But rarely does the monetization side of Genshin Impact get in the way of what feels first and foremost like an open-world adventure brimming with diverse and intriguing content to invest in. Content that isn't just another fetch quest or another handful of items to gather, but a puzzle to work out, a chest to reach, or in the briefest of spots, a curious little spot of world-building to unravel. Grind is an eventuality once you start to near the high-teens and low twenties of your Adventure Rank. Adventure Rank being your character's defining "level" of sorts whose meter can be fed through completing quests and achieving certain milestones. That reliance on levels does unfortunately rub the wrong way at points, especially when it becomes a barrier to later quests, story-based or otherwise. And while setting a minimum level cap on quests can be read as gentle persuasion to explore more of the environment, the abrupt nature doesn't always feel entirely warranted. Particularly when the main story takes a dramatic turn and you find you can't continue on that thread because your Adventure Rank (or AR for short) is one or two levels too low. So it's to the daily Commission Quests or some other similarly short-term activity on the side, for the time being.
Players pursuing the Abyss in Genshin Impact know Hydro-toting Abyss Mages and Abyss Heralds are extremely time-consuming to kill due to their tough bubble shields. However, Dendro is the best Element to bring in a comp specifically for their destructive potential - simply pair a Dendro and a Pyro to trigger Burning consistently and burn through their shields in no t
Even when the game moves away from its exploration aspect and quest-lines become the focus. When players are dropped into one of many dungeons -- or whose side activities laboriously have you hopping from A to B...back to A again...and then literally back to that same B point straight-after -- combat too is another area where Genshin Impact makes both meaningful but also a pleasure in engaging with. On the surface the set-up may not entirely be all that special; characters have their own pre-determined role of regular DPS, two-handed heavy-hitters or ranged whereby one of six elemental classes is assigned. The appeal lies in dabbling with the make-up of your party, of which you can have up to four characters that you can switch in-and-out on the fly. Combat is fast, frantic and at its best allows players to go wild with the elemental possibilities on offer.
Like regular banners, the pity built up on Chronicled Wish cannot be applied to other banners, but interestingly, will carry over to the next Chronicled Wish , despite them only running about once a y
When players explore Teyvat in their Genshin Impact adventures, they might notice that advancing even one World Level can be too overwhelming for their team - especially if they’re not strong enough to contend with enemies. While a natural thing to do here is to just step back a World Level and leisurely earn Adventure Ranks, they will sometimes experience being booted up a World Level against their will. If they spent their Adventure Rank grind with an underleveled comp, then they’ll end up being yeeted to obliv
To tackle the former comparison -- the reference to one of 2017's more lauded releases and a radical shift in series convention, to say the least -- it's not that such a descriptor is inherently untrue. It doesn't take long upon setting out into the fictional world of Teyvat to spot a fair number of similarities with Nintendo's work, some more blatant than others. But to come both into and away from Genshin Impact and proclaim this to be a clone and nothing else massively downplays the ways in which this game is presented. And above all else, does a great disservice to a developer that -- in all their imitation -- understand why the exploration, world and very level design itself of Breath of the Wild worked so wonderfully. There's even a case here that Genshin Impact actually builds atop the ideas Nintendo brought forth. Better still: masters them wholesale in carving out a game, a world, whose back-end monetization, brief technical frustrations and occasional grind can so easily be pushed aside.
There's no greater a highlight than a moment around fifteen-ish hours into wandering the world. Having already established the omnipresent "the world is one big environmental puzzle" motif at the heart of Genshin Impact and successfully completing a near two kilometre trek to a new region, to activate another beacon filling in more of the map, only to spot one of thousands of optional collectibles atop an incline of rocks; a few seconds of climbing later and off in the distance, another beacon. A subtle indicator -- of which the SLG game resource management does a great job at allowing players to organically discover parts for themselves -- that hinted not only towards another environmental conundrum, but also of what may lie beyond. Even then: what other little moments will distract me. It's a truly great, out-of-the-blue moment but another point in Genshin Impact's favor. How, indeed like Breath of the Wild before it, the journey becomes as pivotal and as fulfilling as the destination. Ultimately, the marvel of seeing yet another perspective on the vast world before you. Before long, you're ready to plot another course and begin that journey all over again.
