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slimeranch7 · 2 years ago

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Long rant regarding Sumeru's longest questline (golden slumbers -> her foes rage like great waters)

This is a weird place to share my thoughts on a Genshin world quest but it's not like i really use any other platform.

So, Jeht from Genshin impact, Sumeru's longest running world quest line.

Never thought I'd ever say this but hyv's writing has gotten to a point where i am happy to say that i felt true dread (in the best way, as intended by the writers, probably)

Spoilers for "golden slumbers", all the way up to "her foes rage like great waters". And it's a really long wall of text, not intended for anyone to read, but if u need to scream about that questline, feel free to join me. I feel like I'm screaming into the void rn. No one i know cares about the story or is caught up as far as i am

Most people have like an npc that made them cry in Genshin. To a lot of people it's teppei from the inazuma archon quest. For me, it was Jeht.

The golden slumbers quest started really slowly for me but i needed the primos for upcoming banners, so naturally i rushed through it.

I'm really glad to have been playing while eating lunch because i was still able to skim the dialogue and find the traveller building a relationship with Jeht and her father. I didn't cry when her father died, though. It certainly did leave a sinking feeling in my chest with how raw jehts emotions were then but in the end, i took the primos and dipped

After a few updates, hyv added a new part of the desert and i entered the tanit camps and unexpectedly met jeht again, who was slowly trying to settle into a new community. Matriarch babel set off warning bells the first time i met her, sending jeht to hunt traitors of their tribe in cold blood. I was like "what the fuck? That's pretty dark for a game like this, they didn't even shy away from the descriptions".

We do the story line, meet some people of the tribe, make acquaintances, all is well.

Until Jeht was inevitably betrayed by the very man she built up so much trust with since rejoining the tanit. Its not that some guy tryna force marriage onto a women is shocking, it's the fact that it was done in Genshin impact. It was just unexpected, but the best part is, jeht did not shy away from killing that man (someone she saw as a brother at first) in cold blood as soon as his betrayal was revealed. And then later she kills another tribesmember finding out that he also betrayed them

Oh and somewhere in between, we come close to finding that babel has set up jeht for betrayal as well, but the matriarch smartly covers it up. Truthfully, i did not trust her.

Anyway at this point i was like man this girl takes zero shit. The story goes on, you find that eternal oasis, and Jeht gets to leave remnants of her parents there as their final resting place. At this point, i started feeling emotionally connected to Jeht, and it warmed my heart so much that her parents could stay together in a place they dedicated their life to finding

Quest ends there, after reporting back to matriarch babel. Nearly a month later, because i haven't returned to the tanit camps since, i find that Jeht reappears with another quest. I happily talk to her, and she wanted to retrieve benben (the cute little pyramid robot) to fix him up. We do exactly that.

There was this weird interlude where you meet another woman who was basically groomed into being a mindless killing machine by her own father, which began instilling a sense of dread in my stomach, and later you're forced to kill her, to which i then started feeling like REALLY uneasy. And not only that, i also lose liloupar, the jinni jar that had stuck with us for a good while, and this build up of losing people left and right started getting to me.

I didn't think about it at first when i was playing but at this point i was cutting through each part of the quest with impatience and hyper focus. I even resorted to using my best team (floor 12 spiral level of efficiency) because i couldn't stand taking my time to get used newer team comps

We're told to do some investigation and such which eventually leads to clues of jeht's betrayal. Babel then sends US. US, THE FUCKINF TRAVELLER to hunt down jeht and my god i was scared I'd have to kill her like i did with that poor falcon girl. There were just so many deaths flags present

Investigation goes on, i find out that the motherfucking fatui had a hand in this, that jeht was sold out and captured by them. Mind you, i had no issues with the fatui, if anything they were a minor nuisance. But in the moment, i never thought i could muster so much hate towards a ragtag team of stupid, visionless scoundrels.

Even the ones that were begging for mercy and giving us information- i wanted to cut him up so bad regardless of his pleas for innocence. Even the traveller themselves and paimon began getting straight to the point. They took no shit from anyone they crossed paths with. This build up, the death flags, the climbing desperation that traveller and paimon began to exhibit, and even the notes/descriptions that defeated fatui gave us, it built up such a sickening pit of dread in my stomach that the moment i finally found Jeht displayed on my damn scream i actually slumped on my chair and sighed in relief.

I was just so thankful that i didn't have to kill her. But if anything, i was more scared of how much rage she showed after killing tribesmen sent after us. It turns out babel had set us up so that we would be pitted against Jeht (which of course didn't happen) and the climax includes Jeht confronting babel, and giving her no time to talk because she openly admitted to scheming against both traveller and jeht.

In the end, babel fell like all the open world enemies we kill- ended in cold blood. Jeht didn't hesitate, not even in her in-game posture or the dialogue. She told babel she would kill her, and she did exactly that, no hesitation whatsoever.

And i almost cried seeing the empty tanit camps. I thought Jeht would be all alone again, until benben showed up. At this point it was like three in the morning and i was on a voice call with a friend that didn't even play Genshin, and i almost cried to him about jeht.

All in all, hyv's storytelling has clearly improved by an insane amount since inazuma (the chasm and enkanomiya kind of counted i guess, it's stories were actually quite intriguing). I won't say inazuma was a total disaster because i will admit, i enjoyed the overall story, it was just the execution of it that was a let down.

But sumeru's archon quest had me on the edge of my seat. And Sumeru's longest world questline rivalled the sacred sakura's questline as well as ruu's questline (which says a lot because in my experience, ruu and kazari were the most memorable npcs)

I honest to God have never once played a game that captured my heart so earnestly before. I was literally sweating nervously the entire time at the end. I felt the anger and the dread and the worry that hyv most likely intended for the player to feel when we desperately searched for jeht to its fullest.

I wasn't expecting an immature, bratty and outspoken npc like jeht to capture my attention. There were a lot of ups and downs with our relationship as the traveller with her, and against all odds, we still remained close friends. I don't care that she's a bunch of pixels on my laptop. I don't care that this is a questline with a definitive end. I'm just glad that jehts free to roam as she pleases, and that she has benben so she would never have to feel alone.

This was definitely an indication of hyv taking into accounts of the pacing and player input and building something beautiful out of it. And if the rest of Genshin's stories can be written like this, it's safe to say that I'll definitely be hooked until I've exhausted the full game.

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