Honkai: Star Rail gets painfully online with its perfect Internet speak

Check any HoYoverse social media thread, and I guarantee you’ll find a microcosm of netizens communicating in the infinite languages of online slang, memes, and pop culture references. Those conversations are often some painful mixture of absurdly awkward, endearing, or aggressive, and the writing in Honkai: Star Rail’s latest event perfectly captures that spirit.

The flagship event for Honkai: Star Rail Version 1.5, A Foxian Tale of the Haunted, follows a streamer named Guinaifen, who investigates ghost sighting claims. You and a few other characters work together to put these rumors to rest and grow Guinaifen’s social media presence. It’s a lesson in ghost-hunting and clout-chasing, basically.

Star Rail knows something about posting

The event has you join a paranormal activity forum where people post about various supernatural events around the Luofu. These forum posts become leads to investigate, starting a short quest for each one. When finishing an investigation, you make a forum post of your own to share your findings and put the public at ease.

Every post on the forum garners comments from various netizens. The comments range from thoughtful discussion to, well, this.

There’s even someone barking. What’s extra fun is that Honkai: Star Rail has a race of fox-people called Foxians. Maybe the barking is real? Is it possible that Foxians in Honkai: Star Rail actually do bark at each other to express thirst?

Of course, there are also people using the posts to get attention for themselves. There’s one guy begging Guinaifen to reply to their DMs. Even Guinaifen’s brother uses her posts to try to get more followers himself. Or maybe he’s not even her brother, just someone fishing for followers.

There’s also a nod to the rise of generative AI to churn out low-effort content, with one commenter accusing us of using a similar tool to create our posts.

We even have haters and white knights. Someone makes a post criticizing our content, and people come to our defense in the comments. The top comment has been removed by a moderator, and another has been censored for profanity. Yikes.

The rest of the event’s pretty great too

Aside from the painfully accurate internet “discourse,” I actually like the event as a whole. I haven’t played Honkai: Star Rail in earnest for some time, and this is the event that got me to download it again. There’s a new event story with unique dungeon puzzles, the featured characters have some fun dialogue, and the cutscenes are great. The combat portions of the event have unique mechanics that are actually fun to play around. You get a light cone as part of the event rewards, and unlike Genshin Impact, it appears you’ll be able to partake in the event storyline even after the event concludes.

I’m impressed at how much effort was put into creating an immersive event complete with internet spam. At the same time, I’m faced with how utterly wild and incoherent the internet can be, and I’m not sure if I like it.