A serious critique of Genshin Impact [video] | Hacker News Reader

A serious critique of Genshin Impact [video]

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Since this video is 1h 41m long and many people here on HN probably don’t know much about Genshin I’ll try and provide a brief summary of the game. Genshin is an open world game in the style of Zelda BotW in which you play as an otherworldly traveler who was separated from their twin sibling by an unknown god when they arrived in the world of Teyvat. The sibling you picked then is kept asleep for 500 years until you wake up and begin your journey to find your sibling. This journey takes you across the world of Teyvat as you save people from dragons, Abyss monsters, and other threats. Gameplay wise you play with a team of four characters each with their own elemental skills and abilities. To beat the enemy mobs and bosses you have to combine these different elements to create reactions to amplify your damage. There are also a massive amount of open world puzzles to solve as you explore the world of Teyvat.

The main problem people have with Genshin is that it is a gacha game so you gamble with premium currency to get new units and weapons. Although I do understand why people are extremely against this, in practice it isn’t that big of a problem in Genshin because of the pity system that guarantees that you will get the 5* unit you want after 180 pulls but will normally happen after 150-160 pulls because of the soft pity system that greatly increases your chance of getting a 5* after 74 pulls (the hard guarantee is at 90 pulls). You are also guaranteed a 4* character or weapon after every 10 pulls and these are also very strong compared to the 5* units. You can easily beat the game with only 4* units, and in fact one of the strongest team compositions in the game is made entirely of 4* units. So any claims about the game being P2W aren’t really accurate since there is no PvP content and the PvE content in the game is beatable by 4* units which are obtainable without spending money or a bunch of time grinding.

So overall, I really enjoy Genshin and would recommend other people try it as well. It does have problems but they aren’t as extreme as people make them out to be.

> gacha game

Parent knows this, but maybe other readers might not: Gacha is the Japanese name for those machines on the street where you put in a coin and a plastic sphere with a random toy comes out.

Collecting a set of toys can get obsessive for some, in the same way collecting whatever in micro transaction games.

I also have a question: other than the graphic styles isn’t genshin impact closer to the online final fantasy games or even modern jrpg such as xenoblade?

I’ve never played genshin, but from the little I’ve seen it just seems it’s only the graphic style that matches BoTW

The BotW comparisons come because of the world traversal mechanics, mostly. Genshin very-exactly copied the free-climbing + stamina + glider system that's pretty distinctive in BotW.

A few more notes:

- You'll easily get 30+ hours unique of content with the main story without any need to pay money, which is good value for a free game.

- As with all gacha games, you get a ton of free currency playing through the story naturally; more than enough to get a couple 5* naturally through pity or otherwise.

- As noted, the 4* units aren't bad; in fact some of the higher tier ones are given for free with no strings attached.

- Unlike other gacha, this isn't a difficult game for just playing casually (which is normally a meta-incentive for you to gamble with the gacha) unless you are doing super-endgame things.

- Unlike other gacha, there is no competitive element with a leaderboard/other players (which is normally a meta-incentive for you to gamble with the gacha)

The biggest problem I have with Genshin Impact is Artifact RNG, which is heavily layered with no determinism.

I second this, I've played this game casually for a couple weeks and never needed to spend any money. It just means slower progress, not no progress.

I played another gacha for about 2 years (stopped about 1 month ago). I tricked myself into playing it exactly like that:

> Ok, I'll try it out... but I'll drop it as soon as I'll hit the paywall

The problem is that the companies like Gameloft, Mihoyo, etc. got extremely refined in giving you a *semblance* of progress, while never completely grinding the progress to a halt.

It's pretty obvious after you invested some time: you can do some actions, but only up to X times a day. You can refresh the X with premium currency. You can convert premium currency into normal currency.

In the meanwhile, the tool/weapon/vehicle/character, won't be unlocked right away, but it needs a certain sets of components to be accumulated.

After you finally unlock it, you can improve it/tune it/level it up... but you'll soon hit a wall. To improve it any further you need to boost it/star it up/whatever. And you thus need to accumulate more components.

Eventually, you might find time-limited events, which will you give you a special currency, which you can use to unlock more time-limited goodies... and eventually convert it into one of the other kinds of currencies.

A lot of these concepts don't seem to be heinous: it's perfectly fine to provide a gradual way to unlock something in a videogame. The problem is that usually there's some different mechanism/puzzle/part of the story that leads you there. In a gacha instead the only thing that grants you the majority of those incremental milestones is the pull/loot/boxes/crates/packs.

