#i also gate that fgo made the lostbelt release schedule like that because EVERYONE ELSE thinks its cool to copy them

[vr2]

haha anyways genshin must be on some wild fucking shit if they think theyre gonna try and drag out their main story for like 2 years. on god having like half a year between main chapters of its already weak spindly little story is like mindboggling decision i do not trust your storytelling skills at all to make any of the hype worth it but i also think thanks to the general playerbases inability to read they will continually feel disappointment at how poor genshins main story content is and how it is purveyed to the reader especially in comparison to the lore which is completely jarring in quality of delivery.

in the archon quest at the end of liyue chapter you get a lore dump from zhongli where he just stands there and gives you like 3 quest prompts about shit that exists for no reason other than idk “they needed to put the plot threads in there asap and they forgot they had an entire world to do it in” and then that mf disappears. forever. literally exiled from the overworld unless you pay like ninety quid to summon him on his banner. not to mention every single other npc you meet will never appear again outside of their instanced quests. it’s such a weird jarring end point that you’re left stranded in and its not only a frustratingly awkward delivery, it honestly just seems pointless. why couldn’t there have been an extended epilogue that involves talking to the npc character FROM inazuma, talking to beidou who is a pirate with an electro vision about idk ... travel and her ELECTRO vision being granted which is a feat she in known for in the lore of liyue folk. it could even be someone from the qixing like ningguang who surely would know about the status of foreign nations or keqing who has an electro vision and would absolutely have something to say about baal’s stance on things and her condescension towards humans. god it could still even be zhongli just space it out, let him invite us to dinner and chat over liyue cuisine and let inazuma come up naturally thgouh paimons huge appetite to eat new things. not only would the pacing be better, the plot threads be put in a way where you dont immediately forget them because they’re being rapidfire talked at you, but it would be a great way to make the character seem like theyre people with lives and not just trying to move the plot along and be on their way.

conversely, the story of arundolyn and rostam, the legends of mondstadt and the ordo favonius, the lion and the wolf, the building hints towards the cataclysm of khaenri’ah and what kind of nation earned the scorn of the gods -- its all slowly fed to you piece by piece linked through artifacts, world lore, in-game books, weapons and sometimes the world itself. you uncover things as you explore and the more thoroughly you explore - the more you discover! it’s rewarding, it feels natural and its some of the most fun you have piecing together stories and building out this strange world like some kinda anime historian and it encourages theorycrafting rather than a concrete set of events and characters being straightforward. its genuinely interesting that theres a whole society and cast of characters from the days of yore who are intimately connected with our current cast and the world we live in but also very much their own interesting characters who hold their own legacies and wills, carving them into the stars for ill or good.

its almost as if the main quest writers and the lore writers are completely separate, work on different floors and they dont ever meet because why ... why on earth would you deliver critical parts of the main story in such a blatantly poor way and make it have none of the nuance and intrigue as the worldbuilding? in a game that is designed for the express purpose of making people sympathetic and invested with characters to spend silly money on them? you think your paper thin story is going to let you do that? no gacha game is allowed to have storytelling subpar to the most average middle of the pack lightnovel and get away with being a gacha game. your story has to have at least a few moments where i am dazzled, daresay fucking delighted, at least a second where i have to stop and say ‘this is cool as hell’ or ‘FUCK ITS HAPPENING’ or else it is well and truly expendably worthless non-product! you have to be a little more ambitious than making some normie shit and try and make the story have a little heart! i dont doubt that they can do it, im sure there are talented writers there since i like a lot of the characterisations but man, let em free you need them no more than ever

the only thing i can think of that explains how watered down the story feels in comparison to lore, is a fear of making people ‘read too much’ in the main quests which honestly doesnt seem to be much of an issue to them. lanternrite wasnt that long but the sheer amount of npc dialogue feels staggering because its all ultimately ... inconsequential. we have no investment into these npcs and theres like 15 odd quests of it, it goes from cool world flavour text to genuinely feels like its taking up space all because they are trying to endear you to the lives of these generic npcs when you’d rather know like even one thing about chongyuns life and daily routine or xinyans performances. being able to see kaeya for one second even was the most fun and even then i was still disappointed cause its like bro? you didnt even let him do anything and it was JUST him? in the world there are so many characters explicitly referenced but never utilised and it makes their complete absence even more noticeable and frankly fucking baffling? not even fate episodes for all of our 12 SRs? actually nevermind, even the character stories are somehow unforgivably generic!

honestly i feel like the best event so far was the unreconciled stars event but by my standards it definitely felt like ‘solid gacha game event story’ with a touch of something more interesting with the inclusion of scaramouche’s lore insight. i was hoping this his how events would be in genshin, i really thought that this was the ‘standard’ but for some reason, its beginning to seem like that event was a bit of an outlier? i would gladly take less events and have them be more like the unreconciled stars event, with character interactions and slowly improving and hashing out who these characters are over never-ending carousel of random events that are mostly fetch-quests or fluff.

idk man its just a strange mess of me enjoying genshins world and theorycrafting, loving playing the game and exploring but feeling like the ball is not bein dropped but violently slammed into the ground by the sheer lack of character content whilst being praised by everyone under the sun for ‘story’ and ‘characters’. m*hoyo do better bitch! you already made such a good roster of characters now fuckin do something with them! stop releasing new characters without bothering with any of the existing ones! i beg of you!