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.

MiHoYo's guide to a mickey mouse game:

- soulless characters with generic & recycled designs
- dry ass story completely reliant on dropping the longest most boring exposition dumps of your life that never even go anywhere
- painfully verbose wall of text explaining some shit you already knew Paimon: So what you're SAYING is... says the same exact fucking thing again
- baby easy combat w/ no real endgame
- employees are probably overworked and rarely get to see their children
- gacha

This is the Steve Cutts animation of video games. How are there so many youtubers who think this is brilliant and so many normal people who think this sucks.

I really really wish this game had the balls to name specific works of literature. Like this:

“I’m reading, um… 👉👈 well, you’ll think it’s stupid Gare-Kun, but I’m rereading Gravity’s Rainbow. It definitely helps to just let Pynchon’s wild prose wash over you first before you can really get into his subtle wordplay and encyclopedic references… I didn’t mean to brag, though! I’m sorry if it came off that way…”

“Ugh, can’t you see I’m reading Hegel?! I think he has very interesting things to say about a priori knowledge versus the supposed empiricism of the senses. Not that I’d expect you to care, baka 🙄”