Following up from yesterday’s post, where I described how I’d decided that playing through Genshin Impact, one of the biggest open-world games available, FOR A SECOND TIME, would be an excellent use of my limited hours on this planet.

On the other hand, I’m not working right now and my wife and cat are generally happy so what else do I have to spend my time on?  Woodworking?  I’d lose a finger.  And I like my fingers.

Well the right pinky is a bit of a bitch and I suspect it is plotting against me.  But I don’t think you typically lose those in any woodworking accidents.

Anyway, back to Genshin.  I wanted to mostly talk about the two regions that were available when the game launched – Mondstat and Liyue – and just what the experience is like once you finish those and are wondering what to do.

It’s pretty clear that the designers did not want you to rush through these areas.  Every quest in the main story has a required “adventure rank”, which is a sort of meta level that applies to your entire account – and, while main story quests DO give you adventure rank, they don’t give you enough.  You will be doing side quests and running around solving puzzles and opening chests for quite a lot of the time in these regions, which to be fair is REALLY fun.  Like, it is a never-ending stream of tiny dopamine hits as you make bars fill.

Once you get past Liyue and over to Inazuma, the main quest line gives you plenty of adventure rank XP and roaming all over the map like some sort of hyperactive treasure-chest-fixated squirrel is no longer necessary.  I assume they figure by that point in the game you have embraced your squirrel nature.

But, that conversation is for another day.

The first time you run into an adventure rank checkpoint, it can be a little jarring.  You’ve stepped into this huge beautiful world, met an annoying flying …fairy THING, gotten to meet a couple of quality waifus/husbandos, done a few simple puzzle dungeons that mostly teach you how to interact with elemental puzzles and fly around, and then you’re slapped with a “look, go do some other stuff and come back to the story, it will be waiting for you”.

This is also the only time in the game where you’ll walk into different parts of the map and get big red “stuff here will kill you” warnings on the screen, which gave me a great sense of satisfaction once my characters were strong enough that those warnings stopped popping up.

I think they’re all gone once your characters reach level 40 or so?  This is not a high bar to step over.

Once you DO pass this point, the open world is very forgiving.  There are definitely still ways to die, but running away and coming back when you’re stronger almost always works. Even the first time I played through this game, not knowing anything of what I was doing, the majority of my deaths were due to misadventures involving gravity or drowning.  Even when you’re yanked out of the safe haven of the open world and stuck in a small arena trying to survive against a boss, you get an easy version.

Note: if you go back to fight the bosses again, for loot, you do not get the same version.

Basically, this opening bit is a tutorial level.  It’s just a very, very, VERY long tutorial level, and it does that very well.  It also doesn’t try to sell you too many gacha characters because there simply weren’t very many to sell at the time.  This is a good thing!  When you hit later regions, and the waifu/husbando count increases, it can get a little egregious.

So now I’ll stop the cheerleading, because Liyue and Mondstat were the regions in the game at launch (1.0) and the next region (Inazuma) was released with 2.0 and there were a whole mess of patches in there and honestly this is where things are really messy and they could use with some cleanup and handholding.

Like, the game will suddenly try to send you to Dragonspine, which is a VERY unforgiving area that was added in a post-launch patch, and trust me you are not ready for Dragonspine when it tries to send you there, or it will try to send you to The Chasm, which is a massive and really rewarding sort of open world dungeon area where you are, again, probably not ready, and you’ll get a pop-up suggesting that you start a big story quest that serves as a direct sequel to the events of 1.0…. even though it was added in patch 2.4 so you really should not be doing it.

When I originally got past Liyue, I did not realize that I was being sent in so many directions and to so many places I shouldn’t be going.  Knowing the “correct” path to take made the transition to the next area so very much smoother.

It also struck me, once I finished these opening areas for a second time, that the developers definitely have a bias towards Liyue.  It’s much bigger, much prettier, and the story gets a lot better than “oh woe is us there is a dragon terrorizing our city won’t some brave adventurer do something”.

I mean, Liyue is the in-universe stand-in for China and it’s reasonable that there’s a bit of self love, but it took me a while to come up with a reason why you don’t just start there.  My theory, after minimal reasoning, is that they wanted their game to sell to a global audience and having a sort of vaguely-medieval Germany be the face of the game would be much more palatable for westerners and – especially – other Asian nations.

Oh, one final rough bit about this opening area.  The game is …fairly generous with currency for the gacha system, and you’ll probably get to pull for new characters a few times a play session.  You’re not limited to only getting launch characters, though, so it’s very easy to have the virtual slot machine kick you out a new character that can’t be leveled past a certain point because it requires items that can only be found in later regions.  Fortunately very little of the world is actually gated off, so you CAN run to the later regions and get the stuff you need in most cases, but having done so on this playthrough it does take you through many of those areas I mentioned where you get the big red “stuff here will kill you” text on the screen.

Anyway.  After clearing a tutorial area that’s larger than most full games, it’s off to Inazuma! That’s for another day.  Probably.