bundle of Pleasant-Looking Trash that you can eat. The implications of what you're actually putting in your characters' mouths are a sight to behold.
• Faceless Goons: Many humanoid mooks wear full-body armor with helmets that conceal their entire faces.
• Facial Composite Failure: Seven wanted posters can be found in Belobog. Four of them are comically messy sketches of the Trailblazer, March 7th, Dan Heng, and Sampo, and the remaining three depict the aforementioned characters except the Trailblazer in a glamorous Shoujo romance manga style. It's later revealed that the former posters were drawn by Gepard while the latter were drawn by Pela.
• Fake Longevity: Most of the needed items for your character progression and their availability as rewards from their related content (i.e. Calyxes, Caverns of Corrosion, Stagnant Shadows, Echoes of War) are gated behind the Freemium Timer, ensuring that you'll have to wait for enough energy/stamina resource in order to tackle them. This means that it will take a lot of playtime for you to fully upgrade your party members. There are also additional systems and game mode features that go along with increasing your playtime:
  • Because the substats of Relics are determined by luck and RNG, players have to repeatedly grind content such as the Caverns of Corrosion if they want to min-max or find the ideal substats for their Relics.
  • Echoes of War can only be completed for a maximum of three times per week. Given how you'll need their rewards for multiple times, the game expects you to play for weeks.
  • The Simulated Universe game mode is a good source of precious items like Credits, Stellar Jades, Herta Bond, and Star Rail Pass. However, its rewards reset weekly as a way to both encourage the player to grind again for the next week, and to prevent the player from quickly accumulating them.
• Fame Gate: Trailblaze Missions are gated behind your Trailblaze Level, requiring you to grind other content for Trailblaze EXP first if you want to progress through the main story.
• Fanservice:
  • Some character designs, splash artworks and poses evoke fanservice, such as Stelle wearing a miniskirt, March 7th's short skirt, Asta having bare shoulders and exposed back, or Tingyun showing her legs.
  • Cutscenes and camera angles may also play along by giving Male Gaze or Female Gaze. One example for the latter is Dan Heng's attempted CPR which is played in first-person from the perspective of the Trailblazer.
  • Artwork for most characters' sixth and final Eidolon Resonances give the impression that they are naked; as they are also depicted asleep, it also gives the impression that they are being reborn once they achieve their full potential.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • According to miscellaneous lore bits such as the Data Bank entry "Rubert the Emperor," the description of the Assignment "Born to Obey," and the description of the Simulated Universe Curio "Mechanical Cuckoo Clock," robots and other silicon-based lifeforms in the galaxy were once persecuted by organic lifeforms, with tensions exacerbated by the aforementioned Rubert, who launched the Mecha Wars with the intent of killing every single organic lifeform in the galaxy following the Second Rubert Rebellion. Things got so bad that the IPC planned killing all mechanical lifeforms in return as a last-ditch measure to bring the conflict to an end (and may have led to the subsequent extinction of the Tottonids mentioned in the research paper "Species of the Galaxy: Tottonid"). The tide turned when Screwllum, newly appointed to the Genius Society by Nous the Erudition, led an uprising and liberated his kin from Rubert's tyranny, causing the IPC and organic lifeforms in general to slowly accept them as equals, with the Mechanical Cuckoo Clock being given to him by the IPC as a peace offering.
  • The general populace on the planet Sigonia-IV was extremely jealous of the Avgin race's natural beauty and empathetic talent and hated the Katican race for their violent and barbaric culture, causing them to be heavily persecuted and turned away from the Sigonian nation brought about by the protection of the IPC. The Katicans eventually massacred all but one of the Avgins in a brutal tragedy, with a boy named Kakavasha narrowly escaping due to pure serendipity, becoming the Avgin race's Sole Survivor.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Jarilo-VI, specifically Belobog, bears a strong industrialization-era Russian cultural aesthetic, while the Xianzhou Alliance can best be described as "Space Imperial China". Penacony takes heavily from the US during The Roaring '20s in terms of aesthetic and music; visitors there are called "Dreamchasers", like how there are many immigrants during said era in the US in search of the "American Dream".
• Fight Woosh: Standard overworld battles have the screen dramatically zooming in with a space effect before transitioning to the combat screen. Event battles are instead prefaced by the screen shattering like glass before combat.
• Fission Mailed: The Laurel Crown of Planar Shifts is a special Curio in the Simulated Universe that only triggers if you lose to any non-boss battle. Upon activation it will not kick you out of Simulated Universe and the battle will instead be counted as a win, with all of your characters being revived and healed to full HP. The Curio can only be activated once before breaking.
• Flavor Text: Every single item that you can collect and store in your inventory contains a flavor text, some of which contribute to the worldbuilding, while others contain in-jokes and supplemental quotes.
• Flunky Boss: A large number of boss fights involve the boss either starting with additional enemies at their side or having the capability to summon additional enemies.
• Four Lines, All Waiting: Midway through the Penacony storyline, characters team up and split up, causing the story to diverge into four distinct plot threads. While the Trailblazer, March and Himeko continue investigating the circumstances behind Firefly and Robin's deaths under the pretense of assisting the Family, Welt meets with Acheron to confirm some suspicions of his own and gather more intel on the darkness lurking behind Penacony's shadow. Black Swan also splits up to investigate the truth behind Acheron and makes contact with Constance and Boothill separately, and Aventurine and Dr. Ratio attempt to reconvene with Sunday for the two's plan of exposing Penacony's greatest secret, which would theoretically lead to the IPC re-taking Penacony.
• 419 Scam: Upon scanning a QR code in the Fyxestroll Garden, you receive a letter from someone posing as "the former Vidyadhara elder". For further hilarity, the Trailblazer can contact the actual former Vidyadhara elder and ask if this was his doing.
• Freemium Timer: Trailblaze Power is the capped energy/stamina resource which is consumed to claim rewards from the Calyxes, Caverns of Corrosion, Stagnant Shadows, and Echoes of War. It naturally replenishes over time, but you can also use Fuel or Stellar Jade to instantly recover some of it.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • By the end of the Jarilo-VI arc, Bronya and Seele become Vitriolic Best Buds, if not outright True Companions. This is also reflected in their skillsets which mechanically complement each other. Seele is a straightforward damage dealer while Bronya is an attack buffer whose unique ability is to move an ally up on the turn order to be next. This means you're heavily encouraged to use Bronya as Seele's support.
  • The game may force you to use "Trial" and "Story" characters on very specific occasions if the main story Trailblaze Mission's narrative demands it to. For example, the Xianzhou Luofu Trailblaze Mission is split into two plots; the main plotline follows the Trailblazer, March 7th, and Welt, while the subplot follows Dan Heng, Sushang, and Luocha. There's a mandatory segment which lets you control the latter party, without being able to access certain gameplay features such as modifying the party composition or swapping out their Light Cones and Relics. However, these segments are relatively easy enough to avoid risks of failure.
  • When you start up the game for the first time after the daily server reset, one character in your roster will send a daily message to you (the Trailblazer) where they talk about anything ranging from interests to thoughts they want to share, and can do so up to three times, though some characters require story progression or completion of Companion Missions to see them. The only three characters who do not send daily messages at all are Acheron, Jingliu, and Tingyun. With the exception of Acheron, this makes sense, as Jingliu can never meet the Trailblazer at all, either in the story or as an Express companion, while Tingyun is Phantylia in disguise, therefore was never on friendly terms with them.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • As soon as you unlock the "Warp" feature, the game's gacha aspect of being able to obtain a playable character anytime can throw story immersion out of the window in several ways:
    • You can unlock a playable character even if you haven't properly met them in the story just yet.
    • You can play and move around as a certain character during map explorations even though there's already an NPC version of them standing or roaming alongside you.
    • Most of the time, the story and its cutscenes do not factor who you bring during the in-game battles. For example, a cutscene may show the Trailblazer fighting alongside March 7th and Dan Heng, but you can freely choose any gacha character to fight with. In fact, the Trailblazer is optional in the party for most battles, even though the story acts as though the Trailblazer is always present.
    • Some battle transitions are also affected, such as Natasha and Sampo showing up in a cutscene to assist you during the second phase of Svarog's boss fight, even though you might have already assigned them as party members during the first phase.
    • In-game parties are limited to 4 characters at most, but some scenes and dialogue lines may play as though you've gathered more than that during a fight.
    • Nothing stops military leaders from killing their supposed subordinates in combat: you can take Bronya, Gepard and Pela to fight the Silvermane Guards, Jing Yuan, Yanqing and Sushang to fight the Cloud Knights, Xueyi, Hanya and Huohuo to fight the Ten Lords' Commission personnel or Topaz to fight the IPC grunts.
    • Speaking of Xueyi, she can fight alongside the Mara-struck characters (whom she's supposed to apprehend as part of her job) such as Jingliu and Blade without any issues.
  • More generally, the game is loath to actually block access to maps even if the story says you should be locked away from them. The most obvious example is during a significant part of the Jarilo-VI storyline: for a time, you are theoretically trapped in the Belobog Underworld (e.g. the mining-focused cavern system beneath the city) and you shouldn't be able to return to the Administrative District in the Overworld, much less the Astral Express or Herta Station (which orbits a different planet), but at no point are you actually restricted from teleporting to other places via space anchor. Heck, depending on how long in real time you take on the Underworld chapter, you very well may get assigned a daily quest in the AD!
  • At one point during the Luofu Arc, as part of a plan to infiltrate the Disciples of Sanctus Medicus, the Trailblazer and an undercover Cloud Knight agree to stage a pretend fight so the latter can lose, play dead and escape with the intel to present to the Seat of Divine Foresight. The story frames it as a 1-on-1 fight between them, but cue the actual battle, and it's all four of your current active party members against the one Cloud Knight, let alone if the Trailblazer is present with your current party.
  • Additionally in the Luofu arc, Dan Heng mentions at the start that he cannot go onto the Luofu, necessitating Welt to join the Trailblazer and March. Nothing stops the player from including Dan Heng in the party anyway, even with the side story of Dan Heng himself traveling to the Luofu and meeting Sushang and Luocha.
  • Each playable character is assigned one Path among seven, but this describes their gameplay and may have little to nothing to do with the corresponding Aeon and philosophy. A glaring example is the Xianzhou Alliance, a faction that follows the Hunt and rejects the Abundance, despite their playable units covering several gameplay Paths, including Abundance. Also in-story, there are numerous Paths with their own factions, but only 7 of them are tied to gameplay, meaning several characters are clearly linked to one Path in the story but must be transposed to completely different one for gameplay. For example, Black Swan is a member of the Remembrance-based Garden of Recollection faction, but gameplay-wise she's a Nihility character. All this mismatching may be intentional to some extent, obscuring the true story Paths of characters, such as Sampo, who plays as Nihility but follows the Elation, or Luocha, who is traveling incognito and wouldn't want anyone noticing that his Abundance gameplay is linked to Yaoshi.
  • Paths also have characteristics tied to them, i.e those who follow the "Nihility" Path admire laziness, exhaustion, and meaningless behavior. In practice, however, only a handful of characters have characteristics that match their paths.
  • The element every playable character is designated in gameplay is sometimes not accurate to their actual powers and abilities, whether visually or story-wise. For example, Blade and Black Swan are designated as Wind characters in gameplay, but their red colored slashes and purple colored magic, respectively, does not resemble Wind elemental attacks in any way.
• Gameplay Automation: The Auto-Battle feature allows the game's A.I. to take control of your party. Most of your characters' skills and Ultimates are also activated as soon as they're available (though Ultimates can still be toggled for a Manual casting in the game's options menu). However, this feature is disabled for any story-relevant fights and can't strategize as well as if you were doing it manually, which means that for more difficult fights, a manual approach is still necessary. In 1.3, a consumable item "Automatic Wooden Dummy" is added; if you use it, Auto-Battle will be automatically turned on for the next battle and cannot be turned off, but your characters' damage output will be raised by a whopping 45%.
• Global Currency: Played with. Credits are the galactic standard and used for just about anything, but each planet/spaceship has their own unique local currency, like Hertareum for the Herta Space Station, Shields for Jarilo-VI, and Strale for the Xianzhou Luofu, which can be spent on valuable items from their local shops.
• The Goomba: Some of the mooks have simple attacks and weak Toughness Gauge (a single, non-enhanced Basic Attack can break them; for most other enemies, you need to do Basic Attack twice or an offensive Skill once for the same effect). Such as the Baryons/Antibaryons or the [Element]spawn enemies.
• The Great Offscreen War:
  • The Swarm Disaster was a calamity started by Tayzzyronth the Propagation who desired to propagate more of THEIR kind, and overwhelmed the universe with THEIR offspring, the Swarm. THEY were eventually stopped by a coalition of Aeons.
  • The Mecha Wars was started by Emperor Rubert, an inorganic lifeform who wished to eliminate all organic life and had controlled numerous inorganic lifeforms across the worlds to that end to cause mass devastation. It came to an end when Rubert died of unknown circumstances, implied to be by Polka Kakamond's hands.
  • The Third Abundance War was one of the many wars between Xianzhou Alliance and the Denizens of Abundance. Some present characters from the Luofu are affected by it: Yukong once participated in it and her best friend Caiyi died there, Dan Shu's friend was killed as Lan the Hunt's collateral damage, and Fu Xuan was the one who suggested to call on Lan's aid.
• Guest-Star Party Member:
  • A "Trial" character may be added as a temporary party member during specific missions or events. They come with their own pre-determined and pre-upgraded Light Cones, Relics, and Traces which you cannot change or upgrade further.
  • There's also another type for a temporary party member which is identified as a "Story" character. Luocha is the first example of this during the Xianzhou Luofu story arc. He joins Dan Heng and Sushang after a cutscene, but unlike a regular "Trial" guest member which can be controlled manually, Luocha is always controlled by the AI and you can't also view his in-game battle status.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • For completionists looking to collect every available book in the game, some books operate on a daily spawn system where different parts of the books will spawn in the exact same locations after the daily reset. The game never tells the player about this, nor would they ever think to recheck those spots on their own since every other book part is scattered across the overworld maps and can only be collected once, prompting them to look up a guide just to even know about this.
  • There are a lot of miniquests that the game never tells you about. Instead, you have to interact with a specific environmental object or talk to a specific person to start them, and even then they're not tracked in the mission log. Hope you're ready to investigate every single thing you encounter.
• Hammerspace: Pathstriders materialize objects out of nowhere in a flash of sparkles for their idle animations. This is presumably an In-Universe ability, as they are occasionally shown to materialize weapons in a similar way when bracing for battle inside of cutscenes.
• Hard Light:
  • The Herta Space Station contains a color-coded variety of platforms and bridges materialized out of hard light. These are mostly used by the game as elements in platforming puzzles.
  • Light Cones are said to be "memories contained in slices of light" as Garden of Recollection's invention. They physically appear as cards that empower their holders.
