Developer – miHoYo, Shanghai Miha Touring Film Technology Co., Ltd.
Publisher – miHoYo
Platforms – PS4, PC, Android, iOS

Genshin Impact is one of the best free to play experiences on console that I have ever played; however, it is bogged down by antiquated gacha game mechanics. For every five features that the game does absolutely right, there is one glaring issue that keeps the game from reaching its max potential.
You are The Traveler, who has been brought to the world of Teyvat by a mysterious God. You were separated from your sibling at the beginning of the game and are now searching for them in this new world. Along the way you will help the people of the different regions around Teyvat while coming across a varied cast of characters who can join your party to help you in your search.
Teyvat is broken up into different regions ruled by different Gods, Archons, and have a different cultural theme per region. The starting region of Mondstadt is ruled by the Wind (Anemo) Archon Barbatos. As you search for your sibling you meet Amber, Kaeya, and Lisa. They are members of a group of knights called the Knights of Favonius. You assist in different quests and tasks in the region to help the people and hopefully find your sibling. You also meet other characters that impact the story and have a chance to get these characters in your party, if you get lucky, by spending in-game currency to perform Wishes.
The Wish system is the typical gacha mobile game mechanic. If you aren’t familiar with what gacha is, it is a system where you spend some form of currency to have a random chance to get in-game items or characters.
Typically the game will give you a limited supply of the currency to perform a few free pulls and to pull more you will need to spend real money to buy the in-game currency. Think of it like buying loot crates in games for cosmetics and other items or boosters. In mobile games, these systems are basically a lottery ticket where you most likely won’t get what you are looking for unless you are blessed by RNG.

It is a shame that Genshin has to rely on this system to get funding, but it is such a prevalent system in mobile gaming that it has come to be expected. It is just weird seeing it implemented so strongly in a console game.
If you search YouTube you can find countless videos of people spending hundreds if not thousands of dollars in real money to roll the dice at getting their favorite characters. To put it in perspective, there are some people that have spent $15 and have received the top tier characters that players that have spent $300 still haven’t unlocked.
Because the game is so good, you really do want to spend more money on the game to unlock those characters because they usually have better skills or abilities than the free characters. To make matters worse, there are limited-time frames to get certain characters, so if you find yourself wanting those specific characters you will have to pull during that time frame. It can be super addicting!
Playing the game can be a real treat, especially in the beginning. There are tons of collectibles, puzzles, and secrets to discover. You can pretty much climb and swim to any point in the open world, which has a freedom that is very reminiscent of Breath of the Wild and MMORPGs. You can even use ice characters to freeze water and walk across the ocean. The views are visually stunning. I found myself wanting to scale mountains just to get a view of the entire area around me and jump off to glide through the air.

Another huge highlight of the game for me is the combat system. While you control one character at a time, you can switch to any of the 4 characters on your current team with the push of a button. Each character is tied to one of six elements – Geo, Anemo, Water, Fire, Ice, and Electric. When you use a character’s skills and attacks, it can cause a status on an enemy that is basically an elemental primer. If you switch to a different character of another element and use their skills, it cause cause a combination effect on the enemy.
For example, you start out using a water character and you apply the Wet effect to an enemy. Next you can switch to an electric character and when you use their abilities it will cause a Super Charged status effect that will deal damage over time to the enemies affected. All of the elements can be combined for different effects, which keeps combat interesting and tactical.

As you get further into the game and you start finding yourself grinding out the end-game upgrade materials and artifacts you run into the second major problem with the game – the Resin system.
For anyone that has played a mobile game that has some kind of energy system, you will be all-too familiar with this. Basically, in order to collect loot from world bosses or dungeons will have to spend Resin. You can collect and store up to a max of 120 resin. World bosses require 40-60 resin to collect loot, and smaller fights need 20.
After you spend your Resin stored over the last time you played, you can gain 1 Resin for every 8 minutes real-time, regardless if you are playing or not. Needless to say, you can burn through 120 Resin in literally 10-15 minutes and then are kind of stuck for at least a few hours before you can collect boss/dungeon loot or materials again.
This is an absolute shame because when you are an end-game player this is what you spend the majority of time doing. The only way to get Resin, outside of waiting for it to recharge, is to spend more money or use an item that has a limited quantity in the game to recharge a bit. I am at the point where I can finish everything I can do in a day in about 30 minutes of play time.

I feel like without a major change in the system or getting rid of it all together, the game will end up losing a lot of steam between the time it takes them to add another new region, outside of the initial two, to the game.
The game also features co-op gameplay, where you can explore Teyvat or run through dungeons with others. Currently this is a really weak system as dungeons are about 2-5 minutes long each and again require resin to collect the rewards from. The mode is just weak overall, and I hope they will eventually add raid-like bosses or more thought-out dungeons that will last for at least 10 minutes.
There is a lot to Genshin Impact that I haven’t explained as this is just an impression piece, but I truly do love the time I have spent with it and I really hope they make these quality-of-life changes to keep me invested in it!