The reasons you put up with it are pretty obvious:

- sunken cost: you already invested some amount of time

- feeling of progress. Every inch closer to a goal keep you engaged

- the rest of the game is genuinely well made

Again: what would be a good amount of content for 10 hours of game, gets stretched and dripped very slowly across hundreds of hours. For longer games (like, RPGs) what would be dozens/a hundred of hours gets stretched in thousands.

Even when I play a videogame, I don't want to just "kill time", I want an interesting experience, which ideally makes the most out of the hours that I put into it.

Traditional/non-bullshit/paid in advance games make sure that I get that either with skill, or without having to sweat for it (lowering the difficulty). In a gacha, it'll be a neverending stream of pulls (also, they'll obviously keep adding derivative content, to give you more and more things to unlock)

> Unlike other gacha, this isn't a difficult game for just playing casually (which is normally a meta-incentive for you to gamble with the gacha) unless you are doing super-endgame things.

Is this really the case? I’ve noticed a lot of games that try to get you to make in game purchases are actually painfully easy. My assumption was that if you’re losing, you’re not spinning the wheel, which is their primary means of getting you hooked.

Most gacha games get you hooked, then get you with a soft gate. It's an interesting balance from a game design and monetization standpoint.

If a game has a random numeric "suggested power" metric for levels, watch out.

> "5* unit you want after 180 pulls"

A casual search says "The minimum you can spend for a single Wish roll is $2.97" from https://www.gamespot.com/articles/genshin-impact-microtransa... so that's $534.60 to get a single character you want? Even if it were 1/10th that much with the pity system, that's still outrageous since new characters are released frequently.

The article you linked to does note that the currency for rolls is handed out as you play as well, in what it claims is fairly generous amount, so you don't have to spend extra. (But yes, actually spending money on this sort of game gets ridiculously expensive quickly.)

It can't be all that generous: "In just six months since release, Genshin Impact has reportedly crossed over $1 billion in revenue..." from https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/03/24/genshin-im...

It's generous enough if you aren't aiming for every premium character. If you play all the story content and events, and are doing the daily quests, you'll pretty much earn enough for a guaranteed 5* (80-90 pulls) in about 6 weeks (the length of one version update).

So if you're a free player, you can save up for a character you really want, or just pull and be content with whoever you get.

Mobile game economics are funny like that.

There are people who spend thousands of dollars every single month on mobile games in general, and Genshin is no exception. They are called "whales".

Something that hasn't been mentioned is that a lot of people tend to obsess over some characters, independently of their gameplay value. That's usually how gacha games make a lot of their money.

Oh yeah, the prices to buy premium currency are absolutely outrageous and I won’t even try to disagree with that. However, that really only matters if you want to collect every single character and/or get multiple copies of characters for their constellation buffs. The game is pretty generous with premium currency with most patches (the game releases updates on a 6 week schedule) giving enough currency for around 45-50 pulls. You can also pay $5 for the monthly subscription that gives you enough currency for 18.75 more pulls over 30 days. This is really the only way of buying extra premium currency that isn’t outrageously overpriced. My main point was that you don’t have to buy extra premium currency to have fun with the game or beat it.

We’ll, I’m curious to know what this is all about, but at 1h 41m runtime this video is less a critique of the game and more a documentary about it. I couldn’t find a written summary anywhere - does anyone know of one?

He is just against gacha style games, as everyone should be (gambling addiction enforced by gaming addiction)

So the whole video sums up his experience in how without having to pay a bunch of money, you couldn't win/have fun properly

But this video could be about any new game (online mmorpg) nowdays and be still the same

"how without having to pay a bunch of money, you couldn't win/have fun properly"

The story of life. Many such cases.

> But this video could be about any new game (online mmorpg) nowdays and be still the same

Let's go ahead and address the smaller point here first. Genshin Impact isn't an MMORPG. But that's not the biggest issue here.

The biggest issue here is that Genshin's gambling model is not the same as any new game.

---

The difference between Genshin Impact (which I played for a week, and spent about $100 on) and other games, is that you must gamble for a chance to progress in a meaningful way. To say this is an issue endemic to all new games simply isn't correct.

Most games these days to have some sort of microtransaction model. That's true. However the core gameplay and progression system in Genshin is locked behind loot crates. This isn't the model 'any new game' uses.

