let me start by saying genshin impact is a beautiful, fun, highly entertaining game. it's completely free for the most part, and you will get a good 30+ hours of gameplay for absolutely no charge before running out of things to do.

and then you hit the good old gatcha paywall.

the good

• beautiful visuals. i actually consider it to be a more visually appealing game than breath of the wild.
• interesting and varied character design
• a LOT of things to do in the overworld, including multiple collectibles

the complicated

• fun, borderline addictive gameplay that nonetheless can become repetitive fast. if performing the same task over and over is not your thing, you're not gonna be very fond of this game.
• the story is nothing special, at least up to the point i reached

the bad

• it's a gacha game. if you don't know what that is, let me quote wikipedia: "[...] a genre of video games that implement the gacha (toy vending machine) mechanic. similar to loot boxes (prize crate) in video games, gacha games induce players to spend in-game currency to receive a random virtual item." long story short, the game actively encourages and employs gambling mechanics to coerce players into spending mountains of cash on it. if you have any tendency to be loose with your money, i highly recommend giving this game a pass. it is possible to play it without spending a single penny, but be aware that every part of the game is designed to entice you into spending it. it's how every gacha works. you will be tempted at one point or another, so make sure you're ready to resist that. personally, i think it's a vile system that preys on addictive and vulnerable personalities, and could no longer support it after it became clear the developers had no intention of changing it. be very, very careful with this type of game.
• the gatcha elements aren't limited to acquiring characters, but also to key gameplay elements. this may have changed with recent updates (i wouldn't know), but back when i was into it, simply being able to get into a 5-minute dungeon required time-gated currency you could only alternatively acquire more of by paying real money. this means that once you reach endgame, the game becomes pretty much a mobile game like any other, and you're forced to wait between activities and play for merely minutes at a time.

my recommendation is that, if you really must support this cash-grabbing mess of a game by playing it, do yourself a favor and get through those 30+ initial hours without spending any real money, and then promptly quit like i did. it's genuinely not worth much more than that.

I can't say I regret my time spent on Genshin Impact, considering that I paid nothing in it, and since it's a free to play game, there's no harm for anyone to try it. It has a lot of good aspects but also brings with it all the problems of mobile games in general.

Story is quite meh. I found most main story chapters to be quite boring when it comes to what's going on and dialogue (though the gameplay in them is quite solid, even if non spectacular in terms of mission design) , beside, as obvious as it sounds, the story is still incomplete. There's only prologue and chapter 1 fully released and 2 regions present in the game on the day I'm writing this review (March 2nd 2021). The new chapters and quests will keep getting added in the future and I don't think this game will be fully complete until at least midway next year or so, though to be honest I don't see myself returning again for Chapter 2, I feel I have had enough of this game and its gameplay loop.

Combat is quite fun actually, even if it's a little bit basic and simple in most of its ideas, but it never gets boring, quite the contrary. Combining elements together to create a reaction that causes damage and sometimes status ailments and effects is a neat idea. Using elements in RPGs isn't in any way an original concept but the game plays around it with some very good and fun ideas and combos that will encourage you to use all the 4 characters in your party and experiment with them. The enemies don't have the best AI and their variety kind of sucked all honestly by the time I finished the game, but the elemental reactions idea keeps the combat fresh enough and enjoyable till the end.

The game brings with it though all the problems that I just don't like in mobile free to play games. There's a ridiculous amount of grinding even for the simplest thing like leveling up your characters, it isn't done through battles but by collecting items to use, then you can only level up to a certain level cap before you need to collect further more specific items to increase the level cap again and so on, this is called "ascending" in the game. Similarly for the weapons, they need to be leveled up to a certain level cap then "ascend" them and so on. This isn't a problem when you are focused on only 4 characters just like what I did, but it made experimenting with new characters or new weapons very exhausting process as you will have to level them all the way up from the scratch and grind for ton of materials over and over to make them competitive enough to be used in fights.

