game's gorgeous, and the serenity of exploration really draws me in. vistas galore. combat's excellent and seems to get even more exciting as you gain access to new characters whose abilities you can combine to really do some damage... that said, the writing is pretty bland anime junk. common enemies are, er, dark-skinned bushmen the bland anime knights describe as "of low intelligence" in a really grating manner. even ignoring that, i'm not sure how i feel about the whole f2p gacha system, which throws all kinds of power and wealth at you from the start so there's no interesting ramping up of strength or skill. whatever, i guess? i'm just not sure what kind of longevity this has in a world where i can play things like breath of the wild, dragon quest ix, nier automata, final fantasy xiv, etc. just feels like the sort of thing that eventually leaves you feeling empty inside lol. and, again, that "accidental" tonedeaf racism keeps rearing its head... honestly, nah, this ain't for me. could've been, though.

La primera siempre es gratis.

Genshin Impact es, por encima de cualquier otra cosa, una máquina tragaperras y toda crítica o análisis cultural de este juego debería dejar esto claro desde el principio. Mihoyo quiere tu dinero, lo quiere de forma regular y utiliza todas las técnicas que están a su alcance para conseguirlo. Y muchas de esas técnicas son más sutiles de lo que nos podemos dar cuenta y están diseñadas para crear culpabilidad, rutina y adicción.

Uno de los temas más comentados estos primeros días por los jugadores es que el juego "es demasiado bueno para ser gratis". Hasta cierto punto esto no es falso, pero es peligroso porque el siguiente paso de la reflexión es "no me importa hacer una compra o dos como propina para el desarrollador". Pero esa compra no te garantiza nada concreto, si no las monedas virtuales que te dan acceso a tener la bajísima posibilidad de ganar el personaje o arma que deseas. Y muchas veces, para ganar esas monedas por las que ya has pagado, necesitas jugar a diario para reclamarlas. Por lo que conectarse cada día a jugar se convierte en una tarea diaria y no tanto en una experiencia jugable divertida. Y como los primeros gastos no te van a garantizar casi nada de lo que buscas tener puedes verte en la obligación de seguir gastando más y llegar a racionalizarlo con argumentos como "si ya me he gastado 50 euros tengo que seguir hasta conseguir lo que quiero porque si no he malgastado ese dinero". El ciclo de culpa, rutina y adicción.

Y este es sólo un ejemplo de las formas que tiene el juego para crear adicción y gasto. Por ello ponerse a hablar de si es o no una copia de Breath of the Wild es totalmente innecesario, porque no es más que otra cortina de humo para desviar la atención de lo que verdaderamente importa: el género gacha son máquinas tragaperras escondidas bajo el disfraz de videojuego, utilizan técnicas fuera de toda ética para crear adicción y sus técnicas de monetización deberían estar muchísimo más reguladas, cuando no prohibidas.

This game is incredibly good at slowly feeding you dopamine and to be quite honest I enjoyed it more than Breath of the Wild, which it is blatantly ripping off. The combat isn’t that good or anything but hey, neither is BotW’s. It shouldn’t work; they throw so much RPG shit in here and an insane amount of different currencies and microtransactions. It seems like I’d hate it but it’s very addicting and the writing is surprisingly good. Unfortunately I have to abandon this before I start spending real money on it.

cool gameplay, having a not-original-at-all combat and exploration cycle

but goddamn is it barebones, absolutely POS coop

i don't give a flying one about the story, it's a fucking gachagame with sexualized children

It might look like Breath of the Wild... but hell no. The comparison stops after the graphic style.

Not very innovative in its mechanics and the gameplay is not that fluid.

But it's well done for a free-to-play game, really impressive actually. Just not my type of game nowadays. Too old for this shit I guess... the young me would probably have gone till the end.

Gets the important things right - it's worldbuilding, characters, and tone are all exceptional, and it makes the otherwise (at least right now) standard anime-esqe story work. There is a likability to the world, and the level of detail that goes into every aspect of it's universe is impressive. It feels alive in every sense and filled with history.

Solid RPG mechanics too. Endgame is messy but when it's this solid in terms of gameplay it's hard to complain. And while the gatcha mechanics won't be for everybody, they aren't required to enjoy the world and story. Addictive stuff - I can't wait for more.

