Choose My Adventure: Genshin Impact is slowly working its charms on me

Perhaps this is just time away from the game or the full mental and literal reset talking, but I have to say that right now, Genshin Impact is beginning to hit the right notes for me so far, and I’m not really sure why.

I haven’t had a whole lot of time to really unpack my feelings and I usually try and let this sort of initial wave pass over me to be sure this isn’t just a honeymoon phase, but the hours I was able to spend inside of the world of Teyvat were pretty much the right kind of soothing for me.

Perhaps it also helped that I’ve been ill and having something generally low-impact was beneficial to me, but I’d like to think that this game is landing for me even outside of the influence of DayQuil.

Again, I think the whole gameplay vibe of GI is arriving to me just right. There’s a little bit of guidance, a little bit of sandbox exploration, and a just a lovely map to roam around in right now. I appreciate that Monstadt and its surrounding environs are kind of vanilla compared to some of the later zones, but right now I don’t particularly mind.

I’ve also got to give it up for the combat, which I’m reminded is managing to toe a line between active and casual. It really is kind of impressive how fights in GI manage to feel close enough to an action combat MMO model without going overboard in terms of actions per minute.

Of course, that is being helped by my slowly remembering to use the right elemental counters, but then I have played this before and was similarly trained like a good Pavlov’s dog when I was playing Tower of Fantasy. Still, it was nice to know that the sauce was still there and tasted very good.

I guess the biggest demerit I can hit this game with is its storyline. I do recall things kind of being a bit uninteresting and sluggish in the opening portions, and I’m not sure that there’s any new reason for me to care this second time around. I’m at least starting to grow accustomed to my four-person team of bog standard Favonius knights. I’m also letting the voice actors do their thing and deliver their lines for the most part, so I suppose that’s something.

Except Paimon. She can get into the bin.

Right now I’m sort of being reminded how much Adventure Rank advancement kind of sucks a little bit. I was sort of hoping that the leveling curve had been smoothed out a little bit, but that doesn’t appear to be the case for the most part. I won’t get my next major quest until rank 10 and that just feels like it’s ages away. Then again, that kind of thinking sort of feels anathema to the way GI wants you to experience it. It really is about sort of… well, choosing your own little adventure in-between those major narrative beats. I’ll admit that having the guide is nice to sort of keep me on track, though. Perhaps that was a feature that I never used before, but I’m making a lot of use of it now to sort of give me a bit of direction.

Even so, there is that cynical side of me that feels like a lot of what there is to do in Teyvat is just the usual open world padding. Find chests, clear out enemy camps, solve extremely basic puzzles, clear the fog of war… none of this is really groundbreaking stuff even if it is coated in an anime paint.

But then, there is a bit of comfort in being able to just sort of dip in and out and roam. As much as Genshin Impact’s world can kind of feel like a carnival midway that’s trying to show off all of the things happening in it, there are times where it is just good to let my feet aim me in a rough direction.

It all feels like I’m scratching a bit of a surface, though I also worry that I won’t like what I see once the veneer flakes away. The almost sarcastic amounts of materials, currencies, and other tchotchkes being thrown into my face for every little mundane thing I do continues to annoy instead of encourage. Like the game is desperately trying to fire multitudinous needles of dopamine into my system when my brain is making this stuff entirely without the help of the UI.

Still, I guess I should approach this with the right mindset. I shouldn’t really try to plow through this game at breakneck speed. I should just let the ride slide on and the world unfurl before me in due time. Take up the guides when I need to. Feed my wanderlust when I want to. Don’t worry about the level numbers and the bars. Besides, it’s not like I have a bunch of people to play with. The world is quite literally my oyster.

It would be nice to share this with others, though.

Still, one problem at a time, right? At the moment I’m sort of in that limbo of XP earnings between my last story piece and the next one, so it’s kind of up to me to sort out what to do next. And when I say “me,” I of course really mean “you poll-taking folks.”

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This time around I do have a second poll in mind, and it might be a weird question. As fans know, this game loves to toss as many gacha characters as it can at you in the hopes of getting people to open up their wallets and spin that wheel. I absolutely refuse to buy a single pull, but I also have gotten enough crap to at least try one or two rolls. At the same time, there’s something to be said for not engaging in any of the banners that this game has, and doing so isn’t really challenging for me in any case.

So I leave it to you: to gacha or not to gacha?

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As always, polls will close at 1:00 p.m. EST on Friday, January 26th. Until then, I might just peek back in a couple of idle times to see where my whims take me; as I said, that feels like the “correct” way to play this game.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.