The Shrine

Don't really know much beyond seeing a random trailer, but I've noticed now I'm seeing posts about how the Chinese have surpassed Japanese and American pigs because of Genshin Impact. I mean, it'd be nice if the Chinese developers stop making fake Japanese games if they're not forever in some kind of low self-esteem for seemingly pointless reasons. I wouldn't even consider Japanese a global powerhouse since similar to the Chinese market they make a lot of money due to a combination of low competition and unique tastes but the games are definitely qualitatively inferior.

Now it is notable that Genshin Impact is on the top 10 list for western revenue too. As far as I can tell Western players do appreciate everything that looks like you put some effort into it, but they're also pretty fickle and expect you to at least continue putting the appearance of a good game. So far the launch reminds me of of the Harry Potter game that launched with a lot of hype and then quickly faded into oblivion because Western players have no allegiance to any particular IP if it's not delivering the goods.

I hit Rank 30 and all of a sudden the stuff I'd been farming became significantly more annoying to farm or outright impossible(Looking at you water boss).

I then saw in order to unlock my character's next star so they could have to level beyond 50 I'd have to farm the regular ass camps around the world for their 10% drop rate and I was done heh.

The base game is fun, exploring is fun, combat and mixing elements is fun, the dungeons and activities are fun.

The mobile aspects of it, limiting what you can do daily via energy, the awful tedious grindy nature or farming materials to ascend characters, RNG for the chars you want to play locked behind money, etc, etc. are things that suck.

I think if you just play/grind out the game you'd get to a point where you'd be swimming in materials but the game doesn't organically do this and I'm at the point of the game where I'd have to grind/farm and I'm just not about that life. The gameplay isn't THAT fun or addicting.

Chinese games seem to mostly still be stuck in the mindset of the Korean grinder. Not that the Korean grinder is inherently bad, but you got to have some idea of what you're doing, or that you've no idea what you're doing and this is the only thing you can think of.

As far as I can tell Genshin's monetary model seems to be 'there are always going to be a lot of dumb people with a lot of money', which isn't wrong but doesn't seem like a good long term model unless you're FGO. Not sure how sustainable this model will be since I'm guessing they must have spent a ton of money on advertising (the sudden publicity didn't come for free) but I guess it's at least off to a glorious start.

I've been having fun with it as a nice time waster till Cyberpunk 2077. I cannot get past the damn AR 24 quest final boss though.