Genshin Impact
Genshin Impact is an open-world multiplayer game set in the world of Teyvat. There are seven nations, four of which are unreleased. The game focuses on story, fighting, and exploring. You play as a twin that you pick in the beginning, who is either female or male. The storyline follows this character on their journey, but you are not limited to just playing as them.
Genshin Impact is a gacha type game, which is a game where you earn in-game currency to obtain a random in-game item. In Genshin, there are monthly character banners, where every 30 days a new character comes out. The rarest character you can get is a 5 star character or weapon, followed by a four star character or weapon.
There is the monthly character banner, the standard banner (which never leaves), and the weapon banner. While wishing on banners, there's a chance where you can get the character that is featured on the banner, or a character that isn’t featured; this is called the 50/50. There's a 50/50 chance of you getting the monthly character. If you lose the 50/50, and do not get the featured character, then you have a guarantee of getting the featured character you want next time.
There’s also a thing called the pity system, which tells you how close you are to getting a character. You get a guaranteed 5 star at 90 pity. Anything from 0-50 is early pity, 60-70 is soft pity, and 80-90 is hard pity, or a guaranteed. You need to earn primogems, intertwined fates, or acquainted fates in order to wish. You need 160 primogems to make one pull, or 1600 primogems to make a 10 pull. Each ten pull has a guaranteed 4 star. Down below is an example of what a monthly character banner looks like:
When you get a character, there’s a lot of things that go into making a character good. This includes their weapon, artifacts, talents, ascension level, and constellation. When you first get a character, you can level them up to 20. From there on, you’ll need ascension materials to then ascend your character and level them up. You’ll need heroes wit (purple, white, and brown books). The ascension materials differentiate for each character. Once you ascend a character for the first time, you can level up their talents. Leveling up their talents makes their specific attack stronger, but it’s expensive to do so.
Along with their talents, you can also add artifacts. There are certain domains that are meant for getting artifacts. Artifacts can be for HP, attack, defense, crit damage, crit rate, elemental mastery, physical damage, etc. Each artifact contains substats under those categories, and as you level them up, more stats appear. Certain characters lead off hp, attack, defense, etc.
Along with those things, there's the character's weapon. Characters can be a polearm, bow, catalyst, sword, or claymore users. 5 star weapons are the most powerful, next are 4 stars, the last is 3 star, 2 star, and 1 star weapons. Specific characters have their own designated weapons, although you don’t have to use them. You can obtain different weapons from either the weapons banner, or just by standard.
The last thing is a character's constellation. As you get more of a character, you unlock one of their constellations. You can unlock up to six constellations per character, after you get more than six of one character, you can’t unlock anymore of that character’s constellation. When you do ten or one pulls, you earn stardust which is another type of currency that can get you ascension materials for your character or weapon.
In Genshin, there are different main quests that are called Archon Quests. These quests follow the archons, who are the gods of Teyvat. At the beginning of the game, there’s a cut scene of the twins fighting an unknown god, who captures the twin that you do not choose. The chosen twin spends the game trying to find their sibling, while also going through other side quests, and meeting other characters.
When asked if they like the lore aspect of Genshin, one GHHS student said, “Lore is one of the best parts of Genshin; the game just goes above and beyond with world building. Each update has a new story and new history to learn, the creators are good at building a good story with complex characters and plotlines.”
In Genshin, there are seven archons, titled “The Seven”. Each archon is a different element, being either anemo (wind), cryo (ice), hydro (water), pyro( fire), electro (electricity), geo (rock), or dendro (plants/earth). There are three released archons: Zhongli, the protector of contracts, and the geo archon. He rules over the nation of Liyue. His title given to him by his people is Rex Lapis. Venti, the protector of freedom, and the anemo archon, who is called Barbatos by his followers. He is the leader of Monstadt. And finally, Ei, the protector of eternity. She is called the Raiden Shogun by her people. She is the leader of Inazuma. Certain people can gain visions, which grant them elemental abilities. The three archons are shown above. Ei is on the far left, Venti in the middle, and Zhongli on the right.
When asked about their favorite aspect of Genshin, an unnamed student replied, “While I love the lore, strategy, and aesthetic of the game, I love how it shows the culture of each region the most. Being a Chinese American, I purposefully downplayed the aspects of my identity that came from Chinese culture to fit into my predominantly white school, but Genshin’s beautiful representation of Chinese culture in the Liyue region encouraged me to be proud of being Chinese.” Another student replied, “I think my favorite aspect of Genshin is how much content there is. Even when you have reached what could be considered an endgame, there is still content available, and because the game is ongoing, it will continue to produce more content.”