Genshin Impact: My 1.3 year old journey

A great anti-player ‘game’

First 5\*

That’s right, I (kind of) play Genshin. However, it’s about to end as I’m on the verge of quitting.

So what’s this article about?

An unstructured ramble of my story and regrets with this game. Nothing too serious, just a story. I’ll go into how I started playing, first impressions, the ugly, and the death by ice I’m facing right now.

Beginnings

Mutli-sitting at a statue
New players can’t relate

I first discovered this game in November of 2020, when somehow I found a flux of videos about Lisa’s JP climbing noises. Seemed interesting, and I found out there’s a windows port of the game. Sweet, I guess I’ll download it on my windows ssd. As a heads up, I don’t like the game anymore. Over the months I’ve gotten more bitter and started to care less about the game because of how it treats its players.

But I’ll be honest, the way the game started out and my real world situation from back then made this a magical experience that I’m not going to forget for a while.

When I first played the game, it was right after fall exam season of my third year in university (~late December). I’m in engineering and the third year curriculum was infamous for being notoriously hard and challenging, as well as mandating students to take electives to make themselves suffer even further. So after going through 5 nightmare exams that essentially killed my already trash grades, eyes, body, and mind both physically and emotionally, I was exhausted going into winter break. I wanted some comfort and escape, so I booted up Genshin for the first time. It was nighttime. That first moment when the game is downloading files, the loading screen is the nighttime version, the calming song plays… that moment was honestly somewhat magical. I haven’t played a game for years that left that deep of a first impression. After some cutscenes, tutorials, and some progress I was supposed to head to Mondstadt. Instead I did the typical act of wandering the open world, trying to unveil the map and explore.

My first impressions had some skepticism because the game was seemingly too good. The game is anime style (personal preference), has superb voice acting, is open world, has great music, is completely free to download (I didn’t know it was gacha at the time), and overall felt like an exquisitely polished product. Simultaneously, the presence of the kernel-level anticheat scared me and how the game was F2P. I’ve heard of the developer (still calling them MHY, Hoyoverse is spooky and too Meta-like) and knew they were based in China but that wasn’t a big deal to me, because I’ve always disliked saying ‘China bad’ and blindly assume that everything coming out of the country is against ’the West’ (I don’t like politics). In short, I thought the game was suspicious because it was too good and thought there was a catch.

Getting into the game

Dragonspine view

Over the next few months I started getting more invested into the game. I started increasing my AR, go chest hunting, doing dailies, participating in events, and all other things a typical F2P player would. I realized the gacha nature pretty soon but was okay with it because 1: I was still in the early phase where gacha currency was easy to get, and 2: I’ve had some experience with gachas before. Months flew by; Dragonspine came out, I had fun moments in coop, started grinding artifacts, got my first 5* carry character and weapon, learn how unbalanced melt/vape is, and started clearing abyss floors. My rate of progress was levelling out, chests were getting rarer, achievements harder, AR55 reached, and I started buying welkins because by this point I was playing the game religiously. This span of nearly 3 months was the golden age for me and this game. This game was quite literally my coping mechanism for second semester of third year, which somehow was even worse than the first. The game helped me relax when I can, burn my eyes further for a bit of comfort, and to slack off during a lecture or two. I thought the game was a masterpiece of kind, an innovative gacha game that marked the beginning of new trends and ways for companies to follow. The game had so many details in it that I would be staring at the screen every so often; characters had different walking animations when walking uphill or downhill, their feet would always be flush with whatever surface stood on, the beauty of motion-captured animations, the first fight with the fat turtle, and other minute details that you need to stay still to see.

