#didn't get to do as much bc of the lantern rite quest

[violetsareblue-selfships]

good morning!! <3

[enden-k]

i didn't catch most of the sumeru events and I so get it. i want more of it too, it's like so-so. Big and colorful. fontaine is just sort of the same

Hoyoverse really popped off with sumeru tbh, both characters and quests.

tbh I'm of the opinion that like. there should be one new location event with each update (like the thelxi stuff, tho it was not very exploratory, could have been better) and then they should just do one in a Different nation (I guess they had that poetry thing but it was kinda boring)

also like. they need the hsr thing where you can play story events even after they're done. I missed the fucking interdarshan tournament and I'm still so fucking sad about it. I haven't even been playing genshin all that long and the events already bore me to death. i know they're hard to make but like hoyoverse come on. genshin is you most popular game, Make An Effort

...this kinda turned into complaining I'm sorry. long story short I get you

this is my main issue too and also probably why hoyo decided to take the focus off playable characters and instead make npcs important for events. i have difficulties connecting and feeling so easily so im really unfazed when some random ass same face npc who i know for not even 5mins suddenly dies (cough teppei or what that silly guy was named) or smth- what im saying is that i need the time and chance to know more of this character before i can have a connection and then im able to feel. its why i fucking CRIED and felt so much for jeht and why shes honestly the best npc in this entire game to me HAHAH we honestly need more npcs and stories like jeht and the one cartographer in the chasm etc

anyway

bc hoyo locked some important character stories/lore behind events where the focus was on them (albedos events with SUPER IMPORTANT lore to the game), the scara event before his release, kavehs event,...) it sucks a lot for people who missed those. i guess its why they started to bring in more npcs instead but honestly, those events feel very bland to me most of the time (ofc its different for others) bc of my issue with connecting with a character in a limited time. im excited to see some familiar faces again and then the main story is some random ass npcs lovestory

idk i feel like the events really drop lately. maybe its also just bc im a pampered little noodle spoiled rotten by lantern rite and interdarshan championship. idk if ppl get me there hhghg i think if they either create unique npcs and give us the time and chance to make a connection with them, the events they create around them might get better again. this, or they bring back more events focusing on playable characters but make those accessible after the event end for new players missing them

this turned super long and rambly sorry, im tired and brainless today uhghgh anyway

[peach-m1lk]

JJK characters playing Genshin Impact

Work and School are taking the majority of my time so here's this ig :/

Gojo Satoru:

I know for a fact he plays Kazuha bc Kazuha is good in every team ever. He also likes playing Ayato sometimes.

He's also definitely a whale- he spends so much money on Genshin and has multiple 5 star characters and their weapons at C6 R5.

He doesn't have very high exploration though because he doesn't have a lot of time to play. He's a very casual player despite the amount of money he spends on it. Just logs in to do his dailies, perhaps fights a boss or two.

HATES the Aranara quest because he can't find any of them and refuses to use any "cheats" (looking up where to find them)

His favourite element is most likely Anemo and his favourite region is Fontaine.

Suguru Geto:

I highkey think Geto likes morally grey characters bc he can kinda relate to them.

He likes Raiden bc of the archon quest and her character quest. In other words, he just likes her lore involving Makoto and the other archons.

He's spent some money on genshin. Like buying the Welkin or a character skin or two, but nothing too crazy.

His favourite events are Windtrace and the Golden Apple Archipelago. He also doesn't care too much for the Aranara quest but he likes the primos he gets out of it. He has a few areas at 100% exploration but most of them are between 80%-95%.

his favourite element is Electro and Dendro and his favourite region is Inazuma.

Megumi Fushiguro:

Megumi's favourite 5 star is Xiao bc he has a cool character design. He likes Xiao's tattoos and he likes his skill and burst, as well as his lore and his ties to Zhongli.

Bc of this, his favourite events are the annual Lantern Rite events. He didn't care too much about Xiao at first but then liked him after the story quest where he saved the traveler from falling.

Highkey he's saving up for Cloud Retainer

He's f2p and gets most of his primos through exploration.

Favourite element is Anemo and his favourite region is also Liyue but likes Inazuma too.

Inumaki is a Nilou defender for life! He also likes Ayaka and is an Ayaka defender too.

He just likes the characters that are constantly mischaracterized- esp the ones that are dumbed down to "traveler's harem".

He likes any event involving Itto bc he's funny. But he especially loves Itto's Onikabuto battle events bc he likes mini-game type events.

Also another f2p bc he doesn't like spending much money when he doesn't have to.

Favourite element is Cryo and Hydro and his favorite region is Inazuma.

Panda:

Panda likes Itto bc he's funny (he's the reason Inumaki likes Itto) and he likes Ushi.

He's gotten his highest crit using Itto and likes his character design. He just thinks Itto's a cool character all around (he's right).

Bc Panda is a Panda, he likes exploring Liyue even though he forgets he's supposed to open chests. He just plays to fight a bunch of things tbh. He often joins Inumaki on Co-op and they go around fighting bosses.

Favorite events are also anything that have Itto in them including his beetle battle events. And the events where you just have to fight stuff, like Misty Dungeon.

Doesn't have a favourite element but his favourite region is Liyue.

Okkotsu Yuta:

He doesn't play Genshin that much, if at all, but he only started playing because he saw Panda and Inumaki playing together one time and thought it was interesting.

He likes Chongyun bc of his relation to spirits and pure-yang energy. He once thought something like that could benefit him but quickly let that go.

He's probably only up to Mondstadt and Liyue tbh :/ Barely started the second archon quest with Zhongli and Liyue.

He likes the combat in the game but sometimes he just goes around and picks resources like the corolla mist flowers and dandelion seeds.

His favourite elements are Anemo and Cryo and he doesn't have a favourite region.

[kyogre-blue]

Djdjjd oh yeah I remember that, I squinted at Diluc like "are you trying to throw me off the trail? Even if it weren't p obvious it's Venti, I'd literally just need to pick up a book and see the discrepancy?" Then I remembered that this is Mr "between eating a cryo slime alive or joining the fatui I'd prefer to be crushed to death by a meteorite" So subtle is, hm, shall we say, Not his middle name. But! If Diluc could indeed be subtle, that could have been the set-up to a diversion so you'd start looking into to what Diluc may be hiding instead of any possibly-the-wind-god-in-disguise candidates! (yes I know it's a typo but I like yarn-spinning :3)

Oh glad to know there was buildup to Azhdaha bc when I played Zhongli's second quest I did feel like the dragon came all but completely out of left field haha... like was I supposed to feel sad when I didn't get the backstory until the very end and Zhongli was so unemotional abt it? Like yeah I know Zhongli's Just Like That but idk, Venti's desesperate "no, listen to me!" still lives rent free in my brain (like yeah he literally says "you don't have to listen to me" in the end cutscene and it's a direct contradiction so they changed the text in the subtitles, but the delivery was amazing. Venti sounded so pained, I'm not even mad about them leaving the soundbit in) and compared to that Azhdaha just felt like an inferior copycat of Dvalin :/ ik I have the bad habit of comparing every region to Mond, but...

Also I had seen a lot of fans talking abt Guizhong so I came out of the quick-start lantern rite expecting her to at least get mentioned on his story quests lmfao, silly me. Though I may have just been inatentive bc there was like. 0 incentive in archon quest to explore liyue and I had been actively holding back on exploring bc I felt salty about being used like a cheap rag by EVERYONE throughout the ENTIRETY of the archon quest (except for Xiao and the adepti I guess, thank u funny pompous supernatural animals u kept it real) so I was like "you're asking me how do I find this region without an absentee archon? well I wouldn't be able to tell you bc I'M NOT GONNA FIND OUT. Bitch." I feel a bit dumb though because I DID do The Secret of Nantianmen before the Zhongli quests but I have absolutely no recolection of the infodump. Like, straight up, reading through the screenshots with the weird blue haired girl and not getting even deja vu. I remebered the tree bc it's blue-veined and huge and there was a hecking seelie I lost like twice on the branches, but not anything abt the dragon rip.

