Genshin Impact has been out for a few years now and though I have little interest in it, its cultural influence has been undeniable. It’s crazy how the AI chat sites are full of characters made by kids from this game. It’s also fascinating that this a China made game but seems to be trying very hard to come across as Japanese instead. They’ve calibrated its appeal very precisely to sell it to the worldwide market. Since it’s famously free to play, I thought I’d at least try it out briefly just in order to be able to understand what it’s all about.

For the longest time, I thought that this was an MMO. Instead it’s an action RPG and though it’s an online only game, the multiplayer elements are optional. Indeed you can’t even activate the coop mode until you reach a certain level. The controls are deceptively simple, melee attacks have innate autotargeting. There are no dodges, other than normal character movement, or blocking. There are two special attacks and that’s it. This game’s great innovation is that while you only ever control a single character at a time, you can more or less freely switch between any character in your party as you wish. This means you can switch to a more tanky character to absorb hits or a ranged character to attack a flying enemy or something. Elemental effects combine and interact with one another in interesting ways, so you’d want to exploit weaknesses by switching between characters to use the right elemental combinations. This means there’s a surprising amount of depth underneath the simple facade.

The story starts out being kind of generic with the player with one=half of a pair of siblings who arrive on the world of Yeyvat. The only twin is quickly lost so your motivation is to find your missing sibling with the help of a local guide Paimon. Meanwhile the closest city of Mondstadt is having trouble with a dragon named Stormterror so there is an immediate crisis you can help with. One thing that rather surprised me is that there doesn’t seem to a ton of side quests. More do unlock over time but there aren’t NPCs everywhere offering things to do like in the MMOs. I do like that the game seems to reward unguided exploration of the world. You can kill stuff out in the wild to unlock treasure chests, scavenge for resources and it’s great that so many objects can be interacted with. You can chop trees, elemental effects can affect the world and so on. It makes the world feel alive and full of fun things to discover.

The gacha, or monetization system, is fascinating too. Many other games effectively sell powerful items for real money. That’s in here too of course but Genshin Impact also sells something better: new characters to fill out your roster. You get a slate of characters just from playing through the main questline but to get the really cool and powerful ones, you need to go through the gacha system. I can immediately see the appeal of collecting waifus, or husbandos as the case may be, each meticulously crafted to look and sound unique with personalities and backstories of their own. It’s no wonder this game made so much money. The game gives you a drip feed of in-game money over time so the claim is that you never need to spend any real money if you’re patient enough.

Despite my initial doubts and my prejudice, I suppose, about this being mostly played by kids, this did prove to be a solid game. Its difficulty level seems to be tuned to low side to make it more accessible but fighting bosses can be quite a grind if you don’t know how to exploit elemental combos. Otherwise it’s a perfectly satisfying action game and I can see how the world can be fun to get to know. It’s too much of a timesink for me to get into seriously and the anime style irritates, so I’m going to limit myself to this brief trial. I’m content with being able to understand what people mean when they talk about this game and I will admit to being pleasantly surprised how good it is.