FRIST_008 Genshin Impact Review

800 hours later. What can I say. It would be wrong to judge this game with a single score, so I'd rate it by the patches you play through as you get to know the story. And the game should be split into the patch content + the world and the main story, since the story here is not straightforward at all. So, the base patch. The game feels like Assassin's Creed or Lara Croft on steroids. Tons of chests, puzzles, a living open world that reacts when you burn grass, hit trees, hunt. Monsters don't respawn once you've killed them, and the ones that do respawn come back only after you teleport and after several real days. The world is fun to clear, but the story itself doesn't hook you. It feels like something out of a mobile game, you just don't get it. But at the same time, the main story keeps giving you unique mechanics, so in the end the game holds you purely through its gameplay. Overall, the game here is worth an 8.5. Then, still within the base patch, you get to an icy location with harsh conditions for survival and exploration. I'm someone who always wanted to play some light survival game but never actually played one. And here I got a real kick out of the challenge, out of the fact that I could freeze to death. Here the game became a 9.5 for me purely in terms of gameplay, and I don't even remember the story here. There were some personal quests, but they were of such mediocre quality that they'd get a 7–8 at most. In general, the base patch has the so-called Hangouts and Story Quests, and they're about an 8, with stories kind of like from an anime. Next, the Geo patch, Liyue. Gameplay-wise, it's too big and starts to wear you down with monotony. The story is too drawn out, although the ending is good, a 9. But overall the patch is an 8. + I don't see the point in clearing everything to 100%, the chance of dropping the game is too high. The first patch, Inazuma. Overall, the story is aimed at people who watch anime and have a well-developed imagination for scale, since within a war storyline the game can't add scale through the number of characters. But overall the story itself is good, an anime-style 8–8.5. Gameplay: they added a ton of new kinds of puzzles and, most importantly, every island and mini-DLC added a location/island with its own unique rules. As a result, none of it got old, because there was always something new for 10–15 hours. Next patch, Sumeru. The story starts out very uninteresting, but then turns into something so grand that many games could simply envy it. Without exaggeration, the story here is a 9–9.5, and it keeps players glued to the screen for a long time. But the content and the world itself... in my opinion, it's all done very lazily and designed for the wildest grind. The desert saves the situation a little, but overall the problem remains. So on average the patch gets an 8. Next, the Hydro region, Fontaine. I'm running out of characters, so very briefly. They fixed their mistakes, the world is no longer tedious and not as big, so it's closer to a 9 if you're in the mood to explore it. The story is great again, so overall the game becomes a solid 9. Next, the Pyro region, Natlan. Here they decided to pile on so much variety that you could drown in it. The story reached a new level of staging, direction and camera work. Very expensive-looking and beautiful. Overall, now when you play the game in all these latest patches, it feels like you're playing a big paid anime game for 60 bucks. But here it's all free. Overall, I recommend it to those who love clearing a world to 100%. Those who came for the story will get it, but remember: it develops and always gets interesting toward the end of the story. The setups here are often a problem, lasting anywhere from 1 to 8 hours, and a longer setup doesn't always mean a more interesting payoff, if anything it's the opposite.