While I'd already loved Genshin, this update really brought back the feeling of being new to the game and truly learning how much there was to love about this game. Take this as an overall rating of 3.X, because a lot of it has remained consistent in it's design and worldbuilding.

The exploration in this region is so fluid and engaging. A lot of other regions have their downsides. Inazuma has too much separated islands that make it hard to run around and explore, as well as the need to upgrade the Sakura tree for the electrogram level which is just annoying. Liyue is so beautiful but suffers from the mountains and sky peaks that make it impossible to have fun traversing or farming materials, enemies, geoculus, etc. It's one of my favorite nations but also one I honestly avoid spending time in. Mondstadt is great but really plain and empty and suffers from being early in the game so it misses on the art development MHY has had in their environments. Sumeru solves all of this, with fun sigils you teleport and swing to. The bouncy mushrooms and environments that TRULY interact depending on the elements you use, as well as all the stamina flowers that makes the peaks and lows of the rainforest/desert less of a slog to climb around in.

Similarly, the addition of the dendro element has been my FAVORITE. We'd been teased with it since Mondstadt, and it added a breath of fresh air into the world of team comps. People will say there is nothing to love about Genshin's combat system, but truly there is a little bit of depth that can make theory crafting so much fun. Dendro adds such a fun layer of complexity to my account that makes previously bad characters meta-defining, as well as just giving you so many options for teams you can choose to build. I must recognize my personal favorite: hyperfridge comp. You are beautiful and I love you.

What else to say... I want to get into the characters and archon quests, but these all shine in later patches. The Sumeru quest has, overall, my favorite stories thus far. I truly thought nothing could top the Raiden Shogun's story because I just love Eimiko, but the stories and information we get in every part of Sumeru (including the interludes!!) is hard to overstate. Nahida is a great archon, and Al-Haitham I LOVE YOUUUUUUU

Of course, it's hard to talk about Sumeru without acknowledging one thing: the inherent racism that mihoyo has made apparent in their writing and designs. Honestly, it's hard to summarize the disappointment and nuance that this conversation needs into a review on backloggd, but to see the lack of skin tone variety on a nation that basis it's origins on the Middle East, is difficult. Seeing a character literally named Al-Haitham be whiter than Nahida's hair, Tighnari being the same, and someone like Candace, who is literally named after the Nubian queen Kandake, being a very ashy, pale brown is so painful. The only models in the game with darker skin are the desert enemies, who are portrayed as thugs or bad people. While yes, some are given storylines that allow us to see them differently, it still feels incredibly pointed. Not to mention characters like Dori who are literally a money-hungry merchant who rides a genie lamp with orientalist elements to her visual design.... There is a lot to take issues with, and I've truly lost hope on MHY to really honor and rectify these issues because they want to pander to the mainland China. It's obvious they understand and research these regions too by just looking at the use of the instruments and the food they respect well in the world-building. It's like they know what they're doing wrong, but refuse to fix it. It makes me very sad, but what can you do when the company refuses to acknowledge any of our complaints? It's saddening, but I hope that when we move forward through Natlan they'll learn not to be afraid of anyone with even slightly dark skin.

Also for anyone who particularly has a loud opinion on the last topic, please don't bother trying to start an argument about this with me. It's just not worth the effort.

as a huge fnaf fan, i am biased, but i loved this game. i have always had faith in steel wool after their entry with the first help wanted game, and this was everything i really wanted from it!

there are what feels like so many more minigames in this one, and the quality of the models and sets and overall atmosphere has really developed into something special with the more experience they get under their belt. security breach was many things, but i always appreciated just how beautiful and full of life the expansive pizzaplex felt, despite the lack of scary atmosphere with all the neon lighting. they seem to have struck a good balance between the visual flare of SB and the atmosphere of ruin/HW1, which i appreciate a lot.

i think despite the praises, there just wasn't a way to really compete with how insanely good help wanted 1 was. the endings and secrets to this installment are genuinely fantastic and feature some of my favorite animatrionics/game concepts to date, but the mystery tapes were so much more captivating to me than the story things we are given in this one. i think that this might have some of the best fnaf reveal moments since... idk, ruin? the books' conceptions? so many moments in this one that were more hype on their own that i am struggling SO HARD not to spoil, because if there is a chance for you to discover it on your own, i would hate to ruin it for you. the highs in this are AMAZING, and there aren't really any "low" points i'd say unless a minigame really didn't resonate with you, but my experience as a game OVERALL was less exciting than the first game. maybe because it was more of a hunt to find all the tapes and coins, maybe because it was the first VR game in the franchise, or maybe because it was setting up a story rather than spending time clarifying and continuing an existing one, i couldn't say. i just know they did a great job here, and this is a must-buy for any fnaf fans who are able to purchase a VR headset.

that said, pick up and play HW1 first, even if you've seen a playthrough. come back to this one after.

Okay, I think I will eventually come back to this and try to progress a lot further than I did but I just... felt so underwhelmed a disappointed in this game especially as someone who LOVES shopkeeping-style tycoons and dungeon-crawlers. The idea of tackling complex dungeons with multiple floors to ransack for items to sell in town had me HOOKED. Unfortunately, while the premise is great, the concept ultimately just falls flat.