• Hard Mode Perks: As your Equilibrium Level increases, some game contents or activities like the Calyxes, Caverns of Corrosion, Stagnant Shadows, and Echoes of War will offer you the choice to tackle a harder version of the fight (featuring higher-leveled enemies). However, you are rewarded with more drops and an increased chance of finding rare loot.
• Have You Seen My God?: According to Herta, Aeons tend to mostly ignore mortals and encounters with them are extremely rare, to the point that even someone like a long lived genius like her can only boast about meeting them twice, and considering she herself is an Emanator of Nous the Erudition, that makes her even more of an exception to the rule.
• He Knows Too Much: Once the Astral Express crew arrives at the Exalting Sanctum on the Luofu, the Trailblazer is given a task by Qingzu to infiltrate the Disciples of Sanctus Medicus to look for a Realm-Keeping Commission agent who went missing, which involves them doing various trials by Green Hibiscus to get closer to the answer. The plan goes smoothly at first and the Trailblazer is able to meet with the Disciple's leader of the Exalting Sanctum branch named Mauve Moon, until he accidentally let it slip about his identity as the missing agent having gone through a Face–Heel Turn while bragging about his accomplishments, which subsequently blows the Trailblazer's cover. Upon realizing this, both Mauve Moon and Green Hibiscus attempt to murder the Trailblazer to remove the only eyewitness to their operations, but the Trailblazer proves too powerful for them and they're both slain in battle, or so it seems. Despite the setback, the Trailblazer still succeeds in their mission.
• Healer Signs On Early:
  • While not a traditional healer, you get March 7th very near the start of the game, who has the ability to create shields for other characters to protect them from direct damage. You later get Natasha for free during the visit to Jarilo-VI, who is a healer with the ability to clear debuffs.
  • In the "Aetherium Wars" event, you get the Trotter right from the outset, which has a mass-healing ability.
• Healing Checkpoint: Space Anchors can also instantly heal your entire party and serve as respawn checkpoints just in case all of your party members get defeated during a fight.
• Health/Damage Asymmetry: In full force, with built player characters having at most a few thousand HP while elite and boss enemies can easily hit the hundreds of thousands at higher levels. This makes the Prayer Machine, a crafted item released with the Aurum Alley event, a decent way to exploit this trope.^note The item grants a regeneration effect to all allies and enemies for five turns at the start of combat, healing for 1000 health each turn. Which is a whole lot more for your characters who are likely to be around the 3000s of HP by endgame, and a lot less for even the most basic enemies which hover close to 13000.
• Herd-Hitting Attack: Several attacks in the game are capable of dealing damage against multiple enemies. They come in different varieties:
  • Area of Effect (AoE) attacks hit all targets at once, with equal damage.
  • Blast attacks deal damage to the main target and adjacent ones; in most cases, adjacent targets take less damage compared to the main one.
  • Bounce attacks are series of multi-sequence attacks; the first sequence will always hit the target, while the subsequent ones may hit different enemies at random. Against a lone target, however, the Bounce attack's sequences will always hit the target for big damage and quick Toughness Gauge depletion.
• Hearing Voices: Ever since Alisa Rand, the first Supreme Guardian, made contact with a Stellaron, all of her successorss seem to have gone through this. The eighteenth and incumbent, Cocolia, did so since she was a teenager, and as seen through the Trailblazer's dreams, it still does so.
• Helpful Mook: Defeating a Mask Of No Thought unleashes its "Energy Burst" ability which slightly fills up your party members' Ultimate energy gauge.
• Hero Antagonist: The Silvermane Guard are Belobog's main defensive force and serve to both police the city and defend it from the Fragmentation, interlopers, and general troublemakers. They're otherwise well-meaning and have good intentions, but the heroes find themselves at the wrong end of their bayonets for quite some time due to false accusations of treachery against the city and wind up having to subdue some of its most powerful members.
• Hopeless Boss Fight:
  • At the climax of Jarilo-VI, the Trailblazer successfully performs a Colossus Climb up the Engine of Creation and comes face to face with the transformed Cocolia in the form of a Duel Boss battle. However, the Trailblazer is woefully underpowered and cannot match Cocolia on even ground; after a few turns wailing on her, she impales them on an icicle spear, causing them to slip into a subconscious state where they make contact with Qlipoth, the Aeon of Preservation and gain the Path of Preservation to turn the tides.
  • During the Luofu arc, the heroes make their way through the overrun Artisanship Commission and end up confronting a powerful Fragmentum monster known as the Abundant Ebon Deer. The heroes attempt to defeat it, but they soon realize that it is constantly draining nutrients from the Ambrosial Arbor to heal itself, giving it effective immortality. They end up having to retreat and figure out how to cut off its connection to the Ambrosial Arbor to give themselves a shot at winning.
  • In Luka's companion mission, he challenges Svarog to a Hopeless Duel Boss Fight.
• Human Aliens: There is a race of people called the Vidyadhara who are first encountered on the Luofu (and are implied to be present on all the Xianzhou). They are (typically) visually indistinguishable from humans other than their Pointy Ears, but the main difference between them and regular humans are their life cycles: they live for a few centuries, then when their time has come they regress into the form of an egg and hatch themselves, essentially undergoing reincarnation. Whenever this occurs all of their memories are wiped clean, meaning the same Vidyadhara can live many different lives as many different identities. There are a few Vidyadhara with somewhat more exotic appearances, like Bailu, who has some traits (her horns and her tail) reminiscent of the qinglong.

Tropes I to L

• Idle Animation: Your currently-active character will play their idle animations (and some voiced lines) if you let them stand still for a while in the overworld maps.
• Idle Game: Assignments let you send up to two characters each to acquire some materials. Although you have to wait for several real-time hours to receive those materials, the party members sent into Assignments can still be used during exploration and battles.
• I Just Want to Be You: One of the daily missions involves the voice actress, Celine. She wants to be just like Tamila, the actress she speaks for. She realizes that the sheer level of detail she wants about Tamila would make her a Stalker without a Crush, so she sends the Trailblazer to fetch the info to avoid getting caught.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: One of the daily NPC missions the player can do is help the wealthy Wallace Limestein make friends. However, Wallace's personality is so arrogant with high standards on what friendship should be that everyone that the player talks to declines because associating with the Limesteins could affect their social standing. The only exception is Lavonne, who thinks the association could boost her real estate career, which makes Wallace annoyed that his family name is all what people want from him.
• Immortality Immorality: Followers of the Path of Abundance seek the key to immortality. They believe that the key to immortality lies in long-life species such as the Vidyadhara, but attempts to extend the longevity of short-life species by attempting to transplant or ingest the cells of long-life species have had horrific and monstrous consequences as Vidyadhara biology is wholly incompatible with those of short-life species. To this end, the Xianzhou Alliance follows the Path of The Hunt and seeks to exterminate the followers of Abundance to prevent them from continuing their dangerous and deadly experiments.
• Improbable Weapon User: Examples are peppered throughout the playable cast, such as Asta's telescope-staff, Serval's literally electric guitar, Hanya's paintbrush, and Dr. Ratio's codex and projectile chalk sticks.
• Improbably Female Cast: Downplayed—though a far cry from the 99% female casts of most gacha games, the playable options still lean in this direction, with the number of male characters being significantly outnumbered by the female characters by slightly over twice as much, not including the selectable-gender protagonist. In terms of playable elemental types and Paths without taking the Trailblazer into account, none of the playable males are of the Quantum element or the Harmony path.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Rare treasure chests instantly appear out of nowhere in the overworld after you complete certain puzzles.
• Informed Equipment: Cavern Relics are designed and categorized as head, body, hand and feet equipment, while Planar Ornaments resemble spheres and rope accessories. However, these do not change the appearance of your party members when equipped.
• In-Universe Soundtrack: The Astral Express Parlor Car has a Phonograph which lets you play and set any in-game song as the diegetic background music of the room, though most songs have to be obtained first, either through exploration or by completing missions.
• Inventory Management Puzzle: Part of the "Aurum Alley Hustle & Bustle" event gamemplay is that you have to arrange items inside freight starskiffs, such that all requested items can fit inside, before they're sent off to their recipients. There are several rules and tricks regarding the management, such as the available "slots" (which increases in size as you advance through the event), how "big" and "small" items are treated differently, and that some of the available items allow for placing other items on top of them, giving another dimension to the space management.
• Invisible to Normals: Certain memetic entities in Penacony's dreamscape, such as Clockie and the Origami Birds, cannot be perceived by most people and are only visible to those pure of heart. This primarily consists of children but also includes people like the Trailblazer, who can see these memetic entities even though others with more elaborate and complex personalities like Acheron, Firefly, Aventurine and Dr. Ratio cannot. Due to this, they generally need people who can see them to intervene on their behalf as they cannot interact with most people in the dreamscape. Clockie's Clockie Statue sidequest involves you paying him Clock Credits to power him up until he can be seen normally, although he later abandons this goal in favor of just making new friends.
• Invisible Wall: Some maps have invisible walls that block off passages that seemingly lead to another area of the map, with some even featuring the camera zooming out when approaching much like many other exits to other areas. They can be interacted with, and when you do, you will get a message saying "The area ahead is not available. Please return to an accessible area." While you can't pass through them, NPCs can walk through them undeterred. As the game gets updated, these invisible walls will be removed, allowing access to new areas that could not be explored before. In Penacony's dreamscapes in particular, trying to interact with these walls will give you a funny message about how "even in a dream, exploration has its limits" and that "the Dreamweavers are just doing their job for the money".
• Invocation: All playable characters exclaim a one-liner when activating their Ultimate and (with the exception of the Destruction Trailblazer) unleashing it on their enemies or allies. Some ultimate voicelines are altered or shortened when the game is playing at x2 speed though, to accommodate for the faster animations and cinematics.
• Item Crafting: The Omni-Synthesizer allows you to craft new consumables, craft a higher-rarity material by consuming its lower-rarity variants, or exchange a material to a different type within the same rarity.
• Item Farming: Some progression systems like the character-specific Ascension, Light Cone Ascension and character-specific Traces require you to obtain and farm a number of certain materials in order to upgrade them. Thankfully, the game's interface easily shows you which areas or enemies drop these materials, as well as any secondary gameplay features which let you acquire them.
• Insufferable Genius: The Genius Society is an entire group of them, to the point where their ridiculous level of arrogance and unwillingness to cooperate with both each other and those less intelligent than them are a persistent problem. They may be the smartest people in the cosmos, but oftentimes the ideas and/or inventions of the more generous members are overlooked and nearly forgotten by time because the rest of the Society is too full of themselves to pay attention. This extends to Herta in particular, who is one of the smartest minds who ever lived and could solve an innumerable number of problems and issues singlehandedly, but because she regards a vast number of them as trivial matters almost none of the solutions are ever recorded and thus they never get solved.
• Jack of All Trades:
  • Characters of the Nihility path can qualify, due to their balanced and well-rounded stats, allowing them to also function as dedicated damage dealers in a pinch, sometimes even letting them take advantage of the debuffs they apply to enemies to bolster their own combat prowess^note to compare, Harmony characters may be able to use their buffs for themselves, but it's rare for them to have an attack strong enough to take advantage of said buffs. However, they would lose out to Destruction, Hunt, and Erudition characters (the classes actually designated as main DPS units) in terms of raw damage, due to Nihility characters generally having lower damage multipliers for their attacks; the only exceptions are if the Nihility character specializes in dealing damage in a different way outside of traditional crit-focused builds (such as inflicting DoT), or their name is Acheron (a Nihility character who functions more like a traditional DPS fighter).
  • Aside from Nihility, there are a few characters in support-oriented classes (Harmony, Preservation, and Abundance) that have some offensive capabilities built into their kit, letting them contribute some DPS if needed^{Such as}Bronya (Harmony) has a bonus ability that gives her basic attacks 100% critical rate, allowing her to take advantage of her very high critical damage; Aventurine (Preservation) can perform follow-up attacks and gains increased critical rate based on his own DEF value; Gallagher (Abundance) gravitates towards having high Break Effect, resulting in him dealing hard-hitting Break damage when he depletes enemy's Toughness gauge; Luocha (Abundance) has his healing scale off of his ATK rather than Max HP or DEF, allowing his Basic Attack to hit harder, plus he (like Gallagher) has an offensive Ultimate where other Abundance characters have healing or support Ultimates.
• Jiggle Physics: Depending on the movement and animations, the in-game physics allow the breasts of some well-endowed characters (like Kafka) to shake while moving or attacking.
• Joke Character: In the Aetherium Wars minigame, the Illumination Dragonfish is this: while it does have some utility with its ability to inflict various status effects, its offset by its hefty negatives: its Ultimate does absolutely nothing, and its passive Talent makes it blow up for massive damage if KO'd...Against your own party, with the only 'positive' part is that the explosion regenerates one point for their Ultimates. It can potentially turn into a Lethal Joke Character with the right Expansion Chips, but you're better off just putting another Spirit in its place.
• Just Before the End: The "Vignettes in a Cup" event features a variation of this. As the Dreamscape is undergoing a steady collapse due to the neglect of the Families, the various members of Dreamjolt Troupe lost their minds and started to act violently, becoming the mobs that you encounter around. Siobhan set up her bar in the hopes that the crew of monsters that she had gathered could at least hold off the corruption produced by the collapse for a while longer, keeping their personalities intact.
• Karma Meter:
  • Parodied. You can get an item called "Praise of High Morals" by having the Trailblazer do small acts of kindness, like putting stray letters back into mailboxes or helping someone build a robot companion. You can then spend your Praises to justify morally dubious things like vandalizing a dumpster or rummaging items tossed into a public fountain. You also get a Praise for jumpscaring the Goethe Grand Hotel's room service due to the Trailblazer believing they were a "hotel devil", implying that the recognition of the Trailblazer's good deeds is entirely in their head.
  • The main gimmick of "Gold and Gears" is Intra-Cognition, a numerical representation of your inner cognition's balance between organic vs. inorganic life. The gauge starts at 0 and can be raised or lowered via Intra-Cognition Domains or random events. In order to progress the main story of "Gold and Gears", you must fulfill target ranges for the Intra-Cognition gauge before clearing a Plane Boss, which will unlock cutscenes based on your results. To further complicate matters, the upper and lower bounds of the gauge are lower at lower difficulties, forcing you to go to at least Difficulty IV to complete the mode.
• Kill Enemies to Open: During exploration, you may come across rare treasure chests visibly surrounded by red seals and can only be opened after you defeat the Formidable Foes nearby.