There are two main ways games use microtransactions: cosmetic, and game-impacting.

Cosmetic microtransactions make cosmetic changes in your character or the world around it. No impact on gameplay other than you find something new more aesthetically pleasing.

Then we have the game-impacting transactions. Most games that allow game-impacting transactions (i.e. are 'pay 2 win'), allow you to essentially sacrifice time for money. You can spend hours in game grinding for an objective, or you can spend real life currency to automatically unlock the objective.

What Genshin does is different from most games. There are certain important ways in which you simply cannot progress without spending money. And everything is locked behind a loot box. That's the problem. The problem is with the loot boxes and gambling; not exchanging time for money.

There was a game that I spent over $2,000 on. It was an online 'free-to-play' game with over 70 characters. Each character was around $15-20. Or you could play the game for about 40 (real) hours to grind up enough currency to unlock one. This was fine though, because you picked which character you unlocked and it was unlocked.

Genshin makes you buy boxes with a chance to drop what you want it to drop. That's what makes it pernicious.

Which parts are inaccessible without paying? Maybe I haven't progressed far enough (haven't finished the Liyue Archon quest) but all the money I spent so far is just for weapons and additional characters. They make it easier to defeat enemies but defeating enemies without those upgrades is still doable.

I don't mean that the game is unwinnable (to the extent that such games are winnable) without spending money. But the core mechanic is swapping between different characters for combos and synergies. You're severely hampered without paying to get other characters and increase your weapons.

I remember getting Hu Tao when she was just released. She was (and I guess still is?) one of the best characters. But I didn't have the roster to really play her to her full potential. So it's back to the loot crates to try and pull other characters that synergize with her and help her reach her potential.

Hm? I'm super-lazy game mechanic wise. I spend money. But 3 of the chacters on my team are free, and I almost never use combos because I can't be bothered to do complex stuff. I'm sure I don't maximize my damage-per-second but I still enjoy the game and defeating nearly all enemies is completely doable even with casual gaming skills.

If the critique is "I can't maximize to the absolute highest stats without paying" -- then sorry, I think that's an attitude full of false entitlement.

Heck, look at this frickin video about how they produced the Liyue OST: https://youtu.be/pFrKZxStL_U They commissioned a massive Shanghai orchestra team to produce excellent music. And we get all this amazing stuff for free.

Being unable to maximize a specific character's potential is pretty far from where you said "there are certain important ways in which you simply cannot progress without spending money."

There's nothing in the main content that requires you to have a 5* character/weapon, even though it's certainly easier with them.

> But the core mechanic is swapping between different characters for combos and synergies.

The game gives you a free character of each element to handle the necessary synergies.

There's a difference between "severely hampered" and less effective at end-game content.

Pay-to-win and pay-to-have-fun are actually pretty distinct game-design philosophies. There are a lot of free-to-play games that are pay-to-win for at least some element of the game; but where the game can still be fun without paying.

What usually happens in pay-to-win designs is that the game can be played, if more slowly, in a fun way, for as long as you’re playing against other regular people who also aren’t paying-to-win. This lasts until you get good enough to end up on the competitive-ranked top leaderboard; at which point the only way to advance on that leaderboard is to pay for extra-fancy items/equipment, because everyone else on it already did. (Analogy: doping in sports. Nobody in the minor leagues dopes, because nobody else does, so there’s no need to do it. But everybody at the top does, because everybody else at the top does, and so doping is the only way to even stay viable in the major league. The sport is “fun”, without doping, right up until you hit the majors. Then, suddenly, having any more fun requires doping. That’s traditional pay-to-win.)

With traditional pay-to-win game design, you can still extract fun from the game without paying, if you treat “the game” as being just the subset of the game that lasts until you end up in the major league with all the doping players. If you think of that point as the point where you “beat the game”, put it down, and don’t play it any more — and the game up until that point was fun and worth playing — then it wasn’t a waste of time to have played it.

Genshin Impact is apparently not this type of game, though. It’s the other kind of free-to-play game: the kind where you’re at no point having fun if you’re not paying. (But, of course, which tries to give the illusion that you can have fun, sort of like a casino tries to give you the illusion that you can have an edge.)

It takes a pretty deep dive into a free-to-play game to figure out whether there’s a subset it that is fun to work through without paying. So I don’t fault the author for needing to spend an hour on the topic to properly prove their thesis out.