There's also the obligatory stamina meter in such kind of mobile games that limits the number of activities you can do in the world per day, which is called here "resin". Basically every activity you can do in the world, be it dungeons, bosses or whatever requires spending resin to get the rewards (which are either accessories to power up your characters or the materials required to ascend your characters and weapons). You get 160 resin a day and once your resin is over, you will have to wait till they fill up and so on.

Even the story missions require grinding to open for you. There is an Adventure Rank exp meter that fills up with exp you get from quests and resin-required activities you do in the open world, and each main quest requires certain Adventure rank to be played. Usually there's about 5 adventure rank levels required to be grinded between each chapter.

These don't appear to be a big problem earlier in the game, when there're a lot of quests to be done and a lot of things to keep you occupied, but comes late in the game and grinding starts to become ridiculously excessive, and you start feeling that you log in every day just to do what you did exactly the previous day, again and again AND again till you are able to play a story quest after few days of grinding, then rinse and repeat. It becomes exhausting, and the repetitiveness in the gameplay loop starts to become more and more apparent. It's the formula of the mobile games basically but considering that this game is trying to take itself more seriously by being on PC and PS4 I found the level of grinding to be hard to accept.

This is also a gacha game, as it's well known, and it's by far the worst aspect of the game. Let me make it clear here, the game gives you 6 free characters to play with but otherwise all the other characters, including the actually strong (meta) ones, are only, and ONLY acquired through the gacha part : the wishes system. Similarly to loot boxes games, you roll the dice for 10 items and see what you get, with a guaranteed at least one 4 star equipment or character in each 10 wishes. Of course, acquiring the materials needed to open these wishes/loot boxes either require ton and ton of grinding (you need 1600 of the game currency to get the items required to open them, and most activities give you around 10 to 60 only) just for a 10 wish roll or just splash your cash on it. This would have bee fine, only if the the drop rate isn't that rubbish. All 5 start characters have only 0.16% to get from standard wishes, which is absurdly low. Event characters have 50% chance to be acquired from event wishes, but the materials required to open these wishes are much harder to be collected than standard ones, so more reasons to splash the cash if you want a specific character.

It's all quite random and honestly underwhelming. You can like a character from a trial but end up never managing to unlock it because of it being locked behind the awful gacha system and its terrible drop rate. While I know it's normal for a free gacha game to have ton of microtransactions because this the only source of money for developers, and that yes, you can finish the game without a problem with the 6 free characters they give you (though I found most of them to be boring to play with, to be honest. I spent nothing myself though I was super lucky to unlock Diluc from the wishes system but the rest of my party were the free characters they gave me), it has to be said that this is only a single player game, and there's no PVP or competitive online play to break the game if they made the drop rate of the characters a little bit higher than the absurd 0.16% or so rate, or even make the characters important for the story be unlocked through, guess what, the story. It all screams predatory mechanics for me that play on the gambling nature of many players to keep on spending and spending money on the hope they pull out the character they like out of ton of other characters they will get along the path that they won't care about. You can find yourself spending +200 dollars just to acquire one character you enjoyed its gameplay from a trial, it's crazy. The gacha system is bad even for a free to play mobile game.

I don't want to sound harsh on the game. There's still a lot to like in it. The combat as I said earlier is actually a lot of fun once you put some time in the game. The world is fun enough to explore, had its share of secrets that you can find on your own and there're some tough timed challenges to test your skills and experience in combat system. Most of the main missions gameplay, while being mostly simple and basic missions formula, is very fun and engaging enough (regardless of my opinion on the story itself) and there're some epic moments in them that are presented really well and got my hyped. The game is a lot of fun when it gets going, there's no doubt about it.

The graphics and art style is also great. All my experience with the game was on Android mobile and even though I had the graphics settings on low to get it to run smoothly, it still looked very pleasant to the eye, so I'm sure it will look even much better on PC or PS4 with the highest setting. For a free to play gacha mobile game, this no doubt had ton of budget spent on it and it's showing.

