A lot of people can’t look past the gacha, and understandably so, but Hoyo’s games really have a remarkable amount of craft going into them, including top notch world design, battle system design (Genshin Impact still has negligible power creep, 3 years and 20+ characters later!), and character design.

The theorycrafting and lorecrafting surrounding Genshin (and to a lesser extent the new Honkai Star Rail) reminds me of Blizzard in its heyday. For that matter, so does the rule34…