Haven’t clicked the link or even played Genshin but I believe the novelty is it’s:

1) a proper singleplayer JRPG style game,

2) in “App” format with gacha mechanic.

Previously 1) and 2) didn’t occur in a same title. If it’s an App, it would have extremely simplistic gameplay with gacha, or if it’s a JRPG, there were at most DLCs and certainly not gacha. But they just made it no longer the case.

It's a free game that heavily revolves around buying lootboxes to unlock characters/items and is known as a gacha game[0] They are often intentionally designed to make it really difficult to experience the full game without being forced to spend real money on lootboxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gacha_game

That seems like a bit of an overstatement to me. I've been playing for free for a while now. I'm at adventure rank 25, and my characters are all at levels 40-50. I've unlocked all the maps that are accessible at this level. There's a long list of quests and challenges that I have yet to get to. There's plenty of fun to be had without spending money, and in fact I'd recommend it as a good free open world RPG.

> There's plenty of fun to be had without spending money, and in fact I'd recommend it as a good free open world RPG.

I've put in 50-60 hours with my kids, spent nothing, and we experienced the whole storyline prior to 2.0. I entirely agree with you.

Chinese apps and games dominating the West makes me feel like a Soviet citizen in 1991 watching Coca-Cola and McDonald's ads pop up everywhere.

We are truly in China's century.

Chinese media in general definitely making a larger footprint. In seeing literature as well as TV shows and movies becoming more known.

I am half wondering if I ought to be learning mandarin now.

Are they really? There are a few popular mobile games, but mostly predatory skinner boxes at high risk of regulation.

Translations of Chinese books/films/comics are still consistently awful.

If we're talking about nearly anywhere else in the world, American culture dominates. If you're talking about influences on America, Japanese culture has had (and continues to have) a much bigger impact.

I just don't see Chinese media "popping up everywhere." Chinese media is poorly translated or culturally impenetrable to Western audiences. I say this as someone reading a Cixin Liu book right now and really enjoying it - even so I recognize that it's niche and the translation is rough. I don't think I've ever seen a Chinese movie and I can think of exactly one Chinese pop song that got popular in recent years (made by a Chinese-American in America, of course). America created or popularized rap, hip-hop, country, most pop music, esports, and many regular sports. American companies made Digg, Myspace, Napster, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitter, and a plethora of other popular apps and products.

But because China made TikTok/Douyin/Genshin it's suddenly "China's century"? TikTok is a Vine clone. Genshin's artstyle, stories, and game mechanics are ripped straight from Japanese games. The genre of gatcha is Japanese!

I wonder how I would be today of if my toys were helping me get addicted to gambling.

Have you never opened packs of baseball or Pokémon cards hoping for a specific high value card? Have you never been to an arcade with token/coin pushers? That just replacing the gambling machine’s quarters with tokens. Ticket and prize redemption games at Chuck-E-Cheese are 100% modeled after casinos.

Genshin is a pretty stunning example of how quickly Chinese development and animation studios have grown to develop world-class media.

Many consider this game better than Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is one of Nintendo's crowning achievements.

The other day there was a thread about how many HNers enjoyed using TikTok. They are progressing quickly and many seem unwilling to acknowledge it.

TikTok is far and away superior to US social media.

Twitter is full of rage and hate, and I can't stand it.

Instagram is posers and people being fake.

Facebook is people posting fake news, baby photos, politics, and inspiration quotes for a life most are unwilling or afraid to live.

Reddit is going after the lowest common denominator.

YouTube is losing its edge and making it harder to succeed as a new creator.

TikTok embraces collaborative world building and positivity in a way I've never seen before. It's a total breath of fresh air. It feels good, wholesome, and truly creative.

I'm not defending any of these social media corporations, but the worst people are on every platform and tiktok is not exception. Tiktok also can appeal to the lowest common denominator, it also has rage, hate, conspiracy theories. I think where tiktok's advantage is that that vine wasn't ready to leave this world so its creative medium hasn't run its course, and its algorithm actually feels well designed as apposed to instagram and youtube

It's about the long tail. If I look at the people that I have subscribed to on YouTube, and then take the mean of their count of subscribers, the mean is probably over a million. When I do the same on TikTok it's about 10k. There were probably the same people posting the same content on YouTube, but because there is no discovery, I never found them, and they never found viewers, so they stopped.

