#even the silliest ​g//enshin character designs are downright classy and elegant compared to EVERYTHING ELSE

[thefandomhouse]

[long post]

been reading youtube comment arguments (mistake) about how g//enshin is a bad game with a bad bland story and simplistic gameplay and anyone who enjoys it is an inexperienced child, and h//onkai i//mpact is WAY better and g//enshin is just a passionless moneygrab

and i'd like to address all of those comments here without actually getting into a youtube comment argument bc that would be the biggest mistake of all (trying to censor so this doesn't end up in any tags either, hopefully i succeed)

first off: i'm free to waste my time on anything that brings me real joy and entertainment no matter how "bad" somebody else thinks it is. i'm allowed to have bad taste. we're all allowed to have bad taste. you don't need to be condescending about it. grow up and embrace the cringe.

i'm fully aware that the characters are tropey and the storytelling is hardly the most nuanced or thematically resonant and the pacing is all over the place and the plot is inconsistent. so? i enjoy cheesy anime bullshit. i shrug off plot holes. the characters are charming and--this is important to me--not hypersexualized at every turn. the fact that it comes across almost as a dating sim sometimes makes me laugh, and it never takes it so far that i feel skeeved out. it doesn't take itself too seriously and its humor comes across in the jokes it makes at its own expense. it has enough "dark" elements to offset the silliness and enough sincerity to make those moments hit often enough for me to be genuinely invested. there's more i could say here! which quests i thought were forgettable or had more obvious plot holes, which ones made me fall in love with a character, which ones made me roll my eyes, which ones brought me to tears. it's almost like.......a person can have complex and nuanced opinions about a thing they enjoy without declaring it unambiguously "good" or "bad" on a binary scale? wild

second: the "simplistic characters" thing. ppl keep saying that characters "only have 2 abilities" and are "too simple" as though passive talents, weapon passives, elemental reactions, artifacts, and 4-character team synergy aren't enough to manage. you know what "simple" is? accessible. n00b-friendly. casual-friendly. i'm sorry that y'all are Expert Gamers and yet this game caters to me and my skill level than it does to you and your expectations of 30-branch skill trees

third: idk how these people don't feel the passion in every note of the OST, or the thought and care carved into the landscape. i think the people who designed the cat shrine island were filled with love. i think whoever came up with the frog pedestal hidden in the depths of the Chasm couldn't wait for people to discover their little joke. maybe those commenters never watched the version update streams where the concept artists and developers themselves talked about how much research they did to make in//azuma feel visually diverse yet conceptually unified, from the texture of the stone to the type of tree growing in naru//kami shrine. there's love in every extra line of dialogue tucked into the character menus to let us get to know their history, relationships, interests, hopes, and personality far beyond what we see in quests. believe me, i've played bland, passionless mobile games before (and deleted all of them in short order), and this isn't what they look like. i'm so sorry that the only demonstrations of love you can imagine are character kits and the ever-elusive "endgame content."

fourth: "h//onkai i//mpact is better/has better cutscenes/has a better story." i juuuust barely reached chapter 9 recently after months of forgetting that i "should" play it because it's "better." and yeah, when i finally reached it, the CG kicked ass! it was really cool, with great animation and a character moment that hit decently hard.

but i don't feel like i really...know anyone? until that moment, the characters felt mostly like tropey plot/exposition machines in between samey combat levels with camera controls that fight you at every turn and movement that feels like you're running through water half the time. i kept losing interest and taking weeks to pick up the game again. i hate every time i have to get into one of those slow-ass mechs. not a fan of the space defender levels or the floaty, awkward platformer segments. many of the enemies & missions feel random and decontextualized from the story surrounding them (why did i have to defend supplies during an infiltration mission?). the homescreen UI is an assault on my eyes, as is the fact that i get pop-ups thrown in my face every time i open the game. there are approximately one thousand types of in-game currency at any given time and i have no idea which ones are "standard" and which ones are for events, or where to use them, or where to get them. i hate that stigmata, a type of equipment, just look like more characters, AND that you have to use the gacha to get that equipment. you have to go through 8 menus before you do ANYTHING.

i'm not saying h//onkai is a bad game. on a surface level, it just ain't my jam, fam. if i stick with it, though, it'll probably grow on me, especially if i go out of my way to watch character trailers or read the manga so i actually feel connected to what's happening.

