Let me show you the kind of sentence I look forward to after 10 years of game journalism. Genshin Impact feels built for console and PC but also looks great and runs well on your mobile phone. A colder take would be hard to produce, but this is an important part of Genshin Impact's legacy. The best mobile games have been so good for so long that it's rare to get that kind of surprise anymore, that technological whiplash and disbelief, but Genshin Impact can still pull it off. What a treat. It's an exceptional open-world action RPG despite several progression and monetization hangups endemic to the free-to-play gacha space that Genshin helped revolutionize. It is quite simply some of the most and purest fun you can have on a phone in 2024.
It's hard to evaluate Genshin Impact purely by the standards of either open-world or gacha games, in part because there are two distinct ways to experience it. Treat it as a normal, premium open-world game and you'll find hundreds of hours of adventure waiting. Explore the rich, colorful world to unearth secrets and side quests, complete combat challenges, solve puzzles, and collect materials. Blast through the main quests to unroll the origins of that world and the journey of your hero, one of two blonde, otherworldly twins chosen at the start of the game. Absorb one of the most diverse orchestral soundtracks to ever grace a video game. Cozy up to dozens of memorable characters that would fit right into an anime – cute and cool and tragic, sometimes all at once.
