Despite Genshin Impact being one of the most popular games over the past couple of years and having one of the most ambitious stories, it has quickly gone down hill. But What do you think? Let me know down in the comment section down below.
50 thoughts on “Genshin Impact: A Failure in Storytelling”
Hey Guys! Glad to see all of you taking an interest in the video! Just to be transparent, this video was made before the release of 3.0. With the exception of Collie I did not include the Sumeru portion of the archon quest with my evaluation. I agree Sumeru has improved the story a little and I will return to it at a later date. 😄
tbh it's good lore and stuff is scattered cuz you're experiencing a story you're supposed to hunt for even if in different types of media . As for the archon quests it is story presented to the audience in a digestible manner. It's like a hierarchy of players from least lore invested to those entirely engrossed in it. They do the archon quest grind and log out skip dialogue dont know shit they watch 2 cutscenss they're content rest who need more story they dig for it and get it as much they need to their own satisfaction. It's just another business model encouraging content creators and lore theorist to do sumn shit and promote the game (evil? yea ig)
Personally inazuma was only where they fell off and yes execution is bad but so is the story writing in so many places but again half the audience is probably still 12 yr olds and they won't be spoonfeeding you the whole lore since the creation of teyvat to present day bffr.
I'm fine with the light hearted content but I'm pissed at wtv tf inazuma archon quest act 2 was
and as for the story quests you're meeting a person for the first time and you gonna ask them hey tell me about your deepest traumas and you're entire life history I have 1 quest to waste quick
I agree that a lot of genshin's story is poorly executed, but have you ever thought logistically how all these characters backstories would be fleshed out in game? We have over 50 characters now, and hoyo can't be expected to animate cutscenes and invent story quests for all of them. That would only make the game even more tedious than it already is. From an immersion standpoint, I think it's better to keep most of our interactions with the characters surface level. It would be out of character for most of them to be spilling their backstories to a traveler that they just met. It makes sense that as a traveler, we get to know people throughout Teyvat through brief interactions and simply move on. A character's deeper lore is for people who've formed an attachment to that character to seek out for themselves imo
If you want to play a game with aspects of Genshin (anime styled graphics, large world to explore, gacha mechanics, multiple characters to collect and quest for each to complete, combat mechanics with elements.) and has a good story, just play Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
Agree, going through the story is so painful especially when you are spoiled with good story telling from game like Final Fantasy XIV. I don't have that much problem with Mondstat but started to get irritated by the time I reached Li Yue. You met characters so briefly you can't really connect with them. The npcs are boring, they talk too much and try to make jokes that are really not funny you wish the game have a skip button because it is so painful to read . And the have lack of personality in their movement as you mentioned you feel like you are talking to the same people again and again just with different hairstyles it makes you not care for these people. I'm also not a big fan of Paimon speaking on your behalf and especially doing exposition dump for nearly every single thing that I am already aware off. However recently I have noticed improvements starting with Shenhe and the Jade Chamber questline, our journey in the Chasm with Dainslef and in Sumeru with the Archon quest where you actually spend some time with the character like Al Haitham. Not to forget Rana's story too. I think they are doing good and hopefully this keeps up.
Valid points, but I for one personally didn't have a problem about whether the way Hoyo is managing Genshin's storytelling and lore is good or not to a broad audience.
I'm in the small niche of people that dig obscure not so in-your-face storytelling (ex. the Soulsbourne series) so that's the reason I guess.
Inazuma was bad even from my standpoint, but thats about it when it comes to my story complaints.
One interesting theory as to why Paimon speaks so much is that she had to teach our traveller the language of Teyvat and they still can't talk as fluently and whatnot.
Genshin like many Chinese shows(eg. Scissors seven and several) and drama has the same problem, the slow start which will put a lot of people off just like Honkai but they will gradually get better. I remember part of inazuma's shitty story ending also due to the fact they have to change writing team midway as the original bailed after disagreement with the company
Seeing the story quests patterns, I can confirm that Childe's has to be my fav when he's not even my fav character. His story quest tells us A LOT about him as a person + his lil brother and how they are together. (Although his brother is an npc lol) I also LOVED Zhongli's story quest including Raiden's second one.
