The Chrysos Heirs have the best-designed gameplay in Star Rail and no one can convince me otherwise
Aglaea is very difficult to play. If your team isn’t well optimised, and even then, if you’re unlucky, the garmentmaker is going to die. I think it’s evocative of Aglaea’s endless struggle to maintain both her humanity and Okhema’s safety.
Mydei’s storyline is all about taking matters into his own hands and doing what he believes is right, rather than hesitating and not making any decision at all. His gameplay is this exactly: upon entering his enhanced state, he attacks automatically, and deals more damage.
Castorice has to learn the need for a balance between life and death in order to become Death’s demigod. She performs best when her team has lots of hp for her to drain, and therefore needs high healing.
Anaxa’s kit revolves around weakness, which suits his intellect well. The more weaknesses an enemy has, the more damage he deals, the more energy he can generate and the more weaknesses he can implant. It’s a vicious cycle which I think suits him very well.
Hyacine’s kit is very simple. She heals. She heals so much. Even little Ica’s damage scales off her healing. Which makes sense, because her character is all about healing. About how true strength comes from empathy and kindness and being willing to help others.
I think the way Hoyo managed to implement thievery into Cipher’s gameplay is especially cool. She quite literally steals the other characters’ damage and then throws it back at the enemy. You could also argue that her debuffs ‘steal’ enemies’ stats but that’s admittedly a stretch.
Phainon’s gameplay has definitely been talked about for this exact reason before but there’s a reason why. His gameplay loop is collecting coreflame’s from his allies’ support, becoming Khaslana and taking the field all alone, then burning himself away and restarting the cycle. They even put a text popup- “Phainon returns to the cyclicality once more”- once his ult ends.
Hysilens’ character explores Nihility and whether or not a mere fish in the sea is actually capable of resisting the current. Her gameplay actually offers the counterargument to this: strength in numbers. She applies multiple seperate DoT effects, and then triggers an extra instance of DoT damage (which even has an icon shaped like a fish) for each DoT status that deals damage.
Cerydra is a chessmaster, and her gameplay revolves around the chess mechanic of pawn promotion. When a pawn reaches the other side of the board, it can be transformed into a more powerful piece, which is represented by the buffed character being able to duplicate their next skill. This effect also requires six stacks of Peerage, which is the same number of moves a pawn has to make to be promoted.
Evernight is similar to Castorice, except she has no respect for life- that is to say, no benefit from healing. Her damage output is dependent on repeatedly summoning and killing her memosprites, ideally taking as many seperate instances of damage as possible in the process. This is reminiscent of her willingness to hurt both herself and others in order to protect March 7th.
Dan Heng’s shift from dps to sustain is pretty telling on its own; instead of pushing others away he’s now protecting both his companions and himself. He also has his Bondmate mechanic which I think represents his newfound resolve to intertwine his fate with the fates of others in order to carry out the Trailblaze.
Cyrene honestly deserves a whole post of her own. I genuinely think her gameplay is genius. First, her base state: I haven’t talked about voiceline’s before now, but Cyrene in this state mimics both the Trailblazer and the Elysia’s voicelines- “Hi, did you miss me?" Upon being revived, and “together, we can do anything” on her skill. At the start of the turn (representing the start of a new recurrence), all allies gain an effect called ‘future’ and after taking action, they lose ‘future’ and Cyrene gains ‘recollection’, just like how the seed of memory/the Demiurge gained the stories of the Chrysos Heirs. Her mimicry voicelines are also reminiscent of the Demiurge copying Philia093. Once enough ‘recollection’ is accumulated, she enters the ‘ripples of past reverie’ state. In other words, she becomes Cyrene. In this state, her memosprite skills are called ‘ode to ___’ and ‘minuet of blumes and plumes’. Odes and minuets are both types of poems: this represents the Demiurge finally being able to write her own stories instead of just recounting the past.
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