Listen to the Rain

You'd think I would have written more about this game considering how much I've played it.

Back during the Plague Years, not long after sashagee and I met, she got into a game called Genshin Impact, then still relatively obscure. Her father and brother had started playing it months before, not long after it first came out, and they had gotten her into it in order to play with them. But, as she tells me is often the case, they played much more than she did, rocketed ahead of her in progression, and by the time she caught up with them, they had gotten bored of the game and moved on to another one. She was having a fun time--she's an old gacha hand, having played a ton of the Shining Nikki phone games in the years before she met me until she had to cut herself off from spending too much--but she had gotten herself into a horrible bind. Somehow she had increased her World Level (the difficulty of monsters, basically) up to level 6, but her characters were all severely underleveled and underpowered to the point where she simply could not beat any of the fights necessary to increase your characters' power, which meant she couldn't advance the story either. So she came to me and was like "dorchadas, you're my boyfriend, so I need you to help me."

And that's how I started to play a gacha game.


Now, let me make one thing absolutely clear--Genshin Impact is a gacha game and it is first and foremost a means to extract your money. But, part of the reason I decided to make it my game for September and write a review of it is that they introduced a lot of changes that make it better than it used to be, possible because they developed a conscience but I think mostly because some games explicitly designed to compete with Genshin started coming out. For example, as with most games of this type, Genshin has a stamina system. It's less punishing than something like Kingdom of Loathing--you can tell how few of these games I play because I had to jump to Kingdom of Loathing as my other example--running out of stamina does not block you from doing literally everything, it just stops you from gaining materials to advance your characters. However, the limit used to be 160 stamina units (called "resin"), and since you regenerated 1 every 8 minutes, you'd get 180 total over the course of a day, meaning in order to avoid wasting Resin, you had to log at least twice per day, all in the service of increasing average user time in the game and thus encouraging them to spend more money. Well, you don't have to do that anymore--now the max is 200, so you can log in once, do all of your stuff, and then log out without any worries that you're somehow not being fully optimal.

They also changed how your dailies work. If you haven't played a live service game and are unfamiliar with the concept, most of these games have a certain number of daily quests you can do in order to gain rewards, which are capped in order to prevent certain people from just grinding for hours and hours and days and running out of things to do. It used to be that you had your four daily quests, which would give you primogens (one of the currencies, the one you use for pulls on new characters), and then you'd also have to spend your resin. Now, doing the quests is optional, since every 40 resin you spend is the equivalent of doing one quest and you can get all the rewards just by spending your resin. Since most of the quests are boring "Go here and kill some enemies" or "do this obstacle course," which are fun the first time and much less fun the twentieth time, skipping them is a great quality of life update. The optimal way to play the game on days when you don't actually have time to play takes 20 seconds. You log in, convert all your resin into hardened resin and thus get credit for spending it, talk to the adventurer's guild and get credit, and log out. Done. Of course, there's a cap on how much hardened resin you can have--of course there is--so you can't do this more than one day at a time, but I do it a lot on days where I went into the office, it's late, and I don't actually want to play. Though usually, sashagee spend our resin together, about which more later.

There are a bunch of less-consequential changes too, like how when you would zone into a domain--one of the self-contained zones that drops upgrade materials or gear--you would spawn at the end of a long stairway which was just long enough that if you sprinted up to the glyph that started the battle, you'd be completely out of stamina and thus would have to wait or risk not being able to do any power attacks. Now, you spawn at the top of the stairs, and if you're redoing the battle you spawn right next to the glyph. World bosses now respawn in ten seconds instead of taking several minutes. They added more choice to the battle pass, so you can skip on getting weapon upgrade materials (which everyone has 10x more than they need) in favor of gear upgrade materials (which no one ever has enough of). You can skip past the opening levels of the Spiral Abyss if you beat the whole thing on a previous cycle. Just a whole bunch of quality of life to make the game less annoying to play.

But the biggest QoL change in term of gameplay is what they call Focused Experience Mode. It used to be that if you were trying to do more than one quest at a time, you'd repeatedly end up with a "this character is involved in another quest" popup, because a character could not be in two places at once, so if they were already set to be somewhere for one quest, if you got to another quest that involved them you could not do that other quest. You'd have to go back to the first one. What's worse, the logic for deciding what quest took primacy was extremely convoluted, so you'd sometimes end up leapfrogging back and forth between two quests, doing one step of each at a time before getting the error message and then switching. It was incredibly annoying and made it hard to keep track of what was going on since the quests were using the same characters. Well, now they have Focused Experience Mode, which forces all characters to be in the appropriate place for whatever quest you activate it on. I used it recently to finish the main story and start the limited time event, since the game told me that the character I was trying to talk to wasn't available because of the timed event quest when the timed event said I should beat the main story first for the best experience. In the past I would have had no choice but to it in the order they suggested, but now when I ran into that error message I just went over and flipped on Focused Experience Mode and kept doing what I was doing. It's a huge benefit for people who want to do the story in a cohesive manner.