At this point i just want an option to permanently mute paimon. As for the main archon quest, i am still disappointed and upset by the second part of the story for inazuma :/ it had so much potential but everything progressed so fast
It's quite shocking that until recently I didn't even known that Signora even had a backstory. I do read stuff like the character profiles and voice lines. But you also need to have specific character and level your friendship with him to do that. It's quite sad that so much story is missed. They could turn many of this into more character quests, which people would do because, hey free 60 primo at the end of each quest.
I would like to half disagree with your argument of the main character not speaking. Mihoyo didn't want to let the traveler speak since it was supposed to be you, the player who was embodying them. Now, being said that what I find odd and strange is how this path they've taken with the main character doesn't add up with the story elements. Normally if you are doing this and taking this route of story telling/narrative writing and allowing the player to embody the main character of your story/game there should be some consequences to the actions of your character, for example Skyrim. Skyrim is a perfect example as Skyrim is a vast and ginormous world filled with choices/decisions and lore riddled within the story. The creators wanted YOU to be the main character, or how like Link from the legend of Zelda doesn't talk at ALL in any of the games. These two are perfect examples of the MC not needing to talk in order for story telling/the game to be good. However in Genshin this artistic choice doesn't fit the style the game is trying to achieve. Genshin is a gacha game revolving around getting characters that already have an in depth story with Lore and personalities, the traveler being one. And this is where I will agree with you, having Paimon talk MORE than the traveler in aspects of choice making/directions/etc was a horrible design choice. This game is about the traveler attempting to find their sibling and whilst doing so learning about the world of teyvat in order to discover where your sibling truly is. Having Paimon essentially be the main character when it comes to dialog and story telling is a poor choice in design and writing and makes the game feel more sluggish than it should.
I agree with most of what you said, however for the conversation animations I read somewhere that it saves storage cause there’s a lot of mobile players. I’m currently playing on my banged up iPhone 6s and so the game heavily lags. I’d appreciate more emotion but my phone is going to be a disaster 😭.
Also, I actually saw a video that attempted to reanimate a scene though with the same dialogue. The variety of gestures made it more interesting. But it still felt stale. I think it’s cause their dialogue is is dense and rambly. They never get to the point. Sometimes it feels like the characters are reading a script
This is still being marketed as a mobile game… It's a shame it's not better, but honestly, can you give me another game that has been out for the same amount of time and has all of these things in it? Also, all of this would need a big amount of space in your phone even though rarely anyone plays it on mobile these days (at least to my knowledge).
I've played Genshin since day one and everything you said in this video is exactly why I feel like I'm just playing this game still because of all the time I put in so far and the hope that things will get better (they never do btw). I think it's time to end the addiction and delete the game.
Its all planned !Believe me ,I was certain they will make an anime when they made a summary of a archon quest for Inazuma. Anime will fill all the plot holes .
God damn it, finally someone that mentions the reused models and animations. I thought all this time that I was insane, because nobody seemed to notice. And you know why I'm sure that they will never fix it?
BECAUSE THEY DID THE SAME SHIT IN THEIR NEW GAMES
Honkai Star : Reused dialogue animations, reused models for both characters and npcs
Zenless Zone Zero : they npcs don't even have dialogue animations, nor lipsyinc, not are they even dubbed.
Yes, Hoyoverse is lazy, but uses all of its resources for advertising and waifus so it's fine I guess
half the reason i'm afraid of getting back into genshin impact is because i've missed… one, two, three, four… a LOT of events since i had stopped playing in 1.5, and that means i've missed information that could affect my perspective on the characters, the story, the everything and on top of that i will never get to experience any of it for myself
What’s more stupid about Paimon rehashing what we just read, Hoyoverse go out of their way to tell us via Paimon that “the traveler doesn’t like to speak and Paimon is slow to understand things so she has to rehash what’s just been said for her pea brain to get it”. At this point just make Paimon the MC. Also how in the F’ING F do we manage to make so much friends and enemies while not communicating AT ALL except throughout Paimon once again. They tried to do it Link style in Zelda with the fairies, except for the fact that the fairies don’t speak 24/7. Honestly Paimon needs to sit the F down, kind of had enough of her and how they tell the Paimon VA’s to use the most annoying voices ever, she’s already unlikable don’t make it even worse.
