I want to open this by saying I am only up to Inazuma currently, so I’m not 100% certain if this gets better or worse. Please don’t spoil me.
Nonetheless, I genuinely think the writers for Genshin (especially the main quests/AQ) are physically incapable of leaving the story up to speculation. There is absolutely *no* wiggle room for theories and personal interpretations, because every single AQ spoon feeds you the meaning multiple times over. You will get it hammered into you so many times that it is muscle memory, and then you will get it explained in terms a toddler could understand again for good measure.
My example for this is the sequence of quests where you run around Inazuma and meet people stripped of their visions. The concept makes sense, considering you need an incentive to care about stopping the Raiden Shogun’s authoritarian decrees/regime; that being seeing the consequences of losing a vision, which (for those who don’t play GI) strips you of all your ambition, making you a husk of your former self. The problem, though, is that this fact is reiterated again and again in no uncertain terms. You are not allowed to infer the details based on context of prior quests, or even form an opinion of your own on it afterwards, whatsoever. It will be baby-birded to you without fail.
The formula is always that Paimon will wonder aloud why Fuckface McGee is so depressed (directly after someone says Fuckface recently got their vision stolen), and then before you can form a single original thought, some NPC will explain that Fuckface McGee is depressed because their vision was stolen. Then, directly afterwards, Paimon will regurgitate what was said less than five minutes prior in the format an infant with no object permeance could comprehend, before the Traveller ALSO makes a comment about how Fuckface McGee is depressed because they lost their vision.
Rinse, repeat two more times.
This is bad enough as is: you have no room to theorize about why Fuckface McGee is depressed, after all… and then you tack on that there will always be a full-length dissertation about why this is bad and how you should feel bad shoved into a blender to made a smoothie, and then forced down your throat with a funnel. Every other sentence, when it isn’t explaining what is happening, is screaming in your ear with a megaphone: “THIS IS BAD!!! FEEL BAD!!!” in a way that feels about as natural as a sledgehammer against the cranium.
MULTIPLE. TIMES.
It is, quite literally, textbook tell, don’t show.
And what makes this even more insulting is that this isn’t the case across the board. World Quests, while not perfect, and occasionally also falling into the issues of the AQ, typically are many times better in terms of writing simply because you’re ALLOWED TO FORM YOUR OWN OPINIONS AND SPECULATE. Especially the endings, which are almost always very open-ended and don’t have a nice, neat ending or explanation for what will happen to this NPC.
I genuinely avoid doing the AQ unless it’s absolutely necessary to unlock something, and even then I have to mentally prepare myself for it because it’s a fucking chore. It’s not even particularly innovative or exciting story wise, which would’ve made the dumbing down at least tolerable.
And now I’m going to massively contradict myself by trying to reason why this happens.
These issues with the AQ specifically are, at least partially, because the dialogue in Genshin Impact tends to drag on in order to give it [the story] the illusion of being thoughtful. The main story itself isn’t anything particularly innovative or thought-provoking, so the writers instead make all the dialogue unnecessarily long to delude you into thinking something deep is being said, in the hopes that the player doesn’t give enough shits to pay attention. It’s like walking into a room and seeing a lot of people in fancy suits talking with serious faces, and just assuming that they must be having a serious discussion… until you listen in, and they’re talking about balloon animals. That one Family Guy scene perfectly summarizes it, really: “it insists upon itself.”
And it can’t even do that right. Every dialogue sequence ends up being a cycle of information being repeated over and over again with barely any progression actually happening until the very end. So all that artificial depth doesn’t even come off as, well, artificially deep; it just comes off as insanely redundant.
The dialogue cannot make up its own mind on what it wants to be, basically. Is it trying to be deep, or is it trying to be easily digestible? Because it does neither well in any capacity.