The reason I think Genshin is legitimately fun to play as a game and not just as a waifu harem collector is the combat system. You'll see a lot of screens like that one.

All characters in Genshin have an elemental affinity to one of the seven elements, named in Greek: Anemo (Air), Geo (Earth), Pyro (Fire), Hydro (Water), Electro (Lightning), Cryo (Ice), and Dendro (Wood). Each character also has an elemental skill on a short(ish) cooldown, and an elemental burst that requires building up energy to use. These skills can sometimes have only a tangential relationship to the elements--while early characters are very strongly element-themed, later characters stray further afield. A character like Candace is a hydro character but her elemental skill is a shield bash and while her elemental burst does do hydro damage, it's just an AoE and the damage type is incidental. If you're looking for the fantasy of being a pyromancer or hurling your enemies around with bursts of wind, you can find it, but your team composition will be limited.

However, the real fun comes in the combinations of various elements, which can get very complex. Burgeon, which shows up a bunch above, is specifically the result of applying pyro damage to dendro cores created by bloom, which is the result of doing hydro damage to a target hit by dendro (or vice versa). There's also vaporize in that image, which is using fire on a target hit by hydro. Not in that image, are hyperbloom (using electro on a target hit by dendro), melt (using pyro on a target hit by cryo), freeze (using cryo on a target hit by hydro), quicken (using electro on a target hit by dendro), spread (using dendro on a target hit by quicken), overloaded (using fire or electro on a target hit by the other one)...the list goes on and on. And many of these have additional rider effects, such as doing AoE damage, leaving the target more vulnerable to future damage, freezing the target, single target flat damage boost, and so on. Geo and anemo aren't mentioned above because they have a single reaction to all other elemental types--anemo causes swirl, which spreads one of the other non-geo non-dendro elements around to everyone hit by the anemo attack, and geo causes crystallize, which drops a crystal that you can pick up for a shield.

Most of the actual gameplay is strategizing and teambuilding, trying to come up with a combination that you like and that synergizes well together. You'll either have a quickswap team or a hypercarry team. The former relies on cyling through your team members, trying to use their skills on cooldown and have neough energy to use their bursts the instant they come up, and the latter is about teams where there is a single character who spends most of their time on-field doing damage and three characters who back them up. While you can have four characters per team, only one of them is playable at a time and the rest exist in a kind of limbo, waiting to be summoned. This has no actual story or lore relevance, it's purely a consideration for gameplay and a way to allow each player individually to use these elemental interactions in combat.

And also a way to sell more characters to people, of course. Can't forget that.


It's important to mention, however, that in the course of normal gameplay all of this is totally unnecessary. One of the single most player (and wallet) friendly design decisions Genshin has is that there's no leaderboards, there's no ultra-hard content that you have to clear to remain "on top," and there's no PVP. For a while, sashagee was playing a game called June's Journey, which was a classic phone hidden object game...but with monetization. And there were leaderboards, and there were clubs that had a minimum spend policy in order to get enough points to remain on top of those leaderboards. She saw one that was $5 a day minimum spend, log in every day and complete your tasks or you're immediately kicked out of the club, and there were others that required even higher amounts. June's Journey isn't unique in this--though it is weird to me since it's a 1920's themed mystery-solving hidden object game, so I'm not sure what's up with the cutthroat player base--every game that has a competitive aspect with no cap on spending ends up this way, because there's always someone rich enough and obsessed enough to pour money into pixels.

There are gacha games that have separate price lists for the Gulf states, specifically to drain millions from oil princelings.

Genshin has none of that. The hardest content in the game, the Spiral Abyss, is something you can do once every two weeks, can only be done solo, and flawlessly completing the entire thing gives you enough primogems for...5 rolls on a character, and it used to be 3. There is no competitive aspect to normal gameplay at all, and the competitive gameplay elements that do appear are all time-limited events with minigames like kickball played with bombs or chasing coins that are being blown by the wind around. Not a single one involves using your characters' gear, stats, or combat prowess.