I agree that the characters should interact more. I was just telling my sister, isn't it weird that Diluc and Kaeya have a connection to the abyss order but never met Dainsleif? That would be fun, but no, we're stuck listening to Dain explain crap we already know and then have to hear it again from paimon. Sorry, but I hate dealing with Dainsleif. Also, the MC not talking is weird. What's the point of naming the MC, if no one calls them by their name or addresses them directly? as for the hangout events: I was bored with Barbara's, Kuki's, and Noelle's, I couldn't even finish them. I do not care about many of the characters because the game forgets about them when they should be relevant. We hear characters talk about each other but don't get to see them interact. I would have liked to see Signora and Childe working together, but that's over now. They killed their most sympathetic antagonist in the least climatic way possible. Why? I thought the shogun should've been dethroned or banished but the game shifts the blame entirely on the fatui and tenryo commission which is b.s. The shogun let things get out of hand and she should have stopped taking visions as soon as there was talk of war. but she didn't care and after all the suffering she caused, her people just let her off the hook? after she tried to kill the MC, they go on a date with her? this is fanfiction levels of storytelling. My God! I hate it. And yeah, the MC having to save Inazuma is some 'White Savior' crap that I never thought I'd see in an asian story. But here we are…oh well.
i agree, the way the story is presented is very awkward and makes the stakes and plot points a bit weak, especially in inazuma where that second part of the archon quest felt rushed as all hell.
but it seems they are trying to rectify this mistake with the current storyline taking more than 2 updates
I’ve watched almost half of the video and you’re yet to mention the biggest problem in my opinion; The game just expects you to know stuff for like 65% of the time. Everyone just knows stuff and you don’t but most of the time they’re not gonna explain sh*t, or explain very poorly and just tell you to go read a full novel for a clue of what’s going on. Like???
Imo the inazuma quest was amazing. It always kept me hyped af. Liyue was a bit boring for some reason. Inazuma was peak for me. We shall see for sumeru
I'm not gonna watch a 36 minute analysis of Genshin but i think i know what you mean and i agree Genshin has a lot of interesting lore within, but the presentation is lackluster. My most hated quest by far is Eula's. She seems to have everything laid out for an interesting story but we get some Genshin OC fanfiction level story.
i agree with this, it is pretty painful when the quest comes to me with the default npc, genshin has so many cool characters, i want to see them hang out and interact!
Paimon gets kind of annoying, but I get the idea (if the article I read was right) that the Traveller doesn’t speak the languages of Teyvat, or at least not much of it, which is why Paimon does most of the talking.
I’m visually impaired and can’t read Genshin’s small text, especially when it doesn’t let us zoom in. The fact that most of the lore is only in walls of text kind of ruins stuff for me
Another think is the fact that the character dont evolve o change without the traveler been there. They just wait there not doing anything useful for their character development in like 1 year or until they appear in the history, this just feels really shallow and gives the idea that the traveler is the center of the universe and no one can do anything for themselfs. This also applys for the history, nothing moves without the traveler and it should be the opposite, is the traveler that should be moving with the history. ( In my opinion )
I mean… I do admit that I hate that Paimon's gotta do the talking all the time but other than that, everything seems to be fine by me. I actually like that Paimon is explaining to us what the NPC just said… Makes it easier for me not to forget stuff
why hide lore behind items? cause friking Fromsoftware have been doing the same shit in all their shitting games, u see, u are right, u shouldnt have to go though all that trouble in order to get critical information about character, but again, u are also right about just 10% of the players reading the main quest, and actually giving a fk about the story, the other 90% is divided in "i dont give a shit about it" and " im too lazy, so im just gonna look for a youtube channel to digest it and spoon feed me the story" now from that 10% who read, at least 1 % will actually read items description, ramdon letters, food recipes etc etc, this also happen in Soul games, where just a very tinny minority actually pay attention to the story and an even tinier % of that people will read item description what allow them to understand the lore, this formula is nothing new in video games, is it lazy? maybe.
One of the biggest problems I've had with Genshin is how the main cast is locked away never to be seen in game unless they show up in the story. Even worse, in said stories they show up less than random npcs you don't care about. It'd be great to see these characters hang about in the world so it feels more lived in and for them to take center stage in stories so you're more likely to pull for them
Hey Guys! Glad to see all of you taking an interest in the video! Just to be transparent, this video was made before the release of 3.0. With the exception of Collie I did not include the Sumeru portion of the archon quest with my evaluation. I agree Sumeru has improved the story a little and I will return to it at a later date. 😄
i do still want that skip button
i salute u for bringing these fact.. o7
tbh it's good lore and stuff is scattered cuz you're experiencing a story you're supposed to hunt for even if in different types of media . As for the archon quests it is story presented to the audience in a digestible manner. It's like a hierarchy of players from least lore invested to those entirely engrossed in it. They do the archon quest grind and log out skip dialogue dont know shit they watch 2 cutscenss they're content rest who need more story they dig for it and get it as much they need to their own satisfaction. It's just another business model encouraging content creators and lore theorist to do sumn shit and promote the game (evil? yea ig)
Personally inazuma was only where they fell off and yes execution is bad but so is the story writing in so many places but again half the audience is probably still 12 yr olds and they won't be spoonfeeding you the whole lore since the creation of teyvat to present day bffr.
