Play and Discuss: Genshin Impact
Today, we had 2 minutes to present a game we played during the 2 day long gaming festival. Here on the Tumblr, I’ve taken the liberty to break that 2 min limit in order to go more in-depth however.
I and Malin @designingaction chose Genshin Impact, since providing the accounts of both a new and veteran player would give a nuanced perspective. The game is free-to-play and is available on Windows, iOS/Android and PS4/PS5, but like many other video games, it’s unfortunately not on Mac.
Trailer from when the game was first announced. Voiceovers in Mandarin Chinese.
Find a couple of images that are the most representative of your play experience
Explain the game in one or two sentences
Genshin Impact is an action RPG set in an «open-world environment with an action-based battle system using elemental magic and character-switching.» The protagonist travel the world to reunite with their lost sibling, getting involved with the various affairs of Teyvat’s many distinct nations. The game is free-to-play where the player can obtain characters and weapons through a gacha* system, either through microtransactions or for free by completing in-game activities such as events, quests, minigames and overall exploration of the open-world. New content such as characters, weapons, regions, and events is added every two weeks. It’s primarily a single-player experience, but co-op unlocks around LV16 and is useful for dealing with tough monsters if your party/team of characters is on the weaker side.
Gachapon is Japanese for a capsule toy vending machine, where you spend money to receive a random reward. It can be compared to collecting Pokemon cards, where you want to get the golden card, but you cannot know what cards you’ve gotten until you’ve purchased and opened the package. In laconic terms, it’s a style of lottery machine where you receive collectibles. Here’s a demo of how gachapon works on tiktok.
Include how the games feels like and if something was inspiring to you
After a couple of minutes spent setting up an account, the game gets straight to the point explaining the protagonist’s overall motivation in the narrative, and goes through the game’s controls with an interactive tutorial sequence. For beginners, all these buttons may feel a bit overwhelming, but like any other video game, it’s something you get used to after a while as it becomes a part of the player’s muscle memory, and can be compared to driving a car. The opening arc’s fast pace of introducing new game mechanics is something I appreciate in retrospect, as it wastes no time letting the player begin playing around in a satisfying manner and in a generous safe beginner environment without making the game experience unplayable.
As a veteran player, I’m unable to fully be aware of the game’s unique details unless I explicitly compare it to another game. Instead, it’d be more insightful to have a look at my teammate’s first impression, since she has a fresher set of eyes/senses as a beginner. I think she had not heard of the game before this assignment, which makes sense as the game is does not have as much popularity in Europe as in America or China.
My stepdad likes to laconically describe the game as a «poorman’s Zelda» which is not a terrible description: Like Zelda, Genshin follows the style trend of Ghibli-inspired aesthetic, and borrows many open-world game mechanics from Breath of the Wild. Although MiHoYo also openly borrows from other Japanese titles like Final Fantasy, Bayonetta, Nier Automata etc. For their cutscenes, MiHoYo uses many various sakuga* techniques; For instance, the opening cutscene uses the itano circus and impact frames (Canipa Effect 2020). In short, Genshin is quite a loving homage to the anime subculture from Chinese developers and donghua animators, as evident in the company’s motto: «Tech otakus* save the world.» To put it in the words of Picasso: «Good artists borrow, great artists steal.» Here’s a gif from Zelda BOTW for comparison:
Personally, I find Genshin more enjoyable than Zelda, since the problem with BOTW was that at some point I run out of things to explore, and the open world ends up feeling empty. Although, there’s a discussion around whether or not games should have a definitive ending from an addiciton standpoint, I support the subscription model where you do not run out of content. For me, it’s a matter of the same convenience that Netflix provides, which places the power of choice and self-control in the user’s hand. This allows me as a player control whether I want to continue or not, instead of forcing me to stop. And if I do wish to stop, I can instead just watch a rundown of the cutscenes on Youtube, watch someone else play through the game as a backseat gamer, or simply break pattern and leave the game.
In the game’s settings you can also switch between many different languages, though I would of course recommend playing the game with English dub because Zhongli’s English voice actor sounds amazing, although there are some Chinese expressions or rhymes which does not translate as well such as Hutao’s hilichurl song.
The game is understandably pretty large in terms of MB, partly due to how big the still expanding open world is, but give it a shot if you can 🌸.
Sakuga is an animation sequence in an anime that is of noticeably or drastically higher quality, usually for dramatic effect. This phenomena is common for productions on a tight budget such as animated tv series, which neither has the time nor money to produce cinema-quality animation for twenty episodes straight. I prefer discovering sakuga by watching compilation montages on social media, such as this one on special effects on Youtube, although professional animators would use SakugaBooru, which is a collaborative wiki used to identify and credit the individual artists/animators involved in a production.
Otaku is Japanese for geek or nerd, and is what anime enthusiasts may call themselves. Alternatively, foreigners may also use the word weeb or weeaboo to depreciatively refer to themselves as a member of the anime community/subculture. In the west, it can be defined as a term for foreigners who’s enthusiastic about Japanese pop culture.
Finish with one way of changing, improving or creating a variation of that game
Overall, I think the game is a lot of fun and great in many aspects, so it was difficult to find something we could improve or change about the game. We agreed that we could make the game more ethical, by removing the several different intermediary currencies in the optional payment transaction, which creates a cognitive distance and thus makes it harder to clearly see how much worth you’ve got for the money you’ve spent. At the moment the game has three different intermediary steps before you can gacha pull for a character or weapon: Genesis Crystal → Primogems → Wishes.
If we wanted to create a variation of the game, we could adjust the elemental resonances either by chaning the effects or adding other elements. We could also switch up what kind of weapons the characters uses, or remove how each character is limited to one weapon-type, allowing the player to keep using their favourite character just with for instance a sword instead of a bow. This would also create a larger pool of possible combinations and make the game even more customizable, which adds to a robust game design. The downside is that this would increase the costs since each character needs a different set of animations with each weapon type, which could lead to the animations being less appealing, and detract from the characterization of each character.
