Does it count as anime if it’s Chinese?
Metacritic. Anyway, you might know this game as the Breath of the Wild clone that a guy smashed his PS4 at a convention over in protest. Now that it’s out though, the general consensus is that it’s not a clone like it looks.
Genshin Impact is a free to play open world RPG combined with gacha mechanics. It’s considered one of the first real AAA games to hit big from China which makes it an interesting game to follow from an industry perspective as Chinese market has very different expectations and standards to western markets. Gacha is also pretty much only on mobile so it will be interesting to see how the PC/Console markets adapt to the system.
As somebody who’s not super into RPGs, I’m really enjoying it. You can progress through the story content and side quests without needing to spend money. The beginner grind is pretty generous and “the wall” doesn’t seem to hit until over 25 hours in, if you don’t golden path it. One of the best aspects is just exploring the beautiful open world. I don’t know how they had a $100mil+ budget and give the game for free on the production value alone. It definitely has the similar vibe to exploring Hyrule in BotW though it’s not nearly as dynamic.
It’s fully crossplay on all the listed platforms but PS4/5 are not cross-progress with the other platforms so you need to decide where your save data will be trapped because Sony doesn’t want to play nice.
It will come to Switch later in the year. Being a free game though, I definitely recommend trying it out. It runs surprisingly well on my iPad Air 2019 which is a very impressive technical feat. Apart from Ratchet & Clank, this is probably the other game that’s making me look at PS5’s as the PS4 version definitely struggles under the CPU.
