Honkai: Star Rail sets the mood for update 2.0 with unhinged meme trailer

Rise up, trashcan enthusiasts

Marco Wutz | Jan 24, 2024

Honkai: Star Rail sets the mood for update 2.0 with unhinged meme trailer /

It’s been meme after meme with Honkai: Star Rail recently – the project team over at HoYoverse is truly in tune with the game’s community and continues to embrace the humor coming from its players. After the free release of meme-lord Dr. Ratio, HoYoverse published an unhinged trailer for the upcoming update 2.0, giving us a taste of the new planet we’ll get to explore, Penacony.

You can watch the Honkai: Star Rail Sweet Dreams Preview – “The Great Tatalov” below:

Where do we even start to unpack this? Obviously they’re heavily playing on the “Trailblazer loves trashcans” meme, which has been established by the funny interactions the story’s main character could have with them in Belobog and its underworld – which included the first mentions of the mysterious Garbage King, who’s getting the official name Tatalov in this video. What we see in the teaser looks almost like a parody of the Belobog arc.

That’s the funny surface layer of the video and any member of the community will get a good laugh from it – but it’s not entirely devoid of seriousness.

Penacony being a sort of equivalent to Las Vegas – a city of smoke and mirrors, where all things seem possible – and the strong emphasis on dreaming in basically all teasers for the planet has me believing that we’re in for an absolutely surreal ride once we’ve arrived there.

This unhinged fever dream of a teaser? I fully believe that our adventure in Penacony will be like this. Though the writing had some hiccups during the Xianzhou Luofu arc, Honkai: Star Rail has so far not disappointed in the story department, so I’m confident the writers can make this tone work all while they’re delivering another emotional part of the narrative.

We better get ready to fight Trash-kun to the death. Or save him? I’m not sure, but it should be a lot of fun. We’ll learn more about it all during the Honkai: Star Rail 2.0 livestream in any case.

Upcoming Honkai: Star Rail characters you will be able to play as

Published Jan 24, 2024

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg