#But Mihoyo can’t seem to find writers this good

[zinnshady]

I’m actually blown away by Nikke’s storytelling. It presents itself as an ecchi waifu-gacha aimed at taking your money in exchange for sexy .jpegs and in practice that’s what it is but-

Some themes explored in the first 13 chapters:

>are we still us without our memories

>orienting oneself upon a moral compass

>self sacrifice to protect friends/family

>mourning those who aren’t dead yet, but have been changed beyond recognition

>civil rights (enslaving android-women is wrong and bad)

[kyogre-blue]

jinhwoa asked:

im sorry to bother, i really like ur takes on genshin lore and ur criticisms overall are very interesting to read ! i dont play games regularly and genshin is my first rpg, so i wasnt expecting much because its gacha, but the lore and the quality of the characters' backstory impressed me a lot. 

if u dont mind asking, how different is genshin lore/world building in terms of depth and length to other games (that u may know)? is this how most rpg games are usually crafted?

Hm, this is a little hard to answer properly because, tbh, my experience with both gacha and RPGs is fairly limited. Yeah...

I’ve only played three other gacha games, one more than five years ago (when I didn’t even know what gacha was), another for about half an hour before I gave up, and the third is FGO. 

I’ll be blunt, Genshin can’t hold a candle to FGO in terms of writing, on basically any level. I actually think FGO is more enjoyable in terms of gameplay too, but they are completely different genres in terms of that, so you can’t really compare them. About the only thing Genshin does better is having a pity system. 

For how well other gachas handled storyline, I can only speak from what I’ve heard second hand, and its basically a full spectrum. Many (probably most) gacha games have very perfunctory storylines, so from that angle Genshin is probably above average. However, I’ve heard of multiple other gachas that have fairly involved storylines, most immediately Arknights and Granblue Fantasy. 

Ultimately, “gacha” just means there is a system for random pulling, it doesn’t mean anything in regard to how the rest of the gameplay is or what the story is like. 

FGO just set my standards high, and Genshin is not even slightly close to living up to them. 

In terms of plain RPG games, Genshin is.... also not great. You correctly mentioned lore and character backstories as Genshin’s two strong points, because those are its ONLY strong points. And frankly speaking, these are the least relevant aspects of a game’s writing. A game putting out its only content via “wall of text” that is hidden away in some menus is pathetic and is generally used as a derogative. Genshin relying on this is straight up embarrassing. (For Mihoyo, I mean. They should be far more embarrassed than they seem to be.) 

A game should instead have a good story and good character writing in the present day. That’s something Genshin completely lacks. 

Any reasonably written RPG will blow Genshin out of the water on the simple basis that it will have a complete storyline, character arcs, and character interactions. 

As for how deep Genshin’s lore is compared to other games, I can’t really say much. I don’t generally find digging in lore to be all that interesting. It’s just that Genshin has basically nothing else to do. I can only shrug and say that Nasu probably still has more lore and Dragon Age also had a lot of this kind of detail digging. 

But any normal writer would have written actual story arcs instead of all this. Sure, Asase and Takamine backstory kind of hurts, but imagine if we played through it or if it happened to characters we actually knew and cared about. Wouldn’t that be something.