• Kill the God: While it's incredibly difficult due to their power and the fact that it's near impossible to even encounter them, Aeons can die. Akivili the Trailblaze died long before the start of the story in an "accident," Tayzzyronth the Propagation was destroyed due to threatening to assimilate the entire universe, and Long the Permanence died under unknown circumstances. That being said, once an Aeon is created, so does a Path that can outlive its associated Aeon, which is why the Astral Express can still draw upon the power of the Trailblaze.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: Regin is an NPC staying in the Goethe Hotel on Jarilo-VI who claims to be a "Civilian Scientist" studying his great "Big Universe Time Tunnel" theory, which he believes will be the breakthrough that modern science desperately needs to unshackle itself from the past. Unfortunately, everyone else knows that the big universe time tunnel theory is a load of rubbish and that Regin has no formal education; even worse, Regin has a massive attitude problem and not only refuses to entertain the idea that he is incompetent or uneducated but will lash out at anyone he perceives as belittling him or interrupting his thoughts. The Trailblazer winds up pacifying him for a spell in the "On the Doorsteps of Science" Daily Mission by "submitting" his theory to the Belobog Ministry of Education, who decide to take pity on the Trailblazer for their efforts by pretending to accept the theory and put him on indefinite hold.
• Last Lousy Point: Completing the Simulated Universe Index is this. You obtain Stellar Jades the more Blessings, Curios, or Events you unlock, and unlocking all of them is difficult due to the completely random nature of the mode.
  • Each Path in Simulated Universe has 22 associated blessings. Travelling on a Path gives you a higher chance to obtain Blessings from that Path, but it doesn't guarantee they'll show up every time. You can further increase the chance with the Sealing Wax Curio for your respective Path, but this still won't guarantee you the Blessings and attempting to obtain the one you need adds another layer of randomness to the equation. In addition, there are certain blessings that literally cannot be obtained until you have one of two 3-star Blessings (usually obtained from defeating Elite enemies) from a certain Path in your possession. So if you don't get one of them, it's time for another run.
  • The Events are also bad about this, because not every Event has an equal chance to appear. The Encounter and Transaction Events aren't too bad due to how few of them there are, but the Occurrence events are a whole new story. Perhaps the rarest of these is Ruan Mei, which gives you the choice between all Blessings from a certain Path or 2000 Cosmic Fragments.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Welt's character profile in the official website mentioned that he is the former Sovereign of Anti-Entropy, one of the major anti-Honkai organizations in HI3 alongside Schicksal and World Serpent. It's also referencing the moment after the events of Post-Honkai Odyssey; he had no choice but to team up with Void Archives to the other side of the space portal, which is shown in the Alien Space comic.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: March 7th knows the expression "When in Rome." Pom-Pom doesn't, but there are more important things to be concerned with at the moment.
  Pom-Pom: Rome? Anyway...Third and Final: Rather than being a request, Pom-Pom has a favor to ask of everyone.
  • Being the 'mascot' of the game, March 7th's purpose is to Lean On the Fourth Wall. She also knows the First Rule.
• Level Cap:
  • Characters and Light Cones initially have a base level cap of 20, but that can be increased further for 10 additional levels with every Ascension. They can be Ascended six times, for a hard level cap of 80.
  • Relic upgrades have a hard cap of 15.
  • Although you can still accumulate Trailblaze EXP, your Trailblaze Level will be capped at certain thresholds until you complete the next Trial of Equilibrium.
• Level Scaling: The levels of the Pre Existing Encounters in the overworld exploration maps will automatically scale up as your Equilibrium Level rises.
• Life Embellished: In the "Tales of the Fantastic" event, Mr. Xiyan wants to turn the Trailblazer's adventure on the Luofu into a story, but after listening to it declares that it lacks adventure and proper storytelling tropes. He proceeds to guide the Trailblazer on his quest to writing a drastically warped version of events that effectively transforms it into a second-rate shounen plot, complete with Time to Unlock More True Potential and New Powers as the Plot Demands, with the Trailblazer calling him out on his stupid writing every step of the way. It's also implied that his knack of embellishing events through his storytelling attracts the attention of a mysterious woman who gifted him the strange bird he named Youci (the NPC for Pure Fiction); said woman is heavily implied to be a History Fictionologist.
• Light 'em Up: While it may not look that way due to its nature, the Imaginary element is the closest thing the game has to a light element.
• Limit Break: Performing actions and taking damage charges up a character's Energy, which is represented by a colored bubble next to their portrait. Once it is full, a character gains the ability to use their Ultimate, expending all stocked Energy for an extra-powerful move. Unlike normal actions, Ultimates have the additional benefit of being able to be prompted at any time during battle, interrupting the current player turn or immediately queuing after the enemy's turn when possible.
• Limited Loadout: A character can only equip one Light Cone and one of each Relic type (Head, Hand, Body, Feet, Planar Sphere, and Link Rope).
• Little Bit Beastly: Foxians are a race of humanoids who resemble kitsune, sporting a pair of fluffy fox ears and a bushy tail in addition to a standard human physique. They are virtually identical to humans in other aspects but have a roughly 300-year lifespan and are unable to eat chocolate.
• Logo Joke: Starting from Jingliu, character trailers for new 5* units feature stylized depictions of the game's logo based on the character appearing to cap off the trailer.
  • Jinglu's trailer features the logo freezing over, transforming into an ice blue with stalactites hanging from it.
  • Argenti's trailer features the logo in rose gold colors, with the moon being depicted as a rose stem with leaves and a red rose off the back.
  • Huohuo's trailer features the logo set aflame in heliobus green.
  • Ruan Mei's trailer features a light jade logo with added plum blossom petals.
  • Dr. Ratio's trailer features the logo doused in a watery aqua blue. A few bubbles surround the logo, one of which contains Dr. Ratio's rubber duck.
  • Black Swan's trailer features the logo in crystalline purple and surrounded by glass shards.
  • Sparkle's trailer features the logo in cherry blossom pink.
  • Acheron's trailer features the logo in monochrome black and white, with the "spark" in the center becoming a crimson red and black.
  • Aventurine's trailer features the logo in aventurine green with golden text. The words "Star Rail" appear like the reels on a slot machine.
• Long-Range Fighter: Some characters use ranged attacks in the field. This gives them an advantage over melee characters in that they can easily initiate combat with enemies from afar before they can detect and chase the player.
• Logical Weakness: Although an enemy's Break Meter can be depleted by several damage types, some enemies within the same category exhibit a recurring vulnerability to a given element, which can be understandable given their nature. For example:
  • Frostspawn and Ice Out of Space (Fragmentum Monsters made of ice) are weak to the Fire element.
  • Flamespawn and Blaze Out of Space (Fragmentum Monsters made of fire) are weak to the Ice element.
  • All Automatons and Svarog in Jarilo-VI (which are robots) are vulnerable to Lightning damage.
• Lost in Translation: Sadly, the game's translation out of non-Sinographic languages can struggle to get certain concepts across, which can effect the English version in particular rather heavily.
  • The biggest example is probably the insistence on leaving "Xianzhou" and the attendant world-ship names in romanized Chinese, as the term actually has meaning. "Xianzhou" actually means, variously, "Immortal Ship" or "Celestial Ship" (or "God Boat" if you want to be literal to the point of goofiness), the former more prominent in the Japanese kanji used for the name and in reference to the incredible longevity of the residents, the latter more prominent in the original Chinese and referring to their original missions in "the heavens" and their generally fantastical nature; both of these concepts are fairly crucial plot elements in the storyline aboard the Luofu. As such, the name of the wider political entity could easily be rendered as "the Immortal Ships Alliance" or "the Celestial Ships Alliance". The ship the Astral Express visits is therefore "the Immortal/Celestial Ship Luofu", and both the Chinese and Japanese has punctuation to make it clearer that 罗浮 is the name of the vessel proper (Luofu, itself, referencing an extremely important mountain in Daoist tradition). The English version can be significantly more confusing about all this, and often uses the vessel's full title when simply calling it the Luofu would be clearer, often refers to the individual ship, the ships as a collective concept and/or the Alliance as a political entity as "the Xianzhou" without clarifying the exact meaning-of-the-moment, and the actual meaning and relevance of "Xianzhou" is never made clear for readers in the text itself.
  • March 7th herself also falls victim to this. The entire joke, in both Chinese and Japanese, is that the calendar date she was found on happens to be a homophone for perfectly plausible names - "Sanyue Qi" and "Mitsuki Nanoka" are a little odd, but the latter in particular works perfectly fine as a "normal" name and the joke would only become clear when "Nanoka" explains it. "March" would be pretty uncommon but could work as a given name, but using "March 7th" in full simply makes the joke not work. The English version does try to play it off as March simply not being that concerned about names and living more in the here and now, but the gimmick is ultimately lost. The Korean version also goes with "March 7th" (in English) instead of using any wordplay or translating it to Korean. In the Russian version, the name looks even more unnatural because Russian language uses "day-month" date order, not "month-day".
  • In Lynx and Pela's Companion Mission, Lynx finds what is pretty clearly a floppy disk in the snow and hands it to Pela. Despite this, the English script opts to call it a "flash drive" despite the only relationship between a floppy disk and a flash drive being that they're types of storage mediums, as well as scripts in other languages correctly referring to it as a floppy disk.
  • Played with for Firefly; while her name is a translation from her Chinese and Japanese name, "Firefly" is not typically used as a given name in English, while 流萤 (Liuying) and ホタル (Hotaru) can at least pass as a given name (though relatively rare) in their respective languages. At the cost of sounding somewhat awkward, the name "Firefly" at least manages to carry the meaning and theme across, like her other names do.
  • "Sparkle", meanwhile, might refer to the "sparkler" that she's playing with in one of her official arts; both it and "fireworks" (花火, her name in Chinese and Japanese) are common parts of Japanese summer festivities, which is her theme. The thing is, unlike Firefly above, the English dub doesn't directly translate her name, making her reference somewhat obscure. Played with in that, as a Masked Fool, it's likely that "Sparkle" or "Hanabi" is just an alias she picks up, so the names are deliberate choices on her part.
• Lost Technology:
  • It's touched upon briefly that over the 700 years since the Eternal Freeze began, much of the technology and knowledge used by the Old World that used to live on the surface of Jarilo-VI was eventually lost to time. Hook's Companion Mission revolves heavily around an item called a Geomarrow Probe, a device that can be used to locate Geomarrow deposits. It is incredibly powerful since it subverts the need to locate the deposits by hand, extremely desirable since the entire city needs Geomarrow to survive and is mandatory for trade between the Underworld and the Overworld, and also extremely rare because it is Old World technology and thus can no longer be produced. Hook's father owns one of the only remaining devices, causing much strife as opportunistic vagrants attempt to steal it and any surviving copies for their own personal gain.
  • The trope also ends up zig-zagged a little bit in that what is "lost technology" for the Jarilans is perfectly common commercial and domestic technology elsewhere in the galaxy; it's simply "lost" because the Jarilo Stellaron made star rails around the planet inoperable for centuries, and thus got marked as a "do not visit" world. Much of it was even manufactured by the Interastral Peace Corporation; during the course of the plot, you discover a tracking robot that seems incredibly advanced to the Jarilans, but the Astral Express crew identifies it as a fairly common household robot in need of maintenance!
• Luck Manipulation Mechanic:
  • Qingque has a unique mahjong tile mechanic where lining up four tiles of the same suit upgrades her normal attack into the powerful Cherry on Top! spread damage attack. To help get to her key ability without relying too heavily on luck, she has the ability to throw away or replace tiles with her abilities. Of the tiles she has stocked, using her normal attack will always throw away a tile that does not contribute to a set, and her Celestial Jade ability will keep rerolling any spare tiles in order to find a match. Her Skill, A Scoop of Moon, will also reroll tiles when possible to find a set, and as an added bonus using A Scoop of Moon doesn't cost her turn and also grants a stacking damage buff to reward you for fishing for Cherry on Top!. In addition, her Ultimate, A Quartet? Woo-hoo!, will instantly give her a full set so you can follow it up with a Cherry on Top!.
  • Generating Relics typically gives a random main stat, but you can use a Self-Modeling Resin obtained from the Rewards Pass to force a specific stat of your choice.

Tropes M to P

• Macrogame: The Simulated Universe and its Expansion Modules feature a variety of ways to upgrade your team every time you complete a run.
  • The base Simulated Universe features the Ability Tree, permanent upgrades that can be bought with Ability Points earned by completing runs. In addition to stat bonuses, certain major nodes unlock new abilities that make traversing the Simulated Universe easier, such as unlocking the Path Resonance mechanic and gaining more starting bonuses.
  • The "Swarm Disaster" Expansion Module features Communing Paths instead of an Ability Tree. Completing objectives in the Trail of Pathstrider rewards Communing Points that are automatically allocated to each Path on the Communing Paths grid. Each time a Path reaches certain point thresholds, you are automatically rewarded with permanent upgrades that apply to all future runs.
  • The "Gold and Gears" Expansion Module features the Neural Network, which is functionally identical to the Ability Tree but with upgrades specific to the mode. Unique to this Module is Dice Customization, which allows you to edit the die that is rolled prior to moving to a new room. Both new dice and dice faces are unlockable by clearing "Gold and Gears" with specific dice as well as progressing the story, with each die offering unique passive bonuses and each dice face giving you ways to manipulate the board or buff your party.
• Mad Scientist: Natasha had an adoptive brother Vache with whom she attended medical school with. Like Natasha, Vache was incredibly intelligent in the medical sciences, but much of his focus turned to trying to figure out how to develop a medicine that could protect people from the effects of the Eternal Freeze and allow the citizens of Belobog to leave the city's perimeter. Unfortunately, the more he buried himself in his research and testing, the more desperate he became to get results, and when he moved to the Underworld to practice medicine he tried to peddle a "miracle drug" that would supposedly alleviate a variety of symptoms. In reality, he was giving away experimental batches of his "Blizzard Immunity" drug to test on live subjects, and the vast majority of results were disastrous, with most victims suffering from life-ending or permanently damaging side effects. It got to the point where Natasha and Oleg were forced to confront Vache and convince him to leave Belobog permanently. At the end of Natasha's Companion Mission, Natasha and the Trailblazer go to the surface to find out if Vache is still alive and find a platoon of Silvermane Guards patrolling the border who have been surviving on Vache's Blizzard Immunity. They soon discover that after his exile, Vache realized that his methods were wrong and reformulated the drug, ultimately managing to create a version that is completely safe and produces no long-term side effects. However, they also learn that Vache has been radio silent for the last three years, with only his research notes left behind as proof of his existence. Natasha and the Trailblazer decide to set up a grave for him to honor his memory.
• Mage Marksman: It comes with the territory for playable characters (barring physical damage dealers) who wield bows (like March 7th) or guns (like Kafka and Bronya), with their attacks always dealing damage of their element.
• Magic from Technology: The Divination Commission essentially uses sufficiently advanced and powerful supercomputers for powers of premonition, foresight, mind reading, and even temporarily reviving the spirits of the dead.
• Magic Knight: Non-physical damage units who use melee weapons will always deal damage corresponding to their element.
• Meaningful Name: "Penacony" gets its name from the phrase "penal colony", an apt name for a planet that used to be an interastral prison.
• MegaCorp: The Interastral Peace Corporation is a universe-spanning conglomerate so influential and powerful that its credits are accepted throughout most civilizations - it also doubles as a religious organization for the Aeon of Preservation, Qlipoth.
