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#1 The part where it's a sci fi setting with truly weird things.
#2 The amount of different creatures, items, and so on.
#3 The mostly familiar rules.
#4 The rest of the setting, which is just so much fun.
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The ability to pick nearly any sci fi concept, from any genre, and make it work more or less balanced and toss it into some very fun situations
Friend of mine is an old hand at RPGs but new to starfinder. Starts picking a race, likes androids. Goes to find that artist with the earth sea sky painted chrome people. Likes spellcasting, but wants to be able to cast spells all day without the vancian tracking.
Finds a Robot Raptor with a jetpack under their tail.
I tell him Ok, well we just found your character...we are SO making that. Half an hour later we made that. (Xenomorphic Vesk android, but i think we technially dropped the xenomorphic but just kept the look) Later on they found some literal hair gel* so...
*( a small tweak I make to a starfinder society scenario)
Starfinider isn't afraid to give people a complicated box of parts and let them build with it. With other systems I'm picking the mechanics of my character, with starfinder I'm building them. (This is getting more true, and t the start it wasn't, just barely had enough parts)
So the other thing I like would be the starfinder society scenarios. You have a good mix of star trek exploration and plot twists along with star wars . guardians of the galaxy shoot em ups and heroics.
The setting is fantastic. I adore finding all these new species and planets and conflicts strewn throughout a universe that still very much bears the distinctive marks of Pathfinder. Gods and magic and planar travel alongside space stations and computers and phasers and science.
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Yup, what others have said. Love the setting, love the lore, love the weird, love the bits of connective tissue between Starfinder and the Pathfinder IP before it.
One thing that's been touched on but I want to specifically call out as awesome: The Cantina Feel of having 125+ ridiculous species to choose from. The last time I had this much fun just thinking up ridiculous character concepts was Gamma World. Seriously, it's like the best part of mad libs, except you get a playable character at the end!
"My ____ (adj) Character, from the species of sapient ______ (nouns), mastered the art of ______ (comic book super power) and now travels the stars!"
"My Robotic Character, from the species of sapient penguins, mastered the art of reality-bending, and now travels the stars!"
"My Adorable Character, from the species of sapient onions, mastered the art of throwing exploding playing cards, and now travels the stars!"
"My Edge-lord Character, from the species of sapient giant ground sloths, mastered the art of having all of the poisons, and now travels the stars!"
ChefsKiss.gif
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The great comparison I had totally forgotten about Gamma World, If I remember right in Gamma World you could play any race just by being a symbiotic slug attached to any other creature.
The things I love about starfinder are how the classes, races, and setting are so interesting that they keep me up at night thinking about how a sundial on Verces doesn't tell time but, could tell you the latitude.
Absolutely the setting and genre of the game.
I just love the setting. It speaks to me as this universe of infinite possibilities.
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The fact that the abilities are not *baked* to a 'this is EXACTLY' how this works.
I have a Mechanic with a sentient thaumaturgical nanoswarm playing brain-roomie to her (pre-evolutionist take on Exocortex)
I have an iconic thief inspired by a series of novels in a sci-fi setting that works really well in a sci-fi fantasy setting like Starfinder.
I have a fey-touched janitor cleaning up Reality one small Mess at a time.
I have a recovering vid-game addict who has turned her obsessions to fashion.
And ALL of these characters fit *easily* into the setting without mangling the rules, looking for really 'edgy' cases to make them happen, and they're all (most importantly) fun to play.
They can all contribute to a fight or outside of one (even Starship Combat), and they can have their story.
That flexibility is a lot harder to come by even in PF1 or PF2 (though it's a little bit easier in 2).
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Purely the setting.
For me, I'd prefer a more cohesive setting with a smaller scope than the wild and unruly one we do have. There's some really interesting areas in the existing setting, but because its all right next to a bunch of totally unrelated stuff I'm left with so many parts that don't match up to one another.
Ironically though, my favorite part is only possible in part thanks to the hodge-podge that is the setting. As Wei Ji described above - there's incredible flexibility with the race-theme-class options to define your character however you like. Your character can be so many things and the rules will happily play nice. You can bring really unconventional adventuring ideas into a game and it fits with all the other zany stuff going on, no problem.
I also like the way the rules are solid and straightforward, without anywhere near as many wiggly corner cases as PF1 OR 2.
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What initially hooked me in to Starfinder was that I could pretty easily recreate a couple of past characters from other games, who I only got to play briefly in the systems for which they were initially created. For example, my human ace pilot daredevil operative is based on my character created for a short-lived Serenity RPG campaign. I was able to capture the essence of the character pretty well, even at 1st level, and she's still mostly recognizable even after 9 levels of dealing with the massive amounts of high tech, magic, and aliens that didn't exist in Zefira v.1.0's more mundane universe. The original was just a hotshot pilot who largely kept to herself; this version has surprised me by becoming something of a first contact specialist, and a potential future leader within the Society.