The best thing I can really say about it is that I wish Hu Tao was in a better game.

There's potential for something genuinely good here. The open world has a lot to do, look at and get immersed in. Playable characters are animated extremely well and are often very nice to see in motion. Multiplayer is generally well implemented aside from the occasional puzzle just... disappearing when entering co-op mode - getting carried by higher levelled players illeviates a lot of the slowness of the game and I implore you to play with a higher levelled friend if you ever consider playing this in its entirety. If this was a 50 pound/dollar game with no microtransactions or gacha, I'd probably bump it up to 3 and a half stars, but christ I don't think I've ever played a video game that respects the player's time so little.

I've 100%ed the Monstadt, Liyue and Inazuma regions, and am getting started on Sumeru after several months' hiatus after presumed burnout. At the time, the game's issues were made clear to me, but I rubbed them off as having played too much. Needless to say my thoughts have not changed, and I have a lot to say about the game as a whole.

The combat, while looking flashy and complex on the surface, is monotonous and doesn't change at all in 100+ hours of gameplay, save for exclusive event or dungeon items, gimmicks or mechanics. Its really just: mash left mouse, occasionally hit e, q, or shift coupled with wasd to move, rinse repeat for the whole game. Couple this with basically mandatory, artificial grinding thanks to the world level scaling if you want to progress with the story and power up characters, and you have a slow, boring gameplay loop where, after you've explored everything excluding roadblocks, enemies are still spongy, and you do constant busywork to get dripfed primogems, level up, and ascencion materials to get new, stronger characters and power them up.

The gacha rates are pitifully low, far lower than other gacha centric games, and outside of events and doing everything you can, the currency required to make pulls is scarce. Doing daily commissions nets you 120 primogems, and you need 160 to take a single shot at the slots. That's not enough though, since characters can only be 4 or 5 star rarity, in a pool rife with 3 star weapons. Just getting a character is more reliable when relying on the gacha's "pity" system, where you're guaranteed something of four star rarity for every 10 pulls. Keyword, "something", because there's a good chance you'll just be getting a four star weapon that'll serves merely as upgrade fodder instead. Four star weapons are common enough if you're exploring and collecting materials, too, so its almost always a waste to only get a weapon out of your guaranteed 4 star drop, on top of the 9~ other 3 star weapons you got. 5 star drops are exceedingly rarer,with approx 70 pulls being deemed as reaching pity. Thankfully (at least in event banners, which you should only ever pull on anyway) these are reserved for characters. You have a 50/50 chance to get the 5 star character showcased on the banner or any 5 star character from the perma pool, being guaranteed the banner character for youd next 5 star pull if you get the latter result, which even carries over between banners - a rare example of respect for the player in this game. Naturally, you're incentivised to spend money to get these stronger, rarer, fanservicey banner characters whenever they become available, since their availability is on a timer before they're made unavailable for months again, and there's a good chance you aren't getting a lucky 5 star pull or going from 0 to 70 pity in a month.

The story is, for the most part, pretty by the numbers. There's your lost sibling, an ancient war, gods ruling the land, evil factions that are out to do evil things for the sake of being evil, etc. The inazuma story arc at least stood out, but I was disinterested for most of it, as there's an unreasonable amount of unskippable text, exposition and filler dialogue. That's right; the story is entirely unskippable, and parts of the world in this "open world exploration game" are locked behind it - you can't even mash through dialogue either, since there's a delay to it. I genuinely can't believe this game has been out for two years and it hasn't occurred to the devs that they should add a "skip dialogue" button, but that's the tip of the iceburg regarding poor game design on display here.

I think the worst offender, besides the monotony, grind, tedium, story gating and gacha, is the devs' assumed approach to enemy design, because it feels that whenever they made a new enemy or enemy type, they're made to be as obnoxious to the player as possible. From the Fatui and Abyss mages' obscene shield bars, or just stunlocking, a lot of enemies in this game absolutely suck to fight, and killing a single one often drags out for longer than it has any right to - long enough to the point where I often unintentionally drag enemies far enough from their spawn location for the game to decide "nope! this enemy is too far away! teleport him back with full health instead of continuing to fight the player!". Getting unfrozen or out of a bubble is miserable too - you're left for enemies to pile on you since you got stunlocked by near undodgeable attacks while you mash space bar and not left click, for some reason. Its such an uncomfortable button to mash too, and you can't rebind anything in this game.

To end on a somewhat positive note; the music is fantastic. And suits the mood and locales of the world wonderfully. Its a shame that some genuine talent and passion was wasted on what is essentially a glorified slot machine.