LogFAQs > #947766321

All right, I guess we're doing this. Fatui, I say!

2. Genshin Impact
Genre Open-world RPG

Gameplay: 7
Rest of Game: 8
Engagement: 12
New to Me: 5
Playtime: 5

Total score: 37/40

Song selection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CX2E1ly0na0

This will be probably the longest write-up in the top 10 because its simultaneously the game I have the most to say about, and the game (except for Lennas Inception) that I imagine the fewest people here have played. And boy have I played it. The only game Ive played more of this year is Hearthstone -- I assume, I dont actually have a tally on either game -- and thats only because Hearthstone had a nine-month head start. I gave Genshin a twelve for engagement. It literally broke the scale. Thats how infectious this game is.

Genshin Impact is a gacha game. Lets get that into the open. Its free to play, but encourages people to spend money to acquire more in-game assets, and is actively designed to encourage routine, devoted commitment in order to encourage transactions. Thats reason enough for some people to click away from this review outright, but for the rest of you, hear me out. Thats just the business model, and isnt that nefarious.

GI is often jokingly referred to as Breath of the Waifus. While thats a tremendously undeserved nickname, its not hard to see why. The vibrant, cel-shaded graphics and sprawling open world are reminiscent of BotW, complete with climb-anywhere mechanics. However, the game draws from a cast heavily represented by anime girls. I wouldnt call them sexualized, although the outfits do sometimes trend that way when one is dressed something like a french maid and another has Tharja leggings. They mix in a number of dudes and lolis, though, so I certainly wouldnt say this is the game for horny ogling.

Okay, got those bits out of the way? Great. Lets actually talk about the game.

Genshin is the story of the traveler, your character who arrives in the world of Teyvat without a clear understanding of how they arrived. Many people in this world possess Visions which let them manipulate elemental energies. You have no Vision, yet can apparently do the same. Your traveling companion, Paimon, serves a Navi-like role, and typically acts as your voice in cutscenes. However, soon after beginning your journey, youll encounter your first party member, Amber, and from there the game begins to take shape.

Youll hop between exploring the world, completing quests, and crawling through microdungeons as you see fit, but what drives the game is forming a party of four and switching between them vigorously. You might, for instance, hit an enemy with Ambers fire arrows, and then use the Travelers air attacks to create an elemental reaction known as swirl that amplifies the burning damage. A strong party is generally one that can make use of all four teammates in tandem, particularly through elemental reactions. There are over 25 available characters, but only 4 are literally handed to you. The rest are earned through the gacha mechanics. Fortunately the game does give you a slow trickle of the currency needed to pull for new characters, so F2P accounts are absolutely possible.

One of the interesting quirks of Genshin is that killing enemies awards only a token amount of XP. If you want to level your characters, you have to use items you pick up, which means you can choose how to develop your team. Once you hit level 20, though, youre capped until you can complete an ascension, which requires you to collect certain specific resources. Ive ascended some of my characters five times now. The same is also true of your weapons, which have their own brand of experience items, and are also important to raise for ensuring your partys success. In so doing, some of the late game activity is basically devoted into farming these materials.

However, thats simply because the game itself isnt truly complete yet. Teyvat promises to be a world with seven nations. Right now, we only have two, Mondstadt and Liyue. However, simply the act of exploring and discovering all the corners of Mondstadt alone, finding all the bonus chests and performing all the little puzzles out in the field, will take you a couple dozen hours. Liyue is even larger.

Genshin Impact is at its most fun when you can just run around the countryside discovering things, and the developers have taken pains to create reasons for you to come back to the field later. At the time of this writing, theres an in-game event that has you perform encounters at a bunch of locations scattered throughout the map. Ive found at least half a dozen chests and secrets I missed previously as I reached the event prompts. (And I consider myself a pretty good explorer.)

While exploration might be the initial driving force, your in-game accomplishments begin to take over later. Your account has its own experience level, your characters have levels, your weapons have levels, your other equipment levels, you have a battle pass that tracks how many things youve accomplished this month, the game tallies your exploration progress on the map, and all of that is notwithstanding your own internal goals. Oh, and theres an achievement system, too.

But all of that is telling you what Genshin is. Very little of it describes if the game is any good. And my answer to you is yes. The combat is fluid. The art is great to look at for long stretches. The music, despite getting constantly interrupted by the battle theme, is fantastic. Discovery in the game is thrilling and rewarding. Difficulty is generally low, but spikes at key moments when it needs to challenge you or to encourage you to develop your skills further. The only real negatives are baked into the gacha mechanics such as having an energy system that limits you from farming all day or having the way the game deals out your characters be determined by the RNG gods. Beyond that, though, and given that the game is free, I strongly recommend giving this a try.

Should you play it?: Only reason not to play, IMO, is if you have gambling issues. Its a beautiful game that will mesmerize you for at least the first ten hours until it sucks you in. However, a caveat -- at launch, there was discussion about the executable for Genshin installing a rootkit. The developers scaled that back heavily, to the point that unless youre quixotically paranoid about a Chinese companys product suddenly taking over your system or stealing your info, its not something Id be concerned about, but its still there as part of their DRM. Even if thats an issue, you could still play it on PS4, PS5, or mobile.

Next: The perfect vessel

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Video Game Music Contest 14 champion: Idola Phantasy Star Saga - Endeavour