What you are subjected to on each platform is based on the discovery methods of that platform. There are probably very good reasons that American sites tend to have really bad discovery, it means that Ads are more impactful and it gives the creator of the algorithm all the power.

So it's not that bad people don't exist on TikTok, but because their discovery system is so good I end up watching content that I like. Whereas on YouTube, because the discovery system is so poor, I am subjected to watch things that the platform favors. YouTube favors high-energy, face-contorting, lowest common denominator content. Up until now because YouTube has been the only source of internet video, I had to go along with it as it was the best we had. Suddenly I don't.

I find it very easy to tune my YouTube recommendations. If I open my homepage I see quality content on machining, optical physics, ML, jazz theory, battery tech, chip fab, interior/exterior design, rocket nozzles, etc… and not a single contorted face.

There's literally thousands of raging and berating tiktoks in the SJW category alone. What are you talking about.

> TikTok embraces collaborative world building and positivity in a way I've never seen before. It's a total breath of fresh air. It feels good, wholesome, and truly creative.

This used to be what Twitter and Instagram and YouTube were described as in the past. There's still plenty of gaming views and influencer stuff being done on TikTok, it just hasn't become ubiquitous yet. Or maybe the format means we as a population need to re-adjust to see it. I'm mentioning this because I've seen toxic stuff on TikTok already about niche hobby interests. Stuff like getting people cancelled, internet drama, people posting videos of themselves crying over it, etc.

Instagram isn't so bad... if you follow accounts that only post cute animal pictures.

1bike1world ftw. The reason I started looking at Instagram.

This comment is a bit rosy on TikTok, and your stereotypes are off a bit. I use all these platforms, and all things you attribute primarily to a single platform above have bled into the other platforms, where format allows. Just look to Instagram stories for a lot of examples of people posting inspirational quotes, or to YouTube for plenty of fake news channels, or to Facebook to see lowest common denominator posting. The locus of each of those things may rest with your stereotyped examples, but reality is much more nuanced.

One can find all of these things on TikTok. Right now it’s just new so it feels more optimistic and you want to see it more optimistically.

Different platforms for different things. I never use TikTok, because the video media I consume is almost always long form informative content. YouTube is the only media giant with a large supply of this, and it continues to accrete such creators and content faster than anywhere else.

Maybe you are following the wrong people on Twitter? Switch it to "latest tweets" rather than the default of "top tweets" and then you'll only see the people you follow.

I see plenty of creative, funny, and thoughtful content. I've learned a ton. There's some that I like that I'd call "useful outrage"; some of the things going on in world need that. I see very little "rage and hate".

So which stage are we in? One- anger or have we progressed to four- depression?

Perhaps it doesn't matter it's all fuel to China's nationalism.

Anger is actually stage 2. Stage 1 is denial.

What exactly is so controversial or disagreeable about the parent's comment as to warrant so many downvotes?

I didn't downvote it, but the comment exemplifies the problem in both how right and wrong it is. Genshin Impact has the potential to be a great game, but it's utterly ruined by the gacha garbage that infests it. It's extremely disappointing, and makes you depressed at wondering what an excellent game it could be if it didn't have such a predatory and self-defeating business model.

That seems like an unfair reason to downvote the post. One could dislike gatcha as a business model but the post is about China's capacity to design a game irrespective of the business model. The quality of the artwork, music, etc stands on its own regardless of whether one personally dislikes the business model.

How can one have a great game that is harmful to the players? To me that sounds like: "This food is truly excellent so let's honor the chef. Whether it's full of rat poop and heavy metals is a totally separate issue."

And how exactly is it "harmful"? Your comparison isn't even right. This is free food that comes without ustensils and without a table. You have to pay for a table and ustensils, but the food is edible without them, and the ingredients and the way they're prepared stand on their own. Especially if you consider that not long ago, this part of the world couldn't prepare such a meal at all, even if they provided all the tables and ustensils in the world.

I've been playing this game for almost a year now and I just don't see the parts where they "harm" you if you don't pay. If you can point out concrete examples of this "rat poop and heavy metals" that you get unless you pay, please do let me know.

Gambling addiction is a serious problem that destroys lives. We should not be exposing kids to things with strong addiction potential.

If you'd like a concrete example, here's a guy who realized he had a problem after dropping $15k and decided he needed professional help to quit: https://www.reddit.com/r/gachagaming/comments/b2fopn/i_spent...

After someone close to him died, he went back to it: https://www.reddit.com/r/gachagaming/comments/p3qxfr/gacha_p...

