I've been wanting to play Genshin Impact for a couple of years now. It had been really hyped upon release. And it caught my eye. I mean, it's a free to play anime JRPG that pretty obviously apes its looks from Breath Of The Wild. What's not to be intrigued by? But the problem was I had no good way to play it. Although I was a big PS3 guy, I didn't upgrade to a PS4. And Genshin Impact wasn't on Xbox. I did actually try to play the mobile port, but it required a beefy tablet and didn't have controller support. So now that I've got a PS5, naturally I wanted to finally give this game a go.
Recently I had tried to play Persona 5 - another game that had been on my To Play list for years. And as much as I was impressed by it, I also lamented the fact that as a dad to a young child, I'm often too tired to get involved in heavily story-based games lately. The first time I fired up Genshin Impact it was a very different situation. This is not a story heavy game. I mean, there's some story. But this is a JRPG that is mostly about exploring and going on to the next quest. It looks and feels a lot like Breath Of The Wild, except the action feels faster. All that I can tell you is that I started the game on a Sunday night around 8:30 and before I knew it, it was 11:30. Genshin Impact is that immediately gratifying. You're running around, killing stuff, heading toward the next waypoint, finding loot, leveling up. It's just immensely gratifying. It has the same constant stream of dopamine hits that you might find in something like Diablo. But instead, it's an action JRPG that honestly feels like it could have been a full fledged $60 retail game instead of a free-to-play thing. Of course, being a free-to-play game means that there's some level of microtransactions and gacha and all that. And people are going to hate that. I get it. But when it comes to games like this, my metric is always really simple. I just ask myself, can I play this game and enjoy it without spending a cent? And the thing is this, I stick to that goal. I mean I genuinely play these kinds of games without spending money and the fun only lasts until I hit some kind of pay-wall. The beauty of Genshin Impact is that I just keep going and never find the need to open my wallet. Which is perfect, because I won't. And I'm almost baffled how this game exists. Obviously there are enough players out there spending serious money to keep the constant updates coming. But I don't know why they need to. This game is incredible for free. The pacing is what makes this all work. There's a story full of main quests that keeps you going. And when you inevitably hit a spot where you need to level up to open up the next story quest, there's a huge backlog of side-quests and exploring to be done, all of which earns you more XP to keep going. On top of that, it feels like there's near constant upgrades going on. I'm almost always opening a menu to upgrade character stats, weapons and skills. There's an insane amount of playable characters to meet and recruit. I have to be straight up here, I think I legit love this game. It hooks me the same way that something like Slay The Spire does. While they are completely different games in execution, they have the same ability to make me think about them throughout the day. Genshin Impact is one of those rare games that has me legitimately looking forward to just sitting down and diving back in, even if I'm not quite sure what my goal is for the night. Should I continue the story? Should I do some side quests? Should I grind for XP? Should I just pick a direction and open up the gigantic map? Every option is viable and I love the wide open possibilities of Genshin Impact. And then sort of sums up the appeal of this game for me. I'm constantly digging deeper. I'm constantly finding something else I want to google. I'm thinking about what I want to accomplish the next time I play the game even when I'm not playing it. There's also constant tweaks to be made. Which is to say that there's a steady stream of new characters, new skills, new weapons and so on. Given that you don't play as a single character, but rather a party of four that you can swap between on the fly, there's always the allure of mixing up the party composition to best suit your playstyle. Lately I've been rolling with Lumine as my main up-and-close fighter and augmenting with an archer for long range attacks and two different spellcasters depending on the situation. But there are so many characters available to unlock that there's always some new loadout to mess around with. I'm not going to say that Genshin Impact is better than Breath Of The Wild. Obviously that's subjective. But I can say that I feel way more sucked into this game than the other. Maybe it's the quests or the characters or the fact that the world just feels more alive. I can't really say. But I mean, there's no breakable weapons, and Genshin Impact even managed to make a cooking-based quest feel fresh and fun. So who knows. What I do know is that I really enjoy the flow of the game loop. There's so many quests to head off into. Then there's upgrades to be done. At times, it feels like basically anything you do can offer up XP, which makes you feel like anything you want to do is actually progress. Your characters level up, their weapons level up, and then there's the main adventure rank, which effects which quests are available, the rank of enemies within the world, and the rarity of items you might find. It's all just so compelling. Hitting level 15 felt like an important milestone early on, as it opened up way more upgrade abilities for characters and weapons. After hours in the double-digits, I still feel like I'm very early in this game. And yet, I'm loving every moment. Genshin Impact is a top-tier time waster game. The sort of game I can see myself leaving installed for months or years and revisiting often between other games. In that regard, it sort of belongs in the same tier as some of my most beloved recent-ish games like Slay The Spire or Tetris Effect.
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