Voice acting is also magnificent for a free to play mobile game. Actors were really into it and put a good amount of feelings and emotions into their lines and delivered them really well, I was honestly surprised by the quality of English voice acting particularly in this. It was great. Though the game suffers from a massive lip desync with the voice acting. Many times characters don't even open their mouth, they keep it shut while the voices are delivered. I don't know if this problem is only on mobile or it's also present on PC and PS4. The controls on mobile is mostly smooth and works pretty well in combat, but the climbing controls are terrible and made me hate climbing any mountains or cliffs in the game.

Overall, considering that this is a free to play game, I will repeat what I said in the first paragraph that I find no harm for anyone to try it. There's a lot of fun to have in Genshin Impact, especially early when you are just starting. Ultimately the ridiculous level of grinding for every single thing, and the very random, luck based way to acquire new characters might get on your nerve in the end game, but you won't lose anything by giving it a try yourself even if you didn't manage to commit yourself to it when you reach the end game. If you liked the grinding system and have no problem with the gacha part, then all the better for you. They are still going to add a lot of content, new areas and continue the story in the future so I will say the best way to jump into the game is now when there's only prologue and chapter one released. These alone will take you anywhere around 40-50 hours to finish!

Story : 5/10.

Gameplay : 6.5/10.

Graphics and art style : 8/10

Voice acting and sounds : 8/10

Overall : 6.5/10.

(note: I look at Genshin as the PC game, ignoring its mobile aspect) I played around half a year in this and it feels like the biggest time waster in terms of games I have ever seen.

Short points of the game:

• Game is fascinating at the start, but quickly wears off (when you realize there is nothing new to discover except for new views) and becomes extremely boring in lategame
• Extremely long farm without proper rewards - you will have to waste ~30-90 minutes every day (in lategame) on cyclic actions in order to feel progress
• Weak and very slow main story
• Horrible gacha rates - you will receive anything rare, well - extremely rarely - 0.5% chance for 5*, guaranteed on 90 drop. But farming for 90 drops takes for around of 2-3 months (I mean, without quests. Completing quests makes it around 1 month)
• Pretty low diversity of content in this gacha, even after a half of year
• Game's true essence - miniquests, which basically make you feel like you're not playing the game - you are WORKING here
• Unique drops (loot) are limited to the Gacha system. In the world - you will never find anything exciting
• Faceless, copypasted secondary characters. The game has like ~10 character models and it's ironic that in quests you will see those much more often than any main character (even in quest cutscenes!). This is very destructive to the atmosphere of the game, where you feel like the world consists of copies
• The ONLY source of challenge in this game - "Abyss" (arena, basically). And while it is actually challenging - it is repetitive and has very minor rewards (as everything in this game)
• Everything, except for Abyss, is trivial
• Main characters also feel kinda unnatural (minor minus, but still). While most people in the world resemble normal people, and many farmers\hunters\etc look tough - main characters mostly feel like kids with superpowers. Some of them are Gods (or semi-gods) - and all of those look young (even Zhongli) or clearly childish (Venti). I mean, ordinary farmer looks more tough than any of main characters (also smarter than many too), who solve global problems. I find it funny, somehow

The game launched a lot of different event minigames during this time (half-a-year), often targeting those for multiplayer. Again, same problem: most of those ended up being extremely trivial and simply unfinished. And instead of focusing on something - devs just went for creating another unfinished trivial minigame event.

Now, there comes a question: if the game is so bad, how I wasted so much time in it? It has a bunch of traits that try to lure you into this swamp, and I appeared to be vulnerable to them:

• The game has an exciting start with the feeling that "you can do so much stuff in here". This is an illusion, but a good one
• Game farm forms a strong habit with its daily quests
• They add in new content in small pieces - so that you never feel like you've ended this game. New content also becomes part of your daily routine
• I had a LOT of friends and acquaintances playing into this - this was the biggest factor
• Gacha itself lures in with that "loot" aspect

SUMMARY: If you have a lot of time to waste and you really want to throw that time with maximum inefficiency - there is no better choice than Genshin Impact.

