Frankly, I don't know what's happening as I didn't play Honkai Impact at all but this kind of time travel thing to save everyone intrigues me. I've been reading some similar novels like Heretic Spellblade. The story's nice, even though I don't quiet get what's happening at the beginning.
Still, I'll look forward to the updates even though I don't get interested on parodies so much (especially apparent because of the references that will be lost on me).
At the beginning it ends up being a little confusing, but to put it simply...
The game has a main line where there is no protagonist and follows a trio of valkyries, honestly the protagonist was
a pain in the beginning, at least I thought so, but the story takes a course that forces her to mature, and over time I fell in love not only with her but with all the characters, and the protagonist who is Kiana, she evolves a lot as a character but at the cost of a lot of suffering...
In the game, there are small interactions with the characters and almost all the girls in certain lines show slight signs of romantic feelings for the player, even though he does not appear in the main story, and in some events, mainly on birthdays, some make it very clear that they have feelings, but that was just fanservice so to speak, until events that interconnected the stories started to come out and fans started calling it captainverse and even made a chronological order explaining everything about it
Being honest I love the characters but I don't like the main story very much, not only because of the tragedies but because of yuri, don't get me wrong I have no prejudice I love (and it's not little) yuri, but in honkai I I just can't stand it because I really like the captainverse, so those yuri interactions make me uncomfortable, on the contrary I loved the anime Azur Lane with yuri atmosphere and I think the commander is a useless and unnecessary existence in the game...
I created this game with the intention of joining the two, the captainverse with the main story, I'll try to be as faithful to it as possible but inevitably some things will have to be changed
About the references you won't be missing that many to tell the truth, the characters that appear at the beginning are from the captainverse, they didn't have as much screen time as the mainline ones, much of what we know about them is thanks to the "original" versions that appear in the main line and that will still appear in this game, so even if you don't play, with time everything will fall into place
Anyway, I don't even know if you're going to read all of this, it turned out to be quite long lol, but I hope I summed it up well, and if anyone has anything to correct feel free I only know what I've seen in the game, and I haven't played since it came out