Djdjdj fair, I have heard THINGS about inazuma and raiden ei (especially from my sister, who's behind me in story despite starting several months earlier bc she's vehemently avoiding inazuma lmfao) but idk, I guess I just like picking up the shiny bits and holding them to the light. Sure, there's stuff I dislike about every region! But there's stuff I like about every region too! I try to focus on that :) reading your posts is super interesting for a more critical perspective though! (And yknow it's actually refreshing for someone to actually give the sideye to Zhongli, instead of the 1000th "haha venti cares more about getting drunk than Mondstadt" abyssmal take)

Wow though, the archon quest ending without removing the sakoku decree is REALLY awful though���I was already feeling like they were pushing it too much by forcing you to do both raiden story quests to unlock literally ANY inazuma characters, but they're pushing it even MORE? And is it me or does Inazuma have, aside from NPC-itis, a subset of the same problem in liyue that it's hard to get attached to the characters? You're basically forced at gunpoint to get close to Ayaka, and Thoma left a. rather bad first impression, shall we say, by leaving you stranded in Ritou with no way to get out. and by act 3 we've barely even met the major players in the war, like Gorou (I like him bc he's fluffy and obviously cares abt his men, and I've had him for a couple of months so I was excited abt finally meeting him, but still) Sara and Kokomi. I was more interested in Kazuha bc I thought the prologue did a fairly good job setting up who he is, what he wants, what he believes in (plus I outright cackled at his intro by beidou djdjdj) but he's literally not even relevant in his own region's archon quest? Straight up vanished until the very end of act 2? Why?? And now you tell me that literally none of what he tells us in the prologue ends up ever being relevant? like what the heck was hoyo thinking :/ that many red herrings with no payoff should be illegal

I have been told (cannot confirm) that Zhongli actually emotes in other languages, but the EN dub is... hahaha.

Anyway, there's a few things here that I've thought about a lot.

One, Genshin has a really bad habit of only giving you context AFTER the climax, which renders the entire quest preceding it just floating meaninglessly in the wind and leaves the actual climax with no impact cause you haven't gotten the context for it yet. Venti's quest is like that (as much as I enjoy it), Zhongli's quests are largely like that, Inazuma archon quest is like that, etc. This is a really obvious tell for the writers being too amateur to pace/structure their story correctly, the writers having no time to do a second draft to fix the pacing issues, or both.

Two, Azhdaha is a massive writing disaster not just in terms of the quest's pacing (let's spend the entire time on tracking down some miners... what is buildup or foreshadowing), but especially in terms of its message and implications. A developer interview video explicitly says that Azhdaha is meant to be a nature vs human progress aesop. And it ends with... "nature" (Azhdaha) being sealed away while suffering endlessly ("A thousand years of pain!") and going "no, you're right, I totally deserve to be sealed away, do it," while the humans learn nothing and face no repercussions for the damage they have done for now generations. (Seriously, there are multiple instances where Liyue's mining caused supernatural problems. It just keeps happening.)

Is this how you do a nature aesop. Is it really.

There is also a throughline in Genshin about the gods doing third party racism on behalf of humans. You get to Azhdaha and he is basically tortured by reckless human expansion and yet it's all his fault and he's the only one who faces consequences. You get the oni in Itto's quest, who have to make bizarre concessions to live with humans. You get the vishaps being a sentient race and the original native population of Teyvat, but due to the gods, they've been forced into the underground and mutated due to contact with the Abyss. Even Dvalin, while it's still okay with him because that's not the focus of his story, we never get the people of the city acknowledging him as more than a monster, which would have been nice, since the whole thing was kicked off by them rejecting him.

I really don't like it because people don't need to be coddled like this. They should be made aware of their mistakes and learn to be better.

Three, Inazuma is a hilarious mess.

See, every nation's story is about the archon. The archon is the most important character and the one we're supposed to care about the most. They're the heavy weight banner that's both meta as fuck AND emotionally appealing. Venti is obvious, but even Zhongli is like... the one actual character in Liyue, who is around the most and has the most complexity and impact.