Seriously - other games usually offer good challenging gameplay, or maybe good story, or maybe they're very fun. Genshin can't really offer anything or compete with other PC games in those aspects. It has good soundtrack and nice vivid graphics, but those won't fascinate you for too long

Yes, the game has some similarities with Zelda: Breath of the wild, but it is not fair to say it is just a clone (in fact, Zelda copies a lot of things from other games too). Is this bad? Not at all. Genshin Impact gets things from BotW, but also gets things from another games too and gathered together in one game.

In my opinion, the game is good, fun, with a lot of content and things to explore in the world. There are only 2 things that I don't like:

• Some tasks from the main story are blocked by level. I can understand blocking some secondary features but... ¿Main story? Moreover, once you are advanced in the story and not so many things remain to finish.. it is difficult to get experience to increase your level so it seems designed to make people pay to increase the level and continue the story.
• Gacha system is really bad. I almost finished the game, spent all my Protogems and I got NOTHING. I can understand that obtaining good things should be hard... the thing is that obtaining protogems is really difficult. So you need to spend a lot of time to obtain few protogems and then had really good luck because it is really difficult to get a good object or character. As you can imagine, this is designed to make people pay for this, again.

I would recommend to play the game if you like action RPGs. I like the game. But they really need to fix some things. But, hey! It is free! So relation between quality and price is really good! By the way, it is available for mobile platforms but avoid it... I tried my iPhone and my iPad Pro and it can't be played.

Pro:

-unique character designs (aka beautiful waifu and husbandos)

-refreshing and creative fighting style that keeps the game entertaining with each new character whose elemental powers and fighting style are all different (with a few exceptions who are pretty much copy and paste of another character)

-some of the best video game OST I’ve ever heard

-beautiful scenery that gives the game a certain magical feeling

-certain parts of the story is well-written

-English dub is extremely well-done, some are even the best voice for certain characters imo (for example Khoi’s voice is the best one for Albedo imo)

Cons:

-recent characters have gotten more lazily designed and aren’t as innovative as the old ones (like how Yelan is just a 5* Xingqiu, Al Haitham is a copy and paste of Keqing, Lynette having pretty much the same E ability as Yelan, Lyney’s ultimate is just like Kirara’s hold E)

-many characters need their constellations to be good, aka you need to spend more money to buy an answer to a problem in their kit that Hoyoverse intentionally created to make this character flawed and faulty (like how many shielders can’t shield other players unless you get their cons, so there’s no point in bringing for example Zhongli to an Azhdaha co-op since he’s useless there)

-many critical gameplay design issues (and major QOL problems) are ignored by Hoyoverse (like how something so easily implemented like turning constellations on and off has still yet to be implemented) while they are mostly implemented into their new game Honkai Star Rail (if HSR can have them why can’t Genshin?)

-the world is magical but the magic wears off quickly due to how empty the world is. There are beautiful scenery but nothing to do, you can explore and collect treasures but once you’ve collected you’d have no reason to return to these beautiful places cause there’s no one to interact with over there, nothing to do to make the place feel alive. For an example of a game world that feels alive, RDR2 is a perfect example. It’s so alive I sometimes forget I’m talking to npc and dealing with fake beings who are just a bunch of codes. I’d treat them like a real person and they would react like how a real person would, unlike Genshin npc who only have a select few dialogues and you can only hear them repeat it and can’t interact with them in any other way.

