About

Honkai Impact 3rd is a free-to-play action role-playing game developed by miHoYo and released on Android, iOS and Microsoft Windows. It's a spiritual successor to Houkai Gakuen 2, featuring some of its characters. The game has gacha mechanics and a combat system inspired by Bayonetta and Devil May Cry.^[1]

History

Works on Honkai Impact 3rd began in June 2014 and the game was released in China on October 14th, 2016. On December 13th, a promotional video was uploaded on YouTube.

In 2017, more servers in Asia opened and the global version became available on March 28th, 2018. The official PC version was released on December 26th, 2019.^[2] The game appeared on Steam on October 21st, 2021.^[3] Honkai Impact 3rd is available in multiple languages and its main story has full voice acting both in Chinese and Japanese. The game is regularly updated with new characters, story content and time-limited events.

Reception

11 days after its initial release, Honkai Impact 3rd was downloaded 1 million times in Japan. The game reached 35 million downloads worldwide as of March 28th, 2018.^[4] It was miHoYo's first globally successful title.

The game was praised for its character design, talented voice actors, anime-style graphics, deep storyline and gameplay mechanics as exceptionally advanced for a mobile game. Its large download size and poor accessibility of end-game items were listed as negatives.^[5] The Steam version was criticized for the game's lack of an option to connect with a pre-existing account.

Online Presence

The Honkai Impact 3rd Twitter account is followed by over 438,000 users^[6] and its Facebook page gained over 910,000 likes.^[7] The game has an official Wiki^[8] and a TV Tropes page.^[9] Its most popular subreddit has over 143,000 members.^[10] There is also a web app named HoYoLab made by miHoYo as a forum for their games.^[11] In-game cinematic cutscenes and other videos are posted on the official YouTube channel which has over 872,000 subscribers.^[12] The most popular video "Will of the Herrscher" gathered 59 million views (contains spoilers).

Aside from the game itself, Honkai Impact 3rd has multiple supplementary media such as web manhua^[13] and an anime series (which are also posted on YouTube).^[14]

Genshin Impact, which is a video game made by the same company, has a similar artstyle and multiple references to Honkai Impact 3rd. Fans of both games often make connections between them through fan art, memes and theories.

"Brilliant Bright" music video controversy

On April 22nd, 2021, a music video titled "Brilliant Bright," made in collaboration with the Myth & Roid rock band, was released on the Honkai Impact 3rd official YouTube channel in order to celebrate the global server's 3rd anniversary. The animated video featured characters in bunny-girl suits, resulting in a huge backlash from Chinese fans who considered it inappropriate. They were also angry at the global server getting exclusive content.

Some players reported miHoYo to the authorities and on April 24th, a Chinese man went into the miHoYo's office with a knife, allegedly attempting to assassinate the miHoYo founders.^[15] The video has been deleted from the official channel, although it's still available online.

miHoYo removed almost all in-game content related to the video and issued an apology, giving global players 500 crystals as compensation. Chinese players got an even bigger compensation of 10 Focused Supply Cards, despite their server not being affected at all.

Search Interest

External References