If you'd like more, there's plenty out there about the harms of gambling addiction. One can argue that adults should be able to ruin their lives as they please, but I think there's no excuse for letting adults exploit children in ways that can create lifelong harm.

The point about gaming addiction in kids is fair. But it's also off-topic. The discussion isn't about whether gatcha should be allowed. It's about the gatcha supposedly ruining the game's quality or enjoyment thereof, which is a completely different topic.

Also, not only kids play games.

It's not off topic. The topic is Genshin Impact. You can't just say, "The topic is the parts I like and not the parts I don't like, so stop talking about them." That's not how a conversation works.

Right, but despite that I think it's still possible to acknowledge the high level of production value that went into it. Never played it but it does look pretty. Edit: also, nice music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1O7LpOTBfM

It's interesting because I just don't see it. The game's monetization is just a new character every month or something like that.

I'm impulsive as hell, but I never had the urge to spend money in Genshin. And I spent almost immediately on Dragon Raja, yeah that game got me good. Fortunately the devs ruined it.

Not just a Chinese problem, it's increasingly present in Western games from Team Fortress to FIFA.

I didn't downvote, but maybe the "many consider" weasel-words? It's one of those ways to make a fuzzy and unprovable claim that you're advancing but not quite saying you think it. (Plus, I've not seen that claim actually made, though I've not gone hunting for it.)

It'd be sort of weird to compare those games at that level, anyway, since although there's some superficial systems similarities (Genshin thoroughly copied BotW's open world traversal mechanics), they play incredibly differently. It's like saying "tennis is a better game than chess", or in video games "Doom is a better game than Tetris" -- the genre difference is so great that I don't know if you can meaningfully compare them.

> Many consider this game better than Zelda: Breath of the Wild

Is Genshin Impact a pretty and technically impressive BotW-like game? Yes.

But Breath of the Wild is, by many accounts, considered one of the greatest games of all time [0]. I have never heard anyone suggest this of Genshin Impact.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered...

I don't have a Nintendo and will never buy one, but I do have a phone.

And yeah, the first time I played Genshin I was amazed at the quality for a mobile game. It quickly ran out of content so now it just sits there, quick fun for half an hour.

imo Dragon Raja was better (amazing pvp, damn addictive) but was absolutely ruined by the microtransactions and small servers aspects.

Another Chinese game that I've been very impressed with is Dyson Sphere Program (a Factorio-like game on galactic scale), it's still in Early Access on Steam, by a fairly small team but it's already insanely impressive in scope, and they are improving it constantly.

Wow. I love the toon (non-photorealistic) rendering. Add some wiggle and bounce, you practically have a Disney movie.

I've been out of the loop for a long time. Is this now (finally) common? Are there articles, papers for how it's done? Mid-90s, I had a lot of video game concepts predicated on toon rendering. My young son was infatuated with Doom and I had hoped us parents would have better alternatives.

I may have to try this game, just for the eye candy alone.

A new Never video. I'm all in, I know what I'm doing this AM.

I have only played this game for 50 hours or so, and have yet to reach middle game, so what I write will be biased likewise. I'm sure others will be talking about the system and how it's a mix of an open world RPG and a gacha game.

1. For the money aspect, I did not spend a single cent in the game (nor do I plan to). Yet the experience has been wonderful so far. Yes, if you spend thousands of dollars every month on this, you'll be able to get the latest and greatest characters. But for a free-to-play player like me, I need to plan out the way I spend the gacha currency called "primogems" very wisely. The game gives you quite some primogems when a new area and new quests are released and you play through that content (we've had 3 areas so far in 1 year including the one at the beginning), and after that you get a limited amount regularly by doing daily quests and so on. Usually a free-to-play player can save up enough to get 90 pulls in a couple of months or so? Therefore, advance planning is needed. I enjoy planning like that so I like it.

2. About progression: I feel it doesn't matter whether you're F2P or a paying player. Because, the whole grinding system is gated behind a system called the "resin", which is a thing that replenishes to full in about 24 hours, and it's the same regardless of how far you are into the game. And if I'm not wrong, EDIT: as someone below pointed out, you can buy resin with money, but the exchange rate of the amount spent becomes awful very very quickly. That means, as you go to end game, either you'll run out of things to do, or you won't have enough resin to accomplish all you want to do. At that point, it'll be more like: log in, do the dailies that take 20 minutes, kill some bosses using raisin for another 20, and some other stuff and you're done. That is, once you've cleared ALL the story and world quests, and that'll take atleast a few hundred hours in my honest opinion.