This can be good or bad. I see a lot of complaints online from people talking about how all the optimization and gear choices, picking specific pieces over others, switching sets when you get a different weapon, swapping characters in and out, all of that doesn't matter because any team that you put even a modicum of thought into will steamroll everything in the open world without even slowing you down. And on other hand, I see a lot of comments that unless you want to clear the Spiral Abyss 0.35 seconds faster, you don't need to do massive optimization because you can see the entire story without having to care about any of it. And you can find videos out there of people using the free characters to clear the Spiral Abyss anyway. Part of this is because from a ruthless money-extraction viewpoint, the designers screwed up--many of the early characters are still the best characters of their element that show up in all kinds of teams. Despite being four star characters, pyro healer Bennett and pyro DPS Xiangling show up over and over again in any team that needs pyro damage at all, as does electro sub-DPS (someone who does damage through abilities or elemental reactions, not through direct attacks) Fischl, anemo support Sucrose, hydro sub-DPS Xingqiu...all of these are either available for free to everyone or free through limited-time but recurring events. I just watched a video of someone who soloed the last level of the Spiral Abyss with Amber, widely considered to be the least effective character in the game. You don't need to worry that your favorite characters are too bad to be worthwhile or that they'll be power-crept by later characters, because neither of those has really been much of a problem in the four years Genshin has been running. There's a joke online that the god of the pyro nation of Natlan is secretly Xiangling, because she's the best pyro character, has been for years, and even with the actual pyro god being a playable character soon, how could Xiangling possibly be overthrown?

And speaking of playable characters.


If you're unfamiliar with the term "gacha", it's from the Japanese ガチャポン (gachapon, "capsule machine"), an onomatopoeia for the sound of a crank turning and then a capsule falling and which I just learned is trademarked by Bandai Namco? There are debates online about whether it's gambling or not but this is, as the kids say, "cope." It's absolutely gambling, that's the entire point.

I mentioned primogems above and those are the currency you use for your gambling. Every 160 primogems becomes 1 "wish," which is one roll on a character or weapon. The majority of rolls are 3-star weapons, which are mostly just filler that you can melt down into improving other weapons, but you have a 5% chance to get a 4-star character or weapon--generally the minimum level for something you want to use, though there are some 3-star weapons that are good in specific cases--and a 0.6% chance to get a 5-star character or weapon. This sounds like bad odds because it is, since the house always wins, but since pixels are free, these games usually have what's called a pity system. In Genshin's case, after you've rolled 75 times on a character (65 times on a weapon), your odds of getting a 5-star character start to drastically climb until it hits 100% chance on your 90th roll.

Oh, that sounds good, you say, you're guaranteed a character after a while. But not so fast--this is a money-extraction machine, after all, and if everyone could be guaranteed whatever character they want as long as they were willing to save up a bit, they wouldn't have made billions of dollars. It's true that you have a 100% chance to get a 5-star character after 90 rolls, but oh no no no, you don't automatically get the character you're rolling on. Instead, you have a 50% chance to get that character and a 50% chance to get a character from a limited pool of "standard" characters (which you can also roll directly for if you want, though if so, you have no ability to aim at a particular character you want. If you really want that character you initially rolled on, you need to go through the entire process again, building up pity until you get to 90, and if you have enough primogems (or swipe your credit card enough), then you'll get that shiny new 5-star character. Weapons used to work differently--you used to have to lose twice to guarantee getting the 5-star weapon you wanted--but in the newest area patch this changed and now it works like character rolls where you only have to lose once if you're unlucky.

Ah, but if all that isn't confusing enough, there's a new pity on pity mechanic! Ten percent of the time when you lose a roll, you'll get the Capturing Radiance bonus and get the character anyway. Is this confusing? Of course it's confusing. Gacha games thrive on multiple currencies and obscured probabilities, so that while you're gambling there's no direct connection between the amount of money you're spending and the characters you receive that might make you look at your credit card statement and decide to play a game that a flat fee and gives you everything up front, the way games used to before companies starting hiring psychologists to figure out the best combination of flashing lights and sound effects to make you pull that lever one more time. The fact that as gacha goes Genshin is relatively benign does not absolve it of the sins inherent in gacha as a concept.

One of my frequent complaints to sashagee is that we used to have a social consensus that gambling was something that adults could do but shouldn't be proud of, but now there's gacha games and sports betting everywhere and people use terms like "gamba" to set what they're doing at a slight distance. Hopefully not too many learn the painful less that in the end, the house always wins.


