This review contains SPOILERS! Click to expand.
Genshin Impact is a dangerous game with serious issues, conflicting identities, and very predatory game mechanics.
On one end, it's a very beautiful open world RPG with interesting - albeit a bit simple - action based combat, high budget graphics, absolutely amazing music, everything you'd expect from a top tier game... and at the same time it's also a bottom of the barrel
Genshin Impact is a dangerous game with serious issues, conflicting identities, and very predatory game mechanics.
On one end, it's a very beautiful open world RPG with interesting - albeit a bit simple - action based combat, high budget graphics, absolutely amazing music, everything you'd expect from a top tier game... and at the same time it's also a bottom of the barrel mobile game.
For the first week or two of gameplay, you can explore a fairly large world, solve various puzzles, beat monsters, and generally have fun while picking up lots of treasure chests, upgrade your equipment, and so on. Only after these initial weeks, I prefer to call "the bait", you realize how the game actually works. As open world content has no respawn mechanics - even though at times it'll make you feel like there is one - once you picked up the chests, all of the fun disappears and you're forced into the exact opposite genre - instead of freedom and open world, you are restricted to grinding single room dungeons called "domains", hundreds of times to earn anything.There is no procedural generation here - you'll fight the exact same 20 slime monsters every time in the same order.
And believe me, that "anything" you need to earn is a lot. First you need character experience. This isn't obvious but the truth is enemies in the open world give you no experience, no money, and drop no loot. Technically, they do give experience but you get 10 out of the 130 thousand you need for one single level. You get money, but again, you get 30 when you need 100 thousand to a million to do anything meaningful. They drop items, but those items are not equipment, not consumable, and cannot be sold, they only exist to pollute your inventory, unless you specifically try to level up a character that requires that particular item, as each character needs something, maybe 150 of a specific type of mushroom, berry, or scrolls dropped by spellcasting enemies. The equipment - in this case, weapons and artifacts - they drop are a minimum of two tiers below what you can actually use for weapons, and one tier for artifacts, and both of these only drop from less common, elite monsters. Anyway, the open world is clearly designed to offer limited resources and cannot be played at all to progress your account beyond the point when you run out of chests to find, and even until then the progress is limited to only a few kinds of resources. Another hint that the open world chest hunting is a fake, filler game mechanic is the existence of chest compasses - you can obtain these items a few weeks after you started the game and they outright tell you if and in which direction a chest is nearby. The excitement and fun of finding treasure? This game company doesn't care, the only important thing in their eyes is that every player must have equal progress on their account. If they fall behind or get ahead, that can't be allowed - even though the game is primarily single player. Which brings us to the second major problem, time gating resources. Basically, you are only allowed to grind those single room areas which give you stuff 9 times a day which is roughly 5-15 minutes of playtime total for the day. You are done? Log off, stop wasting our precious server bandwidth. But come back everyday because this opportunity to get anything can't be stored, it has to be done everyday. There, exactly like a mobile game, except, I think this much playtime a day is extremely stingy even for mobile games.
But I got derailed a little, so going back to resources, you need character experience, you need character ascension materials, you need weapon experience, you need weapon ascension materials, you need talent books, and of course you need artifacts. You can expect to wait one to two months to gather enough of these resources, playing your allowed 10 minutes every day, to be able to get a character up to acceptable levels where they can be used for anything. If you think you can instead use them to fight low level content for fun, think again, as the game denies the low level content from you. There is a game mechanic that levels up enemies in the entire game as you spend time playing - in particular, do those daily allowed activities that are the only way to progress your account.
This enemy level up mechanic is also using a hostile design - you must reach the higher world/enemy ranks to be allowed to progress your characters beyond various thresholds, but ultimately, even if you grind out everything allowed, beyond a certain point the enemies progress more than you can. Rank 35 allows you to get 5 star artifacts in a small, weekly quantity, talents at level 6, characters and weapons at level 70, and enemies are only around level 40, or 50 for bosses. But some ranks above you are still limited to 5 star artifacts - albeit they are coming in larger quantity but that won't save you because the time gating and RNG mechanics on them prevent obtaining actual quality rolls on their stats - still limited to level 6 talents - as the material needed to go further is a random drop from a boss you can only fight once a week - and even your characters and weapons only go up to 80, later 90 while the enemies will go up from 40 to 70, 80 or even 90. This will ultimately result in you killing enemies slower as a reward for making progress AND grinding out the additional resources needed to reach your new level caps. Not only do the enemies get several times more HP with those extra level, but the level difference advantage you had before in the damage dealt and taken formulas will slowly disappear and turn against you as well.