First of all, a minor(?) nitpick but who the HELL releases a game on steam with no actual keyboard controls? I literally could not navigate the menu because it was so unintuitive that I had to google controls on steam discussions to start. The devs even acknowledge this and explicitly have said they do NOT want to accommodate for keyboard & mouse players, and that the game was designed for controllers. I feel like I wouldn't usually care, except like? You're on steam, appealing to pc gamers, and don't explicitly tell me on the steam page that I won't have fun without a controller. Straight up wtf LOL

But whatever, you know. Its really not that big of a deal and I mean I had a controller anyways so oh well. Except... the dungeon elements were incredibly, incredibly easy after just 2 or 3 runs. I died to the boss maybe once before I was able to beat the first floor every single time & went on to clear the subsequent levels just as easily. Its not like I expected Hollow Knight levels of difficulty or anything, but this definitely feels like you will only find challenge/fun in the dungeoneering if you are new to the genre. I also want to say that I DO consider myself decently good at games that test pattern-recognition and reflexes like bullet hells, so take my experience with a grain of salt.

Despite this, I still felt okay with the game at first. I honestly didn't explore too far after a couple attempts since on top of feeling too easy for me, the combat was kind of clunky, but it was passable enough. Weapons aside from the sword/spear felt not great to me, but I also generally dislike bows in video games especially in a top down where I can't really aim comfortably. But while in dungeons, you're main goal is typically fighting and exploring for loot to sell in your shop. To me, this could have EASILY redeemed the game for me. Instead, in my little time with the game the store aspect felt really... boring? Easy. Also a little confusing? I just kinda want to sigh when I think back on it.

When I think of an amazing capitalism simulator, I think of Recettear. It also has a very mid dungeon system, but MAN the actual store aspect is so fun. I cant help but compare them to a degree. One thing that came to mind in my playthrough is the idea that different customers of different wealth brackets can shop, & you can sell things to each person with different prices because of what they are willing to accept. Similarly, there is a sort of supply and demand system that comes into effect that shows you if things are being sold for higher or lower than normal retail, and I would like it but I felt like. A little lost? In deciphering when it changes, by how much, etc. You have to FIND what the range of prices is for an item through trial and error which is totally okay, but when the specific item is being sold at market none of your recordings are saved in the log book and you arent given any type of ballpark estimate for the resources worth that you find. For example, in Recettear, if you sell a short sword, putting it in your display and selling to a customer will bring up a default price of say 500 gold, and you can adjust to 120% markup or 80% discounted rate or adjust to whatever arbitrary number or percentage you like & work within that system to find the sweet spot in different customer demographics, sales, price drops, etc. It is a really indepth system that takes something simple but elevates it. Moonlighter attempts to do the same and honestly does, but worse. When you find an item, you have no clue if you are pricing something at 100 gold when it should really be 8. This sounds like not a big deal, except the price ranges between items on the first floor alone goes from 3 coins to over 1k. How am I supposed to guess anywhere near accurately? Especially when pricing things poorly also reflects on your relationships with different classes or affects the popularity of items. Its really frustrating.

To speak more on the sales aspect, I really, really dislike the actual ui for it. I like the little idea of setting up items in the boxes you want and customising your store. Its really cute!! Recettear did similar and I truly loved it. Unfortunately, I feel compelled to compare the 2 once again to accurately demonstrate my issue with the games approaches to fulfilling the actual sales. In Moonlighter, an NPC will approach the box with an item, inspect it, then make a face that shows how happy or upset with a price they are. They will then leave the store angry, or leave money at your register and dip. In Recettear, the npc approaches the item, and then prompts a screen where you see the person who wants to buy, the base price of the item/what they are offering, & then are given the option to adjust and haggle. They give dialogue to indicate their feelings and leave either successfully paying or in anger. These function very similarly, but Moonlighter takes the individual sale out of the equation which circles back to the idea of different classes having different budgets and hurts that part of the system. It is impossible to tell who is going to buy what. NPCs approach multiple items and pick what they are going to buy, and you cant adjust the prices in preparation for each customer. It is just so hard to do that. Not to mention that in my experience, distinguishing who is wealthy or poor or what was so HARD for me. In Receattear, you are told what the person wants to buy, they clearly are wearing tattered clothing if they are poor, fancy clothes and dresses if rich, etc and you can engage accordingly and react. In Moonlighter, I could not do this effectively. I struggle to find the proper words, but the system just felt unsatisfying. This piece of interesting depth felt like something I couldn't actually play around, and I wish that wasnt the case.

This game very clearly has so much love in it and so much attention to detail that I want to like it. The art is very pretty, and the various character designs are very cute. I like the aesthetics and the feeling of the town and I love that your business helps the town flourish too. I like that the dungeoneering and the store front feel equally important, and I like the thought put into it. Unfortunately, the balancing and minor flaws add up for me in this game and ultimately made my experience feel like a boring slog, where I never actually had a piece of the game I could appreciate. If 1/2 of the systems were very good, I could rate this well. But for me, I just couldnt enjoy it. It was incredibly underwhelming. I hope you can find more fun with this than I, but unless you are very new to these systems in games, I think your experience will be sullied by its minor but additive flaws.