But then we get to Inazuma. Ei is the final boss, so we can't buddy up with her. We don't even see her except in two boss battles, and then she dumps out her backstory in a poorly integrated animation and the story ends.

And then, the very next thing, is we go on a date with her around town. She likes sweets! She doesn't know what fiction is! She needs you, the player, you stud, to teach her about life! Isn't she so waifu?

And a good chunk of the player base went, "excuse me, what the hell."

The writers really wanted you to go "so maybe she caused a civil war and untold suffering with her negligence and selfishness, but have you considered... I love her??" And that's fine and normal. Fans do that, I do that. Insert Legend of Galactic Heroes meme.

The problem was that the writers did not bother writing Ei into the archon quest enough for people to feel anything for her. They did the opposite, they wrote a whole lot about how much all these NPCs are suffering. So naturally, what people care about is those NPCs and their suffering.

Which Ei's story quests entirely skip over. It's just never addressed.

This gets pretty funny if you look at Sumeru because the writers were obviously aware of the issue, and they tried to patch over it.

You see Nahida a lot in the Sumeru archon quest. She's around for a bunch of the stuff going on. The thing is, Nahida is SO able to move around and do her own thing that it begins to cause dissonance with the narrative they give her (CAGED BIRD METAPHOR). We're concerned later that she got "caught" by Dottore, but this doesn't correlate with freeing her from the Sanctuary of Surasthana. I believe we don't even discuss it until after Dotorre? Because before that, she's just too able to do stuff, so it doesn't really feel like she's locked up.

But the Sages sealing her is then treated like their worst crime (even though they just inherited the situation lol). It's not that they're encouraging people go insane from forbidden knowledge or causing so many scholars to have emotional breakdowns from the pressure or mistreating the desert people. Oh no, we're against them because they were mean to Nahida. But Nahida... was cool with it basically? She could travel around, she could talk to people, she was too fine for this to be impactful even if logically it wasn't nice.

Don't even ask why we're so set on making her the archon ruler. I don't think we even ask her if she wants to do that.

The writers made Nahida present in the story a whole bunch, but they didn't really make her a good character. If anything, her presences raises a whole lot of questions while not contributing much.

(It worked tho, people are totally up in arms about their "radish daughter.")

It's similar for everyone else in Sumeru. They're around a whole lot. But the emotional core of the story is still pretty much entirely NPCs. It's Dunyarzad, it's Setaria, it's the kid whose keeper grandpa was taken, it's Rahman. They're the ones who actually care about what's going on and emote about it.

People say Sumeru is better writing, but imo it's just longer. The core issues are pretty much all the same, just dragged out and more tedious.

[genshins1mpact]

man i hadn't played any of lantern rite until yesterday cause i had to play catchup with the archon quests and stuff this week whenever i had time.. ended up rushing and completing everything last night... talk about tired 😭

only got to see the pretty decorations for one, brief night 😔

(and with all that, i just barely managed to stay awake long enough to finish it 2hrs before it all shut hhhdjdjf the things i did for that ningguang skin and all those rewards... only meant to do enough to get a few things but ended up clearing out the shop.....ah, ning 💀 and i picked yunjin bc.. everyone else is c6 lol)

am i the only one who was super sad we didn't get to make any more xiao lanterns??? i'd been holding onto hope for that for so long,,,,,

but hey the firework launcher gadget is really cool, i will def give them that

speaking of, all the damn shadow puzzles and a handful of the firework puzzles had me fried last night lol, doing them all back to back got me dizzyyy 🥴

but nothing was worse than fighting uuhghh beisht was it?? yeah doing that fight like 6x in a row sucked ASS oml

the fight isn't even that hard (with a good shield and ranged chara, cause i def didn't die first in co-op.. oop) BUT...... the constant dodging and leaving and waiting around drags out the fight sooooo much, i HATE that shit.

mhy PLS stop making shit like that, like signora's tornado phase hhhh shit's the worst

[violetsareblue-selfships]

good morning!