Much like how the Future Market Trailblaze Continuance showed life on Jarilo-VI following the events with Cocolia, Sojourners’ Ghastly Reverie in Honkai: Star Rail deals with the aftermath of the events of the Xianzhou Luofu. However, though it does a good job at introducing Huohuo and the other members of the Ten Lords Commission, it suffers from some similar issues to the Luofu’s main story.
Before we begin, I’d like to say that this article will contain spoilers for the Sojourners’ Ghastly Reverie Trailblaze Continuance. The plot follows what happened early on in the Xianzhou Luofu arc, after the Ambrosial Arbor messed up the Creation Furnace. Apparently, an elemental being known as a heliobus was the one inside of the Creation Furnace and powering it up. But it escaped after the events of Version 1.0. Meanwhile, the Trailblazer and Guinaifen are looking for ghosts in the Fyxestroll Garden area of the Luofu. That’s when they meet with Xueyi, Hanya, and Huohuo. Though the judges try to escort them out, a heliobus traps them inside of a maze, with its ultimate goal being revenge (of sorts) against the Xianzhou.
While I enjoyed the Trailblaze Continuance adding on to the established lore of the Xianzhou Luofu, it did not feel like an epilogue in the way that Future Market did. That’s honestly fine, since it’s not as if we’re wrapping up loose ends or anything yet in the story. But something about Sojourners’ Ghastly Reverie felt off to me. Future Market made it very easy to care about what was going on because of how many familiar faces were in the story. In comparison, only Guinaifen and Xueyi are characters we’ve seen before and we hardly know them. Xueyi doesn’t even play that major a role in the story. So it feels a lot like the Trailblaze Continuance exists to try and advertise Huohuo, who is the pick-up character in the gacha.
Topaz debuted as a playable character in the same patch as Future Market, so of course she had an important role in the story. However, she arguably still took a bit of a back seat to Bronya. Huohuo is surprisingly a very fun character and the Trailblazer has a lot of personality for a silent protagonist. But, like with what happened in Future Market, I would’ve liked another established character to help integrate Huohuo and the other judges. Call me cynical but the heavy focus on them made it impossible to think about anything other than how these three characters are either currently in the gacha, or are coming up soon. In fact, since we barely know Xueyi anyway, I felt like Hanya could have taken Xueyi’s role in the story. Hanya’s the one who’s going to be in the latter half of Version 1.5, after all.
This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy Sojourner’s Ghastly Reverie. I enjoyed seeing Huohuo’s bizarre friendship with Tail, as well as how it subverts your expectation of how HoYoVerse usually handles character death. I did legitimately think that Tail would come back all “Surprise!” so it was nice to see him gone for real. I haven’t actually played the “A Foxian Tale of the Haunted” event yet so he’ll probably come back there. After all, it would be bizarre to remove a major aspect of Huohuo’s character so soon after meeting her.
There was something very odd about the Xianzhou Luofu’s story when compared to the Jarilo-VI one. It felt disjointed and suffered from odd pacing. While pacing isn’t really an issue for Sojourner’s Ghastly Reverie since it was only about an hour and a half long, it felt like a completely separate story from the Luofu arc. Future Market followed up on the immediate aftermath. Meanwhile, Sojourner’s Ghastly Reverie picks up from something that happened in Version 1.0. That’s probably why it feels so weird, especially since it feels like so much time has passed. Hopefully, the story for other Xianzhou ships or worlds can be closer to the writing for Jarilo-VI.
Honkai: Star Rail is readily available on the PS5, Windows PC, and mobile devices.
