Genshin Impact

2026-03-18
It's my theory that Mihoyo created Covid to produce a vulnerable population ripe for conversion into gacha-gooners with their crack-rock BOTW clone. Hunter Biden describing the dangers of crack cocaine could just as easily apply to Genshin with its ritualized dailies and habit-forming pulls. But if you're like me and were able to resist the call of the crack pipe—only spending $15 across three months in 2020—what you got was a terrifically fun exploration game with a weirdly engaging action RPG combat system.

The problem is Mihoyo does want you to get addicted. You start out cruising, climbing, and flying across this gorgeous open world where every new vista brings landmarks, puzzles, treasure chests, items, and characters. It's a cornucopia of fun delivering unfettered dopamine directly into your ratbrain.

But after 30 hours everything slows to a crawl. The Adventure Rank grind—once a gentle nudge to go find more fun—starts feeling like squeezing blood from a stone. You need gargantuan amounts of exp and now you're just repeating the same shit over and over. Your World Rank has climbed high enough that you have to run a team of buffed-up heroes, which means less experimentation and more time grinding resources and dumping them into your existing roster just to stay at par.

This is when you feel the call of the crack pipe. A new five-star character could make this all so much easier. One big spin! This is taking forever—why not spend a little money on experience? It's fitting that the actual voice attached to these demonic whisperings is called Paimon. Only instead of a demon king responsible for numerous atrocities in a certain Ari Aster film, it's an annoying, high-pitched, blathering nitwit telling you to buy more Primogems or whatever. And staring at the odds to get the sexy ginger twink Diluc—realizing I'd have to spend real money—I snapped to consciousness like I was coming off a bender in a crack den wondering where my pants were. That's when I realized I'd had all the fun I was ever going to have with Genshin Impact.

Which is to say: just like crack, Genshin Impact is fun, even euphoric when you land one of those Big Pulls. But it's a slippery slope to getting fleeced and turned into yet another whale on some bean counter's spreadsheet at Mihoyo HQ. C'mon—let's find your pants and get out of here. I think there's a Dunks around the corner.

???
I initially ignored this game because a "Breath of the Wild ripoff with gacha elements" sounded terrible to me. How wrong I was! It's incredibly fun. They did a wonderful job capturing the fun of exploring in BOTW. And then paired it with super fun combat-- some of the most fun combat I've seen in a while. Add to that a addicting grind and progression to get more and more powerful with tons of items and things to farm to gear up your characters and you have a very compelling gameplay loop.

The story was ok...? From what I could tell. The story contains the first glaring problem with the game: the fact that story quests are gated behind a required "Adventure Rank" (a level that increases via XP you gain from doing pretty much anything in the game). And it's not like they do it after you finish the main story or like every chapter. No, add a gate that you have to grind past for every single main story quest. Which is honestly fine the first 10 times or whatever because I was honestly enjoying exploring the world, finding all the landmarks, finding treasure chests hidden about, completing puzzles, that it was fine that they wanted me to do that. But after a certain point you've basically explored everything and don't want to do that anymore. And they continue to gate it.

In addition raising Adventure Rank becomes harder and harder as you go along because they have a World Level mechanic where as you progress, the enemies get harder. Now there's a progression for each character where you can farm mats to level up your people but it quickly becomes an intense grind. And your reward for grinding is your character becoming stronger...and then weaker against all the main challenges you need to grind on because the enemies get leveled up by the World Level.

It's also a gacha game. I ended up only spending $15 dollars on the game. $5 for a 1 month thing that once a day gives you 90 Primogem, a currency gained as you play and do stuff, that you can trade in for "wishes" (at 160 Primogem) which are a roll of the die to get a new character (rarely) or an ok weapon (extremely likely). I spent another $10 which augmented rewards for another mechanic where you accrue experience and get stuff to help level and/or Primogem, etc.

I actually was ok with the drop rates. It meant when you got a new character which only occurred for me, even after like 100 wishes, 4 or 5 times, it's really, really excited and a chance to try them out. But then you realize you have to spend a huge amount of your accrued resources to level them up or they're trash because you're at World Rank 3.

And that's the thing. The game is so, so fun, like really one of the most fun things I've played in the entirety of 2020, and I've played a lot of games this year. But then they throw these barriers up in front of you for quests, or keep ratcheting up the difficulty, and making the grind more lengthy and tedious. In the end, I think I only made it up to Chatper 2 maybe in the story? And I'm done. I just don't have the time.

I'm considering the game Completed because I believe I've seen everything it has to offer. I made a very competitive team. Got to World Rank 3. Got a 5 star character drop (not Diluc like I really want :/ ). And explored the entire world that's unlocked currently. If they make it more player-friendly I'd consider coming back. But as it stands I had a ton of fun with it.

Giving the game an 8. If it was a bit more player-friendly I honestly think it'd be an easy 9.