-story is usually pretty mediocre with certain exceptions. The Fontaine storyline is very good so far, Sumeru's is quite good, Childe’s character quest is good, Albedo’s event character quest is good…but many others are bad and disappointing, like the Inazuma quest for example. War doesn’t feel like a real war, rebels are too naive, Raiden is too easily swayed and even goes on a date with us after we beat her?? What waifu-selling BS, ideologies are too black-and-white, it’s so easy to say “rebels are good corrupt government is bad” but it’d be much better to show more sides to things like maybe the rebels could be the bad guys in certain people’s eyes, maybe they created more problems while trying to do good, maybe not all rebels who joined the rebellion are in it for justice, they can be doing it to take advantage of the benefits, or there are spies, or the bad apples in the rebel group are giving them a bad reputation that’s causing additional problems for them on top of the rebellion…etc. A great example would be how The Last of Us does it, it has a few rebel groups and they’re all amazingly written. Genshin feels like it dumbed down the realism and nature of war and rebellion due to the age of its target audience

-a lot of the good story quests are limited events which doesn’t make sense. The quest that shows us Kazuha’s backstory and his family and stuff is a limited event quest while his actual character quest doesn’t shine light to anything we don’t already know about him

-like the story quests, so many important things are limited time. The quest that tells us who Albedo truly is is a limited event quest, Albedo’s best and maybe the only weapon good on him is a limited event weapon. HSR allows us to play old events that we missed, yet Genshin doesn’t. Why? Now new players have no way of finding out Albedo’s backstory unless they google it, which is not what an immersive game like Genshin should be making players do

-many quests in game are intentionally dragged out to make themselves feel longer and “better” written

-dialogues can’t be skipped, so prepare to sit through hours of boring and badly written dialogues, you can’t just play it on auto either since occasionally it’d make you choose a dialogue option so you have to be constantly watching

-game is said to be casual but it keeps throwing FOMO stuff at your face and make you speedrun the game in order to build a single character you really like to use (for example if you just started the game and you pulled Cyno, prepare to not be able to use him for a few months while you grind and speedrun the game, oh you don’t want to speedrun and instead want to play it casually? Well you won’t be able to play Cyno for maybe half a year then since all his character materials are locked in Sumeru and you have 4 nations and hundreds of hours of non-skippable dialogues to grind through

-many quests are bad because it lets its characters go to waste. For example, if Hu Tao’s character quest needs her to help someone who had a near-death experience, the game would make her help a random npc who we really don’t give two s*** about, despite there already being a perfect playable character created for this scenario: Bennett, an unlucky boy who has the misfortune of stumbling upon anything bad. By having Hu Tao help Bennett who had a near-death experience, it not only would make this quest more interesting for us because it features characters we know and care about, but would also present an opportunity to give us more insights into them and add more depth to their already established character. TLDR: if a character quest needs someone who does a certain thing, don’t use a npc, use an existent character who can fit the same role.

-exploration locked behind hours long quest. New area opens, you go explore the desert, every temple you see is locked, every puzzle mechanism is locked behind a gadget you don’t currently possess, you explored for hours only to return empty-handed and disappointed. Now a week later, you finally grinded through the hours long quest and got the gadget, but you’ve lost your initial enthusiasm and now the thought of having to go explore all that again fills you with dread and annoyance.

-gacha rates are bad. It used to be even worse until Tectone “fixed” the weapon banner rates (but we don’t talk about Homa 🤫). Some might say “it’s a gacha game so of course the rates are bad”, might I point you toward a gacha game with fairly good rates? Dislyte. And when I say good rates I don’t just mean the rate at getting characters, it also includes how many free pulls the game gives you, how f2p friendly the game is, how much fun you can have as a f2p vs as a dolphin/whale…etc. Dislyte does all this much better than Genshin. Its characters don’t need constellations to be good and usable (instead constellations make them OP), it even has 3 star characters who can fit a role no 5 star characters can, some of the best teams you can create for specific bosses feature 4 star characters, some could even be argued as a “must” for fighting that boss (Djoser for Apep, Li Guang/Meredith for Fafnir)

-you can only block a maximum of 30 players. We all know the Genshin community and co-op experience can get pretty toxic, so if you don’t want flame wars then give us the option to ignore these haters

-player nickname you can give to friends shouldn’t be limited to 10 characters (I once wanted to nickname a friend who asked me for help with building Keqing as “helpKQbuild” it’s not even that long yet due to the limits I had to use “helpKQbild” instead :(