I'm fine with the light hearted content but I'm pissed at wtv tf inazuma archon quest act 2 was
and as for the story quests you're meeting a person for the first time and you gonna ask them hey tell me about your deepest traumas and you're entire life history I have 1 quest to waste quick
I agree that a lot of genshin's story is poorly executed, but have you ever thought logistically how all these characters backstories would be fleshed out in game? We have over 50 characters now, and hoyo can't be expected to animate cutscenes and invent story quests for all of them. That would only make the game even more tedious than it already is. From an immersion standpoint, I think it's better to keep most of our interactions with the characters surface level. It would be out of character for most of them to be spilling their backstories to a traveler that they just met. It makes sense that as a traveler, we get to know people throughout Teyvat through brief interactions and simply move on. A character's deeper lore is for people who've formed an attachment to that character to seek out for themselves imo
If you want to play a game with aspects of Genshin (anime styled graphics, large world to explore, gacha mechanics, multiple characters to collect and quest for each to complete, combat mechanics with elements.) and has a good story, just play Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
Agree, going through the story is so painful especially when you are spoiled with good story telling from game like Final Fantasy XIV. I don't have that much problem with Mondstat but started to get irritated by the time I reached Li Yue. You met characters so briefly you can't really connect with them. The npcs are boring, they talk too much and try to make jokes that are really not funny you wish the game have a skip button because it is so painful to read . And the have lack of personality in their movement as you mentioned you feel like you are talking to the same people again and again just with different hairstyles it makes you not care for these people. I'm also not a big fan of Paimon speaking on your behalf and especially doing exposition dump for nearly every single thing that I am already aware off. However recently I have noticed improvements starting with Shenhe and the Jade Chamber questline, our journey in the Chasm with Dainslef and in Sumeru with the Archon quest where you actually spend some time with the character like Al Haitham. Not to forget Rana's story too. I think they are doing good and hopefully this keeps up.
Wait Klee has a…. Dad? He exists? I never knew this 💀
Valid points, but I for one personally didn't have a problem about whether the way Hoyo is managing Genshin's storytelling and lore is good or not to a broad audience.
I'm in the small niche of people that dig obscure not so in-your-face storytelling (ex. the Soulsbourne series) so that's the reason I guess.
Inazuma was bad even from my standpoint, but thats about it when it comes to my story complaints.
One interesting theory as to why Paimon speaks so much is that she had to teach our traveller the language of Teyvat and they still can't talk as fluently and whatnot.
Pp
Can we just delete paimon
Genshin like many Chinese shows(eg. Scissors seven and several) and drama has the same problem, the slow start which will put a lot of people off just like Honkai but they will gradually get better. I remember part of inazuma's shitty story ending also due to the fact they have to change writing team midway as the original bailed after disagreement with the company
Well, it's nice that we actually got Scaramouche's Backstory in a cutscene in the new update
Ah yes the ANIMATIONS That Golden Apple Archipelago with Fischl didn't really get me
Cuz her "Crying" is just her scratching the back of her head
Seeing the story quests patterns, I can confirm that Childe's has to be my fav when he's not even my fav character. His story quest tells us A LOT about him as a person + his lil brother and how they are together. (Although his brother is an npc lol) I also LOVED Zhongli's story quest including Raiden's second one.
At this point i just want an option to permanently mute paimon.
As for the main archon quest, i am still disappointed and upset by the second part of the story for inazuma :/ it had so much potential but everything progressed so fast
It's quite shocking that until recently I didn't even known that Signora even had a backstory. I do read stuff like the character profiles and voice lines. But you also need to have specific character and level your friendship with him to do that. It's quite sad that so much story is missed. They could turn many of this into more character quests, which people would do because, hey free 60 primo at the end of each quest.
