From the second the mysterious swordswoman Acheron was revealed in Honkai: Star Rail, fans had an inkling that there was more to her than developer HoYoverse was letting on. The release of version 2.0 in February confirmed they were correct, showing her to be a semi-amnesiac who barely knows herself. But with the release of version 2.2, Acheron has given fans some more information to work with in the form of her true name—Raiden Mei. For fans of HoYoverse’s other games, it’s a doozy of a reveal.
To be more accurate, Acheron reveals that her full name is Raiden Bosenmori Mei. When it comes to HoYoverse’s games, that’s a pretty loaded name. Honkai Impact 3rd, Genshin Impact, and Honkai: Star Rail now all have characters that are some version of each other and who bear the name Raiden. Genshin’s version, Raiden Ei, is the Electro Archon whose visual and fighting styles all pay homage to Honkai Impact 3rd’s Raiden Mei. HI3’s version of the character is of the most interest to fans of Honkai: Star Rail.
This isn’t the first time a character in Honkai: Star Rail has alluded to HI3. Welt Yang, one of the residents of the Astral Express, bears the same name and appearance as a character from HI3. In fact, they are actually the same character, with Star Rail revealing that Welt has somehow crossed into the game’s universe after leaving HI3. In addition to other multiverse building in Star Rail, Welt’s existence establishes that characters can cross over between games in some form.
That’s one of the reasons fans were already theorizing about Acheron upon her reveal, as her visual style riffs on both Genshin Impact and HI3’s Raidens. But it wasn’t until players encountered her in game that they started to suspect she might be HI3’s Raiden Mei. Dialogue between the Trailblazer and Acheron alluded heavily to the events of HI3. Those theories were confirmed with Acheron revealing her true name. But things aren’t as straightforward as they might initially seem.
To make matters more complicated, while Acheron is Raiden Mei, she is not the Raiden Mei from HI3. Yet there are a lot of similarities. While Star Rail has established there are different universes, which include other HoYoverse games, there are also alternate timelines to these universes. Acheron is an alternate version of HI3’s Raiden Mei, or at least that’s how I understand it. Even before the reveal of her true name, Acheron has a conversation with Welt in which she says she isn’t who he thought she was—implying she is not the Raiden Mei he knows. But the conversation between the two still alludes to events from HI3, with Acheron revealing they occur in slightly different ways than in Welt’s timeline.
In addition to the confirmation that Acheron is some version of HI3’s Mei, a climactic cutscene shows her reaching out to catch the Trailblazer as they both fall through the air. It references an iconic shot from HI3 in which Mei similarly caught protagonist Kiana. Mei and Kiana’s relationship is one of the central pieces of HI3, and Acheron alludes to her version of Kiana being dead or missing in some way. That missing part of her life seems to be a major factor in her uniquely pessimistic view of the world in Star Rail.
Whatever the truth may be, Acheron, or rather Radien Bosenmori Mei, has major implications for where the story of Star Rail could be going. While she’s not the first alternate universe character (again, Welt exists), her story and identity are getting center stage in the narrative. Star Rail has been a delightful sci-fi RPG so far, but as the game ventures deeper into its intricate multiversal world, who knows what could be in store?
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