#tfw you remember SERAPH was an event and judge all other events by the precedent it set lmao

[ac-liveblogs]

I mean, it’s not like Genshin events aren’t always weird and unsatisfying, but I do generally think they’re getting better.

I see a lot of people (mostly on Twitter) talking about Unreconciled Stars and to a lesser extent the Chalk Prince and the Dragon being the best events, but those were like. The worst of them?

Unreconciled Stars especially. It started basically... very shortly after I started Genshin, I don’t think I’d even finished Liyue yet (AR woes), and I... was very used to FGO events, which are quite lengthy and usually have at least one or two character arcs, a full complete story, comedy chops, etc. depending on the genre of the event, and always have a very climactic finale with a huge boss fight that the event slowly builds up to. And because I’m, like. Used to narratives, and read books and play games, I had certain... reasonable expectations about the way the event’s story would be paced anyway.

Like for example, the expectation that when Fischl was introduced, she’d be a focal character in the story and she’d have a complete narrative within the arc. I’d kind of assumed she was telling the truth about being from another world at first because I hadn’t read her profile (because I didn’t have her), so I thought the stars and her being from another world would tie together and it would turn out that she was relevant to whatever it was that was happening. I also assumed that when she left the event, she would come back, because we’d spent half the event travelling with her and getting to know her so why on earth would our companion just bounce and not return after having done... basically nothing?  

Well, I was wrong on all counts. Fischl was just there, travelled with us a bit, had no narrative relevance to the event in any way, contributed almost nothing and then left and didn’t come back after passing us off to Mona. Also she wasn’t from another world, she was a chuuni, which is already kind of... making your fantasy world less interesting right out the gate? You really wonder why she was even there in the first place.

But okay, fine. Mona... Mona was... Mona was there mostly for gameplay and exposition purposes, and she saved us from Scaramouche when he tried to attack us. She didn’t have any greater relevance beyond “I’m helping solve the mystery”, which was okayish when I thought Fischl was still coming back, but less so when she never did. And Scaramouche...

Okay, so like, a boss shows up and meeting him is treated like a Big Deal. You reach the climax of the event and he shows up again and you, naturally, are like “oop! here it is! the big climactic finale! we’re gonna fight him!” and you’re gearing up for a boss fight because why wouldn’t the event end with a bang and then he just makes you fight some mooks, cackles about some baffling plot revelation that won’t pay off for IRL years and bounces. and the event ends. 

I was so disoriented playing it. It ended on this weird lore dump about some guy that died centuries ago that wasn’t... even super relevant to anyone in the cast, and Fischl, Mona and Scaramouche didn’t do anything. I should’ve taken it as a warning of things to come, but I figured it was just messy first event syndrome and things would improve. Which they have somewhat but uh, the bones of all the problems in later events and chapters were definitely already there.    

Chalk Prince is also pretty anticlimactic and strange. It tacked Albedo’s character quest onto the start of the event, which padded things out, but it also ended without a climactic boss fight and also just loredumped about a dragon that had been dead for centuries. I don’t know - when we saw this dragon heart beating in a mountain I went “oh, we’re going to fight the dragon as a ghost or something” or maybe “oh man, something’s going to make us fight Albedo?” and “there’s something really ominous about that sword that’s going to bite us later”.

But the dragon really was just a talking piece, and this super dangerous sword that only worked for us really was just a free weapon, and the random flower that burst out of the ground was just an evil flower, and then the event was over. The climax of the event was Sucrose getting knocked over by Pallad and the flower showing up which, to my mind, was like, a miniboss at best. 

Is that partially on me for underestimating the scale of whackiness or drama that Genshin was willing to reach? Yeah, maybe. Genshin is not a game where you can expect to fight ghosts,  or evil swords to be ominous, or there to be princesses from other worlds, and its on me for not realising that it might not have stories like that. But it’s really not my fault for expecting the stories to feel complete or for the characters to have stories within the events they’re the focal point of. 

At the time my thought was “Genshin is for some reason making regular story chapters events and that’s why they aren’t complete narratives/don’t have character arcs/just exist to set up future plot points and character arcs” and to an extent I still think that’s true of those events, because functionally that’s all they did, but man, those two events were bad. Genshin’s definitely improved on making events self-contained stories since those two - the events are still a little bland, but they don’t end as suddenly and they do try to use their cast better. 

Lantern Rite’s story was dull, but they spent the event establishing our goal (taking Xiao to the rite), so it was a satisfying enough finale to finally convince him to watch the fireworks. Windblume also wrapped up nicely. I think those two worked best because they didn’t have some Big Plot that was meant to hint at something happening in the future - they were really just about Xiao and Mondstadt, so the writing was less ambitious. Summer Isles were... messy, and still set up future events (Alice....), but less offensive. 

I can only hope Genshin won’t use events to set up future events - they are not good at this - and stick with telling self-contained stories, but we’ll just have to see how it goes I guess

#ac plays genshin impact #i hate that fgo gave me standards for gacha games #is fgo perfect and amazing and always good writing? no! #but i've never finished an event feeling confused or disoriented #in writing or gameplay #or like the event's story was hugely lacking #even the ones i don't like #tfw you remember SERAPH was an event and judge all other events by the precedent it set lmao