but to be 100% honest, i am simply a bigger fan of fantasy/mythological elements than i ever will be of sci fi and mechs, even though i do enjoy both. g//enshin showed me a giant, six-winged, blue-green dragon within 10 minutes of opening the game and my whole brain got dopey with seratonin. there are gods and illuminated beasts, mischievous spirits and silly tanuki, elementals and giant snakes and ancient ruins and likely more to come with every new real-world culture they take inspiration from. on a level that is fundamental to my very being, i care about all of that SO MUCH MORE than robots and zombies!!! and for a lot of people, i'm sure the exact opposite is true and those people lost their dang minds about getting to shoot missiles in a cool chunky mech. some of my h//onkai nitpicks probably apply to g//enshin to some extent too, but i notice them less because i'm so much more excited about everything that surrounds them.

none of us are incorrect! we just care about different things!!! and that care applies to everything from story structure, to game mechanics, to combat, to the genre itself!

back to the cool CG for a sec tho: the thing about it is that a) it thematically and stylistically matched the rest of the game, and b) it didn't use the game engine. it was 2D anime-style animation.

g//enshin does not have any 2D anime-style animated cutscenes in the game (though it has a recently-released short animated story teaser). all of the major cutscenes that happen in the present USE THE GAME ENGINE, and the cutscenes that are retellings of past events are highly stylized animations that reflect the art and culture of the relevant region. i highly doubt this is a budget issue, or a passion issue, as those commenters claim. it sure seems like a creative choice to me!! maybe i'm wrong and we'll get dramatic anime cutscenes in the future, but honestly i feel like that style would be kind of jarring to see in-game, especially if it replaces what is usually a pretty smooth transition from gameplay to game-engine cutscene.

and the game engine thing is important to me!! i can't tell you how many times i've seen a genuinely cool promotion for a game that ends up looking absolutely nothing like how it was advertised, with gameplay that feels even more stilted and limiting as a result of unmet expectations. (looking at you, LoL. if only you were as cool as all your promo material.) but g//enshin really looks Like That ALL THE TIME, albeit with more canned animations in standard gameplay.

meanwhile, h//onkai's genre and environment are well suited to those flashy 2D animations IN ADDITION to having a game engine that (as far as i'm aware) is NOT well-suited to portraying complex character expressions or dynamic environmental interactions. i could very well be wrong about this (i'm not on the dev team! obviously!), but it's potentially easier/less expensive to animate a whole scene like that in 2D than it would be to make it look good in the game engine.

idk if h//onkai really is the company's "favorite child" or whatever but i'm preeeeeetty sure there are more factors deciding what format the cutscenes take than just "they like the other game better."

fifth: there were also comments that boiled down to "they make a lot of money so they should be able to just Instantly Get Good," which is both a supremely ignorant take and demonstrably untrue (see: every argument about recent pok//emon games). i mean, i don't really know how the game development process works, but i'm pretty sure it's not some sim game where you click a button to instantly upgrade all your employees so they can produce the next quality tier of products. shit takes time to create! people need experience! apparently it took the devs a long ass time just to make sure Chi//lde's flowy cape didn't break the fucking game! i know it feels like there are long stretches with nothing to do but realistically speaking these updates/characters/events are coming out at BREAKNECK speed.

lastly: there are tons of perfectly valid complaints about g//enshin! it is far from perfect. i'm not gonna defend the artifact grinding system bc the artifact RNG is an absolute endless nightmare, no question. and i agree that the endgame content is lackluster at best, though personally idk what form i would want ongoing content to take. randomly generated co-opable dungeons maybe? i dunno! i just know not everybody likes fishing and mining as much as i do.

there's also the issue of the "empty world," which is less a g//enshin-specific problem and more about the inherently transient nature of exploration--like alb//edo mentioned in a quest one time, actually: once the unknown becomes known, interest fades, and what was once exciting becomes boring. b/ot/w had the same problem (arguably to a greater extent), but it was less noticeable for a lot of people because the story had a finite end, whereas g//enshin is ongoing. i don't think there's a real solution to this; it's just the nature of an open-world game released in pieces. we will always consume content so much faster than the creators can research, design, program, test, and implement it.

that was a whole lot of rambling to no one in particular (well, multiple people in particular, but no one i want to actually talk to) but it all boils down to this:

if you do not love this game--if you find the story bland, the characters boring, the gameplay overly simplistic, the world passionless, and the endgame empty--why the FUCK are you in the comments of a video about it? how did you even REACH endgame if you were so fucking bored the whole time? did you really spend weeks, if not months of your life on something that you apparently view with nothing but disdain, enough to throw contempt at anyone who genuinely enjoys it? was there nothing you loved, nothing that captured your attention? is it really the g//enshin devs who are loveless and passionless, or are you just projecting?