"A game for everyone is a game for no one."

This is something that Hoyo failed to consider with the start of Honkai Part 2, as they tried to appeal to both existing players and new players, but in the end alienated them both.

Part 2 had a lot of marketing back in February. More than I’d ever seen during Part 1. It’s very obvious that Hoyo were hoping Part 2 would appeal to a wider audience and bring people over from Genshin and Star Rail. But it didn’t work. Not very well, at least.

New Players were alienated by Part 2’s overreliance on Part 1.

Part 1 is extremely long, which can be daunting to a lot of people. Meanwhile, Part 2 was meant to be a fresh start where new players can jump in without prior knowledge of Part 1. Unfortunately, Hoyo couldn’t even execute this properly and decided to lock Part 2 until you reach level 30 rather than simply include a gameplay tutorial at the start of Part 2. This forces new players to play the worst chapters Honkai has to offer, giving a poor first impression.

Then, Hoyo decided it would be a great idea to use existing concepts and terms without even explaining them. How is someone who only started playing for Part 2 meant to know what the Sea of Quanta or a Bubble World is? These things don’t get explained until way after you would have reached level 30.

Existing Players were alienated by Part 2’s lack of a connection to Part 1 and desire to be something that it’s not.

Despite there already being two great storylines that Hoyo could’ve turned into Part 2 - A Post Honkai Odyssey and the Previous Era, Hoyo chose to set Part 2 somewhere with as little connection to Part 1 as possible, likely as part of their efforts to make it easier for new players to get into without prior knowledge. As a result of this, so far Part 2 has an entirely new cast (besides from Ai and Vita but they don’t count since they’re just narrators now). While it’s confirmed that the old cast will have a role in Part 2, and we know that someone from St Freya will make an appearance after the end of the first arc (more than 20 hours into Part 2), it feels wrong to not even have one existing character in the main cast. After all, this is Honkai Impact, so why are there no Honkai Impact characters? The new trio should’ve had an existing character (like Susannah or Sora) in it, or they should’ve saved Griseo’s return for the start of Part 2 and had her take a similar role to that of Welt in Star Rail. (Also I just want to clarify I don’t hate the new cast. I like the new main trio, along with Dreamseeker, Songque and Thelema.)

Honkai Impact is not an Open World game. Aside from APHO, Open Worlds do not work well in this game. Hoyo should know this after the backlash they received when they tried Open World Chapters towards the end of Part 1. With Part 1.5, they created what I consider to be a near-perfect system, returning to Stages but keeping Side Stories and the Open World level design. And then they decided to throw it all away and return to non-replayable Open World Story Chapters for Part 2, now with an added (mostly optional) Artifact/Relic grind. It’s obvious that this was meant to appeal to Genshin / Star Rail Players, but Honkai Impact isn’t either of those games.

Both New and Existing Players are negatively affected by poor writing and Honkai’s current identity crisis.

The game is in a weird place right now where half of the UI has been updated to feel more modern and streamlined (removing any of its identity and charm in the process), somewhat resembling Star Rail’s UI, while half of it hasn’t. This makes it feel like two different games mashed together, which I suppose is fitting.

And then there’s the poor writing. I don’t think anyone will argue against the writing having declined in quality since the end of Remaining Flames, what with the technobabble and bloated dialogue of the final arcs. Unfortunately, Part 2 hasn’t fixed this. I have seen so many people say they barely understood what was going on in the first Chapter of Part 2 due to the way it was written, and I can relate. Plus the pacing of Chapter 1 was awful. We barely even got introduced to the new cast before moving onto the Seven Shus storyline.

TLDR Part 2 is poorly executed and alienates both new and old players due to having both an overreliance on Part 1 while also having too little of a connection to it storywise (so far). It doesn’t fix a lot of Part 1’s issues while also bringing back the mostly-disliked Open World format.