-considering the game is a Chinese game, sometimes there are translation issues, two major ones being the “sworn brother” thing between Kaeya and Diluc, and Childe’s dialogues during our fight which gave us a false impression of him in the English version

-PAIMON!!! Can’t believe I forgot about this monstrosity. This annoying greedy rude flying emergency food of a baby gremlin who insists on stealing the spotlight from us with every given opportunity and repeating to us what others have already said as if we are infants who can’t pay attention to something for more than 3 seconds. If a npc tells you “you just need to go to place A and do thing B and retrieve item C”, Paimon would then repeat it to you “to sum it up, we just need to go to place A and do thing B and retrieve item C! Doesn’t sound like too much of a hassle! We can do it Traveler! Place A is near where character D lives, let’s go ask them for help!” And let’s not forget about how annoyingly high-pitched and squeaky her voice is. Idk why in God’s name the voice director decides to make her this way when her old voice during the beginning of the game is 100% better, but it’s seriously grating on my ears and make me want to yank my ears off every time I hear it. Listen to Paimon’s voice in the other languages and you’d find all of them less squeaky than the English one. (No hate on her English VA, she has no say in how Paimon should sound like)

-there are probably more but I just woke up and this is all I can think of for now, will edit this if I think of more

EDIT: Fontaine's quest elevated this game to new grounds. The Hydro Archon Furina is probably the best written character in this entire game. If Hoyoverse keep this up, I might have to change my score for this game.

Intro

This is a F2P single-player MMO.

The Good

The stuff with the elements is clever and some characters are drawn beautifully.

The bad

• Tutorial takes like three hours.
• Borderline child porn characters.
• You switch between 4 characters with 2 attacks each. That's it.
• No skills.
• No attributes.
• Worthless loot. Seriously, 95% is crap.
• Enemies are so irrelevant even Torchlight looks engaging in comparison.
• F2P bullshit.
• Incredibly ugly, empty and boring world.
• Pointless story.
• Bad mini-games.
• You can't equip items by double-clicking or pressing enter, you have to move the cursor to the other side of the screen and click the "switch" button.
• Each character has five slots for items that have to be switched constantly.
• The rest of the interface is pretty bad too (let me double-click ffs).
• Invisible walls and other awful barriers ("let's not go there right now").
• Completely dead MMO-world filled with copy-pasted "characters".

Conclusion

I played this for over 4 hours. I never felt anything (well, except frustration at the interface). I never felt the enemy was a threat. I never enjoyed getting loot. I never had the idea i had control over my characters' development. They call this an "action role-playing game" but it's more an "inaction understudy game". This game makes freaking Torchlight look good.

I really feel like I need to write this review. Mostly for myself, to get my thoughts out there, but also for others, who might have been or currently are in a similar predicament.

I need to start by saying I have played genshin impact, aside from the last year, pretty consistently ever since its launch. I'm not a hater who played the tutorial and called it a day. I have played for hours, hours and hours. Actually, this whole review idea started when I tried finding a way to check my playtime with my account. Must be an easy stat to show for Mihoyo, right? They have a detailed stats page for each players, including chests opened, days active, achievements received, etc. But no playtime. It would be so easy to implement, yet despite the numerious requests to do so, it's still unavailable to this date.

This is why I'm writing this.

Ever since my teenage years, I have played gacha games on and off. It first started with the phone game Love Live! School Idol Project, then shifted to other games until finally landing on Genshin Impact. The thing is. As a teen, and even an adult. I would cut on my sleep to play these games. To finish a quest, to get special exclusive items, etc. I would play in between classes and as soon as I got home. I would play too much.

I have had this issue with other games, I once got hooked a full summer of my childhood on Harvest Moon Magical Melody, and most likely played too much for my own good. However, games Like Love Live! and Genshin Impact are, to their core, fundamentally different.