That joke in the caption was heard everywhere before Genshin came out, when the trailers showed people climbing up cliffs, flying on a glider, and fighting enemies in a thunderstorm just like smash-hit game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. While there's really not much similar between them plot-wise--for one thing, one of the major complaints about BotW is how story-light it is and that is absolutely not true for Genshin--the world exploration has a lot of points in common. Relatively early on in Genshin, you get a "glider license" that lets you fly from high places and soar on winds. You can climb cliffs. There are thunderstorms with lightning bolts (and being rained on applies hydro and being struck by lightning applies electro). There are little puzzles scattered all around the world that give you primogems, artifacts, money, and so on. You can stumble on random quests in the wilderness and complete them to learn a few facts about the world.

That mostly all ended when the game came out, though, because beyond the superficial similarities they really aren't anything alike. Breath of the Wild embraced the concept of a world with weight, where objects have physics and can be used in interesting ways to solve puzzles or deal with situations, and Genshin replaces that with elemental interactions. BotW is perfectly happy to let the player die if they have the wrong solution to a problem and people complain online that team composition mostly doesn't matter because almost nothing in Genshin is hard enough to need to optimize. And also, Genshin has co-op play.

Kind of. This is the main thing that sashagee used to try to draw me in after getting me into Final Fantasy XIV and it turned out that she was misled. She had visions of us exploring the world together, solving puzzles and fighting monsters, in a big fun colorful open-world adventure, the way she had planned for us to play Horizon: Zero Dawn side-by-side and talk about the game as we played. It turns out that that's not possible. Genshin multiplayer is vestigial outside of instanced content, and local multiplayer mostly only exists to allow you to get into place to do that instanced content. You can help solve puzzles in another player's world but it doesn't benefit you at all. While in multiplayer mode, only the host can talk to NPCs and vendors and the host cannot unlock new areas of the map. About the only use of wandering around the world is killing world bosses together, and they require resin to loot so it's something you do for 10 minutes a day and then wait for your resin to recharge. sashagee's vision of us exploring Teyvat together was dead before it even got off the ground.

That out of the way, exploring the world is one of the most fun parts of the game and, most importantly, one you can do for free. A lot of gacha games are designed with a points-of-light world map, where you basically teleport from location to location and maybe get to do a story event or fight a battle, or even explore a small dungeon if the game has a big enough budget, but each individual location is self-contained. If you're unlucky, going to any of these locations will also cost whatever that game's limited resource that allows you to do things is, so if you have a few hours to play and you want to play Your Favorite Gacha Game, you'll have to open your wallet if you don't want to be done in 20 minutes. This is the way Kingdom of Loathing works, for example, though fortunately there are no gacha elements there. If you're lucky, visiting the locations will be free but you'll still need to spend your currency in some other way.

Genshin doesn't have any of that because it has an open world. If a new patch comes out and you want to play for twelve hours and explore every nook and cranny of the new area, solving all the puzzles, doing all the quests, and finding all the chests, you can and it won't cost you a dime. That, as well as the lack of PVP and the way most content is not that hard, makes Genshin a good occasional game. The only real reason to care about having super-strong characters is that they let you get more currency to get more characters, and if you just want to see the story and explore the world, none of that matters. As with most gacha games, the overwhelming majority of players are playing on their phones and spend no money, and despite the multiple currencies and the pity system, Genshin is one of the best gacha experiences you can have as a free player. You can still get a new 5-star every couple of months and you'll be able to see the entire plot of a patch all in a day if you want. That's part of why sashagee plays to now more than Final Fantasy XIV--sure, some of it is that she still has brain fog and it's much easier to keep track of 8 abilities (4 characters x 2 per character) than the 30+ you need to remember per job in FFXIV. But part of it is that Genshin has several hours of story every six weeks. FFXIV has several hours of story every four months. If you're just in it for the story, you'll be in more often in Genshin.


Genshin's plot is basically one of those iceberg meme templates.