In conclusion, Genshin Impact has a good lore but suffers from bad execution.
YOU GUYS VENTI IS THE REAL MC ALL ALONG
I would like to half disagree with your argument of the main character not speaking. Mihoyo didn't want to let the traveler speak since it was supposed to be you, the player who was embodying them. Now, being said that what I find odd and strange is how this path they've taken with the main character doesn't add up with the story elements. Normally if you are doing this and taking this route of story telling/narrative writing and allowing the player to embody the main character of your story/game there should be some consequences to the actions of your character, for example Skyrim. Skyrim is a perfect example as Skyrim is a vast and ginormous world filled with choices/decisions and lore riddled within the story. The creators wanted YOU to be the main character, or how like Link from the legend of Zelda doesn't talk at ALL in any of the games. These two are perfect examples of the MC not needing to talk in order for story telling/the game to be good. However in Genshin this artistic choice doesn't fit the style the game is trying to achieve. Genshin is a gacha game revolving around getting characters that already have an in depth story with Lore and personalities, the traveler being one. And this is where I will agree with you, having Paimon talk MORE than the traveler in aspects of choice making/directions/etc was a horrible design choice. This game is about the traveler attempting to find their sibling and whilst doing so learning about the world of teyvat in order to discover where your sibling truly is. Having Paimon essentially be the main character when it comes to dialog and story telling is a poor choice in design and writing and makes the game feel more sluggish than it should.
I agree with most of what you said, however for the conversation animations I read somewhere that it saves storage cause there’s a lot of mobile players. I’m currently playing on my banged up iPhone 6s and so the game heavily lags. I’d appreciate more emotion but my phone is going to be a disaster 😭.
Also, I actually saw a video that attempted to reanimate a scene though with the same dialogue. The variety of gestures made it more interesting. But it still felt stale. I think it’s cause their dialogue is is dense and rambly. They never get to the point. Sometimes it feels like the characters are reading a script
This is still being marketed as a mobile game… It's a shame it's not better, but honestly, can you give me another game that has been out for the same amount of time and has all of these things in it? Also, all of this would need a big amount of space in your phone even though rarely anyone plays it on mobile these days (at least to my knowledge).
I've played Genshin since day one and everything you said in this video is exactly why I feel like I'm just playing this game still because of all the time I put in so far and the hope that things will get better (they never do btw). I think it's time to end the addiction and delete the game.
I suspect certain entities within hoyoverse and their dumb rules and restrictions are the real reason the story quests are so poorly executed
Albedo and Kazuha actually question about paimon
Its all planned !Believe me ,I was certain they will make an anime when they made a summary of a archon quest for Inazuma. Anime will fill all the plot holes .
God damn it, finally someone that mentions the reused models and animations.
I thought all this time that I was insane, because nobody seemed to notice.
And you know why I'm sure that they will never fix it?
BECAUSE THEY DID THE SAME SHIT IN THEIR NEW GAMES
Honkai Star : Reused dialogue animations, reused models for both characters and npcs
Zenless Zone Zero : they npcs don't even have dialogue animations, nor lipsyinc, not are they even dubbed.
Yes, Hoyoverse is lazy, but uses all of its resources for advertising and waifus so it's fine I guess
genshin desperately needs an event archive
half the reason i'm afraid of getting back into genshin impact is because i've missed… one, two, three, four… a LOT of events since i had stopped playing in 1.5, and that means i've missed information that could affect my perspective on the characters, the story, the everything and on top of that i will never get to experience any of it for myself
What’s more stupid about Paimon rehashing what we just read, Hoyoverse go out of their way to tell us via Paimon that “the traveler doesn’t like to speak and Paimon is slow to understand things so she has to rehash what’s just been said for her pea brain to get it”. At this point just make Paimon the MC. Also how in the F’ING F do we manage to make so much friends and enemies while not communicating AT ALL except throughout Paimon once again. They tried to do it Link style in Zelda with the fairies, except for the fact that the fairies don’t speak 24/7. Honestly Paimon needs to sit the F down, kind of had enough of her and how they tell the Paimon VA’s to use the most annoying voices ever, she’s already unlikable don’t make it even worse.