• Mascot:
  • March 7th, one of the game's main characters, serves as its icon.
  • In a similar vein to Ai-chan, Paimon, and DAVIS, Pom-Pom serves as the secondary mascot for the game.
• Mayfly–December Romance: There are laws against this on the Xianzhou Alliance, mainly because they already know that these typically do not end well for either party involved. Amusingly, there is a Vidyadhara woman NPC on the Luofu who has the inverse problem, where, due to what is implied to be a birth defect, she has an extraordinarily fast reincarnation cycle of about two weeks, causing her to forget all of her relationships after they barely start.
• Metal Slime: Warp Trotters are pig-like creatures that will attempt to run from you but will drop Stellar Jades (the game's Gacha currency) if you beat them. One can only appear in an area once you've cleared the main story objective in it, and if you catch one, they will not attack you but will spend their first few turns cowering in fear and will attempt to escape, though they are backed up by regular enemies. They have bulky HP and Defense, so the challenge comes from defeating them before they can escape, and successfully defeating one will add to the current area's treasure chest tally. v1.1 adds Lost Trotters, which are silver variants that randomly appear in battles and will double the material drops if defeated. In addition, they have alternate counterparts in the Simulated Universe which will still try to flee but have additional mechanics contingent to them: Destruction Trotters throw out a rocky Counter-Attack when any enemy is struck; Preservation Trotters have relatively less Toughness and HP, but erect a shield that absorbs a certain number of hits against the enemy; and Abundance Trotters have an absurd amount of HP, but will sacrifice it to heal injured enemies.
• Mind Virus: One sidequest involves a curio, the Crackup Conch, suddenly telling motivational quotes instead of jokes. Asta determines that the problem stems from a memetic virus, which can be spread via thought or close contact and alters the personalities of infected hosts. The Trailblazer is sent to investigate and check the online search history of three potential victims. The culprit turns out to be Johanna, a slacker working in Medical who suddenly turned into a workaholic overnight.
• Min-Maxing: You can freely equip a character with specific Light Cones and Relics to min-max on the stats that their gameplay, Traces, and Eidolons typically rely or scale up on. For example, Seele has innate CRIT Rate and CRIT DMG buffs, making her a Glass Cannon who works best if she can land Critical Hits more often. On the other hand, Gepard is a Stone Wall whose skills scale with either his HP or DEF, so he's min-maxed with tools that make him even more durable. The Self-Modeling Resin is a very helpful item when it comes to min-maxing as it lets you select a main stat of your choice when you use the Relic Crafting function.
• Mobile City: The Xianzhou Luofu is effectively a giant city with its own functional society contained within a spaceship, so it's a given.
• Money Is Experience Points: Credits are also consumed (alongside the other EXP-boosting materials and/or spare items) whenever you "Enhance" or manually level up your characters, Light Cones, and Relics.
• Money Grinding: Every single character and equipment progression system in the game consumes Credits, and due to their costs getting more expensive the further you make upgrades, you are bound to repeatedly farm and hoard Credits in the endgame. Fortunately, some game modes, missions and content give out sufficient Credits when completed, though the "Bud of Treasures" Calyx challenges are designed for farming Credits efficiently at the cost of Trailblaze Power.
• Monster Compendium: The Data Bank has an "Enemy Creatures" section that serves as your in-game bestiary. Aside from providing descriptions and lore, it also catalogs the weaknesses of a given enemy and how many of each have you defeated already.
• Moon Logic Puzzle: Some of the Ministry of Education quizzes can border on this, either intentionally or due to translation issues. The second quiz, for example asks the sum of various flowers, one part being "27 is Sunshine, and Sunshine is 4". Just multiply them and get 108, right? Wrong, you have to multiply the two digits of the first number, 27, and arrive at 14. The second number given (4) is supposed to let you check your answer, being the result of multiplying the two digits of the resulting number (14). Not to mention the quiz asks for ''Sunflower'' instead of Sunshine.
• More than Mind Control: The Supreme Guardians before her were able to resist the temptations of the Stellaron, but Cocolia's waning faith in the power of Preservation combined with her desire to make a change in Belobog and strive towards a better future allowed the Stellaron to corrupt and warp her mind. Cocolia attempts to break Bronya as well by using her own influence as her adoptive mother in tandem with the Stellaron's control, but Seele and the heroes arrive to stop her before anything happens to Bronya.
• Multiple Endings: Certain Adventure Missions (sidequests) and "hidden interactables" in the open world may have different endings depending on your choices. A lot of the time, there are also different, mutually-exclusive achievements tied to said different endings as well.
• Mysterious Stranger: The Stellaron Hunters are an interastral terrorist organization who have committed various crimes across the cosmos and are guided by an entity known as Elio who has the ability to see the future. However, their true motives are hard to pin down, and even further so when they directly intertwine themselves with the fate of the Trailblazer. Their involvement in the Xianzhou Luofu incident amounts to being there so the Trailblazer will be there, and as Kafka reveals they seek to guide the Trailblazer to their destined fate whereupon they will face Nanook, Aeon of Destruction.
• Mythology Gag:
  • There are various easter eggs that reference certain lore, moments or concepts from the previous Honkai games (particularly Honkai Impact 3rd). They are presented in varying degrees, some of which are obvious for those who played the older games, while others double as Freeze Frame Bonuses.
    • "Quantum" and "Imaginary" aren't your typical elemental attributes or damage types, unlike many other RPGs. When they're treated as a gameplay mechanic, they're directly lifted from the QUA and IMG types that supplemented the BIO/PSY/MECH triangle of HI3, completw with the same respective indigo and yellow color-coding from the aforementioned game.
    • The Trailblazer's primary weapon is a baseball bat, which is the iconic weapon of both Kiana and Kevin Kaslana.
    • As the Trailblazer, March 7th, and Dan Heng flee from being arrested by the Silvermane Guards, March 7th looks back and blows a raspberry at her pursuers. Back in the "Reburn" animated short, Kiana also does the same thing towards the Arahato mecha.
    • Seele's Ultimate shows her eyes becoming red. In HI3, this is a telltale sign that her sadistic self "Seele" takes over.
    • In Herta's Curio collection, you can find a broken sword that is heavily implied to be the one Himeko from HI3 used to fight against the Herrscher of the Void. The HSR version of Himeko even has a unique interaction with it, which references the "Everlasting Flames" animated short.
    "She was reborn in the fire, she was smiling in the fire."
    • During the Jarilo-VI Trailblaze Mission, Bronya finds out that she was raised in the same orphanage as Seele before being adopted by Cocolia Rand. This closely parallels the childhood of her Honkai Impact 3rd counterpart Bronya Zaychik.
    • The animated short "A Flash" is deeply reminiscent of the "Final Lesson" animated short, since both shorts involve a teacher being killed by their own student.
    • During the Xianzhou Luofu Trailblaze Mission, Yanqing uses a skill that summons a giant sword to fall on his enemies. It's virtually identical to the Edge of Taixuan, a martial arts skill from HI3 used by several characters including his direct inspiration, Ma Yanqing. The way he learnt it, by deflecting an otherwise mortal blow by unlocking a new skill, is very similar to how Fu Hua reawakened her own Edge of Taixuan by deflecting Li Sushang's.
    • Silver Wolf's character trailer shows her playing HI3 as Bronya's "Haxxor Bunny" Battlesuit, which Silver Wolf is based off of.
    • The Myriad Celestia trailer "Kyoden: A Cleave Across the Transient World" talks of the twin planets Izumo and Takamagahara; the latter spawns the Yaoyorozu-no-kami, eldritch beasts and beings that exist only to kill, that terrorized Izumo, a setting very similar to HI3s story (especially during the "Previous Era"). The people of Izumo broke their 70033 blades^note the number refers to the amount of Herrschers in Guns Girl Z, HI3s predecessor and reforge them with the corpses of the Kami they slain to forge twelve blades called Sentinels, which all correspond to the original 12 Herrschers, with the Sentinels eventually being shattered and reforged into Origin and End, a reference to the final two Herrschers of Origin and Finality. In addition, through out the video, hints of Mei's theme "Honkai World Diva" can be heard in the background. For bonus points, Shiraga Oni (the male narrator) is voiced by Qin Qiege and Hino Satoshi in the Chinese and Japanese trailers respectively, both of whom voiced Kevin Kaslana in Honkai Impact 3rd.
    • The 2.0 update added achievements named after games in the Honkai series, including "FlyMe2theBaloon", "Balloon Gakuen 2", "Balloon Impact 3rd", and "Penacony: Balloon Rail".
  • An English translation exclusive one: both this game and Genshin Impact have areas inspired by ancient Chinese culture, the Xianzhou Alliance in the former and Liyue in the latter. In both of those, a lot of old Chinese terms and titles are used that would be hard to comprehend for a non-Chinese speaker, which results in the translation using a lot of old Latin words as replacement to be more immediately understandable while keeping the 'ancient' feeling.
• Never Trust a Trailer: In the "Reburn II Concept Animated Short" teaser that was meant to drum up hype for this game, Carole Peppers from Honkai Impact 3rd was featured prominently alongside Welt Yang and she boarded the interstellar train with him, hinting that she would be a central character of this game. However, she is nowhere to be seen in any of the following trailers or in the launch patch.
• Nobody Loves the Bassist: You can ask Dunn about Serval's band. After he tells you that he played keys when he was a member, Serval sings and plays guitar, and Pela is the drummer, the Trailblazer can ask if there were only the three of them.
  Dunn: No, I remember there was another person... Who was it again? I can't believe it, I actually can't remember who it was...
  Trailblazer: Doesn't a rock band need a bass player?
  Dunn: Ah—yes, yes, the bass player! I just remembered it after hearing it from you. Haha... but what was his name again? Wait, was the bass player a guy or a girl...Eh, never mind. I just can't remember. Don't worry about that person, it's not important.
• Non-Combat EXP:
  • While your active party members gain some EXP after defeating the Pre Existing Encounters, the points are so minuscule you'll end up wanting to consume Character EXP Materials to manually level up your characters instead.
  • Aside from completing modes that consume Trailblaze Power, you can also earn Trailblaze EXP by simply opening treasure chests and accomplishing missions.
• Non-Standard Game Over:
  • You can end the game and story early if you choose to reject Himeko's offer to come with her to board and join the Astral Express in favor of staying in Herta's space station, where the Trailblazer lives a peaceful life as part of the Space station staff.
  • At the end of the 2.0 questline, the Trailblazer can choose to take Aventurine's deal or refuse. You are supposed to accept the deal, but if you refuse, then the Trailblazer reports Aventurine's activites to the Family, which blows open and thwarts the IPC's conspiracy to reclaim Penacony. Afterwards, the Trailblazer and the rest of the Astral Express never learn the secret of the Watchmaker's Legacy and it is implied they spend the rest of their lives in Penacony's Dreamscape.
• Noodle Incident: Having been part of the Astral Express crew for a long time already, both March and Dan Heng hint at some of their past exploits with their banter, such as how they once accidentally crashed the Astral Express in the middle of a stadium and were punished with two weeks of community service, or how March bemoans that they get betrayed by the local populace every third planet.
• No OSHA Compliance: The Fight Club in Boulder Town, despite being framed as a "boxing ring", could hardly be called safe since there are no rules and regulations to forbid stuff that can lead to serious injuries. Not only are human participants allowed to bring their weapons in the ring (ranging from axes to guns), but even robots are allowed to participate and fight the humans with their dangerous arsenals. Taken to the extreme in the Boulder Town Super League event where even Fragmentum monsters are allowed to participate. Given that the owner of the Fight Club, Scott, is known to put spectacle over safety since his actions indirectly caused Kluzer's death in the sidequest "Silent Yet Shining", it can be chalked up to him simply not caring as long as it brings in spectators.
• No-Sell:
  • The "Barrier" status buff negates the next instance of damage, though it does not fully protect against lingering Damage Over Time effects.
  • Some enemies have 100% base resistance to certain debuffs. Blaze Out of Space, for instance, cannot be Burned.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Inverted for Eikura Shuu, a researcher from Xin-41. On his home planet, Shuu was considered a genius on a planet where the average population is for all intents behind the times and oppressed by a race they have been convinced to believe are practically gods. He was able to pass his exams and was accepted onto the Herta Space Station, where he discovered that in terms of intelligence he was essentially the bottom of the barrel when compared to the rest of the space station's researchers. He ends up not having the heart to tell his family what it's like on the space station aside from some warnings about the Slinkans ruling his home planet.
• Not Me This Time: Right before the party prepares to depart from Jarilo-VI, they receive a transmission from Kafka concerning Stellaron activity occurring at the Xianzhou Luofu, where her associate Blade, another Stellaron Hunter, is being held captive by local authorities. All parties involved, including both the Astral Express crew and Xianzhou government, assume that the Stellaron Hunters are directly involved with the disaster and, in the former's case, is manipulating them for some ulterior motive. One mind reading session clears up some interesting truths: the Stellaron incident was caused by a conspiracy from the Disciples of Sanctus Medicus and has nothing to do with the Stellaron Hunters. However, they did manipulate the heroes into getting involved because they need the Trailblazer to loan their assistance, and by saving the Luofu from the Stellaron they will be owed a favor they will need to call on to fight Nanook the Destruction.
• Notice This:
  • Collectible items (usually readables) occasionally shine when you haven't picked them up yet during exploration.
  • Completing a puzzle or a Formidable Foe challenge presents you with a rare treasure as a reward, but the game also displays an icon pointing to that treasure chest's location so that you won't easily miss it.
  • During some quest objectives in Xianzhou Luofu, you'll have to rely on the senses of Diting (Tingyun's pet dragon) in order to find specific things that you can't normally identify. The game will be mostly covered in a washed-out color filter when you use Diting's help, but the points-of-interest (such as small item pick-ups or traces of scent that serve as directions) will have vibrant colors that allow you to easily to spot them from a distance.
• NPC Roadblock: Occasionally during your adventures, you will encounter NPCs blocking off passages to areas, who will refuse to let you walk pass until you accomplish certain tasks that make them go away. One notable roadblock in the Pillars of Creation subarea of Jarilo-VI blocks players entry towards a very large bridge seemingly leading to a new area, though as of version 1.4, the map boundaries does not extend past the bridge, leaving the area inaccessible for now.
• Number of the Beast: According to hotel receptionist Alley, the Trailblazer was given the Platinum Suite 666 in Penacony's Grand Hotel.
• Oblivious Adoption: In Yukong's Companion Mission, Yukong's daughter Qingni discovers that she is actually the biological daughter of Yukong's deceased best friend Caiyi, who perished in the Third Denizens of Abundance War. After Caiyi's death, she entrusted Qingni to Yukong, whom she raised as her own daughter. Qingni also learns that the reason Yukong is against her becoming a fighter pilot is because it was part of Caiyi's Last Request in the event that she did not return.