Once you buy a game like Harvest Moon, you own it and are officially a customer. The company's work is fulfilled by that sale. To gacha games, you are a daily customer, and they must keep you as long as they can, so they will create strategies to pull you back in, and spend money. That makes people who are sensible to these types of strategies go off the rails. Despite never having spent an outrageous amount of money on these types of games, I have spent countless hours of my life playing them, often neglecting myself and my wellbeing to get one last reward. I can say without a doubt that gacha games are predatory, and this is the main reason while I don't feel inclined to recommend this game to my friends anymore, despite liking many things about it. It will take years for the main story to end, and who knows by then how much hours people will have spent grinding mindlessly, not even enjoying it, for the pure sake of keeping up to date? Life's too short, and there's too many other things to do with our limited time on earth.

This is probably the longest intro to a video game review, but it needed to be said. That being done, let me talk about the actual game now.

• Story 3/5: The story is a bit messy to be quite frank, but the more you get into the game, the more it starts to make sense and is enjoyable. I will give credit where it's due, there are a lot of hidden details and lore dispersed throughout the game. You can collect books, read weapons descriptions, find letters, etc. and while I personally felt overwhelmed by all of this, I can recognize there was a lot of effort put into this aspect. However, I'm suspecting that they might be partly writing the story on the go, as new updates drops by, which is why it might sometimes feel confusing to the player.

• Graphics 5/5: This is a partly subjective point as aesthetic appreciation varies from one person to another, but I love the cartoonish look of the game as well as the lively colors and beautiful landscapes. I have been reading mangas and watching animes since I was a kid, so I'm obviously biased towards this art style.

• Music: 10/5 This is without a single doubt, my absolute favorite part of the game. Just to give you an idea, despite not having played for months, I still await eagerly for the new soundtrack to drop on spotify, and listen to it on loop. I've studied music for most of my life and god, Genshin Impact soundtrack does not disappoint. Teyvat, which is Genshin's Impact world, has different regions that are inspired by different real world countries. This is a huge challenge for any composer, as they must write wildly different styles for the game, while keeping some type of cohesion throughout the whole soundtrack. So far, there are 750 tracks that have been released, and they're all, in my opinion, beautiful in their own way. Even if you wouldn't touch this game with a ten foot pole stick, I encourage you to go watch one of their free live concert on youtube, to see what I'm talking about.

• Gameplay 3/5: The gameplay is a hit and miss to be honest. The combat mechanic is fun, as well as the world exploration part, however the daily tasks and other grindfest that is to be expected with any gacha game is a total bore and a pain in the ass, aside from the few times you might decide to Co-op with friends. I don't mind grinding in games in general, but gacha games are hell and take this to an absolute insane level that sucks the enjoyement you once had for the game out of you.

• Overall 3/5: Listen, some people might play Genshin Impact for years on and off and treat it like any other game, without ever feeling obligated to play everyday and grind absurds amount. I recognize that, but I am not this person. This game is so big it easily feels overwhelming, and it's bursting to the seam with events and limited characters, weapons and costumes, as well as mini games that are becoming fairly sophisticated (there is a card game in-game that has been built from scratch and that, to my surprise, I enjoyed a fair lot, despite not being well versed in these types of game). I feel like it has its own microcosm at this point. If I was immortal, I would mostly likely see this game to its end, and enjoy playing it a lot more in the years to come. However, I've battled so much with gacha games in the past, trying to keep them to a reasonable gameplay time, that the risk of loosing myself in this game is not worth it for me. I have too many things left to do on this earth to give this game such a significant part of my time.

If you plan to play one game in your whole life and this game is Genshin Impact, sure, then I guess you could make this gacha game work for you. As for me, I've got too many other games to experience before dying.

If you've somehow made it this far, thank you so much! Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments, and forgive me for any mistake I might have made, as English is not my native language.

For starters. I'm playing this game from the start. Like from the very first day. Also I played some BOTW but never finished it. So I have something to say about all this BOTW clone things and about the game in general. I'm also game-as-service veteran and probably gacha-addict. Ok let's go. I split review in a few parts.