I agree that the characters should interact more. I was just telling my sister, isn't it weird that Diluc and Kaeya have a connection to the abyss order but never met Dainsleif? That would be fun, but no, we're stuck listening to Dain explain crap we already know and then have to hear it again from paimon. Sorry, but I hate dealing with Dainsleif. Also, the MC not talking is weird. What's the point of naming the MC, if no one calls them by their name or addresses them directly? as for the hangout events: I was bored with Barbara's, Kuki's, and Noelle's, I couldn't even finish them. I do not care about many of the characters because the game forgets about them when they should be relevant. We hear characters talk about each other but don't get to see them interact. I would have liked to see Signora and Childe working together, but that's over now. They killed their most sympathetic antagonist in the least climatic way possible. Why? I thought the shogun should've been dethroned or banished but the game shifts the blame entirely on the fatui and tenryo commission which is b.s. The shogun let things get out of hand and she should have stopped taking visions as soon as there was talk of war. but she didn't care and after all the suffering she caused, her people just let her off the hook? after she tried to kill the MC, they go on a date with her? this is fanfiction levels of storytelling. My God! I hate it. And yeah, the MC having to save Inazuma is some 'White Savior' crap that I never thought I'd see in an asian story. But here we are…oh well.
i agree, the way the story is presented is very awkward and makes the stakes and plot points a bit weak, especially in inazuma where that second part of the archon quest felt rushed as all hell.
but it seems they are trying to rectify this mistake with the current storyline taking more than 2 updates
I’ve watched almost half of the video and you’re yet to mention the biggest problem in my opinion;
The game just expects you to know stuff for like 65% of the time. Everyone just knows stuff and you don’t but most of the time they’re not gonna explain sh*t, or explain very poorly and just tell you to go read a full novel for a clue of what’s going on. Like???
I don’t think Paimon being the speaker is to wild. Link never speaks. So, idk.
I actually quit the game in Inazuma when it first came out, then came back to do Sumeru. Inazuma was that bad of an area.
Will you release video about sumeru?
Imo the inazuma quest was amazing. It always kept me hyped af. Liyue was a bit boring for some reason. Inazuma was peak for me. We shall see for sumeru
I can barely understand him speaking 😵
I'm not gonna watch a 36 minute analysis of Genshin but i think i know what you mean and i agree Genshin has a lot of interesting lore within, but the presentation is lackluster. My most hated quest by far is Eula's. She seems to have everything laid out for an interesting story but we get some Genshin OC fanfiction level story.
i agree with this, it is pretty painful when the quest comes to me with the default npc, genshin has so many cool characters, i want to see them hang out and interact!
well said … good effing video
Paimon gets kind of annoying, but I get the idea (if the article I read was right) that the Traveller doesn’t speak the languages of Teyvat, or at least not much of it, which is why Paimon does most of the talking.
I’m visually impaired and can’t read Genshin’s small text, especially when it doesn’t let us zoom in. The fact that most of the lore is only in walls of text kind of ruins stuff for me
Another think is the fact that the character dont evolve o change without the traveler been there.
They just wait there not doing anything useful for their character development in like 1 year or until they appear in the history, this just feels really shallow and gives the idea that the traveler is the center of the universe and no one can do anything for themselfs.
This also applys for the history, nothing moves without the traveler and it should be the opposite, is the traveler that should be moving with the history. ( In my opinion )
Didn't Paimon teach the traveller the local language on the beach? Ig that's at least something
I mean… I do admit that I hate that Paimon's gotta do the talking all the time but other than that, everything seems to be fine by me. I actually like that Paimon is explaining to us what the NPC just said… Makes it easier for me not to forget stuff
why hide lore behind items? cause friking Fromsoftware have been doing the same shit in all their shitting games, u see, u are right, u shouldnt have to go though all that trouble in order to get critical information about character, but again, u are also right about just 10% of the players reading the main quest, and actually giving a fk about the story, the other 90% is divided in "i dont give a shit about it" and " im too lazy, so im just gonna look for a youtube channel to digest it and spoon feed me the story" now from that 10% who read, at least 1 % will actually read items description, ramdon letters, food recipes etc etc, this also happen in Soul games, where just a very tinny minority actually pay attention to the story and an even tinier % of that people will read item description what allow them to understand the lore, this formula is nothing new in video games, is it lazy? maybe.
One of the biggest problems I've had with Genshin is how the main cast is locked away never to be seen in game unless they show up in the story. Even worse, in said stories they show up less than random npcs you don't care about. It'd be great to see these characters hang about in the world so it feels more lived in and for them to take center stage in stories so you're more likely to pull for them
Hm