Despite being a big dang gamer nerd, I don’t have many platinum trophies.  Most of them are rhythm games or Soulslikes, and while either of those represents a certain amount of dedication they cannot compare to the time it took to collect the same for Genshin Impact.

Well, to be fair I wasn’t really trying to get this until about three weeks ago.  Up to that point I had just been doing something they call “playing the game normally” until I noticed that I was like 80% of the way to collecting the platinum trophy through just that and surely it couldn’t be too hard to go the rest of the way?

I make a lot of poor decisions that start with “surely, it couldn’t be too hard to…” and honestly this wasn’t the most flagrant example of that.  The most time-consuming part was  tracking down about 300 more chests in the Liyue region.  I did need to stop grinding reputation in Fontaine and move my weekly quests back to the older countries, and collect some doohickies in Dragonspine since I’d never finished that part of the map, but that was a case of like an hour every week doing stuff I couldn’t do again until the next week.

I also had to grind down to floor 12 of the Spiral Abyss, which I had never done before, and finished it in a genuine nail-biter of a close fight with my wife cheering me on.

The lesson learned there was to not go up against a flying opponent when you don’t have anyone with a bow.  Like 80% of the fight the only damage I was putting out were Yae Miko’s electric turrets, which were able to target on the Z axis and tickle the dude to death.

So, really, it could have been a lot worse.

Genshin is a weird game to talk about, though.  On one hand it is a game with a lot of subtle toeing-of-the-line when it comes to China and how it is the most awesome place in the world and doesn’t every other country just get us completely wrong, and incorporates some incredibly predatory FOMO when it comes to promoting new characters and weapons via gambling, and is painfully stingy when it comes to handing out primogems to the unwashed f2p masses…

But on the other hand it is a ridiculously huge, gorgeous world that is FULL of stuff to do and places to explore and has a story that is 100% playable from beginning to (so far) end with easy-to-acquire four star characters.  Like, you could take the half-dozen or so characters that you are guaranteed by getting through the tutorial and never roll on the gacha again if you wanted, and honestly I am occasionally tempted to try that and see how it goes.

Furthermore, unlike a lot of episodic games, I’m pretty confident that it is going to make it to the end.  It’s been out for over three years and has 5 out of 7 regions complete while still printing money for the creators every single day.  Pretty much every patch comes with enough new “game” to be equivalent to a complete single-player packaged game, and those hit every couple of months.

It’s also raised the bar for what’s possible in a mobile game.  Granted, I don’t typically play it on my phone, but I am a well-off nerd with multiple large-screen devices that I can use instead.  For people for whom their phone is their games console, it’s the sort of massive open-world exploration game that you’d have written off as untenable only a few years ago.  Honestly, it’s hit me about as hard as the first time I saw Wolf3d running on a 386 back in the early 90s.  I would not have thought it possible on the hardware, yet here it is.

The only embarrassing thing I really need to come to terms with is that I’m supposed to be a raving weeaboo and yet the games I am regularly playing are Genshin Impact (China), World of Warcraft (USA), Nikke (South Korea), Blue Archive (South Korea, again) and Chrono Circle (yet more South Korea).  Like, I need to find a Japanese game to get hooked on at some point before I start practicing my hangul.