3. For pay2win: I don't think it's a pay2win game. There are some units that the game gives you for free, and once you reach a certain level called Adventure Rank, you get to participate in events that give free 4*s. Some of the units are really really strong even in end-game (Xiangling comes to mind). Besides, even if you don't have the "best" team for a given character, there are characters you can substitute in. It just depends on how brain-dead you want to be when choosing your team builds and actually attacking the monsters (my favorite example for this is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTrRZEZ0wO4 where the guy literally takes the free characters the game gives out, and uses the game system, skills, and so on to beat abyss 3, which is quite hard for a beginner. I was able to clear this stage at the early game thanks to this person's proof that it's possible to actually clear content even with starting characters.)

That out of the way, here's what I love about the game:

1. The story. I am a sucker for great stories, and Genshin is done quite well. I actually decided to start with a new account after sinking dozens of hours into an old one because I went through the story too fast (one chapter in a week). This time, I've decided to take my time and enjoy the story like fine-aged wine.

2. The graphics. The graphics in this game are of an extremely high quality when it comes to non-physical rendering (NPR). If you're somewhat acquainted with anime-style toon shading, this game does it very well. No, it doesn't look like a cinematic Hollywood movie, and it's not meant to look like one. But its art style might be the best I've seen so far when it comes to NPR.

3. Maybe a bit niche, but the Japanese voice acting is top-notch. MiHoYo have good taste when it comes to choice of voice actors/actresses. Note I don't know anything about the English/Korean/Chinese ones.

Lastly, I'll just rant a bit about how I feel when I hear people say "there's nothing to do in this game". Sorry for sounding rude, but no game has infinite content for anyone to consume; this isn't Netflix binge-watching. To me, the best way to consume this game is slowly and steadily. Think of it as dining a full-course meal at a nice restaurant with a nice atmosphere. Of course it's different from gobbling down a Big Mac at McD's and washing it down with Cola. You slowly take bites of each food that is served, a sip of the drinks that are served, and relish the taste. I feel that's the best way to get maximum enjoyment out of this game. Come back home after a long day and unwind with it for an hour or two, and then put it away for the next day. It'll easily last a few months, and the game's updated every 6 weeks with new content with small events in-between.

TL;DR: This is a fantastic hybrid of single-player open-world RPG and a gacha game with fantastic graphics and story that I feel would be best enjoyed slowly. If you have the chance to, I highly recommend to try it.

Just to note, technically you can buy resin with money (you can replenish your resin with primogems, up to 6 times a day), but it's not very cost efficient so you're generally better off using those primogems on wishes. And like you said, you eventually run out of things you'll want to spend extra resin on.

Ah, forgotten about that. Yes, you're right. Corrected, thanks!

I play it.

Besides the main story and occasional events, there isn't much to do in this single player game.

Login every week and do some exploring and fighting, like Black Desert and other games, pretty much. Or just wait for some event, which usually has some entertaining story or game mode (there's a tower defense thing going on now). Other than that, there ain't much to do.

Think of it more like an unfinished, constantly updating version of the old Fire Emblem GBA games.

Others here said it "can't be enjoyed without paying" - no, it actually can't be enjoyed much at all. I.e. if you don't like it in the first hour, you won't like it no matter how much you spend.

Whether you pay or not, it's literally the same experience, but fewer characters (they're all the same basic types, so who cares).

People who spend on games with gacha elements are very interesting as I fail to see the point of it.

...why are you playing this game when your comment seems to boil down to "I don't like it"?

"Play it" is a stretch for two hours a week. I do like the story and events, which are rare.

Gatcha is very similar to reality.

Games without gatcha are arguably more about grinding from an equal starting point and only unless the gamer uses bots/cheats or pays someone for what they want like level/progress an account or their account when not grinding themselves.

Gatcha brings the unequal reality we live in, well into the game world and where someone can spend their way to the goal without grinding as much. The reality we live, very much reflects the new game worlds that are now in existence thanks to gatcha and it's kind of remarkable that people are upset about it. We live everyday outside of games where one's misfortune or fortune reflects their life from the start to the end. The shortcuts that can be taken, what can be quickly achieved with funds, and that goes for anything from healthcare to lifestyle to even academics.

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