• One Nation Under Copyright: The Interastral Peace Corporation operates essentially like this; in addition to being a corporate entity that does business across the galaxy, the worlds and areas it directly administrates constitute one of the largest interstellar polities. IPC space has its own laws and regulations, with traders having to register to trade with them separate from other spacefaring polities (such as the Xianzhou Alliance). To date, the IPC has generally been portrayed as somewhat more benign than other examples of the trope, though it is still willing to post bounties on known criminals (such as the Stellaron Hunters).
• One Stat to Rule Them All: No matter which path your characters are on, Speed is widely considered to be the most "universal" stat in the game, simply by virtue of allowing yourself to act ahead/more often than the enemies do (as part of the game design).
• Organic Technology: The Starskiffs on the Xianzhou Luofu aren't so much "built", but rather grown inside incubator tanks out of Starskiff seeds in Stargazer Navalia, in pretty much the same vein that a tree would grow. The wooden hull is fed nutrients overtime to form a shape of a boat, and once finished, the Starskiff is taken out of the incubator tank and outfitted with mechanical components to complete the process. According to Chengjie, it's a remnant of Lost Technology from the Ambrosial Arbor before it was killed by Lan the Hunt.
• Our Gods Are Different:
  • Aeons are god-like entities who, at least for some of them, were once living beings who Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence, becoming the embodiment of a philosphical 'Path'. The creation of an Aeon also brings forth that Path into existance, which allows beings with enough willpower (such as all the player characters) to draw power from it.
  • Emanators are, essentially, demigods - except instead of being born half-divine, they are individuals chosen by a particular Aeon to represent their Path and are empowered as a result. For example: the Lord Ravagers, the Emanators of Nanook the Destruction, hold massive amounts of power and each is The Dreaded for galactic civilizations.
• Our Mages Are Different: Pathstriders can be thought of as mages of the theurgist variant. They accumulate abilities in the form of blessings from the Aeons, which are earned by following the Paths, the philosophies and ways of life, that the Aeons have forged. Pathstriders usually specialize in following the Path of a specific Aeon, though their combat style often differs from the combat style associated with their chosen Path. For example, Fu Xuan is a follower of the Erudition in her daily life, but uses Preservation in combat. The benefits that blessings give take many forms. For example, one blessing of the Path of Trailblaze enables Pathstriders to remain comfortable in regular clothing in harsh environments like Belobog's ice. Another allows them to delay sleeping if they need to, though they have to make up for it later. Some blessings of the Harmony offer Mind Manipulation powers. Blessings of the Preservation tend to revolve around protection, like making barriers.
• Out-of-Turn Interaction:
  • Ultimates can be performed outside of a character's current turn. Offensively, this allows you to find the right timing to use the move, such as when an enemy's Toughness Gauge is about to break; defensively, a supportive Ultimate used at the right time can save your character(s) from certain death.
  • "Follow-up attacks" are special attacks that certain characters possess; if you perform a certain action/trigger the special condition for the character with this ability, said character will immediately perform said attack even if it's not their turn yet. Counter-Attack abilities also count as "follow-up attacks" by the game. In Simulated Universe, Blessings of Elation focuses on attaching boons to follow-up attacks
• Overhead Interaction Indicator: Quest-giving NPCs generally have an exclamation mark icon on their heads. However, other icons may also be used to signify that an NPC needs something. For example in the Astral Express Parlor Car, you may come across Pom-Pom having cartoony dark clouds above their head; talking to them reveals that they're having a stiff neck, which then triggers a mini-sidequest for you to help them.
• Parental Abandonment: An unmarked sidequest in Penacony involves trailing a father-daughter duo named Wesley and Penelope, who have come to Penacony in search of Charlotte, a struggling but passionate artist and also Wesley's wife and Penelope's mother, who suddenly walked out on them many years ago. The Trailblazer follows their efforts throughout the Dreamscape, until they reunite with her in the dreamscape's Reverie Hotel. To their shock, they discover that she abandoned them because she realized that she loved art more than her own family, and having Penelope was her way of giving someone Wesley to care for in her absence. While they are frustrated and repulsed by her decisions, Penelope chooses to take a job at The Reverie in reality as a housekeeper to help her father recuperate his savings and also see if she can break through to her mother and convince her to return home.
• "Pachelbel's Canon" Progression: The music "played" by Kafka in the opening cutscene is Pachelbel's "Canon in D".
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: Two types of Calyx (Golden) buds; "Bud of Memories" and "Bud of Aether", respectively drop Character EXP Materials and Light Cone EXP Materials for you to manually and quickly level up your characters and Light Cones.
• Percent-Based Values:
  • The numerical values of most Basic attacks, Skills, Ultimates or Techniques tend to be calculated based on a percentage of one of the character's stats. These can be viewed through the character's Skill tab from the Details menu, and most of their percentages can be increased by upgrading their nodes in the Traces tree.
  • Most consumable items restore health or increase stats by percentages, though some of these also tend to add fixed values, such as the Diet Fried Rice healing a character by 28% of their max HP plus a fixed bonus of 250 HP.
• Perpetual Motion Machine: There have been several references to machines using the term:
  • Dr. Ratio has enough expertise in the field to make a machine come close to perpetual motion. If the Trailblazer asks Dr. Ratio about making the Astral Express a perpetual motion machine, he will note that it uses fuel, but a lot less than one would expect, and it appears to already be such a machine. Himeko theorizes that it is powered by the Path of Trailblaze.
  • One of curios in Simulated Universe is the Perpetual Motion Cuckoo Clock, which is powered by "Archimeles Spiral Energy". Oddly enough, its creator committed suicide for unknown reasons upon being recognized, and the curio itself is cursed.
• Phonýmon: The Aetherium Wars event has you playing through what is effectively the setting's equivalent of Pokémon. In this case however, the Mons take the form of hologram copies of enemy units that you capture and train. The setup even involves you going through various challenges where you have to face down multiple battles and puzzles in order to progress before ultimately challenging a boss similar to Gym Challenges.
• Planet Spaceship: The great world-ships of the Xianzhou Alliance are literally the trope: space-faring vessels so colossal they possess full internal atmospheres, complete with cloud cover and atmospheric refraction, and house multiple biomes in various habitation sections (called "delves"). The second major story arc centers on one of these vessels, the Luofu, and the crisis it faces after it comes into contact with a Stellaron (and what, if anything, the Stellaron Hunters have to do with the situation). Aside from the Luofu, the Yuque and Yaoqing are mentioned in the plot.
• Play Every Day: As expected of a live service game, there are plenty of things that encourage the player to log-in daily; the Nameless Honor battle pass has 4 daily missions that provide The Nameless EXP for increasing your battle pass's level, and there's a set of Daily Training Activity missions that reward Stellar Jade. The Trailblaze Power energy/stamina resource is also capped to encourage the player to tackle the challenges that consume it, and then play again the next day when it has been replenished over time. Downplayed come Version 1.6, where the Daily missions for Nameless Honor are axed; in exchange, some Weekly missions are changed to offer more exp to compensate, thus making this trope more like "Play Every Week" instead.
• Plot Tumor: Partway through the Xianzhou Luofu storyline, the Trailblazer (and only the Trailblazer) suddenly gets diverted to a subplot involving the Disciples of Sanctus Medicus, a cult that is spreading the Abominations of Abundance throughout the Xianzhou Alliance, under the pretense of not having anything better to do while waiting on other plot developments to happen. This plotline eventually joins back to the main plot when it's revealed that Dan Shu, an alchemist that you confer with throughout the story is actually the leader of the Disciples of Sanctus Medicus and is set up to be the Luofu storyline's Arc Villain, or so it seemed at first. Due to fan outcry of the plot being way too intrusive to the main story, however, the devs announced in the Voices of the Galaxy radio commentary that they'll be moving the Sanctus Medicus plot to sidequests instead for a future update.
• Poison Mushroom:
  • There's some consumable items that reduce the user's HP in exchange for some benefit, but you can also straight-up eat Trash, which doesn't do anything other than reduce the user's HP by 15%. Trash can also be used as a synthesis ingredient to make the Vomit Inducing Agent, which reduces the user's HP by 99% but also greatly reduces the Satiety gauge (allowing them to consume more items). Averted by Pleasant-Looking Trash, which has the appearance of a golden Trash bag but is purely useful in nature.
  • Some of the curios in the Simulated Universe are purely negative by their functions, such as reducing the options of blessings you can get after a battle or making you lose some Cosmic Fragments whenever you move onto a new domain; whenever you'll get such a curio, the game will notify you explicitly, and events that give you such curio often also will have you gain another positive effect in exchange.
• Poor Communication Kills: The IPC wanted to recreate and distribute the Synesthesia Beacons invented by the Genius Society across the cosmos to reduce the amount of unnecessary bloodshed caused by language barriers across races and species. Ironically, to their dismay, once everyone had the ability to understand each other the number of wars actually increased.
• Power Equals Rarity: It's a gacha game, so it's to be expected:
  • 5 Star characters have generally higher stats and more powerful abilities than most 4 Star characters, altough many 4 Star characters are more than useable and fulfill specific roles better.
  • Higher rarity relics give more and higher stat bonuses.
  • Higher-rarity Light Cones have better stat scaling than their lower-rarity counterparts and stronger effects.
• Power-Up Food: Much like Genshin Impact, you can feed items to your party members to heal them or grant them temporary boosts (although it's not just limited to food this time).
• Pre Existing Encounters: Encounters are physically present in the overworld and can be initiated by attacking them with your weapon or using a Technique that can attack overworld enemies. Striking an enemy with their Weakness causes the relevant foes to start the fight with a portion of their Break Meter depleted and take a small amount of damage. On the other hand, being attacked by a foe triggers an Ambush, causing your enemies to gain initiative.
• Premium Currency:
  • Stellar Jade can be earned in-game by opening chests, unlocking achievements, completing quests and Daily Training Missions, or participating in the Simulated Universe game mode. It can be exchanged for more Trailblaze Power, or converted into either a Star Rail Pass or a Star Rail Special Pass for pulling items from the Warp gacha.
  • Oneiric Shard is a purely premium currency which can only be bought using real money via the game's Microtransactions. It can be converted into Stellar Jade, or used to buy items from the Contract Shop.
• Press Start to Game Over: At the end of the Herta Space Station quest line, you are offered the opportunity to either join Himeko on the Astral Express or stay on the space station. You can turn down Himeko's offer, which cues a Non-Standard Game Over where the Trailblazer spends a peaceful life living aboard the Herta Space Station.
• Priceless Paperweight: Hook once owned a stuffed teddy bear that she affectionally named Junjun when she lived at the orphanage. The Trailblazer and Hook end up going back for it in hopes of selling it for a bit of shield to buy her father a birthday present. However, they soon discover that Junjun's sewn eyes are made of an incredibly valuable gemstone named erudite, which exponentially increases its value. Hook decides to sell the bear anyways in hopes of scrounging up enough shield to buy a replacement Geomarrow Probe for her dad.
• Promoted to Playable: Characters who started off as NPCs may become playable and obtainable from the gacha in post-launch version updates.
• Puppet King: At the end of Cyrille's questline, the Trailblazer obtains a pamphlet about Belobog history that reveals Cyrille's real purpose: After the mysterious disappearance of her sister Cyrilla, Prime Minister Stefan Marquez adamantly pushed for Cyrille to become the 8th Supreme Guardian of Belobog in Cyrilla's place. However, Cyrille was deemed utterly incompetent at her job and Stefan gained an extraordinary amount of power in a rapid amount of time, pushing horrid draconian policies on the Belobog populace. Dissatisfied with Stefan's rule, the Silvermane Guards prepared to overthrow the duo in a coup, but Stefan vanished and was never seen again while Cyrille was pushed into an arsenal box and murdered. It is surmised by Belobog historians that the death of the 7th Supreme Guardian and the disappearance of Cyrilla are both linked to Stefan's schemes.
• Put on a Bus: Void Archives is conspicuously missing despite being together with Welt at the end of Alien Space. He is indirectly mentioned a few times by Welt and some lore tidbits but his current whereabouts are never addressed.
• Puzzle Reset: Several types of puzzles offer the "Restart Challenge" button on the left of the HUD to help you reset them to their initial states. This is very helpful in "The Fool's Box" series of block puzzles because it's possible to get stuck there if you happen to move the wrong boxes.

Tropes Q to T

• Rain of Arrows: In Simulated Universe, Path Resonance: The Hunt has a portal open up in the sky to rain down a barrage of purple arrows on the enemies.
• Random Drop:
  • The drop tables of the Pre Existing Encounters in the overworld maps are semi-randomized. While they are guaranteed to drop specific types of items, the rarities of such are random, though higher Equilibrium Levels provide better chances of dropping higher-rarity items.
  • The Relic rewards you earn from completing the Caverns of Corrosion and Echoes of War challenges are random, though the more difficult versions of the fight will drop higher-rarity Relics.
• Random Number God:
  • This trope plays a huge factor in determining a Relic's stats. Aside from the Head and Hand Relics respectively having Max HP and Attack as their fixed main stat, the other four types (Body, Feet, Planar Sphere, and Link Rope) have random main stats.^note In general, these four types can boost Max HP, Attack, and Defense percentages; in particular, the Body Relic can also boost Effect Hit Rate, Outgoing Healing Boost, Critical Rate, and Critical Damage; for Feet Relic, Speed; for Planar Sphere, damage boost for any of the seven types; and for Link Ropes, Break Effect and Energy Regeneration Rate All initial substats and their individual values are also random, and a Relic may have up to four initial substats depending on its rarity. For every three enhancement levels, a Relic may also gain a new random substat if it still has less than four of them, or it may randomly receive an upgrade for one of its stats otherwise.
  • The Galactic Big Lotto Curio in Simulated Universe will occasionally give you a random Curio when breaking an object, but it also has a chance of destroying itself and reducing all of your characters' HP by 99%. These results aren't mutually exclusive, so it's possible to have both happen on the same object destruction. The Interastral Big Lotto Curio acts similarly, giving a chance at Blessings while risking the loss of all Energy and Technique points.
• Really 700 Years Old: In the Xianzhou Alliance, pretty much everyone who isn't specifically a human is at least a few centuries old if not more.
• Red Pill, Blue Pill: An early quest involves you attempting to figure out what happened to the researcher Rocky's girlfriend. You end up giving him closure by presenting him with one of two signal logs: a red one which contains the truth, and a blue one that contains a lie. Regardless of what you pick, you get the quest rewards anyway.
• Red Spider Lilies of Mourning: Blade has a spider lily motif (particularly in his splash art) which alludes to his repeated deaths and many lost loved ones. His burst animation also explodes outwards in a way that resembles spider lily petals.
