Phishy
1 review liked by Phishy
Genshin Impact
2020
If you have problems with gambling, self control or money management I recommend ignoring this game and other Gacha games.
Overall I'm very mixed on Genshin Impact as it's a mobile Gacha game that is also available on PC. So I'll start with the good and then move onto my main issues. Because it is a Gacha game, there is RNG and daily/weekly restrictions designed into basically every aspect of this game, which is normal in this genre. It's important to understand going into it that you will be limited with what you can do and how often you can do it.
Most of the great aspects of this game come from being a brand new player. The combat and characters feel and look great and the reactions between elements allow for a decent amount of creativity and lend itself well to the other strongest part, the exploration and world. Entering into this huge open world riddled with puzzles, chests and enemies feels a bit overwhelming, but can easily lead to getting lost and spending hours looking for every hidden thing. Having a variety of elements to complete puzzles and traverse the world is an exciting first experience and I'd recommend it for that alone if you don't really care about anything more.
The story and the lore aren't the most amazing thing and there is a lot of telling rather than showing through talking to a character and asking about key plot elements. But it's an exciting and interesting world held up mostly by the characters you collect and their involvement in the story, having hints and nods of foreshadowing and lots of sidequests building the world a bit.
There's a housing system that you get after the second main area of the story that recently got updated to be much better. It has a lot of options and even lets you have more interactions with the characters you own. Everything within it is time gated and you will need to farm separate materials and manage it daily for its currency, which increases as you rank it up making it all a little bit faster, but this can take a bit.
A tip for the character banners. If they're not on the Standard Banner, which uses the Blue Wishes, they are limited. Meaning they aren't always available and if you really want them, you're best saving your Primogems and Wishes until they show up again, unless you are willing to spend upwards of $180AUD for a single copy of the character. There is a pity system, at 90 Wishes, you're guaranteed a 5-Star, with a 50% chance of it being the banner character and at 180 Wishes guaranteed the banner character.
The biggest negative I've seen and the one that affects the most people is probably the grinding of materials for your characters. Each character needs 5 different materials to raise their max level. Then to level their Talents, you need 1 of 5 previous materials, plus a different one, eventually you'll need an additional material as well. Weapons work in a similar way and there are also Artifacts, 5 for each character that have a Main Stat and Sub Stats that are randomised. It can take up to a month to collect all the necessary materials for a single character, including the EXP books needed to level them up.
If you're just starting the game will reward you with enough of these to keep your starter characters strong enough to go through the main story quests.
Once you're done with the story, there are a variety of other quests, like Sidequests, Story quests which follow specific characters and Hangouts, that are personal Player and Character interactions. After those, there are only daily and weekly objectives that don't take more than maybe an hour to complete. The only current end game repeatable activity is the Spiral Abyss, which is a variety of combat encounters over 12 floors with floors 9-12 resetting each month. Difficult groups of enemies that you must defeat within a time limit. The rewards are only obtainable once per reset. But aside from that, unless there's an event happening, there's no other repeatable content.
My overall opinion is that I love the combat and exploration, but the game doesn't offer a casual way to engage with builds or teams without months of investment, such that it's not worth my time to try silly or fun builds as there's no where to use them. Events also don't usually have a randomised variation at the end, so once you've got all the rewards unless you enjoy that same content there's not much reason to redo it. There's also a lot of strange and irritating limitations, such as a training dummy that you can only fight once a day, a lot of achievements are locked behind RNG. I've been playing since day one and am still missing about 10 Achievements because of this. Being able to pull characters at the beginning of the game, but unable to level them, thus being unusable, as their materials can only be obtained in later areas that you need to complete story to access is weird too.
This game just has so much potential, even while staying available on mobile, but Mihoyo just won't go down that path, I just find it frustrating, especially considering the money they made.
Overall I'm very mixed on Genshin Impact as it's a mobile Gacha game that is also available on PC. So I'll start with the good and then move onto my main issues. Because it is a Gacha game, there is RNG and daily/weekly restrictions designed into basically every aspect of this game, which is normal in this genre. It's important to understand going into it that you will be limited with what you can do and how often you can do it.
Most of the great aspects of this game come from being a brand new player. The combat and characters feel and look great and the reactions between elements allow for a decent amount of creativity and lend itself well to the other strongest part, the exploration and world. Entering into this huge open world riddled with puzzles, chests and enemies feels a bit overwhelming, but can easily lead to getting lost and spending hours looking for every hidden thing. Having a variety of elements to complete puzzles and traverse the world is an exciting first experience and I'd recommend it for that alone if you don't really care about anything more.
The story and the lore aren't the most amazing thing and there is a lot of telling rather than showing through talking to a character and asking about key plot elements. But it's an exciting and interesting world held up mostly by the characters you collect and their involvement in the story, having hints and nods of foreshadowing and lots of sidequests building the world a bit.
There's a housing system that you get after the second main area of the story that recently got updated to be much better. It has a lot of options and even lets you have more interactions with the characters you own. Everything within it is time gated and you will need to farm separate materials and manage it daily for its currency, which increases as you rank it up making it all a little bit faster, but this can take a bit.
A tip for the character banners. If they're not on the Standard Banner, which uses the Blue Wishes, they are limited. Meaning they aren't always available and if you really want them, you're best saving your Primogems and Wishes until they show up again, unless you are willing to spend upwards of $180AUD for a single copy of the character. There is a pity system, at 90 Wishes, you're guaranteed a 5-Star, with a 50% chance of it being the banner character and at 180 Wishes guaranteed the banner character.
The biggest negative I've seen and the one that affects the most people is probably the grinding of materials for your characters. Each character needs 5 different materials to raise their max level. Then to level their Talents, you need 1 of 5 previous materials, plus a different one, eventually you'll need an additional material as well. Weapons work in a similar way and there are also Artifacts, 5 for each character that have a Main Stat and Sub Stats that are randomised. It can take up to a month to collect all the necessary materials for a single character, including the EXP books needed to level them up.
If you're just starting the game will reward you with enough of these to keep your starter characters strong enough to go through the main story quests.
Once you're done with the story, there are a variety of other quests, like Sidequests, Story quests which follow specific characters and Hangouts, that are personal Player and Character interactions. After those, there are only daily and weekly objectives that don't take more than maybe an hour to complete. The only current end game repeatable activity is the Spiral Abyss, which is a variety of combat encounters over 12 floors with floors 9-12 resetting each month. Difficult groups of enemies that you must defeat within a time limit. The rewards are only obtainable once per reset. But aside from that, unless there's an event happening, there's no other repeatable content.
My overall opinion is that I love the combat and exploration, but the game doesn't offer a casual way to engage with builds or teams without months of investment, such that it's not worth my time to try silly or fun builds as there's no where to use them. Events also don't usually have a randomised variation at the end, so once you've got all the rewards unless you enjoy that same content there's not much reason to redo it. There's also a lot of strange and irritating limitations, such as a training dummy that you can only fight once a day, a lot of achievements are locked behind RNG. I've been playing since day one and am still missing about 10 Achievements because of this. Being able to pull characters at the beginning of the game, but unable to level them, thus being unusable, as their materials can only be obtained in later areas that you need to complete story to access is weird too.
This game just has so much potential, even while staying available on mobile, but Mihoyo just won't go down that path, I just find it frustrating, especially considering the money they made.