I’m not exactly a fan of Genshin Impact, but it has nothing to do with the story, characters, art style, or gameplay. In fact, I’ve never played the game.
Let me explain.
If you’re reading this without knowing who I am, I’m yakkocmn, and I make YouTube videos on all sorts of topics related to video games. While I usually focus on indie games and soundtracks, I became known as the “gacha games guy” by parts of my audience after making three videos discussing the genre. As a result, I’ve been asked countless times in my YouTube comments, Twitch streams, private messages, and even by my PARENTS if I’ve heard of this little free-to-play open-world anime Breath of the Wild game called Genshin Impact.
Yes, I have. And no, I don’t particularly like it.
What sets Genshin Impact apart from other games?
There isn’t enough time in the world for me to fully explain what gacha games are, but if you’ve ever played or looked into mobile games, chances are you might have seen one. Fate/Grand Order, Dragalia Lost, Granblue Fantasy, Azur Lane, the list goes on and on. Concisely put: they’re anime gambling — usually some form of RPG where you can use premium currency either earned in-game or purchased for real money to pull at an in-game slot machine for a chance to receive powerful characters and weapons. Even some Western titles and games like Raid: Shadow Legends count as gacha, if we’re getting technical. They mostly keep to themselves within their own communities, occasionally reaching out for clearly telegraphed sponsorships and advertisements around the internet.
But instead of reading a soulless ad for a game they’ve never played, streamers and creators are actually playing Genshin Impact, resulting in more mainstream attention in the gaming community than any gacha game I can recall. Some of them may still be sponsored, but plenty of creators have been singing the game’s praises since release. It’s clear that Genshin Impact had an incredibly strong and positive launch within the content creation scene, with the alternative being obvious sponsorships containing company-provided footage over a pre-written script. We all know that coming within 20 feet of a mobile device with Raid: Shadow Legends installed increases your chances of contracting skin cancer.
In the final gacha games video I uploaded to my YouTube channel, I went fairly in-depth when discussing my personal experience with the genre. I recommend watching that video because it explores even more topics that I couldn’t fit in here while ALSO being an all-around banger, if I do say so myself. To summarize: while I often enjoyed the RPG mechanics in gacha games, their incessantly grindy nature is what led me to uninstall almost all of them in late 2019. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not trying to say all gacha games are bad. My relationship with the genre is so complicated that it took a 22 minute video to try and make some sense out of it all.
From a pure gameplay perspective, I avoided Genshin Impact due to my personal disinterest in massive open worlds and slow character movement, so I can’t give you an in-depth gameplay review (other than the fact that it looks really nice). To be honest, considering my distaste toward industry-standard manipulation and addiction tactics like daily rewards, battle passes, FOMO and a ruthless, shady gacha system… I don’t think I’ll ever touch it. Smack on a poorly designed stamina system in a game that also requires copious amounts of monotonous grinding, and boy, I’m still not interested!
On the flip side, I know that plenty of people adore this game. Many friends and viewers of mine have grinded for hours on end since day one and really enjoy Genshin Impact. That’s great! In case I haven’t already made this perfectly clear, I don’t wanna make it seem like I’m targeting people for playing a game, or trying to make anyone feel bad for enjoying their experience. If anything, the time and effort put into this game’s design is several steps above the power creep turn-based mechanics of many competitors in the scene.
I can’t deny that the game itself looks beautiful, and according to thousands of its active players — it’s fun! MiHoYo has expanded outside of mobile to PC and console markets, making Genshin Impact the perfect type of game to get a new audience hooked. It has a massive world, plenty of content, and a lot of time and money invested into the development of its characters and story.
Also, anime.
But here’s my problem.
MiHoYo somehow managed to avoid the negative connotations of the gacha genre by indirectly hiding Genshin Impact beneath the misnomer of a “free-to-play anime Breath of the Wild.” Whether the game is a shameless Breath of the Wild clone OR a breathtaking masterpiece that will be heralded in gaming for decades to come, the monetization system as a whole is the one of the reasons why I’d have reservations about making standard content for it, let alone taking a sponsorship.
To simplify the current concerns regarding Genshin Impact, some players believe that MiHoYo isn’t being completely transparent about their pull systems. In countries like Japan and China, there are strict and complex regulations for mobile games and digital gambling that don’t exist in North America, with one of the most prominent being that developers are required to list the exact rates to pull different rarities and characters. Not only does Genshin Impact have an atrociously low base five-star rate of 0.6%, but community-organized speculation and analysis on thousands of pulls reveal a confusing soft pity system and fluctuations in the rates as a whole. For those of you less acquainted with all this wacky terminology, this just means MiHoYo hasn’t published the exact specifics on how each piece of the gacha system works, making it harder for people to have a better shot at their favorite characters by saving up.