• Rejection Affection: One sidequest involves helping a Vidyadhara named Cong win the heart of his crush, Jingzhai, despite several failed attempts at winning her heart, even attempting to give her a precious keepsake of his called a Unity Lock. She was previously in love with a famous and extraordinarily talented poet named Guyu but is no longer in a relationship with him for some reason; Cong believes that he can woo her with poetry like Guyu's, but as he is lousy at poetry he programmed several automatons to generate poetry for him. It's eventually revealed that Cong is actually the reincarnation of Guyu, and Jingzhai - who isn't a Vidyadhara - has been in a relationship with several of Cong's previous reincarnations, with each life being inherently driven to pursue her and using the Unity Lock as a keepsake of their previous relationships. However, being in love for so long has since rendered her dull to the excitement of romance, and she has tried to reject Cong because she feels that she can no longer reciprocate his feelings. He finally gets the hint when she reveals the truth behind their relationship, upon which he scurries off to hang out with his automaton and sulk for a while.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: The Aeons owe much of their concept to Aleister Crowley and his religion Thelema. A number of Aeons are also named after real-life mythologycal deities or names; with the first Aeon being mentioned, Nanook the Destruction, being named after the Inuit god of bears and weapons and Qliphoth the Preservation being named after a concept in Kabbalah. See the characters page for details.
• Required Party Member: Climax Boss fights force specific characters to be fielded, such as the Trailblazer during the Jarilo-VI final boss and Jing Yuan for the Xianzhou Luofu final boss. We Cannot Go On Without You also takes effect, as you will automatically lose the fight if the mandatory party member is KO'd.
• Resource Reimbursement: : In Simulated Universe: Gold and Gears, if you choose to play the dice "Company Time", you'll get 30% reimbursement of Cosmic Fragments (the Simulated Universe's currency) whenever you purchase "Blessings" and "Curios" in the Transaction domains, or whenever you upgrade Blessings in the Respite domains.
• Retraux: The sound effects for Path Resonance: Elation are noticeably bit-crushed and sound like they were recorded from an NES.
• Reused Character Design: Several Star Rail characters bear some significant resemblance to their counterparts from the previous Honkai games, but with varying degrees of alterations. Welt at least has the justification of being the same character as he was from the Honkai Impact 3rd storyline.
• Rewarding Vandalism:
  • The environment contains numerous breakable objects that will reward you in Credits and a handful of materials for destroying them.
  • This gets spoofed when there is a certain barrel in the Silvermane Guard Restricted Area whereupon a guard standing nearby will berate the Trailblazer for their vandalizing actions if you break it. Apologizing profusely to him will grant a Praise of High Morals.
  • That same guard makes a comeback in the aftermath of the "Aetherium Wars", this time as an IPC Team Leader. This time, he's not accepting apologies for another broken barrel, and beating him in combat nets you an achievement called "Don't Try This at Home".
• Rewards Pass: Nameless Honor is the Star Rail counterpart to the Battle Pass in Genshin Impact. Completing Daily, Weekly and Season Missions awards Nameless Honor EXP that levels up the Nameless Honor, awarding Credits, materials, and Star Rail Passes. Nameless Honor comes in a "free" tier, known as Nameless Gift, and can be upgraded to Nameless Glory by paying real money, which unlocks a bonus track with more rewards and an exclusive Light Cone.
• Rhetorical Question Blunder: In "You Already Know Me", Arlan is arguing with Asta because he refuses to give her encryption key back and let her make wasteful (but well-meaning) purchases for the space station. When she asks who gave him the right to manage her money, he retorts, "You did." She admits she might have done that but she doesn't count "buying an entire starnought fleet for security" as "wasting money".
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: The "Critter Pick" event in version 1.6 allows you to create and nurture Ruan Mei's creations after she abandons the project in the "When the Stars of Ingenuity Shine" mission. The creations that spawn are basically adorable little mooncake cats and some of them even resemble certain playable characters like March 7th, Dan Heng, even Kafka and Blade.
• Ridiculously Human Robots: Sheila, the tour guide for the Department of Galactic Geopolitics, is revealed to be a lifelike android named Prototype 157 created in the image of the real Sheila, the late founder of the Department of Galactic Geopolitics. Gunn, a researcher in the department and former lover of the real Sheila, is also revealed to have created her as a way to cope after his actions indirectly resulted in her death when her home planet was attacked by the Antimatter Legion. The Trailblazer has the option to tell Prototype 157 the truth, decommission her, or destroy her. Regardless of your choice, Prototype 157 is rendered inoperable and soon replaced by a new "Sheila" bearing the number "158".
• Rightful King Returns: Played with. Dan Heng's Companion Mission heavily involves internal Vidyadhara politics fighting over the position of High Elder. The Preceptors believe that Dan Heng, who has since revealed his identity as the Imbibitor Lunae, should be allowed to retake his position as High Elder, while the Alchemy Commission sides with the late Dan Feng's decision to pass down the title to Bailu. As far as either of them are concerned, Dan Heng has no interest in staying on the Luofu given how much lingering bad blood there is between him and the surviving Vidyadhara, and Bailu couldn't care less about who has the title of High Elder, but the Preceptors don't see it that way and send assassins after Bailu to kill her and ensure that Dan Heng retakes his title.
• Robot Buddy: You get two throughout the course of the main story, and they both serve the same function of finding hidden stuff on their respective worlds:
  • On Jarilo-VI, you get the Home-Use Object Finder, aka "Findie", a robot from the Interastral Peace Corporation that was stranded in the Belobog Underworld for 700 years. Findie can split its body to a maximum of seven segments, each pointing a light at the hidden object's location with the color of the lights determing the object's distance. And once you're within the object's proximity, using Findie again will cause it to regroup all of its segments and reveal the object for you. After Findie has served its purpose, you can go on one more sidequest to hand it off to Asta for safekeeping.
  • On the Xianzhou Luofu, you get Diting, a bionic dog from Tingyun. Diting functions similarily to Genshin Impact's Elemental Sight in that it creates a temporary aura to reveal trace trails and other shining things of note.
• Running Gag:
  • You can examine virtually every trash can that you can physically reach and get completely unique flavor text for every single one. It gets to the point where it sounds like the Trailblazer has a borderline creepy obsession with trash cans.
  • To a lesser extent, you can also examine most cardboard boxes you come across in the Xianzhou Luofu, and like with the trash cans, they all have unique flavor texts.
  • During part 1 of the Penacony questline, after every time something truly bizarre happens (and given that bizarre is Penacony's theme, it happens often), the Trailblazer can ask if they've just died.
  • Similarly, during part 2 of the Penacony questline, Trailblazer has to introduce themselves several times, and each time, you can say you're Penacony's resident mascot Clockie, to March's exasperation.
• Samus Is a Girl: In the story, some of the Faceless Goons (whether it's the Silvermane Guards, Cloud Knights, or IPC Grunts) are actually female, with their always-masculine-looking armors concealing their bodies. This is lampshaded with one Cloud Knights NPC in Alchemy Commission, correcting someone who called her "sir".
• Schizo Tech: Justified in the case of Jarilo-VI: the planet's main (and only) city, Belobog, has a post-Industrial Revolution aesthetic mixed in with significantly higher tech elements like intelligent automatons - the latter are a remnant from before the planet was hit by the Eternal Freeze and cut off from the rest of the galaxy. Seven hundred years later, and Jarilo-VI's general technology level, which was at the very least space-faring, regressed significantly due to a lack of resources and lost knowledge.
• Science Fantasy: Even moreso than the other entries in the Honkai series, the game is a huge mix of science fiction and fantasy, with interplanetary travel and highly advanced science mixed in with mystical elements and god-like entitities.
• Screw Destiny: Kafka and the Stellaron Hunters' philosphy is that free will and choice don't exist, and the future is already predetermined along several lines. In Kafka's Companion Mission, though, the Trailblazer can refuse to help Kafka. Doing so eight separate times causes Kafka to finally give up trying to enlist your aid and she remarks at how impressed she is the Trailblazer is able to defy Elio's predictions. The quest then immediately ends and you are granted the "True Free Will" achievement. .
• Secret A.I. Moves: When fighting boss versions of playable characters, such as Gepard or Bronya in Belobog, they have unique moves attacks that are not available in their playable version.
• Seers: The Divination Commission's role on the Xianzhou Luofu is to predict the future, and thus is made up of civil servants that can do so.
• Semi-Divine: "Emanators" are special individuals that the Aeons "bless" directly (in different ways) in order to represent their respective Paths. The game explains that normal Pathstriders are akin to fragile seafoam, while Emanators create waves that crash shorelines, and Aeons conjure tsunamis that engulf whole mountains.
  • The Emanators of Destruction are the Lord Ravagers, whom Nanook personally appoints as the generals of Antimatter Legion. They espouse facets of destruction in their own ways.
  • It's implied that the 7 Arbiter-Generals of Xianzhou Alliance are Emanators of the Hunt, and Lightning-Lord is one of the manifestations of their powers.
  • A few members of Genius Society are confirmed as Emanators of Erudition, such as Herta and Zandar.
  • 2 higher-ups of IPC, Taravan Keane and Diamond, are confirmed as Emanators of Preservation. However, most infos regarding their Emanators are highly classified by the IPC.
  • Shuhu is one of the Emanators of Abundance, whom the Luofu's High-Cloud Quintet battled against.
  • It's said that Emanators of Harmony can possibly appear among anyone in the Family, but they've also mentioned several people who have been their Emanators.
  • While Self-Annihilators (including those who joined Doctors of Chaos) are said to have gazed at IX, the text makes special mention of "the few who can single-handedly withstand the encroachment of Nihility on their existences, their journey of self-annihilation is drawn out to infinity, and the road they walk is like a shadow of IX cast in the world" - those few are implied to be Emanators of Nihility. Acheron is confirmed to be one of them.
  • At least according to Welt, all Memokeepers are Emanators of Remembrance.
  • Back when Tayzzyronth was alive, THEY created an Emanator of Propagation strong enough to convert whole planets into incubators for new Swarm offsprings.
• Sequel Escalation: Star Rail marks a dramatic upgrade in overall power scaling in the Honkai Impact 3rd continuity. In the previous game, Herrschers were the most powerful entities observed, being Physical Gods with cataclysmic dominion over Honkai power up to and including Reality Warper abilities. Aeons, by comparison, are actual gods and make Herrschers look like peanuts by comparison, as noted by Welt's observations. Justified in that Star Rail expands on the whole cosmology and shows civilizations beyond Impact 3rd's Earth and humanity, which the previous game has hinted through the appearance and mention of alien civilizations.
• Sequel Hook: The end of Trailblaze Continuance mission Jolted Awake from a Winter Dream has Aventurine, Topaz's co-worker, talk to her about having a business deal in Penacony (Astral Express' next destination) and he asks her to support him, hinting at their future involvement in the story. The 2.0 patch reveals that he was dispatched to Penacony to set forth a plan for the IPC to reclaim the planet and the 2.1 patch shows Topaz's involvement in the plan.
• Sequential Boss: Certain boss fights have multiple health bars (indicated by red dots underneath the bar itself) - down them to 0% health and the bar will refill, likely changing their moveset to something far more dangerous. Of note are the Dual Boss robots of World 2 of Simulated Universe who will only enter Phase 2 once both of them are downed at the same time.
• Set a Mook to Kill a Mook:
  • Both Automaton Spiders and Illumination Dragonfish explode when killed. Because of this, players can take them out first to make them explode right next to their mook allies, inflicting damage on them or killing them if their health is low enough. For the former group of enemies, this tactic is especially effective against Vagrants and Automaton Grizzlies because the explosions can reduce their Break Meters. For the latter, they'll damage and inflict a defense debuff on all remaining enemies, and netting a kill against an Aurumaton Gatekeeper using this explosion gets you an achievement.
  • Sting enemies in the Simulated Universe also explode upon death, dealing major damage to their allies. This is the most reliable way to kill a bunch of them that outpaces their replication.
  • Trotters in Memory of Chaos' "A Shot from the Sky" period will explode when they're defeated, dealing big damage to other enemies around it.
• Set Bonus:
  • Much like the Stigmata and Artifacts before them, Relics provide additional effects under certain permutations. Each character has a slot for one of the six types, classified as either Cavern Relics (Head, Hands, Body, and Feet) or Planar Ornaments (Planar Sphere and Link Rope). Both groups provide bonuses if at least two Relics of a given set are equipped, with the former providing additional bonuses if four are equipped. This means that an optimally equipped character has three active bonuses (two from Cavern Relics and one from Planar Ornaments, with the former category being either a pair of lesser bonuses or a lesser and a greater bonus). As of v1.3, there are fourteen Cavern Relic and ten Planar Ornament sets.
  • Each Path in the Simulated Universe has a Blessing that gains increased effectiveness relative to the number of Blessings from the same Path. In addition, once you unlock certain features from the Ability Tree, you can pick a Path Resonance at the start of a run, which will grant an additional Limit Break when you collect three Blessings from that Path. Additional Skills allow you to unlock Path Resonance bonuses when reaching certain buff number thresholds (six and ten) that allow you to get a free boost to your Path Resonance, such as increased Energy charging, allowing you to stack it up to twice, and granting an additional bonus effect on use. Expansion Modules build upon this by adding Resonance Interplay, which boosts your Path Resonance further upon obtaining at least 3 Blessings from a related Path.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The quest "A Teacher and a Friend" has Chengjie, a starskiff engineer with a plummeting self-esteem and motivation, seek to finish the starskiff his deceased master Ryan had designed to feel like he accomplished something. After helping him get the materials and testing his prototypes without any success, the Trailblazer and Qingque resort to summoning the dead master’s spirit thanks to a special technology. Ryan reveals that the manuscript Chengjie used was a failed concept he had come up with in his early years, and is thus completely worthless, before convincing Chengjie to let go and pursue a dream of his own. Chengjie realizes he wasted his time on a wild goose chase out of blind devotion to his master, but at least finally manages to move on with his life.
• Shirtless Scene: Most playable characters are depicted shirtless or topless for their sixth Eidolon Resonances, giving the impression that they are naked. However, exceptions may arise depending on the character, such as Hook and Bailu remaining clothed due to their childlike appearances.
• Shoot the Medic First: Some enemies can heal their allies in battle, incentivizing taking them out first to keep them from undoing the damage inflicted by your party members. Examples include the Automaton Hounds in Belobog and the Trotters of Abundance in the Simulated Universe.
• Shout-Out: So many, we have a separate page for them.
• Show Within a Show: The flavor text of the Thief of Shooting Meteor Relic set is based on a fictional movie series that stars a suave and cunning Phantom Thief named Meteor Thief Leblanc. Each piece of gear comes with an exquisitely detailed description of Leblanc's methods and exploits, each concluded by a staff member of the IPC divisions creating the series trying to figure out how to make the films as cheap and marketable as possible. At the end of the series, Leblanc meets his match in the form of a Great Detective, which is stated to have been an in-universe Audience-Alienating Ending that the writers came up with because they believed the fans felt that they wouldn't have the guts to write it.