Decline

Mona dashing
Pinnacle character design

Eventually the honeymoon phase wore off as expected. The magic of exploring the land was gone, the music got repetitive, the dailies even more so, I had all the characters I needed and wanted, events got tedious, the devs made decisions that irritated me, I started to see the faults and cracks of exposed greed through every aspect of the game, the development pacing was getting too slow for more advanced players like myself, the freemogems got rarer, and the AR55 stagnation moment hit. It was a weird, gradual withering transition from “let’s continue exploring Liyue, Chasm should be around the corner” to “alright, time to burn 160 resin again and maybe Inazuma will be out in 2 years” and becoming more pessimistic. Eventually the flow of welkins stopped and now I’m an impure F2P. At this point I was playing just to see Inazuma be released and rely on it as a last hope.

A New Hope?

By mid summer, I was consooming leaks, seeing the enlargened map, new characters, and becoming excited. I thought that the honeymoon phase could reemerge for at least a split second, and this time I would pace myself to enjoy it to the utmost that I can. And in a sense, it did. I remember the night of explore sushi land for the first time, hearing new music, seeing new NPC models and textures, and the map being expanded with a great ocean. The new exploration mechanics, quests, and islands kept me interested, not to mention the cursed ER domain that I was planning to farm for a while. This new honeymoon period lasted for about a month, which turned into an avalanche of developer screw-ups and growing negativity soon after.

Freefall into bitterness

Reimagining an old shot
If you chose male traveller, you are wrong

Soon after the Raiden banner, things turned sour. The devs received a lot of ‘criticism’ for anniversary preparations and had the most hilarious damage control attempt I’ve ever seen, the negativity I was facing with the game continued to grow, and the honeymoon phase faded out again, leaving behind all the problems I faced before the Inazuma launch. Artifacts are a rigged system that you should never get invested into, everything is drip fed to make you come back each day, dailies are horrifically boring and have achievements locked behind RNG, and the whole game reeks of slimey money-grabbing schemes (weapon banner, anyone?). By mid September, I paused playing and uninstalled the game. I spent about a month on break, then reinstalled and briefly played again for a week or two. I can’t even remember if I participated in events by this point, that’s how much the apathy towards this game grew. After the reinstall, I stopped playing again for about 2 months, then started logging back in again. This started about a month ago, since leak pics of an upcoming coomer targeted character caught my attention. Nowadays, I do dailies and log out. I haven’t spent a single resin since I started playing again, nor do I ever plan to. Ultimately, my time with this game is nearing its end and I’m not even sure if I’ll roll for the upcoming coomer bait now. I never did have much luck with finding a gacha game that stayed interesting for long, but this game was truly a gem among the ones I’ve played.

Reflection and other thoughts

This game did all kinds of positive things to me; it helped me get back into gaming, provided a magical experience during the honeymoon phase, showed the future of what gacha games will look like (even though I despise gacha nowadays), and simply let me have fun during hard times when university would drive me to the brink or past insanity. I’m not someone who can follow gacha-like live service games for long, I prefer single player games that have a defined ending, even if I end up paying more for them than I ever will for Genshin. But still, I can reflect that this game did have amazing positives while they lasted. I won’t thank MHY for developing this title since I think they’re a scummy business, but the game itself has some merit.

The game itself is a masterpiece with some of the best production value and quality I’ve ever seen. At the same time, it is operated by the worst management I’ve ever seen that unfortunately has a billion dollars in each ear as earplugs. They know that this game is a money printer and won’t care about you for a very long time. Not to mention the fanbase that seems to accept being spat on and thrown into mud, and even whiteknighting the company throughout their masochism. I would be very wary if you’re a new player just getting started. Be careful of the broader audience’s mindset, especially the subreddit, but luckily whatever comes out of that cesspool is invalid junk. Don’t take this game seriously, always use it as a 10 minutes-per-day fallback when you have absolutely nothing left (but by the time you reach this point I’d advise just stop playing altogether). One series I’ll shill for is the Atelier series, which is my preferred go-to JRPG series these days. I have a review of the most recent title, check it out.

Bonus: My achievements

Since my account is virtually dead (but I’m not sure if I will sell it), here’s a list of personally significant achievements in the game.

Average artifact grind