Speaking of resources, I did mention you are looking forward to 30-60 days of grinding per character, but you need four characters for the open world game party and eight for the only existing endgame activity, the Spiral Abyss. The game has a quite strict element system and you need specific elements to destroy specific enemy elemental shields, so you will need at least one character of each main element as well. This doesn't stop here though and it is another conflicting part of the design, as this is a Gacha game which means the core game mechanic is collecting new characters from booster packs very much like trading card games, with a very limited amount of free packs you can access and absurdly low drop rates. Of course you can always buy more for real money, but doing so is in the realm of insanity, as you can expect a new 5 star character to cost around 2-300 USD on average while they are on the rate up event. Outside that, it costs roughly 10 times as much, or is outright impossible because limited characters can only be obtained for a short 3 week period. If that sounds bad enough, this only unlocks the weakest power level of the character, and you need to repeat the gambling process 6 more times to max them out, easily totaling $2000+ for the event character or over ten thousand for non-event characters. Anyway, this is the main source of monetizing in the game, and actively blocking people from using those characters through the tedious, unfun, and time gated leveling system and lack of low level enemies or content due to the world level mechanic discourages obtaining new characters, this too is a huge design contradiction. Remember - this money goes into the tiny chance to play one character in one specific game on one platform on one account and only until the official server they bought them on exists. And it's enough money to buy a new car in the worst cases.
If you paid attention you noticed I haven't told you how to get weapons yet, well, those are also coming from this gambling mechanic and to get the highest tier, you'll likely need to pay even more than for characters, as each weapon also needs 5 duplicates to max out, but there is no way to guarantee getting a specific weapon from a booster pack for a specific amount of worst case spending like with event characters. In other words, with bad luck you can literally throw an infinite amount of money into this slot machine and never get your weapon anyway.
In addition to all of the above, the game has security and privacy issues, and bugs are commonplace. While the graphics are wonderful, the texture loading is so slow and random that it completely destroys the enjoyment and the update made it worse.
Finally, the game is extremely incomplete. Only 2 out of the 7 planned initial regions exist and if you try to leave this not so large open world, the game's mascot will push you off a cliff to your death, teleport you back to a save point or do other mean things to you. The story was also only like 10% complete at best. At the current update rate, you an expect a complete base storyline and all the initial regions to become available 2 years from now.
You might wonder why the game has such high ratings from many reviewers despite the problems and this is why : it's designed to be extremely addictive. You are required to log in every day for daily quests and spending the limited resource to obtain progress, there are plenty of time limited events some of which even contain storyline progression or unique weapons, and the initial week or two is very fun, again mostly because you get a lot of treasure without being aware of how little they are actually worth in the game's horrible economy system. This conditions your brain to perceive the game as fun, and no matter how bad it gets later on, it's very hard to stop playing it and admit you were deceived. Additional mechanics reinforce this conditioning : you will have to click "claim" buttons all the time, all over the place to get irrelevant amounts of worthless rewards hundreds of times which acts as brainwashing, basically. Other games, not designed to abuse human psychology will simply put your reward into your inventory, which too makes it obvious this was designed with hostile, manipulative intent. You'll probably need to click those Claim buttons like 1000 times on your first two weeks of playing.
As better weapons, higher rank characters, and even more play time to progress your account or simply have fun playing - not that the current way of grinding the same one room full of slimes is any fun - all are very limited in quantity unless you spend massive amounts of real money on it, this game can be classified as Pay To Win, or even Pay to Play, as well as Free to Play, because you can play for free, absolutely, but you'll run out of things to do very soon and feel awful as by then the game will condition your brain to want more.
Ultimately, however, I think "Pay to Wait", "Pay to Grind" or "Pay to Suffer" might describe the game experience the best, as the largest issues - the waiting time on character development, the repetitive, boring single room "dungeons", and the total lack of anything to do in the open world are not solvable with money, neither is the horrible and very likely rigged artifact generation and leveling system. Please note the laws require them to disclose the odds on the booster packs you get characters and weapons from, but even there they have a hidden mechanic that isn't described to the user to manipulate users into feeling lucky - the last 15 rolls before the guaranteed worst case success have hidden, vastly increased rates - but they aren't required to disclose the odds on leveling up various stats on your equipment. Why wouldn't they make it so the worst stats upgrade the most frequently?
If all of that wasn't enough, the game in its current state is extremely simplified - you need to increase your DPS as high as possible and nothing else matters. Pretty much every relevant content you'll need to grind on daily basis, or anything that offers any difficulty, are fights with a strict time limit, so building your characters for anything other than raw damage will not work. Finally, for a character collection game, there aren't enough characters, and they rotate the character packs too slowly - it has been 9 consecutive weeks of having a male character out of which 6 weeks it was a geo element character in the rate up banner, so not only is it hard to build up characters to be playable after getting them, it's also hard to get characters you like as the selection is too little and too time limited so it doesn't even get better later on, as new characters will be unavailable except during those three specific weeks.
As the software is clearly designed to be addictive, manipulative, and trick you into spending unreasonable amounts of money while the players having fun is secondary, I recommend avoiding this "game" at all costs, because you'll either regret it, or get stuck in a horrible addiction.
A final warning sign, even though the game is only 3 months old, they already added a "returning player reward" mechanic that gives you a lot of good stuff for free if you don't log in for 14 days. You heard that right, you can actually make progress by not playing the game at all while any attempts to do play are severely punished by limited daily playtime. As this actively encourages players to quit playing the game with a pretty good chance they won't actually come back 14 days later, I can only think of one reason why this feature exist in such a new game, and that is a massive drop in active players already. If that's true, the game might not even exist a year from now and all your grinding or money invested will vanish as the official servers shut down.
And to close this review : "Free to Play" but they already made $500 million+ in their first 3 months. Yeah, sounds "Free" to me, right.
