MeinMMO author Irina Moritz wanted to really like Genshin Impact, but unfortunately things aren’t working out between them.
It’s afternoon, school is over, you come home, throw yourself in front of the TV, and “Live Your Dream” or “Fly Through Time” is playing through the speakers.
This was often the case for me, and I’m sure it was the same for many others. My school and university time were completely accompanied by anime and mangas.
Over time it has faded, but I still enjoy games in anime style from time to time. Therefore, I was very pleased when Genshin Impact was released and became successful. It looked great from the start and is also free-to-play.
But no matter how hard I tried to warm up to the pretty and action-packed game, it just didn’t work. And the culprit was the characters of Genshin Impact.
When You Can’t Stop Rolling Your Eyes
It all started so well. The opening cutscene with the twins was cool. The plot about the siblings traveling through worlds immediately drew me in.
Then you land in Teyvat and meet the first characters, like Paimon. Paimon is a classic mascot who accompanies a silent protagonist: super cute, somewhat silly, 100% chatterbox. While some of her comments made me roll my eyes heavily, I was actually able to live with Paimon quite well.
Amber really got on my nerves with her “Jaha! I’m also all grown up!” attitude, but I just considered that a one-off case. Of course there are characters in a game that you can’t stand. It should get better, after all Genshin Impact has a lot of them.
But somehow it didn’t get better. Although the characters I later encountered weren’t annoying, the eye-rolling continued.
- Conversations that were supposed to come off as sweet felt silly or dumb
- When characters flirted with me, it sounded rather clumsy
- Ideas and plans of the characters that should sound clever often came off as banal
The overall writing seems really poor, especially compared to the high quality of the other elements of the game like gameplay or open world. It was really frustrating. I tried to follow the dialogues and get excited about them, but it had the opposite effect.
The further I progressed in the game, the less I wanted to complete the side quests of the individual characters because they simply came off as unsympathetic due to the writing.
“Is there something wrong with me?”
In between, I even started doubting myself. I sat there thinking: “These are just normal anime clichés that can be found everywhere. It can’t be that you don’t like anime anymore.”
But the anime games I’ve played this year were all great: Persona 5 Royal, The World Ends With You, Astral Chain, FF: Crystal Chronicles, etc. Not to mention my main MMORPG Final Fantasy XIV, which, although it doesn’t have an anime design, is still very “Japanese”.
All these games also have the classic “anime traits” like mascots or Japanese character archetypes that are present in Genshin Impact. But they didn’t bother me.
I therefore suspect that Genshin Impact is too heavily relying on clichés for my taste. Unfortunately, I find the characters at best completely uninteresting and at worst just annoying. They feel too exaggerated and are too strongly pressed into the gacha archetype templates to seem natural.
And that is a problem for a gacha game where the characters play an important role. They are part of the strategy, which the developer monetizes successfully and which is indeed very successful.
However, it has become too much for me, and it makes me somewhat sad because it actively ruins my enjoyment of Genshin Impact. I have therefore decided to set the game aside for now. I won’t give up on it completely, but I don’t want to spoil it for myself by forcing myself to keep playing.
I know that many of you really enjoy playing Genshin Impact, and I’m glad that you like the game. Do you have tips for me or know of character quests that were particularly cool that could change my opinion? I want to like the game, but so far it has sadly only scared me away.
