An unexpected bird in Honkai: Star Rail and China’s war on sparrows

Abstract

In April 2023, the gacha game Honkai: Star Rail was launched, published by miHoYo/HoYoverse, a Chinese company now very famous for its hit game Genshin Impact. The game is a space opera focusing on a group of interstellar adventurers that travels across the universe to eliminate dangerous artifacts known as Stellarons. The player builds their team with a variety of anime-style characters (23 in total as of writing) earned from a brutal1 gacha mechanic.