At its most basic, it's the story of a pair of dimension-hopping twins who show up to Teyvat—presumably from Hebrew תיבת (tevat, "ark (of)" as in Tevat Noaḥ, "Noah's Ark"), though I don't think this is confirmed anywhere—in the middle of a massive disaster and decide that this isn't one of the worlds they want to spend time on, so they go to leave. When they do, the Unknown God, visible in the picture above, engages them in battle. She calls herself the “sustainer of heavenly principles” and says “the abrogation of mankind ends now!” and defeats the twins, sealing them both away. The twin you pick as the PC remains sealed for five hundred years and the other one's fate is a mystery, so the PC sets out to find them, reunite, regain their world-traveling powers, and continue their journey. This requires visiting each of the seven nations each themed after one of the elements, meeting with that nation's ruling god, and trying to get some answers about the Traveler's twin and what happened five hundred years ago while solving problems on the way.

Each nation has a guiding principle embodied by its god that may or may not have anything to do with the element. Mondstadt, the German-themed Nation of Anemo that is first one the travelogue, has freedom as its guiding principle, and as part of perpetuating that principle the ruling god Barbatos basically never does anything directly, because divine intervention would necessarily limit his people's ability to live their lives. In contrast, the Japan-themed Nation of Electro Inazuma (稲妻, “bolt of lightning”) has eternity as its principle and its god Baal rules with an iron fist in furtherance of preventing any change from occurring on the island chain, since chain and progression would by definition be antithetical to eternity. Sumeru, the Middle Eastern/South Asian-themed Nation of Dendro with wisdom as its principle, has a kind of magical internet its people can tap into to have questions answered. Liyue, the Chinese-themed Nation of Geo with contracts as its principle, has the magical mint that produces all the money used throughout Teyvat. Exploring the nations and seeing how their principle affects their culture and people is one of the most fun parts of the game for me, especially later when you learn the history of the nations and how there were not only seven gods in the past.

If you're familiar with the Ars Goetia you might recognize the names of the gods above, which is part of where the iceberg comes in. Each god has a true name, which is the name of a goetic demon, and so does the mouthpiece of the Traveler, visible on the right in the very top image—her name is Paimon. And in one of the first limited-time events in the game, back in patch 1.1, the shocking revelation at the end of the quest to chase down falling stars is that "The sky is a lie." This shows up again later on in the main quest, and most recently in 5.1 when:

Quest spoilers

The god of pyro Haborym, when fighting off an Abyssal incursion, blasted a hole through the fake sky, revealing the shattered remnants of a moon behind it.

The moon in Teyvat is always full, though books provide legends that there were once three moons. Various ruins around the world hint to civilizations that pre-date the current seven nations, such as the ruins on the now-frozen Dragonspine Mountain near Mondstadt. The memories of the world find root in the ley lines, which in gameplay a produce the ley line blossoms you can farm for money and character XP materials but show up over and over again in quests giving rise to hauntings (as past events replay in the present) and false memories. Is Teyvat a Gnostic prison? Is the system of nations and gods set up to deny humanity's true potential, with the Visions being acceptable crumbs of power dangled in front of humanity by Celestia? Why does Celestia react with overwhelming force to anyone attempting to learn about the true history of the world?

I don't know the answers to these questions yet because they haven't been revealed, but people sure do spend a lot of time theorizing about them! It's like the Dark Souls fandom in the days after its release, fueling an entire industry of theory videos, reaction videos to the theory videos, crack theory videos, etc. And like Dark Souls, a big chunk of the lore is in item descriptions, in-game texts, elements of visual design, and is never explicitly spelled out. If you're the kind of person who loves getting into The Lore about media you're interested in, Genshin is the game for you.


Unfortunately, I can't really say the same for the character-specific content.

As you do daily quests, you gain "keys" that you can use to unlock character quests. For 5-star characters these are generally extensions of the main story or sometimes explorations of the character's background. Some of them are even necessary to progress the main story--at one point in Inazuma you get told to do Kamisato Ayaka's character story to keep going with the main quest. This isn't usual, though, and the majority of them are optional but interesting. My man Baizhu's quest explains why he's coughing all the time:

Quest spoilers

Because his particular branch of supernatural medical practice involves absorbing diseases from the patient to "cure" then, which means he has like 200 diseases and is on a massive regimen of alchemical elixirs to keep his symptoms under control.

These stories are all totally linear, you run from start to finish and then they're done.

In contrast the 4-star character events are called "hangouts" and that's a good description of how much narrative weight they have--basically zero. They're branching paths, with different dialogue options unlocking new story beats and the ability to go back and replay through from any branching point. Some of them are cute, and some of them are funny, but they're all fluff and I remember almost nothing that happened in any of them. The screenshot above is from the hangout with Ningguang, the richest woman in Liyue who, while she's not dishonest, understands that time is money and if you want to get ahead you need to plan out every moment carefully to maximize your gains--what we might call the "sigma grindset." And then her hangout just happens to be a day where she has nothing at all on her schedule, and she just happens to have a lovely evening gown that she can wear when she and the Traveler go to an event together, and it just happens that the gown is for sale as an alternate costume...