• Shoot the Hostage: Jing Yuan and Dan Heng tag team Phantylia this way during the Coup de Grâce Cutscene. Knowing that Phantylia would really like to corrupt him for her future plans, Jing Yuan deliberately baits her into acting hasty and capturing him, causing Phantylia to momentarily open a metaphysical link between herself and Jing Yuan. Upon doing so, Jing Yuan calls in Dan Heng, who shoots through Jing Yuan to nail an exposed Phantylia and finish her off.
• Sibling Team: The Landau siblings (Serval, Gepard, and Lynx) can be one, and there's an achievement for winning a fight with this.
• Simple, yet Awesome: You can obtain free 5★ Light Cones from Herta's Store by grinding Herta Bonds in the Simulated Universe, and there's also a relatively cheap "Superimposer (Custom-made)" item which lets you Superimpose them to their full potential. These may not be as "specialized" or tailor-made to a specific character unlike those 5★ Light Cones that can be obtained from the gacha, but they still have high base stats, and their effects are still sufficiently strong enough when activated.
• Situational Sword: A Light Cone's effects will trigger only if it's equipped to a character with the matching Path. But even then, some Light Cones also have supplemental effects that trigger only when additional conditions are met. For example, the Fermata Light Cone can only be used by characters who walk the Path of Nihility, and it further boosts the damage you deal only if the targeted enemy is afflicted with Shock or Wind Shear.
• Skill Scores and Perks:
  • The character-specific skill tree system is called "Traces", and its nodes consist of static passive buffs and stat boosts (white nodes), or upgradable ability values (black nodes). New nodes are unlockable or upgradable as you perform more Ascensions on a character.
  • In the Simulated Universe, the Ability Tree is a mix between a skill tree and a roguelite progression system. The nodes consist of either permanent stat boosts or unlockable gameplay features. The tree is semi-linear as the previous nodes within a given row must all be unlocked first to unlock the next row.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: The planet of Jarilo-VI was a once-thriving landscape that has since frozen over under the Eternal Freeze, a supernaturally-influenced unceasing storm that makes the entire planet completely inhospitable except for one single city on the surface.
• Snowballing Threat: The Propagation is this due to self replecation. Gameplay-wise overlaps with Increasingly Lethal Enemy.
• Socialization Bonus: Some game modes allow you to use a Support party member by borrowing a friend's or a random player's Assist character. The supporting player will then receive additional Credits.
• Soft Reboot: Honkai: Star Rail is a sequel to Honkai Impact 3rd as it takes place in the same continuity and follows up on Welt's adventures after the events of A Post-Honkai Odyssey, but the game is set in an Alternate Universe and is set up in such a way that knowledge of Honkai Impact 3rd's lore will enhance your understanding of the game's backstory and characters but isn't required and can be enjoyed on its own.
• Source Music: A small interaction in the Herta Space Station's Master Control Zone involves the Trailblazer stumbling across a computer with a song contest displayed on the screen. Going through the submissions, they find a song named "Crises" (the battle music for Herta Space Station) at the bottom of the leaderboard and are absolutely taken by it. They have the option of giving it upvotes until it goes straight to the top of the leaderboard, upon which they will earn the record for "Crises" as a fan reward.
• Stalked by the Bell:
  • In all Simulated Universe modes, if you take too many turns to complete a battle, the game will start applying an irremovable Berserk buff to the enemy party for the rest of the battle, which increments at the start of each new cycle and increases their damage dealt by 20% per stack.
  • In Simulated Universe expansion module modes, there is a Countdown mechanic that decreases by 1 each time you move to a new node on the board. Once it hits 0 and starts going into the negatives, the Countdown will turn into Planar Disarray, which applies stat buffs to all enemies in Simulated Universe for the rest of the run and will continue increasing for each node traveled.
• Stat Overflow: Patch 1.3 not only upped the cap of the amount of stamina that all players can hold, but it also added a system in which stamina is 'stored' when it regenerates over the cap (though at a slower rate) that can be redeemed at any time, up to a maximum of 2000, which is enough to fill up the stamina almost ten times over.
• Status Effects: Each element has a status associated with it. By default, status effects have a 100% affliction chance when inflicting a Break on a foe with their Weakness.
  • Bleed: Inflicted by Physical damage. Victim takes Physical damage at the start of their turn. Bleed is unique in that the damage inflicted is based on the percentage of enemy's health value.
  • Freeze: Inflicted by Ice damage. When their turn comes up, they take Ice damage and thaw, and said turn will be skipped (i.e they can't do any action during said turn), but their next turn will be advanced forward, and even more if you repeatedly freeze them.
    • Dissociation: An upgraded form of Freeze applicable via Simulated Universe Blessings. In addition to skipping the target's turn, the target will take a percentage of their Max HP in Ice Damage upon thawing.
  • Wind Shear: Inflicted by Wind damage. Victim takes Wind damage at the start of their turn. Wind Shear can stack the more you inflict it, up to 5 times, for more damage.
  • Burn: Inflicted by Fire damage. Victim takes Fire damage at the start of their turn.
  • Shock: Inflicted by Lightning damage. Victim takes Lightning damage at the start of their turn. Unlike the other Damage Over Time statuses, Shock lasts for 2 turns by default.
  • Entanglement: Inflicted by Quantum damage. Victim cannot act and loses priority. Status wears off at the start of their next turn, upon which they will take Quantum damage. The amount of damage inflicted by Entanglement can be increased by attacking the target.
  • Imprisonment: Inflicted by Imaginary damage. Victim cannot act and loses action priority and SPD. Wears off at the start of their next turn.
• Starter Mon: In addition to the Trailblazer (and their alternate Paths), you acquire March 7th, Dan Heng, Herta, Asta, Natasha, Qingque, and Yukong for free. Unlike typical starter characters, almost all of them are decent at worst and will pull their weight given proper investment and team composition.
• Story Breadcrumbs:
  • Much like in Genshin Impact, these tend to be scattered all over the game zones in the form of recoverable books and the like. Quite a lot of additional information can be learned about the game world in this way, particularly aboard the Luofu, where a number of the books and whatnot detail precisely how the Xianzhou Alliance works and what their history is.
  • The loading screen may randomly mention lore-related topics aside from providing gameplay tips.
  • Relics have additional paragraphs of lore that go way beyond a simple Flavor Text, but these can only be read in-game if you tap on their "Backstory" button.
• Straight for the Commander: Any mooks summoned by Flunky Boss perish instantly if the boss is killed. There's a series of achievements that encourages this tactic - for defeating Silvermane Lieutenant, Bronya and Gepard without killing the Silvermane Guards they summon and for defeating boss version of Cocolia without killing Bronya.
• Straight Man and Wise Guy: While working together, Aventurine and Ratio form this, with Aventurine frequently making jokes about the absurdity of their mission while Ratio responds in a deadpan manner.
  Aventurine: Look, like I said — brute force can also solve things.
  Dr. Ratio: The Council of Mundanites should consider you as their member, for no one in this universe is more suitable to be there than you.
• Stylistic Suck: During the Penacony questline, Aventurine is required to shrink himself down into a miniature model version of Aideen Park to unlock the door leading to Sunday's chambers. Unlike normal overworld characters, the NPC figurines in this area are noticeably buggy, with them suffering from various anomalies such as Welcome to Corneria, clipping into the floor, random glitchy speech, and spitting out error messages. Aventurine at one point has to kick a figure multiple times to make it give him information as its dialogue repeatedly glitches.
• Super Mode: Aurumaton Gatekeepers will enter Wrath mode when their Sanction Meter reaches 100%, which fills up gradually every time they attack or if your party members strike them with their Skills or Ultimates. When activated, the Aurumaton Gatekeepers will gain stat boosts amplifying their attacks, summon two Illumination Dragonfish to their aid, and lock out their Break Meter from their elemental weaknesses for a few turns, after which they'll return to normal with their Sanction Meter resetting back to 0%. Wrath mode activation will also cause them to act immediately regardless if it's their turn on the Visual Initiative Queue or not.
• Super Move Portrait Attack: Whenever a character initiates their Ultimate, a splash showing their character art is quickly shown before getting right into the Ultimate's animation.
• Superpower Lottery: Emanators of Destruction personally chosen by Nanook effectively become planet busters, making them feared across the galaxy for the amount of devastation they can bring.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • The end of the Jarilo-VI main quest. Yes, you've managed to defeat Cocolia and seal away the Stellaron that had so badly disrupted the planet's geosphere and thus biosphere. These things, affected by almost a millennium of ecological disruption, are not going to simply revert to their previous, pre-disruption state overnight, and it is going to be an absolutely atrocious amount of work to restore the planet to anything even resembling its former glory. What you have done is at least prevented things from getting worse, and Bronya resolves to square her shoulders and help lead the people of Belobog into that beginning of the future. Not only that, attempting to reveal the truth of a 700-year lie is a recipe for political disaster, which is why Bronya opts to fudge it to make the people rest easier.
  • Just because you're a member of a group known for traveling the universe and helping people out in times of crisis doesn't mean that everyone is going to welcome your help with open arms when they never reached out or asked for your help in the first place. When the Astral Express Crew meets face to face with Lady Yukong of the sky-faring commission, she point blank refuses their offer citing that the Stellaron wrecking havoc on their ship is an internal affair that they themselves must deal with. Essentially, the protagonists are outsiders trying to interfere in an internal matter that has nothing to do with them. Especially when said Outsiders illegally entered the ship in the midst of a martial law lock down where no ship can get in or come out therefore making it impossible for Outworlders to know anything about the Luofu after the lockdown- not to mention they entered the ship via Silver Wolf hacking through the systems and forcing the entrance they entered through open. With that fact in mind and records that Kafka contacted them on top of knowing highly sensitive information that was not made public to civilians, the group become people of interest. The only reason they are not thrown in jail or interrogated in regards to their relationship with the Stellaron Hunters is because Jing Yuan intervenes on their behalf- and even then he doesn't trust them with helping to track down and seal away the Stellaron but asks for their help in tracking down the wayward Kafka. It's only after they extract useful information on Kafka and the sudden revival of the Ambrosial Arbor that Jing Yuan starts asking the Astral Express for their help in the Stellaron crisis.
  • Even if Jing Yuan lifts Dan Heng's banishment from Xianzhou, the former states that the people, especially the Vidyadhara, may still not be able to accept him back due to the crime Dan Feng did. Dan Heng doesn't mind.
• Suspend Save: In Simulated Universe and certain lengthy map instances such as "Warring Expeditions", you can exit anytime as you like, and the game will give you an option to continue from where you exactly left the next time you enter that mode. There's also an option to start over from scratch, deleting the previous save state.
• Sword Lines: Characters with bladed weapons briefly leave swing traces whenever they attack. The lines are also appropriately colored and come with additional visual effects depending on the weapon. For example, Seele's scythe swings have indigo lines to match the color palette of her weapon, while the Path of Preservation Trailblazer's lance thrusts are accompanied by yellow and white sparks because the weapon itself produces flames.
• Tag Team: You bring up to four party members when exploring, but just like in Honkai Impact 3rd and Genshin Impact, you can only control one character at a time; you can tag in with another party member by tapping their portrait in the HUD. The Pre Existing Encounters on the maps have varied Weaknesses, so the game encourages you to tag often if you want to consistently strike them first and inflict pre-emptive damage.
• Take a Third Option: An extremely rare Domain Occurrence in Simulated Universe allows the Trailblazer to meet Ruan Mei, who grants the option to choose one of two or three a game-breaking boons (depending on the event). However, if you have the playable Ruan Mei in your party, you get access to the "You are... Ruan Mei?" option, which lets you claim all of the boons simultaneously.
• Take That!: Qingque's heliobus illusion in "Foxian Tale of the Haunted" mocks common AAA gaming practices. In her imagination, Qingque has successfully managed to spread Celestial Jade to the entire galaxy, but in the pursuit of innovation (and money) she has tasked her company with coming up with new ways to improve the game. Suggestions include charging exorbitant microtransactions for basic actions like drawing tiles, diverting into "popular" genres such as a Celestial Jade-themed action RPG spin-off, and shoving a gacha system into the game that forces you to pull for tiles.
• Take Your Time: No matter how urgent an objective might be, it won't advance unless you talk to a certain NPC or walk through the quest area. This allows you to do something else at your own leisure, such as Level Grinding in preparation for a story-related battle.
• A Taste of Power:
  • You get to control Kafka and Silver Wolf in the prologue, where they're powerful enough to utterly and casually wipe the floor with the Antimatter Legion forces in their path. Then the Trailblazer is introduced, and alongside Dan Heng and March 7th, they're all notably weaker and have to struggle more per encounter as you now have to build up your party manually. Notably, both Kafka and Silver Wolf are not obtainable from the gacha nor do they have their information as playable characters in the Data Bank added during the game launch, the earliest possible point in the game's lifetime where the prologue can be played.
  • Similarly to the aforementioned Kafka and Silver Wolf, Dan Heng as the Imbibitor Lunae becomes temporarily playable in two of the last few missions of the Luofu story arc, while he himself does not become a addition to the player roster until version 1.3.
  • While these characters cannot be controlled at all, namely Luocha and Jingliu, you get to see how they fight and perform in battle before their official release.
• Temporary Online Content:
  • Events and non-standard gacha banners (also known as "Event Warps") are only available for a limited time, with the game also displaying individual timers that indicate their expiration.
  • Downplayed with certain major events like the Boulder Town Super League and the Everwinter City Museum, which are stored in what the name dubs the 'Conventional Memoir' - the questlines and the content itself are added permanently into the game, though doing them during their limited-time run allows the player to earn more rewards.
  • Notably, it is generally not possible to miss important items via events - most temporary event rewards are materials you can get elsewhere, such as character upgrade material and Stellar Jade, and the stuff that isn't is usually just useless commemorative items - but one notable exception is the event-only Light Cones: "Before the Tutorial Mission Starts" from Starhunt Game event in 1.1 and "Hey, Over Here" from "A Foxian Tale of the Haunted" in 1.5.
• Theme Naming: Every character's Eidolons are named as part of a specific theme relevant to that character, though some are broader or more esoteric than others. For example, March 7th's all make reference to her missing memories and desire not to forget again^note Memory of It, Never Forfeit Again, Just Like This, Always..., etc, Guinaifen's describe her street performing acts^note Brushing Teeth while Whistling, Blocking Pike with Neck, Catching Bullet with Hands, etc., and Silver Wolf's are named after hacking terms & techniques^note Zombie Network, Bounce Attack, Overlay Network, etc..
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: There's an achievement for dealing 20,000 or more damage to an enemy who has 1% HP or less. Curiously, it's named Bring a Gun to a Knife Fight.
