I’ll be playing mainly Genshin Impact and Picross for the rest of the year, so apologies to readers who don’t care about gacha games. Technically I’m also playing a few other games, but none as seriously as these two. I’ve been playing Rakuen Seikatsu Hitsujimura for years and years, but the current raid event is boring so I might sit it out. I dropped the garbage Atelier Online for real a few weeks ago. I’m also mostly retired from Granblue Fantasy, but I log in for the free rolls because hey, free rolls.

On to the Genshin Impact update!

• After I reached AR29, they allowed to me to continue the story. And such garbage the story is. Instead of continuing the murder mystery investigation, I had to spend hours doing a series of glorified fetch quests, all designed to show off the latest characters Mihoyo is trying to pimp (Childe and Zhongli). It’s only at the end of the quest chain that the story promised to move on… but only once I get to AR35. Haa… This is why nobody should play gacha games for the story.
• Instead of rushing to AR35, I’m taking the time to level up my characters instead. Raising your Adventurer Rank isn’t necessarily a good thing. It unlocks stories and certain domains (dungeons) but it also makes enemies stronger. If your weapons, artifacts and levels aren’t keeping up, exploration can quickly become a nightmare.
• That’s why I’ve been focusing on beating bosses and clearing domains to get the materials I need to uncap my characters, weapons and upgrade my artifacts. I’m going in order of weapons -> characters -> artifacts, simply because it’s easiest that way. Stronger weapons make it easier to beat the bosses you need to strengthen your characters. And artifacts take a lot of fodder to level up so I leave them for last.
• Current party is Traveler (Anemo) at level 51, Xiangling at 50 (gotta get them Jueyun Chilis), Chongyun at 50 (Cryo Regisvine, here I come!). Those three are my regulars, then I rotate in Barbara, Sucrose, Lisa or Amber as needed. I’d love to have a better Electro character but the gacha hasn’t been cooperative. Also I’m mostly saving my gems for a really good banner.

And this is where the “resin gate” I mentioned in the title comes in. When I started Genshin Impact, I heard more advanced players complaining about the stamina system, a.k.a. resin, and how everything good is locked behind it. I didn’t get it before because I could get away with ignoring domains, leylines and world bosses. But once your characters get past level 40, you’ll be feeling the pain.

Resin maxes out at 160 and fills at a rate of 1 resin every 8 minutes. Roughly 21 hours for a full refill. Wanna fight a boss? Go right ahead, have fun! But it will cost you 40 resin if you want to get any rewards. 20 resin to run dungeons. 60 resin for weekly bosses. And all these events don’t take very long to do.

It’s fine for now since I still have a lot of exploration left to do in Mondstadt (70% ish) and Liyue (40%) but the time is coming and is already here for many players where they log in once a day, do their daily commissions and use up all their resin in 15 minutes and then log out till the next day. If that happens, it will be the end of Genshin Impact and me, because I’m enjoying the exploration and the battles but not the dungeons and the material grinds. Luckily there’s a new update coming in a few days with a new region called Dragonspine to explore. As long as substantial new areas are released frequently, I think I’ll be playing for a while.

Aight, next update at AR40 unless something super exciting happens. See ya!

Life never goes the way you expect. I was planning to play Tokyo Xanadu eX+ and some other PC games, all off my laptop. Then my laptop suddenly stopped booting. Won’t respond to all the common fixes. It seems like the hard drive is okay, so there’s a good chance I’ll be able to copy the data off, but until I get round to having it seen to, PC games are out. Next time I should think about backing up not only my important files but also my game savefiles. =_=

Anyway, since my plans were thrown out of the window, I’ve been in a funk (read: sulking) so I’ve been playing Genshin Impact and Picross e8 instead of making new plans. Good old Picross, it won’t betray me. Or at least I’m already used to my 3DS acting up so I won’t feel anything if it decides to go AWOL right when I need it.

Yah so anyway, Genshin Impact update in lieu of anything better to post. Last time I posted, I said I hadn’t achieved anything worthy of note or explored the depths of the game system. Many, many hours later, I’ve done a lot of things, including:

• Domains – they’re just dungeons with DPS checks where you grind/refuse to grind for artifacts (accessories) and materials to level up your weapons.
• Explored Liyue and Mondstadt quite thoroughly. At least I’ve touched all the Statues of the Seven and unlocked all the Teleport Waypoints and picked up a ton of Geo and Anemo oculi.
• Finished the story event in Mondstadt, currently investigating a murder mystery in Liyue (there was another stealth mission, but I just dashed right to the goal, ha). But I can’t go any further because I need to be Adventurer Rank (AR) 29 to continue and I’m capped at AR25 until I do a quest to raise the level.
• Got the hang of gliding after jumping to my doom way too many times. Unless there’s a windcurrent, you don’t need to jump to glide. Just walk off the edge and immediately press X (PS4 controller). Took me way too long to figure that out.
• Ignored all limited time events because they sound like a hassle. And the rewards are an insult. There’s a delivery event with a daily reward of 60 primogems. 60. When you need 160 for a single pull. Ha. Bite me, Mihoyo.