I think it’s safe to say that this is making people upset. On the Chinese app store TapTap, Genshin Impact is currently being review-bombed in response to both the rate controversies AND issues with the stamina cap, which directly controls how much you can play the game. The rating has dropped to a 4.8 out of 10, and similar concerns are being echoed throughout the game’s global communities as well.
Monetization system? I thought it was free-to-play!
Now that we’re done talking about numbers and math, let me get into how this strengthens my prior stance about the game. The most common outcry I’ve heard in response to criticism is that Genshin Impact is free. Fans of the game don’t use it to excuse every critique, but the most frequent arguments I’ve seen look something like this.
“I beat the whole game without spending a penny, and you can clear end-game content with the base characters!”
“Rates are better than other mobile games I’ve played.”
“The developers are so generous!”
“You don’t have to spend money to have fun, it’s completely optional.”
While these comments may be true for a specific subset of players, the amount of money MiHoYo is generating makes Genshin Impact anything but free. Sure, you may be able to experience much of the game without spending a single cent, but that doesn’t mean other players won’t be tempted, or that you practically cannot experience all of the gameplay mechanics developed in an action RPG without spending massive amounts of money on gacha banners.
Alright, hear me out. Breath of the Wild, but you gotta pay $1,000 to use the freeze ability.
Oh, the bombs? Yeah, you’re gonna have to grind to the end of the $20 battle pass for those.
At this point, I’d rather just buy a game for $60 but be given the ENTIRE experience, rather than knowing I can experience the “full game” for free while tons of content, experience multipliers, and daily rewards that make game more fun or less grindy are locked behind purchases.
I heard there’s a character that plays like Noctis from Final Fantasy XV. So I could pull endlessly in pursuit of them, or buy Final Fantasy XV when it goes on sale for like $15, and use my remaining $6,985 on, I dunno, every indie game ever released on Steam and a burger.
And fries. I’ll buy you a milkshake if I have enough left over.
The concept of “whaling” is nothing new in the mobile gaming sphere, but in case you’re unfamiliar with the amount of spending that goes on in gacha games, players will often drop a LOT of money in pursuit of specific characters.
The regulations I mentioned earlier were in response to some Japanese players spending upwards of $6,000 for a single unit in games like Granblue Fantasy. My problem, however, isn’t just the fact that these games are gambling and can be dangerous… It’s that this type of gambling keeps getting normalized. I’m not immune to this either. It’s fun to make jokes about luck and misfortune amidst a community of fellow players suffering together, and I’ve done it in several videos in the past. However, as I continue to distance myself from gacha games and reflect on the genre more and more after all of my experiences, it just makes me sad.
For many, this genre is about pulling that overpowered character, or the one they want the most, or the newest, hottest girl. Or guy. Monsters? Sure. The stress-filled gambling that fuels the gacha economy is what drives content, community discussions, and memes about the genre as a whole.
Streamers and YouTube creators (whether sponsored or not) further push this agenda by advertising Genshin Impact using cutesy or clickbait titles about the hundreds to thousands of dollars they’ve spent on the game so far, parading around their ability to drop amounts that would be incredibly unhealthy for the average player. Peeking into the Genshin Impact section on Twitch to be presented with titles like “$1,300 spent so far :)” is very bizarre, to say the least.
So what am I getting at with all this rambling?
In the end, I don’t have anything to say about Genshin Impact’s gameplay, nor can I rightfully criticize it in any regard. I’m not interested in it, but I can’t deny the sheer number of people who love it. Ultimately, the discomfort I feel in regards to the publicity it has received since release is that when you raise the open-world anime RPG curtain, there’s still some manipulative, unforgiving mechanics pulling the strings backstage. By releasing on PC and consoles instead of just mobile, Genshin Impact was introduced to an entirely new market, dodging the negative connotations of digital gambling and engrossing hordes of new consumers unfamiliar with the shady side of free-to-play monetization.
Genshin Impact is basically a gateway drug for the gacha genre.
If someone gets invested in Genshin Impact because they’re a fan of RPGs, anime or Breath of the Wild, but they aren’t too good with handling finances, or they really, REALLY want the strongest warrior with the biggest sword or the cutest girl with the biggest bahonkadonkers, it can easily lead to addiction, massive amounts of reckless spending, and in the worst cases… crippling debt. Self-control should not be a prerequisite for enjoying a video game, nor does it excuse manipulative design tactics.
Just because the game is free to download doesn’t mean the entire experience is free, or that no one else will be tempted to spend money on a game specifically designed to make you want to spend money. Designed so well, in fact, that it generated $100 million in revenue in the first two weeks. At that point, if the interesting gameplay mechanics or characters you desire in an open-world action RPG are locked behind repetitive grinding, a mediocre stamina system, daily rewards, a battle pass and an unscalable gacha paywall… does the game being “free” really mean anything?
That’s a pretty intense ending, huh? I like it.
