Honkai: Star Rail 3.0 missing voices – These characters are muted in English

The Astral Express is embarking on its greatest adventure yet in Honkai: Star Rail 3.0, but some of its leading members won’t have anything to say about it in the game’s English dub due to the effects of the ongoing voice actors’ strike.

The exact list of missing VAs will be a bit of a spoiler for HSR 3.0’s story, so you can find that further down and we’ll provide some context on what’s going on first.

VAs are rightfully fighting for better protections from AI-based exploitation, which some recording studios are unwilling to agree to – and some of those work on HoYoverse’s games. Although the devs are apparently in the process of moving all of their voice work to studios that are unaffected by the strike due to having signed an agreement with the union representing the VAs, they were unable to get every voice talent in front of a microphone in time for this update. 

Contractual issues and delays are bound to happen with a large and complex undertaking such as this, so fans shouldn’t blame the developers or the VAs for this. Both parties would dearly prefer things to get back to normal as soon as possible.

Unfortunately, this means that key characters in HSR 3.0 will be muted during gameplay and cutscenes in the English dub, meaning that anyone who wants a complete experience should either try playing in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean – whatever floats your boat – or wait until HoYoverse can patch in the missing voice lines with an update. There is not even a rough estimate for when this might happen, though, so it could be a long wait.

Based on a preview build we had access to prior to release (HoYoverse told us that this was unlikely to change for launch), the following characters will be muted in HSR 3.0’s English dub:

• Himeko
• Dan Heng
• Trailblazer (Stelle and Caelus)
• Kafka
• Firefly / SAM

Trailblazer and Dan Heng have a lot of screentime in HSR 3.0, making their absence a big loss. Himeko’s part is substantially smaller and hurts the least, as she has more of a supporting role so far. The surprise appearances of Kafka and Firefly / SAM contain some pretty emotional dialog, which would probably hit home a lot harder if the dialog had been voiced – another sad miss, especially as Kafka hasn’t shown up in so long.