After playing so much more than before, I’ve gotten used to the battle system. It’s still a bit messy, but in a fun-ish kind of way. Definitely starting to grow on me, especially when I trigger useful elemental reactions. I especially enjoy using Barbara to wet enemies and then freezing them with Kaeya.

The level cap at AR25 is a good time to review my parties, weapons and artifacts so I can tackle tougher domains and events. I don’t have any gacha characters except Chongyun and Sucrose, which is a bit sad, but I’ll do my best with what I have while stockpiling Primogems for the next banner. It would be painful to pour all those EXP tomes into free characters who are destined to be tossed aside, but that’s a mobile game for you. Even the current gacha characters will be powercreeped in due time.

My to-do list for the next couple of days (gamewise): raise 3 or 4 characters past level 40, raise their weapons past level 40, give them the best artifacts and level those up as well, then undo the level cap and raise the world level to 2, then do enough sidequests to reach AR29 and continue the story.

Aight, so if you don’t see me for the next two weeks, that’s what I’m working on.

Thanks to a successful PR offensive and positive word of mouth, Genshin Impact is one of the hottest and most successful gacha games of the  year. I mentioned that I was going to try it once the version 1.1 patch hit on November 11th, and indeed I did. An hour here, and hour there. I had a lot of connection issues with my wifi that hampered my progress, but after hooking my laptop to the router with a LAN cable those went away and I was finally able to progress.

Many quests are locked behind your “adventurer rank” but I was able to continue with the main quest once I reached AR 10, after much opening of chests and completing of side quests. Until they asked me to complete a stealth mission to steal a Holy Lyre. I hate stealth missions, though. You probably didn’t know that because I won’t play games with a heavy stealth focus (sorry Metal Gear!) and I have no problems dropping a game if it springs a surprise steal mission on me. So yeah, Genshin Impact is dropped until I can get someone (you know yourself, see you Saturday) to come over to my house and clear that stupid mission for me. I HATE stealth missions, have I said that already?

What I like about Genshin Impact

-Bright happy colors!

-The cellshaded anime-style art is nice.

-I like open world games with plenty of areas to explore.

What I don’t like

-The combat is too fiddly with all the elemental reactions, switching parties to get different effects, having to break shields, getting frozen, etc etc. It’s all a bit too “action” for me, since I prefer less messy systems.

-Dungeon puzzles. Especially the kind that needs specific party members with specific abilities to clear. It’s forgiveable right now since most of the domains are more like tutorials, but I don’t want to keep doing this kind of thing. The worst ones are the ones with archers in some high place where you have to get Amber to aim and strafe and other such nonsense. Royal PITA.

-Other gimmicks like gliding and swimming. I didn’t think much of gliding either way until I did Amber’s story quest and had to glide everywhere. Another PITA.

-Supposedly you’re able to fight enemies all over the field, but if you stray too far away from a boss, it retreats and heals all its HP back to full. Boo, hiss~

-Beating enemies gives you only a pitiful amount of Character EXP, like +10. So there’s no point fighting enemies unless there’s a chest involved. This makes combat even less enjoyable and more frustrating.

-The game will eventually open up and have more areas to explore, but right now I’m tired of running through grassy plain after grassy plain and I’m already done exploring Mondstadt.

-The game sounds like it’s going to get even more complicated once I progress. Right now my level is really low so I haven’t experienced any of the things fans talk about like leylines (only seen one), domains, Abyss, ascension quests, world levels (big fat zero), daily commissions, etc.

-Stealth mission. Seriously? No.

Future plans?

As you can see from above, the things I dislike are more than the things I like. There’s nothing wrong with Genshin Impact – that’s the way the game is designed to work, and plenty of people love it that way. It just doesn’t suit my personal tastes. The only reason why I’m not dropping it outright is because it’s very very early days for me and my opinion might change as I get used to things/as update patches fix things. The game is definitely on hold until “I” get that stealth mission done. In the meantime, I have some one hour reviews to do and Tokyo Xanadu eX+ to finish.

Update (Nov 26th)

Bwahaha! Complaining on My Blog-no-Jutsu never fails! After shutting down the game without even trying the stealth mission, I decided that giving up without trying wasn’t very gamer-like of me. So I loaded up the game today… only to find that the game had skipped the stealth mission entirely and cut straight to the cutscene where a mysterious stranger makes off with the Lyre. Whooppeee! But why? A bug? An anti-frustration feature? Or my trusty old Jutsu at work again? Of course it’s the jutsu!

Either way, a pass is a pass. Thanks to that, I’ve been able to proceed with Genshin Impact‘s story without any further hassle. Between story quests and the occasional map quest, I’ve reached Adventurer Rank 12 and unlocked “daily commissions.” Daily commissions are just another name for glorified busywork – go here and beat this monster, give this wheat to that little boy, that kind of thing. But it’s a good excuse to explore areas of the map I haven’t been to.

Thus right now I am loitering around Dawn Winery, clear across the continent from the Falcon Coast where I’m supposed to be gathering tear crystals to save a dragon. Very patient creature, that Stormterror. Next Genshin Impact upgrade will be at AR20, and then in 10-level increments until/unless I drop the game. See ya!