Serra

Since 2014, I have had a consistent fall routine: pick up the latest Destiny release and then throw my sleep schedule and anything resembling a good habit out the window to binge for a week or two to prepare for the new raid experience. So you can imagine my dismay when, likely because of the ongoing global pandemic, the upcoming Destiny 2 expansion was delayed by nearly two months. What was I to do? Not spend the fall binging? Maintain my good habits and not grind? Act like a reasonable and responsible adult?? Thankfully, I was saved from that dilemma when another game emerged to fill that hole and whet my appetite for grinding, Genshin Impact. But is this game worth grinding?

Genshin Impact is a free-to-play third person role play game. While visiting different worlds with their sibling, the player-controlled Traveler encounters a being referred to as the Unknown God who abducts their twin and leaves the Traveler stranded. The Traveler awakes in the unfamiliar world of Teyvat, meets the strange traveling companion/partner in crime/emergency food Paimon, and sets out to find this Unknown God and reunite with their missing sibling. But Teyvat is a world with its own problems, and after arriving in the nearby city of Mondstadt, the Traveler is quickly dragged into a conflict that looks to involve the world’s various nations, seven gods, powerful monsters and entities, and numerous other foes shrouded in mystery. Like a lot of massively multiplayer online role playing games and free-to-play role playing games, the story is a work in progress that will be expanded upon and continue in subsequent updates. As such, it’s hard to really talk about and evaluate the game’s narrative because it is currently incomplete.

At first glance, Genshin Impact looks like an amalgamation of a number of different games, most prominently, Breath of the Wild. On the visual side, the world, character designs, and art style resemble Breath of the Wild with an anime-influenced spin. In terms of gameplay, the stamina bar and climb anywhere exploration, the gliding mechanics, and even the game’s puzzles and self-contained dungeons all bear more than a passing resemblance to Breath of the Wild. In fact, these similarities led to one of the more notorious (and stupid) stories prior to the game’s release. There’s no way you can look at Genshin Impact and not draw comparisons to Breath of the Wild, but the developers at miHoYo have crafted their own world and experience. For instance, while Breath of the Wild was set in a world that had suffered a calamity, Teyvat is more vibrant and alive. Towns are larger, visually unique, and are filled with numerous characters to interact and are more bustling. At the same time, most of the towns and the vast majority of characters occupying these towns feel like they don’t matter. I don’t think it is a stretch to say that over ninety percent of the people and places in the towns are completely pointless. Genshin Impact is a brand new game, and over time, this might change as the developers come up with quests to make more of these characters relevant. But as of now, most of the towns just feel like filler.

Another major departure from Breath of the Wild is Genshin Impact’s approach to exploration and narrative. I love Breath of the Wild, but I can look at the game objectively and see that Nintendo wanted players to explore Hyrule and craft their own story, to the point that the game’s narrative served as support to the gameplay experience and suffered as a result. Genshin Impact provides a more structured and narrative driven experience, so players are more clearly ushered from one objective to the next. Although players often have the freedom to choose how to approach those objectives, this narrative structure comes with greater restrictions on exploration. In a lot of open-world games, exploration is not about exploring, but just ticking off objectives and map markers. And while Genshin Impact is not as bad as the worst offenders, the game’s emphasis and approach to grinding brings it pretty close. The more I progressed through the game, the more I found myself only exploring Teyvat because I needed to grind to even progress the story.

While there’s no denying miHoYo looked to Breath of the Wild for inspiration in terms of visuals and exploration, Genshin Impact’s core combat is a drastically different experience. Every character can use one of five weapon types, swords, spears, heavy weapons, bows, or magical tomes (coincidentally all weapon archetypes resembling those featured in Breath of the Wild). Each character also has access to two abilities based on an affinity with one of the seven elements, wind, fire, water, earth, ice, lightning, and nature, with the Traveler able to switch between elements (currently only wind and earth, but the others will presumably follow eventually). In most situations, up to four characters can be used and players can freely switch between characters in and out of combat. The heart of the game’s combat revolves around switching between characters and chaining abilities together to unleash damaging combos. For instance, I often combine my archer Fischl’s electric ability with a character named Xiangling’s fire ability to trigger the overload status effect which causes an area of effect explosion, and then use the Traveler’s wind ability to draw in enemies and trigger the swirl status to spread the effect. Figuring out the best way to synergize your character’s abilities to take down tough opponents is where the game shines, while also unfortunately putting a spotlight on the game’s gacha mechanics.