• Story

Game has okayish story. We are playing as an outsider who came from different world into world of Teivat. There are some fractions in the game who want to conquer the world, some gods, archons and more. Typical shounen manga premise. We need to find our sibling and to do this we need support from everyone. We do some tasks, meet different characters and so on. It's not the best story but script is solid and little by little you understand wth is going on. I give it 3/5.

• Side stories

It's not a gacha if there is no side stories. So side stories are stories about particular characters to understand them better. And ofc to sell them to you. In this stories you will see a glimpse of their power and start to throw money in your screen. Is it a joke? Or maybe not? Anyway stories are great. I give them 5 out of 5. They are much better than main quest or main story. Most character development comes through these stories. There are some sadness and good laughs. Sadly most of these stories are locked behind your adventure rank or keys. Because it's f2p game, you need to do some chores to get something good in return. So prepare to grind.

• Gameplay

Oh boy. Well, you have from 1 to 4 characters in a party. You can switch them and do some elemental reactions here and there. Reactions are you main damage, not your auto-attack. You explore the world, dungeons, kill bosses, grind some gear to advance to new level. And that's all. All you do is grind gear to advance to the next level where you will be grinding new gear with better stats.

If you are still reading this I guess you are pretty excited. Wow, new gear! But there are some problems. You know, this is gacha game and the main point of the game is to sell you as much as possible or at least steal your time and attention. So here come some restrictions. And ofc it's energy or resin in Genshin. Wanna kill some badass bosses? Sure you can kill them as much as you want but only first four will drop loot. Wanna grind some gear? Cool but 1 dungeon clear = 20 resin out of 160. Wanna grind some specific gear? Sorry but no. We heard you need cryo pieces for your cryo waifu so we decided to give you water gear. There is no protection against rng, you can literally grind for months to get what you want and still not get it. Trust me. My Diluc is still wearing hourglass with hp% as substat. Maybe I'm unlucky though. And why do you need all this gear? You probably don't need it. If you want to enjoy the story you can equip whatever you get. Even on higher AR.

Speaking of AR. AR is your adventure rank that grows slowly while you do story quests, open chests, daily, dungeons. Why do you need AR? As I wrote earlier some stories are locked behind your rank or keys. You need certain AR to unlock daily quests. And after you finish all your dailies 8 times you get 1 key to open sub-stories. Exciting, right? Also the strongest dungeons where you will get a chance to get a better gear are behind AR. This section is a bit too heavy so I need to finish it ASAP.
What about endgame? Why do we need all this gear? There is no endgame at the moment. Only abyss but it's pretty boring, because it's just dps check. Kill 15 mobs, 20 mobs, 30 mobs in a minute, two or more. Also there are strong debuffs on the stages to make you suffer more.

• Gacha

Not generous. That's all you need to know. 70-90 soft pity where you chances go way up to get a 5 star (weapon or character). If RNGesus is not on your side you need to summon 70-90 more to get a guaranteed unit. But you can play without 5 stars even though they have better stats than 4 stars (units and weapons alike).

• Quality

Top noth quality. Great animation, great attention to small details. Amazing voice acting (lipsync is meh though). Every time I play I see something new. Like different animations after each attack and so on. Music is way too good and some tracks stuck in my playlist e.g Liyue battle theme. Really that's some crazy shit you won't see in AAA games.

• Support

Because this is game-as-service, there are constant updates to make you play. Lately they barrage us with different events, mini-games and so on. Most events are fun to play, some not. I give it 5 of 5 for creativity and amount of work they put into them. At least it's not copy-paste but we will see in the future. Most events are time limited, so there is always some FOMO in the game. Keep playing and paying.

• Conslusion.

This is not a BOTW. You can explore the open world, climb walls and clifs and open chests while attacking bokoblin-like creatures. Yes. And that's all similarity. In it's core Genshin Impact is just another time consuming gacha that mostly restricts the way you want to play it while BOTW gives you tools and opportunities to play how you want. (weapon durability in BOTW sucks though)

PS: give yourself a pat on the back and stay safe if you reached this part.