It's pandering. And I know why they do this--this is a gacha game. The foundation of profitability is getting people attached to their waifus and husbandos, especially in Genshin where there's no competition or power creep to keep forcing people to buy the latest units to keep up with the game's progression. So you need to draw people in, and that's why whatever characters are available for rolling on show up in the main story and the limited events, and that's why the hangouts exist. I've talked about the good things in this game and it is fun, don't get me wrong, but it all goes back to the first point I made. The main goal of Genshin Impact is to get you to open your wallet and pull out big fistfuls of cash, and everything in the game is ultimately in service to that goal.


Since part of the point is to keep you playing the game, the better to make you spend a lot of money, Genshin Impact has frequent events. Some of these are just designed to evoke FOMO, with a thin story about someone needing to do some research and so you need to go fight some monsters, or sometimes even no story at all, just a note in the events page that there's a "go fight some dudes" event. Others have a relatively short quest attached to them, usually with whatever character is up for gambling on that patch so you'll get attached to them and be more convinced to spend money. Sometimes, though, the event takes up basically all the story space for the entire patch. One example is the Golden Apple Archipelago event, where you travel to a series of islands out in the ocean that are psychoactively reflecting the inner lives of several characters (conveniently available to roll on), so you can learn vitally important parts of the those character's backstories. And if you weren't playing in the extra six weeks of that event, well, you're out of luck.

They don't do this entirely for FOMO reasons, though that's obviously a big part of it. As I mentioned above, the majority of players of Genshin play in East Asia on their phones, and while I have the game on a computer SSD and don't have to care about loading times or hard drive storage, both of those are major considerations for a phone game. Genshin is almost 100 gb on computers, and while on phones it's not nearly that big, it's still dozens of gigabytes and it only stays so low because these events and their locations and cinematics are deleted after the event ends. That's fair enough, but that means that there are major character developments that new players have no way of learning except by looking them up on YouTube, but unless they already know they exist, they would have no reason to do so. To pick one example, I missed an event because I was taking a break where we learned that Xiangling's companion bear companion Guoba (锅巴, "crispy rice") was the last remnant of the stove god Marchosias (another goetic name). I use Xiangling all the time and while I in one recent event there was a very brief mention that this occurred--a single line mentioning Marchosias--if I hadn't seen sashagee play through the event, I would have had no idea what happened and no idea that anything even had happened. And since hangouts are just fluff nonsense, this is where a big chunk of the character development for 4-star characters occurs. If you're not playing the exact time when the event happened? Sorry, out of luck. People have been asking for a way to download and view old cutscenes in game for years and so far, it hasn't happened.

Now, that said, the story events are genuinely high quality. All fully voice acted, some of of them with custom out-of-engine cutscenes, and occasionally with a giant new area to explore (the better to delete it out of existence when the event ends). There'll often be new minigames, custom dungeons, bits of furniture or decoration for your player housing, and of course, a bunch of primogems to encourage you to do the event, if the story isn't enough of an enticement. As I mentioned above, they aren't just fluff, there are genuinely interesting and important plot beats there. It'd be nice if there were a way for everyone to see them.


So, what do I think overall?

That's hard to say. Genshin is a money-extraction mechanism, and part of the reason it's so fun and easy to play is because it makes money hand over fist. Open world games, especially ones that get big amounts of new content nearly every month and which have tons of voice acting (Genshin is voiced in four languages), cost a huge amount of money to make, but its profitability insulates it from a lot of dark patterns that would otherwise probably be added. Gacha game are notorious for being shut down the instant their profitability ratio stops making sense for the developer to keep running, and if Genshin were anywhere close to that level, I suspect all of those quality of life updates the game recently got would never have happened.

It's free. It has good production values and a fun story that you can dive into as well as deep lore that you can watch hours of videos about if that's your thing. But really, what you need to play Genshin to its fullest is willpower. You need to understand that you will fail the 50/50, that you will lose rolls on characters you really really want, that the game does not provide you enough primogems to get everything, and you have to resist the urge to break out the credit card and swipe. If you can do that, if you can treat it as a free game, then you'll have a lot of fun.

Just don't end up like the Kickstarter person who embezzled money to fund her rolls on her husbandos.