welp it's been about a month and i decided to come back to this with my opinion now that i finished the liyue story arc.

the story + actual gameplay are really good - i have a few complaints about the exact implementation because i am Not Good At Video Games (tm), but all in all, it's been a fairly enjoyable experience + pretty easily filled the niche that ffxiv left behind when i had to stop playing. (the story in particular is really well-done - i love the writing, it's so good, both for the main story quest and the side character quests, and even the dinky side quests are pretty interesting too.)

unsurprisingly, the biggest detractor - and it's a very big detractor - to the game is the gatcha mechanics. the drop rates just for characters in general are abysmal, which is extremely frustrating as a brand new player who just wants to be able to meet + experience all of these fantastic characters with great storylines (i don't think i've had a single ten-pull that gave me more than one character since i started playing, and of them, i've gotten multiple duplicates - and this is without saying anything about my disdain that out of a total of 13 released five-star characters, only 5 of them aren't limited banners only). maybe i've been spoiled by arknights, but honestly, genshin's gatcha reminds me very heavily of avengers academy post-revamp (which essentially turned the game into a gatcha where it had been very much not before that, and the game was so greedy with it that they legitimately killed the game in a few months with the change).

i'll likely continue playing the game for the main storyline and various character quests, at least for a while, but i don't really see me staying super invested in the game much beyond that for the long-term, just because the thing i like most about games like this - collecting characters + leveling them up + getting to explore their storylines - feels like it's more or less stuck behind a paywall.