Honkai Impact 3rd is a story first, and a game second. It is a large multimedia project that thrives on long form storytelling.

This is a guide to reading the story of Honkai Impact 3rd. It will include the game’s main chapters, open worlds and game modes, chronicles, manga and visual novels.

This is not a chronological order of the story, but rather a recommended reading order.

You can skip or delay manga and visual novels if you want, but reading them will enhance the experience by a lot, and they contain story elements essential to the plot.

When new content comes out, or missing content is found, it will be added into the guide. We try to stay up to date as well as we can, but it may sometimes be behind an update or two due to time constraints.

Game modes like Abyss, Universal Mirage and Memorial Arena do not contain story. However, enemy descriptions may include spoilers for the story, so don’t read them unless you’re caught up.

Elysian Realm, Chronicles and the Open Worlds (Sakura Samsara, A Post Honkai Odyssey, Shicksal HQ)are heavily story focused, and are included in this guide. They will unlock long before they appear in this guide. I heavily recommend NOT playing them until you’ve reached them in the guide. They contain heavy spoilers for other parts of the story, and are only unlocked early so that newer players don’t feel left out. But trust me, you’ll have enough to do that it won’t be a concern.

Coop Raids have non canon stories, but it is advised not to read the subtitles until you’re caught up, because there are some main story spoilers there. Expeditions have spoilers in the descriptions, but should otherwise be fine.

Some battlesuits and augments were introduced through joke events and alternate worlds. As long as you don’t read the descriptions or skill names, looking at the battlesuits will not tell you what happens in the story, as anything you see may not appear in the main story.

Yup. Sometimes, you’ll have text popping up whilst you’re slaying foes. This can be quite distracting. However, the text is important, so spam some attacks or dodges if need be, so you can pay attention to the text. It can hold relevance to both story and gameplay.

In Global/SEA versions of the game, please keep these matters in mind:

• There is no English voice over. Just Chinese (CN) and Japanese (JP).
• Not all game content is voiced.
• Sometimes, newly added content will only be voiced with CN voices, but JP voices are added later.
• Sometimes, events will be partially voiced with CN voices but not with JP voices.
• When you set the game to CN, Chinese voices will apply to gameplay and story. However, CG and cutscenes will still have JP voices. The exact reason for this is unknown. This also means event cutscenes will often be unvoiced. Some of the animations are made available in Chinese on youtube, and we will link to those in this guide.

Due to a persistent bug, for some players subtitles will not always function as desired. This issue is less common in more recent chapters and events.

If subtitles appear not to be working for you, you can try the steps described on the official FAQ. However, this solution does not work universally. As such, if the issue persists it is recommended to either watch a recording on youtube, or continue without the subtitles. For animations, we will be linking directly to the videos in this guide.

The most stubborn scenes in this regard, you won’t lose that much by missing a couple of lines, so if you can’t get it to work or find a good recording, just continue the story and you’ll figure out what’s going on without much issue.