• They Called Me Mad!: The followers of Qlipoth The Preservation, seeing the Aeon mindlessly building an immense wall, dedicated all their lives and resources to following his example, building immense walls and fortified structures. Multiple text logs mock them for how nonsensical the effort is, including how they accidentally invented bartering just to get more construction materials, but come the Antimatter Legion and an endless ice age descending on Jarilo-VI, those fortifications were the only reason the city of Belobog was able to withstand the onslaught and the cold.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: An In-Universe example. Two guards in Belobog can be overheard discussing the recent single by Mechanical Fever, where Pela sang lead vocals as an experiment, in such a manner.
• This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman: When talking about endgame modes or battle-focused events, the Path of Erudition tend to be viewed unfavorably compared to Destruction or Hunt, as these gameplay modes tend to involve Elites or Bosses with high HP, which Erudition characters struggle against. Perhaps due to this, the game has subtly made more (non-general) scenarios where Erudition characters can shine, such as additional Flunky Bosses or the Pure Fiction game mode which focuses on multiple waves of regular enemies and scoring based on how many of them are defeated.
• Timed Mission:
  • The Forgotten Hall and Pure Fiction stages must be completed in a number of in-battle cycles. More stars can be gained per level if less cycles are used to finish the stage.
  • Some specific sidequests need to be completed within a given amount of time after they are initiated. For example, the mini-sidequest of helping Pom-Pom with their stiff neck has a 4-hour timer, though it's generous as the main objective itself can be completed within minutes.
• Toggling Setpiece Puzzle: Some platforming puzzles in the Herta Space Station require you to toggle between orange and blue Hard Light platforms in order to reach an objective. A gray platform can also be activated to provide a shortcut to a previously-used control panel, which then mandates you to toggle between the blue and orange platforms again.
• Too Awesome to Use:
  • Fuel is hard to come by, and it's used to partially refill your Trailblaze Power. It is often saved up for the endgame because higher Equilibrium Levels equate to better rewards from the content that consume Trailblaze Power.
  • Self-Modeling Resins are used to guarantee the chosen main stat of Relics when crafting them via Omni-Synthesizer (in addition to the chosen set and part), but their sources (limited events, endgame shops, etc.) are limited and cycle slowly, with a patch typically only providing 1-3 of them. So, they are often saved for potential future Relic sets.
• Touched by Vorlons: Showing devotion to or even earning a single glance from an Aeon is enough to power up mortals to superhuman levels.
• Trailers Always Spoil:
  • The "WHITE NIGHT" trailer promoting Penacony features a shot where Aventurine wears a battlesuit for an apparent boss fight. It also depicts the duel between Acheron and Sam.
  • The 2.2 trailer outright spoils the fact that Robin is somehow still alive and that the Trailblazer will gain a new class/weapon in the form of a magical hat.
• Translator Microbes: Living beings across the cosmos have managed to surpass the language barrier via Synesthesia Beacons, a microscopic device taken in the form of an injection that binds to the nervous system and allows beings to talk to each other by recognizing their "internal dialogue" and its nuances, converting it then reconstructing it into a form that the recipient can understand.
• True Art Is Incomprehensible: In Aurum Alley, the Trailblazer can come across an art installation called "Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Luofu Art: Delivery Dragon", which appears as a pair of empty courier boxes haphazardly laid out on the side of the road. The Trailblazer's internal monologue offers an interpretation of the art piece, to which they can either praise or disparage as junk.
• Turn-Based Combat: The main gameplay loop during battles. However, a unit's turn isn't necessarily static due to additional Action Initiative factors that determine when can it act.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: The Luofu plotline splits up early into two distinct threads: The main plotline, which follows the Trailblazer, March 7th, and Welt, and a subplot involving Dan Heng, Sushang and Luocha as they try to catch up with the main party.

Tropes U to W

• Underground Monkey: Enemies can have alternate versions or palette swaps depending on their element. For example, the Flamespawn and Frostspawn have identical base models, but differ only in terms of their respective Fire and Ice affinities. It's justified in the case of Fragmentum enemies, as the Fragment can warp reality to duplicate things that already exist, but it gets odd when enemies from completely unrelated factions are palette and texture swaps of each other, like Voidranger: Reavers and mara-struck soldiers, or Voidranger: Eliminators and Silvermane Cannoneers.
• Upgrade Artifact: Eidolons are special items that you get when you obtain a copy of a character you already have, either from the Warp or by purchasing/winning them in game (in the Trailblazer's case, Eidolons can be earned through story progression or purchased from specific vendors). Each character has 6 Eidolon upgrades that are unlocked linearly, so if you wish to unlock them all, you'll have to obtain 6 copies of the character. The first, second, fourth and sixth Eidolon upgrades will grant new passive or improves specific abilities, while the third and fifth will improve Trace levels.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: In the quest "Old Fortress Scavenge", Pela will follow your character as an NPC while exploring the Corridor of Fading Echoes. However, if you walk into certain small spaces, such as one enclosed by barbed wire, a chunk of rock, and some boxes, she can end up trapping you by blocking off the small space you need to escape from by simply standing there; due to the small space, making her move is impossible; since you can't open the map to teleport to a Space Anchor to escape due to the location being treated like a Domain of Excursion, you have to press the escape key to restart the mission.
• Vague Age: Exaggerated - due to the "different worlds" setting, the concept of "age" and the measurement of time as they know it are different from world to world; in Xianzhou, for example, you have to live for a few hundred local years to be considered an "adult". Especially true for characters with "Girl" body types (Clara, Pela, Herta, Fu Xuan etc); Clara is for all intents and purposes a child, but Pela (from the same planet) looks just as young, yet holds a high position in Silvermane Guards.
• Variable Mix:
  • Being in an enemy's line of sight will add an eerie "Psycho" Strings effect to the overworld background music, letting you know that you're being targeted by them.
  • During the boss fight with Cocolia in Jarilo-VI, "A Trap With No Return" (which is derived from an instrumental version of "Wildfire") plays in the background when the Trailblazer pulls the flaming lance manifested by the Path of Preservation and it stays that way for a while in the succeeding boss fight. Sometime after depleting the first health bar of the boss, a scripted dialogue happens, and "A Trap With No Return" is replaced by the full lyrical version of "Wildfire" until you defeat the boss.
• Versus Character Splash: Duels in the Fight Club boxing ring are always preceded by a screen featuring the Trailblazer on the left versus the opponent's representative on the right.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: Gallagher reveals that Clockie and his fellow cartoon characters are based on real people who lead Penacony's prisoner uprising against the IPC long ago. Clockie himself is a cartoon interpretation of the Watchmaker, and Hanu is based on one of the Watchmaker's allies, Hanunu.
• Video Game Caring Potential: You have the option of performing particularly nice gestures (for a certain degree of "nice") in some optional dialogue events, which will reward you with an item called Praise of High Morals. Hilariously, the only purpose of Praise of High Morals is to be spent on other optional events where you do obviously immoral things, such as stealing from a fountain or robbing someone's unattended briefcase.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: Firefly gives you 20000 credits to buy food during your tour of Penacony. You have the option of spending all of said money instead of just buying one or two items, leaving her stunned but trying to put on a brave face as she foots your bill.
• Video Game Dashing: During exploration, your currently-active character can dash, not only to quickly move through the map, but also to sprint past and flee from any roaming enemy that tries to chase you around.
• Visual Initiative Queue: A stack of icons on the upper left corner of the battle HUD represents everyone's turns, going from top (the current turn) to the bottom. Status effects that briefly adjust the Speed stat will also alter the queue in real-time.
• Visual Pun: The Automaton Spider is an Action Bomb that looks more like a fist, and when it's about to go off you can see the thumb lift off a yellow button. It's a Deadmans Switch.
• Vocal Dissonance: Julian is a Master of Disguise who can make himself look like a man years older than he really is. But he's still a kid with a kid's voice, so he gives himself away when he responds to a question.
• Visual Calculus:
  • Dr.Ratio has visualized math equations during his idle animations, and it's also incorporated into all of his attacks during combat. May overlap with Formulaic Magic since he seems able to weaponize these visualizations.
  • Ruan Mei's character trailer features her (as a child) envisioning chemical diagrams upon seeing a frozen monster during a research expedition.
• Wagon Train to the Stars: Our heroes (the Trailblazer and their traveling companions from the Astral Express) are journeying through the galaxy from one exotic destination to another, helping people solve their problems from package deliveries to toppling dictators, battling everything from the forces of oblivion aboard the Herta Space Station to bellicose vagrant miners on Jarilo-VI to a forbidden heretical Abundance sect on the Xianzhou Luofu. Never settling down, the Astral Express blazes a trail from adventure to adventure through lightyears of wonder and mystery.
  Welt: The Alliance and the Express haven't had any previous dealings, so our arrival might not receive the warmest welcome. But as Trailblazers, we're not in this for fame or gain — we just need to do everything in our power to assist the Xianzhou and eliminate the source of disaster." "Always keep that in mind, and don't forget the way of the trailblaze: Explore, understand, establish, and connect."
• Warp Whistle: Space Anchors enable instant warping on specific parts of the map after they have been activated.
• We Are as Mayflies: Humans are considered to be "short-life" species on the Xianzhou Alliance, as their expected lifespan pales in comparison to that of the Xianzhou natives (Homo caelestinae), Foxians or the Vidyadhara. The first one can live for thousands of years, Foxians have a life expectancy of roughly 300+ years, while Vidyadhara are technically immortal but undergo a cycle of reincarnation every few centuries.
• Weird World, Weird Food: To emphasize the otherworldliness of the setting, Jarilo-VI, Xianzhou Luofu and Penacony have local foodstuff that either look completely alien, or look close to something in real life but with a twist.
• We Used to Be Friends: Cocolia and Serval used to be as close as sisters during their high school days, but at some point their relationship suddenly changed and Cocolia cut off all contact with Serval. It's eventually revealed that Serval used to work for Belobog's government and specialized in research on the Stellaron, with it all but stated that Cocolia, who was at this point under the Stellaron's control, feared that she was getting too close to the truth surrounding the Stellaron and decided to put a stop to a potential threat to her goals. Serval eventually learns to bury the bad blood between her and Cocolia by killing a Fragmentum monster formed from Cocolia's emotions and ultimately destroying the electric guitar that they built together. There's even an achievement for having Serval deliver the final blow to Cocolia in a boss fight.
• We Would Have Told You, But...: At the climax of the "Punklorde Mentality" sidequest, the Trailblazer and Leonard walk in on Screwllum and Herta having a nasty row about the former's decision to shut down the Simulated Universe project, with Herta storming off in defiance. Screwllum proceeds to mention that Silver Wolf is after the titular Punklorde Mentality Curio buried somewhere in the Simulated Universe and sends in the Trailblazer after it via a special backdoor before he shuts down the project, where they trace Silver Wolf's steps in locating the Curio. It's only when the Trailblazer locates the target that Screwllum reveals that there was never any intent to shut down the Simulated Universe and that all of the events leading up to encountering Silver Wolf were a reverse-gambit against her to trick her into acting hasty and jumping into the Simulated Universe after the Trailblazer to steal the Curio. Since the Trailblazer and Leonard were the only ones not in on the plan, they served as the perfect bait up until the big reveal.
• We Will Spend Credits in the Future: The IPC enforces the use of Credits as the standard galactic currency. However, planets have their own Global Currency Exception that are used to buy local wares.
• Weapon Specialization: A variant. Light Cones, the closest thing the game has to conventional weapons (as in Honkai Impact 3rd and Genshin Impact), bear passive abilities that can only be activated if equipped on characters of a given path. Furthermore, some of them seem designed to be equipped almost exclusively by certain characters, indicated by their artwork bearing said characters' likenesses and passives that can amplify their strengths and/or ameliorate their weaknesses.
• Wham Shot: After Jarilo-VI's Supreme Guardian, Cocolia grants the Trailblazers permission to search for the Stellaron, she turns around as her hands show the Stellaron signs.
• Whole-Plot Reference: The entire Aetherium Wars event is a blatant one to the Pokémon franchise.
• Who Needs Their Whole Body?: The elusive head of the Aurum Alley Merchant Guild is... the talking severed head of an Aurumaton Gatekeeper. The Aurumaton President claims to have existed since Aurumatons like him still roam the streets freely, but after the incident where the Aurumatons "rebelled", he willingly detached his whole body away and lived only as a head ever since, because he doesn't want to become a danger to the community like the other aurumatons.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: The citizens of Xianzhou managed to achieve immortality millennia ago, but quickly found it didn't solve all of their problems and only served to create new ones. With effectively infinite lifespans, their population soon ballooned out of control and civil wars started over resources while external forces also attacked them to steal the the secrets of their immortality. In addition, their immortality made them vulnerable to Mara sickness, a disease unique only to immortals, which means at any time they can suddenly become mindless violent abominations. Additionally, the player can learn later that immortals born with congenital health issues like birth defects or blindness cannot have them corrected through technology or surgery, as their bodies will always inevitably revert to their "natural" states. The citizens of Xianzhou grew to despise their immortality so badly that they switched from worshipping Yaoshi to Lan and dedicated their entire lives to hunting down the followers and abominations of Abundance.
• Wind Is Green:
  • Downplayed for the playables. Even though the Wind element and its Wind Shear DoT effect is denoted with a green color, a majority of the Wind aligned characters do not feature green in their designs or attacks (which always deal Wind damage), with Blade's sword slashes even being colored red. The only characters who play this straight are Huohuo (who has green hair) and Dan Heng (applies to his spear and parts of his clothes, and has a green aura when activating his Ultimate).
  • Played straight for the Windspawn and Stormbringer enemies, whose physical appearance and attacks are colored green, matching their Wind-aligned attacks.
• World in the Sky: The Xianzhou Luofu offers a unique variant to this trope in that it's a Planet Spaceship with biodomes each containing floating civilizations above large cloud seas, where transportation is done by flying boats called Starskiffs.
• World Tree: The Ambrosial Arbor is a giant wilted tree that is the centerpiece of the Xianzhou Luofu, which originally gave its citizens immortality. However, it's more of a malicious example in that it was originally planted by Yaoshi the Abundance, the Xianzhou Alliance's Arch-Enemy, and was subsequently killed by Lan the Hunt to keep its dangerous immortality-granting powers from further harming the populace. The tree is revived by the Disciples of Sanctus Medicus who planted a Stellaron inside it in an attempt to undermine Luofu's belief in Lan, and to get everyone to side with Yaoshi once again.
• Worldbuilding: About 80% of the game's text is dedicated to exhaustive monologues detailing incredibly minute details about the galaxy that the game takes place in and the innumerable characters that populate it. Many Relics and Curios are based on planets and environments that have tertiary relevance at best to the actual plot and are completely irrelevant at worst, but help establish how diverse, mysterious and wacky the galaxy can get on a cosmic level.
• Wreaking Havok: Breakable objects have physics applied to them, so when you break them, their parts will mostly scatter in the direction you're facing and fly across the air before coming to a rest on the ground and fading away. If there's a wall in the way, they'll bounce off of it in a semi-realistic fashion. This serves no gameplay purpose other than to look cool.

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Ohhhhhhh, we will see
Come with me take the journey.

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