MOAR LIKE breath of the waifu!!!11!11 (jk these arent even that similar)

This is solid for what it is. I find rapid party swapping games with shallow but snappy action rpg combat like this really alluring, and the elemental reaction system feels nice and just complicated enough to give things some thoughtfulness. I haven't found the gacha elements to be intrusive or obnoxious yet but time will tell, and I'm still worried about this business model and what it signifies for games in the future! This narcoleptic flavorless anime world has totally underwhelming and tedious lore / characters, but the visual presentation is still really confident, readable, and sometimes picturesque. Some of the loading screens are kind of appalling, especially when you need to enter/exit buildings repeatedly for insipid NPC quest progression. There are also WAY too many systems and similar items for my liking-- I feel like theres so much meaningless environmental/UI clutter and collecting/upgrading of shit that doesn't really amount to anything other than busywork. Busywork is kind of the goal and intent of the game though? I cant imagine getting emotionally invested in this world or engaging with it with all my focus, but this is totally a satisfying and well-made thing to putz around in while watching/listening to other things until you abruptly abandon it, never to think of again. I'd much rather be playing this than ANY assassins creed but also ive literally already forgotten everything about Genshin and it's been 1 day since I played it!!!

really shockingly full experience for an (initially) free title but I definitely will never ever spend a cent on this and can't imagine doing so

Probably the best gameplay of any gatcha game, but with some of the worst gatcha mechanics.

A genuinely fun BoTW-like with a lot of playable characters, and lots to explore. Unfortunately, the devs are incredibly stingy with the currency you need to roll for characters and incredibly rare gear.

Not to mention it costs a lot to buy the premium currency to convert into enough of the in-game currency to buy rolls. I don't care what you say, it shouldn't cost ANYONE thousands of dollars to get a stupid waifu or husbando, and to max out their perk trees (which you need to buy rolls again and hope to get duplicates.)

I'd say wait until it's gatcha system becomes less predatory.

Genshin Impact is certainly uhhh, something.

Or at least, it really wants to be something, it takes a lot of different things and smashes them together, somehow coherently, in the hopeful goal of being a something. But it really doesn't, it's not a something at all.

That's the long and short of it, but let me break stuff down to the specifics. Genshin takes a shitton of inspiration from other ps4 anime titles (weirdly Atelier Ryza kept coming to my head), BotW, and korean mmos in this weird mesh of trying to be a hack n slash anime open world. You have exploration, dungeons and character class and element mechanics, a pretty standard anime story, and a somewhat sweet vibe in the visuals. But like, each every one of these components are soulless, they don't really come together to make anything special, they're just there.

Exploration is route and boring, with a lot of fucking about getting numbers to go up and seeing very uninteresting sights. You might find some neat gear but gear generally just means number and stat ups rather than anything of much worth.

Mechanics boil down to being very simple, mostly picking whichever buttons you want to mash to make enemies keel over because enemy design asks nothing of you and all characters can functionally instawipe a group in their own way. Elemental play leads to very particular lock and key options but not anything dynamic, sheikah slates and element play of BotW it certainly isn't or really trying to be, it's just dressing.

The vibe itself is very disturbingly stolen from BotW, with the overworld music using the same kind of piano timbre that goes back to it, but it's just MISSING something. It's easy to say it's just missing a soul, but there's more to it, there's not even a sense of direction to what the music is playing. It feels ethereal but in the bad kind of sense, the one where you're playing around anime open world limbo rather than something serene.

I won't deny that the game at least looks pleasant, if anything that was the one thing I enjoyed in the amount of time I spent, getting a literal "ooo pretty" out of my mouth in the first five or so minutes. I guess another plus in this game's direction is that the gacha isn't overbearing as it is basic f2p design really, it's pushed in your face once and then it at best only subconsciously works for people going for completionism shit. From what I've been told, you can clear the story just fine without interacting with the shop at all, so that's nice.

That's kind of all the positive sentiment I can scoop up for this though, it really just kinda sucks otherwise. None of this ends up with Genshin Impact having its own identity, being something from even just one of its parts much less the sum. It really feels like a game made for eastern audiences that does 'just' enough to be relaxing and comfy to waste time in, but then offer nothing in return. Originally I was going to make this review just as I tweeted about it, saying that Genshin Impact is just Destiny 2 for eastern audiences.

I don't really even know about that anymore though, there is certainly a lot more I can give and recommend about Destiny, this is just going to be an afterthought eventually.