i'm a double hypocrite and picked genshin back up AGAIN in 2023 jesus christ, still stand by a lot of my previous opinions but definitely gained a bit more respect for the game. Exploration is a blast for my baby brain, even disregarding sucrose my beloved it's honestly one of the prettiest games I've ever played, combat gets repetitive but has enough going on to make it alright, the characters are awesome though that's to be expected when their whole business model is selling them to you, and the story is passable enough for a game like this (you could make some of the objectives more interesting though good lord those liyue quests were painful.)
Of course, the gacha rates and artifact grind are terrible, but from what I've experienced this does genuinely seem like one of the few games where you can set most of that aside if you want as just about anything is viable in 99% of content and the level curve is mostly manageable if resources are used wisely (as in don't build 23 characters at once) though the grind does start to show itself around the fourth ascension stage onwards.
I know there really isn't anything to offer in endgame content for those who have completed everything and that's a huge turnoff for many players, but in my opinion that's both Genshin's biggest strength and weakness. On one hand, not having huge gates on new content takes out a lot of the stressful required minmaxing that many other f2p games suffer from, and there is a LOT of that content (AR55 and nowhere near done) but on the other it does hurt the experience of a live service game they want you to never stop playing when you do get through everything and all that's left is the same dailies and Spiral Abyss, it could definitely be handled much better. It really depends on how you approach these kinds of games, whether you're content to just wait for the next patch or need to get on every day on that sigma grindset.
Overall, returning to Genshin really surprised me and put a lot of my previous points I just parroted around from others into perspective. It is still a free-to-play gacha game with many of the pitfalls of the genre and should be approached carefully as such, and it really is just another average open world romp at its core, but that's good enough for me tbh.
Of course, the gacha rates and artifact grind are terrible, but from what I've experienced this does genuinely seem like one of the few games where you can set most of that aside if you want as just about anything is viable in 99% of content and the level curve is mostly manageable if resources are used wisely (as in don't build 23 characters at once) though the grind does start to show itself around the fourth ascension stage onwards.
I know there really isn't anything to offer in endgame content for those who have completed everything and that's a huge turnoff for many players, but in my opinion that's both Genshin's biggest strength and weakness. On one hand, not having huge gates on new content takes out a lot of the stressful required minmaxing that many other f2p games suffer from, and there is a LOT of that content (AR55 and nowhere near done) but on the other it does hurt the experience of a live service game they want you to never stop playing when you do get through everything and all that's left is the same dailies and Spiral Abyss, it could definitely be handled much better. It really depends on how you approach these kinds of games, whether you're content to just wait for the next patch or need to get on every day on that sigma grindset.
Overall, returning to Genshin really surprised me and put a lot of my previous points I just parroted around from others into perspective. It is still a free-to-play gacha game with many of the pitfalls of the genre and should be approached carefully as such, and it really is just another average open world romp at its core, but that's good enough for me tbh.