I am writing this review after something like a year of playing Honkai: Star Rail, right as it started to lose me. It's kind of a post-mortem on my experience with the game, and whether I end up dropping it today, tomorrow, in the next month or in a few months, I'm marking it as "abandoned" for reasons that hopefully will become more clear as you read this review.

Honkai: Star Rail is a gacha JRPG. It's a chinese game rather than japanese, but it follows all the usual JRPG tenets by focusing more on the story and the feeling of adventure than on the aspects of building a role for yourself to play.
To explain how bad of a mismatch those two genres are, I will need to talk about what smarter people than me almost certainly have a better name for, and what I call "perpetual storytelling".

Different people approach writing differently: some like to plan everything out, and have the world, the characters, the main events and, most importantly, the ending planned in advance before they even commit a word to the manuscript of the story, while some prefer to let it flow as they go and develop organically. This is often referred to as architect/gardener dualism, but really it's more of a spectrum and most writers fall somewhere in the middle.
This model only really makes sense when the author actually sets out to write a complete story, with the beginning, the middle, and the end. This is how overwhelming majority of the stories work, but it's not how all stories work. With this conceptual framework set, I can now talk about perpetual storytelling.

What happens, when you as an author set out to write a story that is supposed to run indefinitely? Imagine you’re writing for a TV series that’s guaranteed to get greenlit for new seasons as long as the ratings don’t drop too badly, or, indeed, for a live-service game of which gacha games are a subset of, which don’t really end as much as they just die one day, as the developers post the End of Service notification. Imagine that also, for some ungodly reason, you decide to have the overarching plot alongside the more manageable finite arcs that take place within a season of television, or, in case of gachas, within the span of an update.
If you’re leaning architect, you are screwed, as you can’t really be an architect if you’re writing a perpetual story. You can’t plan for everything, because there is no cutoff point for you to stop at. As years go on and the narrative wheels spin through, you will exhaust whatever preplanned material you’ve had and will start to have to make stuff up on the fly. Retcons and things that couldn’t have possibly reasonably be hiding in the background will follow. In effect, you will have to start being a gardener.
Writers who lean gardener thrive in this kind of environment, but the usual problems with the kinds of stories that grow organically are multiplied tenfold, when you can never go “enough is enough, I’ve said everything I wanted to say with this story”. Rehashes, contrived conflicts, contrived attempts to freshen the setting, aforementioned retcons and things sprung out of nowhere, characters in perpetual stasis after they play out their role, power/stake/scope creep are all problems that get exponentially worse the longer the story goes on, and this is all problems that every piece of media that goes through perpetual storytelling embodies eventually. This includes shows like LOST and gacha games like Honkai: Star Rail alike. But this isn’t even the worst problem that comes out of this mode of storytelling.

The worst problem is the reason why the story has to be perpetual. You can’t even have a satisfying ending, because you have to keep your audience, you can’t have them decide “ok, enough is enough, I’m satisfied with where the things ended up and I don’t really care to see what’s next”. As such, every ending of every arc has to open three times more questions than it answers, and you have to be constantly promising your audience that the Cool Stuff and the answers to all the questions is just around the corner.
The worst problem of Honkai: Star Rail, and by extension, of all live-service games and narratively driven TV shows and millions of words long webnovels is the constant blueballing of their audience. The audience has to be kept motivated enough to keep playing/watching/reading the thing, but at the same time, never satisfied enough to decide that they have had enough.

With this long preamble out of the way, I can finally talk about Honkai: Star Rail.

The first area of the game, the space station, is pretty much the tutorial area. You, the analogue of walking nuclear bomb that, for some reason, isn’t treated with the kind of horror the concept should require and isn’t locked under seven locks on some desolate planet where blowing up wouldn’t kill millions of people, solve a few small problems and become a part of the mostly persistent motley crew that’s composed of the fairly standard spread of archetypes: a comic relief, a straightman, a wise old man, a hot competent lady and a small mascot creature. The task is to go around the universe and solve local problems in attempt to defuse the same kinds of artifacts of mass destruction that the main character possesses, which cause all sorts of weird stuff happen at the writer’s convenience.
This isn’t the worst setup for the perpetual story, because one of the workarounds for some of the problems having to spin the wheels forever creates is to not make it much of a story to begin with, and focus on individual story arcs that can be planned and executed more conclusively. Problem solved? Well, you might think so after playing the first planet, Belobog, and I wouldn’t blame you for not noticing that the entire Belobog arc fit into the initial release version of the game, 1.0, and the brunt of the narrative hydra I was talking about, where every conclusion has to spring up three times more questions than it answers, is being borne by the second planet, Luofu, which is full of promises of cool stuff in the future and where nothing interesting happens in the moment.
This will be the pattern for every story update from then onwards. The story of Luofu “ends” with a few characters wiggling their eyebrows towards Threats on the Horizon, the story of Penacony, the third planet, ends alike. Each of those took multiple patches, and every one of those was in and of itself incomplete, leaving the player with heavy-handed cliffhanger and plenty of breadcrumbs leading nowhere.

And now, finally, for the reason I’m marking this as “abandoned”.
No matter where I drop this story, it will never be finished. By its own tenets, by its own incentives the only way it ends is if Hoyoverse cans the game, and if it happens, the kind of narrative hydra that years of perpetual storytelling spawn cannot be killed to satisfaction within a month or two between the End of Service notice and the game going offline. There will simply be too many hanging plot threads, too many things not playing out as they should, the overbearing load that comes from always positing more questions than answers.
Think of the ending of LOST, or BBC Sherlock, or Moffat era Doctor Who story arcs, or Homestuck, or Worm, or any other perpetual story. This is the kind of ending perpetual stories get, and it’s the only kind of ending they can get simply by the strains the structure imposes.

The clash between JRPG, that focuses on telling one cohesive story full of colourful cast where everyone goes through their own arc, and live-service model where the story can’t be whole and cohesive by design, and where characters have to be rehashed, reinvented and replaced over the course of the indefinite run, should be obvious by now. No matter how long Honkai: Star Rail is going to run, it’s not going to get better as a JRPG, and it will never even reach the same heights as it did in the very first planet arc that was allowed to be whole by the virtue of the incomplete second planet already present on release.

There isn’t much I want to talk about here other than storytelling structure, to be honest.
The gameplay is alright. It’s gacha. If you’re an impulse spender, avoid the genre at all costs, otherwise it’s a decently fun time with interesting teambuilding, slow incremental progression systems and not much in the way of high-end content.
Someone has compared these games before to a very long-term roguelite run, and I think the comparison is apt – the fun in gachas lies in making do with whatever luck and planning sends your way, and it stays entertaining for as long as you keep getting new teambuilding ideas.
This is where the advantage of the live-service model is – every patch brings some new gameplay content, whether it’s a new game mode, new characters or gameplay-focused events.
The character designs are mostly pretty bad, unless you like a very specific aesthetic (detached sleeves, random holes in clothing, as much skin-tight clothing as possible to accentuate curves), barring some of the guy designs. The character archetypes are bland and I don’t think I like a single character in this game much.
The area designs are hit or miss. I really like some of the areas, while others are warehouse mazes or disjointed floating platforms or generic JRPG final dungeon designs that consist of Menacing Floating Cubes.
The visuals and music are fine. There are good vistas and good themes, but nothing particularly stands out. Nothing is grating either, though.

I recommend this game to people looking for a gacha/live-service with an above-average effort put into it. If you’re not a fan of the genre and don’t see yourself sticking to one game with perpetual but fairly incremental updates to gameplay, there’s nothing you can find here that you wouldn’t be able to find in better games.