As I said earlier, Genshin Impact is a free-to-play game and if you have ever played a free-to-play mobile game with a gacha system, you will recognize a lot of mechanisms in place that are used to keep players sinking time and money into the game. The game features incentives to pressure players to log in every day, temporary events, a myriad of currencies, more than half of which seemingly serve the gacha system, and its own iteration of the stamina systems prevalent in so many free-to-play games. As I have been following stories about Genshin Impact while working on this review, one thing I’ve noticed is that this is the first time a lot of players have been exposed to a game with these free-to-play mechanics, and especially a gacha game. While there are some exceptions, gacha games have largely been confined to mobile games. If you’re one of those players who has never experienced a gacha game, it is important to realize what type of game this is and to be aware that many of the game’s powerful characters and weapons are locked behind chance. Yes, Genshin Impact gives you a handful of characters with different elements and a steady flow of premium currencies so you can definitely play the game without spending a penny, but it would be disingenuous to act like the game is not designed to encourage players to spend money.

While there are issues and criticisms with a lot of the free-to-play mechanics, those issues pale in comparison to the ones that are the result of the game’s grind. Genshin Impact requires a lot of grinding. Progression of the game’s story is locked behind an account level called the adventure rank which is raised by doing things like completing quests and opening chests in the world. Every character has his or her own level which is primarily raised by using experience books. There are also weapons to grind, materials to collect, and currencies to farm. And that’s not even discussing all the grinding associated with the game’s gacha. Look, I played Final Fantasy XI and I still play Granblue Fantasy. I am no stranger to games that require grinding, so when I say that I have problems with Genshin Impact’s grind, I like to believe that I have given the game more than a fair amount of leeway. One of my big problems with Genshin Impact is that the grind takes a lot of the fun out of this game. Exploration loses a lot of its appeal when I’m not exploring for fun, but to find every single chest so I can get twenty to thirty experience closer to the five thousand or more I need to rank up. In the same vein, combat, in my opinion the best part of Genshin Impact's gameplay, feels like a waste of time when enemies reward experience in the low teens and my characters need tens of thousands of experience to level up. I’ve gotten to the point that when I see monsters or enemies in the world, I don’t fight them if they’re not guarding a chest or part of a quest because it feels pointless. I have had conversations with others playing the game that you eventually feel compelled to fight monsters to farm materials, but I’m not sure introducing more grinding is going to alleviate my issues with the game’s grind.

Genshin Impact has been out for just over a month now, and its initial impression reminds me a lot of Granblue Fantasy in its early days. I’ve been playing Granblue Fantasy for years now and have seen the steps taken by Cygames to improve the player experience and not hamper the game’s narrative. It is definitely possible that miHoYo will make similar changes to improve the overall experience. Then again, the game reportedly made nearly two-hundred-fifty million dollars in its first month, so it is hard to imagine any drastic changes at this time. There have been more than a few cautionary pieces written from journalists and gamers worried about the snowball that Genshin Impact might start in the gaming industry. It's definitely possible that we're about to see an influx of free-to-play mechanics permeate gaming, but honestly, it feels way too early to have those concerns. I've definitely encountered my share of technical hiccups, but from the music, to the voice acting, to the core gameplay, Genshin Impact feels like a solid game. I have no doubt that it would not be doing so well if it did not feel as such.

Genshin Impact has promise, but personally, I think they took the free-to-play approach and steered hard too hard into that. The story seems interesting, albeit more than a little cliché at times, but then there are so many hurdles for players to overcome to progress through the available story. The core combat gameplay experience is enjoyable and the world has the potential for exploration, but the game’s approach to grinding undermines those aspects. I know there are some people who have loved Genshin Impact and have poured a ton of time (and money) into it. For those players, more power to you. I think Genshin Impact wants to be the game that occupies the most of your gaming time. For me though, Genshin Impact has been a nice distraction, but it has not done enough to be more than a game I play from time to time when there aren’t other games demanding my attention. Maybe it will become something that I want to invest more time into down the road, but as of now, I’m not stressing if I do not log in everyday, if I’m not using my stamina optimally, if I miss events, or if I fail to draw a featured character. And given what I've seen from the game so far, that's perfectly fine with me.

This world is full of unsolved mysteries.

All images owned by miHoYo.