Honkai Impact 3rd: Big in Japan, Coming to America

School girls battle monsters in this action beat ‘em up game

By IGN STUDIOS

Partner Content by miHoYo

"Hey, I'm big in Japan!" goes the old quip. But when it comes to Honkai Impact 3rd, the mobile action game from miHoYo, that's no joke. Just 11 days after its Japanese launch, Honkai hit one million downloads. Toss in a million more in Korea, and Southeast Asia, and Taiwan, and err, 6 million first-month players in China — and 35 million downloads overall — and you begin to see that Honkai… well, it's kind of a big deal.

And Honkai Impact 3rd is currently rated 4.8 / 5 on the Google Play Store. Download it here!

Now it's America's turn to join in on the action. Honkai Impact 3rd officially launched in the United States on March 28th. But first, here’s everything you need to know about this new title.

Console in Your Pocket?

miHoYo posits that Honkai packs a console-quality action-game experience into a mobile package, with a combination of high-end, anime-style graphics and smooth, responsive controls driving arcade-like 3D brawling action.

To accomplish high-end graphics, Honkai offers toggleable settings for luxuries like high-dynamic range rendering, anti-aliasing, post-processing, physics, and framerate cap. In-game graphics are designed to be fast and colorful, closer to high-end arcade games like Guilty Gear Xrd than a typical mobile outing.

The devs spared little expense on the voice talent, too. Sharp-eared anime fans will recognize the vocal contributions of Rie Kugimiya (Fullmetal Alchemist, Gintama), Miyuki Sawashiro (Hunter X Hunter, Fate/Apocrypha, Durarara!!), Kan Asumi (Nisekoi, Hidamari Sketch) and Rie Tanaka (Fruits Basket, Bakemonogatari).

How to Honkai

But what about the gameplay? Imagine a 3D anime brawler with RPG progression elements and you're most of the way there. Your characters—warriors in the elite Valkyrie Unit— dash into relatively short, bite-size missions to dispense beatdowns on the mysterious, world-threatening monsters known as Honkai.

Successfully completing missions leads to numerous stat and equipment upgrades, and sometimes unlocks entirely new Valkyrie to play-— discussed further in the next article in this series.

As a touch-based game, you access most attacks via quick taps or brief holds, with different combinations unleashing different combo variations. Your Valkyries can dodge too: Well-timed, last-second dodges activate Time Fracture, a bullet-time-like slo-mo during which Valkyrie can unload on their hapless foe's back. Unique, meter-draining Ultimate attacks and multiplayer-oriented leadership buffs (for example, increase everyone's HP by 12%) add additional flavor to each character.

In short, there's lots of bad guys to beat up, tons of gear, characters, and achievements to unlock, and everything's been engineered for maximum addictiveness. 35 million downloads and counting suggest they're onto something.

For the next article in our series on Honkai Impact 3rd, we’ll be discussing Characters and Customization. See you next time!

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