Summary
At the beginning ofHonkai: Star Rail, players are first introduced to the Stellaron Hunter Kafka. The mysterious red-haired woman uses guns as her preferred weapons, and she seemed to have a way to manipulate anyone in her way as she and her companion Silver Wolf infiltrated Herta Space Station. Since then, players couldn’t wait topull for KafkainHonkai: Star Rail’s future banner updates.
InHonkai: Star RailVersion 1.2, Kafka officially became a five-star banner character alongside fellow Stellaron Hunter Blade. She is a Lightning characterfollowing the Path of Nihility, meaning that her abilities apply shock damage to enemies that chips away at their health over time. However, if one would pay attention to the story and their interactions with Kafka in-game, they might notice that she has another ability that wasn’t added to her playable skills: Spirit Whisper.
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Kafka’s Spirit Whisper Ability Explained
According to Kafka’s in-game character story, she has an enchantment called Spirit Whisper that can hypnotically manipulate people through language. She used this to set up theTrailblazer(Stelle/Caelus) to absorb the Stellaron in the beginning of the game. She would also use this ability to keep Blade at bay by controlling the Mara within him.
IfHonkai: Star Railplayers would pay close attention to Kafka’s dialogs, it seemed that she uses “Listen” as the operative word to start controlling people. A recent example would be Kafka stopping the fight between Blade and Imbibitor Lunae by saying, “Listen to me.” It’s quite similar to howBioShockvillain Frank Fontaineused “Would you kindly?” to manipulate the actions of Jack throughout the game. Meanwhile, some might argue that Kafka could control people at will without having to say the word based on the Jepella Rebellion cinematic.
Honkai: Star Railplayers would also witness Kafka’s Spirit Whisper in boss battles against her, both in the main story andSimulated Universe. When she used it, players would lose control of some of their characters for a number of turns, causing them to attack their allies. The only way to counter this would be abilities that dispel debuffs, like Luocha’s Prayer of Abyss Flower and Bronya’s Combat Redeployment.
Kafka’s Spirit Whisper is undeniably broken. However,Honkai: Star Raildidn’t add this ability to her combat skills when she was released as a banner character. While it’s common for certain NPCs to have abilities that aren’t available to their playable versions,Honkai: Star Railcould have still maintained Kafka’s Spirit Whisper ability since it’s an important aspect of her character in the game’s main story.
If Kafka’s NPC would control players' characters, it would be interesting to see how she would use Spirit Whisper to temporarily manipulate enemies during battles. It could be useful during challenging battles, like in Echo of War and the Simulated Universe, especially if the ability would target a boss monster, forcing them to attack and possibly eliminate weaker monsters. Spirit Whisper might even save players time and life points if they would just let enemies attack each other for a good portion of their battles.
The only flaw with Spirit Whisper being playable though is that it might be deemed useless when there’s only one enemy standing. Kafka might not be able to fully utilize the ability if the enemy doesn’t have any teammates to attack. The most it could do is to probably immobilize them for a couple of rounds, and inflict Lightning DoT like the rest of Kafka’s abilities. Perhaps this could be the very reason whyHonkai: Star Raildidn’t add the ability to Kafka’s arsenal in the first place, or possibly because it was simply too broken.
There seemed to be no indication about Spirit Whisper becoming a playable ability in the near future. But considering thatHonkai: Star Railhas started releasing alternate skins for its characters with new abilities, likeDan Heng’s Imbibitor Lunae, maybe Kafka will get the same treatment down the line.
Honkai: Star Railis available now for Android, iOS, and PC. A PlayStation 5 version launches in Q4 2023.
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