hoyoverse have one and only one thing they ever want to be doing: the epic shounen anime dramatic showdown scene. all the other writing building up to the big moment is frustrating -- characters launch into excessive monologues, overshare their life stories, do not react to critical new information or ask followup questions; the main character has an unusually high proportion of weird asshole dialogue lines in minor sidequests; there are problems with the lorebooks that would take a longer writeup to explain. this all looks like a bunch of scattershot complaints, but i really do think there is a deep and singular issue here with what the writing team think they're doing as opposed to what's actually happening on screen; i just haven't fully formulated the exact description of the problem yet.

on top of all this, it's a gacha single player game, and the wretchedly slow character progression systems that come with this are widely known. i'm used to these by now, but that doesn't mean it's good.

the dramatic moments are cool though! i'll have a good time with this for a bit -- at least the turn based poor-man's-smt battle system is something i enjoy, and it's fun to beat up goons in space sometimes -- but, especially after some experience with genshin, it's clear that this stuff is just not really for me.

EDIT: you know what, i'm bumping this up half a star cos some of the writing is winning me over. the text chats in particular are high level.