Genshin Impact is one of the most popular open-world role-play MMOs in the gaming community, with more than ten million players. According to Wired, “in less than two weeks after its September release, it grossed over $100 million and took the title of the most popular release ever in the West.” Recently, Genshin Impact won the best game award from both the Apple Store and Google Play. In one of the most commonly used social apps used by varying age groups, Discord, Genshin Impact has become the prominent game of the app. Hitting over seven hundred thousand members, which is the most number of members the app has ever had in a server. One of the reasons why I started playing, and why many others began to play, is because of the various characters you can play as. The designs for each character are absolutely ethereal. The open world itself can be seen as beautiful with the graphics and the amount of details that was put in place.
Not only are there amazing characters with their own story lines and an appealing open world, but the storyline of the game itself is also interesting to Genshin Impact fans.
The player starts off with the ability to choose either being a female or a male twin. After choosing, the player has an abrupt brawl with the antagonist, Signora, who causes the player to fall into a deep sleep, enabling Signora to separate the player from their twin. Very little is known about what happens to the other twin, but it’s assumed, from what we know, that the other twin essentially joins the “dark side.”
From then on, as the player, we wake up in a world which is foreign to us. Our main goal is to reach out and save our other twin sibling. A cute little fairy named Paimon wakes us up and becomes our guide in this new world. While trying to save the other twin, we have to face multiple obstacles in our path, which vary depending on which nation the player is in. The world itself is divided into seven nations, each representing its own god/element. The seven elements present in this game are cryo (ice), pyro (fire), hydro (water), electro, anemo (wind), geo (earth), and lastly dendro, which has yet to be added to the game.
A gacha system is incorporated into this game. In terms of mobile games, a gacha system is where a player has to “pull” for characters or items, meaning players need to spend in-game currency to get random rewards. This gacha system makes the player farm for primogems, one of the currencies in the game, which is used to collect different characters. The rarest character is five stars and the lowest is a character with four stars. Primogems can be obtained by completing various quests where you battle certain enemies and get a chest as reward which drops artifacts and primogems. The player can even choose to purchase primogems in exchange for actual money, which is one of the main ways the game gains profit.
Like anything that has growing popularity, there’s a growing hatred towards the game as well. One reason why some players may dislike the game is how, like any other gacha game, to do decently well, you have to essentially “pay to win” to get primogems. The chances of getting a five star character is less than 1% which means the player has to spend more primogems to try to obtain them. Not only is it good to get a five star character once, but a player should try to pull for duplicates of the characters. By getting duplicates, the player can get certain materials which can strengthen the character, making it easier to defeat high-level bosses.
Overall, I highly recommend Genshin Impact to anyone who has the time to spare! It’s one of the many things I enjoy doing when I’m procrastinating school work.