Video Game Re­view: Gen­shin Im­pact 1.4

Gen­shin Im­pact has re­ceived its next mas­sive con­tent up­date in the form of Ver­sion 1.4, which of­fi­cially launched on March 19. 

Gen­shin Im­pact is a game I have been ab­solutely lov­ing for the past few months. It launched on Sept. 28, 2020, and I started play­ing it on Oct. 8, not ex­actly know­ing what I was get­ting my­self into. What I dis­cov­ered was a sprawl­ing, open-world, ac­tion-ad­ven­ture RPG. The world de­sign is stun­ning and ex­pan­sive with lo­cales based on me­dieval Eng­land and feu­dal China, and there is a plethora of quests, mon­sters, and char­ac­ters to play as. When it was an­nounced in June of 2019, most of the gam­ing com­mu­nity wrote it off as a clone of a very pop­u­lar and sim­i­lar game, the crit­i­cally ac­claimed Leg­end of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. To be fair, it is prac­ti­cally im­pos­si­ble to ig­nore the sim­i­lar­i­ties. 

One thing in­cluded in Gen­shin Im­pact that was not in Breath of the Wild was the “gacha” game el­e­ment. This means that there are lim­ited-time items or char­ac­ters that are avail­able dur­ing events, al­low­ing play­ers to spend in-game cur­rency to “roll” for those char­ac­ters. When I say roll, I mean they are pay­ing to re­ceive a col­lec­tion of items that may or may not in­clude rare weapons or char­ac­ters. This in-game cur­rency can also be bought us­ing real money, in­cen­tiviz­ing play­ers who want cer­tain char­ac­ters or weapons to spend money to re­ceive them. As preda­tory as that sounds, the mi­cro­trans­ac­tions are en­tirely un­ob­tru­sive. The player is never forced to spend their money, nor are they miss­ing out on the main events of the game be­cause of it. I have been play­ing the game for five months en­tirely free, miss­ing out on no con­tent, save for a few char­ac­ters that, es­sen­tially, boil down to how you want to look when you are com­plet­ing all the tasks set out be­fore you, none of which re­quire in- or out-of-game cur­rency. 

The rea­son I bring up this game now is be­cause of the cur­rent con­tent up­date: Ver­sion 1.4. This is the biggest up­date the game has re­ceived in weeks – and the de­vel­op­ers are reg­u­larly in­ter­act­ing with and tweak­ing the game – and it fea­tures one of the old­est char­ac­ter events, called “ban­ners,” get­ting a re­run. This ban­ner fea­tures the game’s first five-star char­ac­ter, Venti, a bow-wield­ing bard with wind pow­ers, and it will be avail­able for twenty days fol­low­ing March 19. Once this ban­ner has fin­ished its run, Venti will be un­ob­tain­able un­til a ban­ner with him comes around again, and the game’s de­vel­oper, Mi­hoyo, has done an ex­cel­lent job thus far of keep­ing im­por­tant de­tails like that a se­cret. This lim­ited-time fac­tor of the ban­ners is what makes the char­ac­ters on them worth pur­su­ing to the point of spend­ing money – in some peo­ple’s opin­ions, up­wards of $1,000. 

It’s not just the fan-fa­vorite char­ac­ter Venti that has the Gen­shin Im­pact com­mu­nity in a tizzy; there is an­other new event in-game: The Wind­blume Fes­ti­val. A re­gional hol­i­day of the me­dieval Eng­land area, called Mond­stadt, is the rea­son for all the ex­cite­ment. The city is dec­o­rated in lovely turquoise and teal ban­ners, flow­ers, and scenic treats for the eyes. Dur­ing this event, there are loads of story quests, side quests, minigames, and other op­por­tu­ni­ties to earn those oh-so-pre­cious “pri­mo­gems,” the game’s char­ac­ter cur­rency. In ad­di­tion to be­ing a good way to col­lect re­sources to pull char­ac­ters, the minigames them­selves are just fun: an archery con­test, a glid­ing chal­lenge and even a lyre-play­ing game. 

All this new con­tent af­ter a com­par­a­tive dry spell for the game has fans ready to jump into the game and en­joy them­selves. Even if they have lit­tle in­ter­est in earn­ing pri­mo­gems or spend­ing their own money, play­ers can ex­pect a lovely time ex­plor­ing the fes­tive Mond­stadt re­gion, par­tic­i­pat­ing in the nu­mer­ous ac­tiv­i­ties on dis­play and com­plet­ing all the new story con­tent to ex­pe­ri­ence.