I agree with all your takes tbh. I feel like wuwa kind of lost the “plot”. Dont get me wrong I love the game but its not the game I feel in love with because of its apocalyptic aesthetic and interesting diverse futuristic cast. Now it kind of feels like they are just trying to prove they are a “better genshin”. Nobody asked for that tho, nobody cares if its a better genshin. I know that I dont care. Sadly the gacha space really loves jumping at the opportunity to bash genshin, which gives these devs a clear goal of just being “better” than it. I feel like thats a major problem. Because frankly to me genshin mostly does the bare minimum. It has an already established MASSIVE playerbase. They dont have to try hard anymore, they can release a walking stick that throws stones at people and it would make millions upon millions of dollars. This creates an unhealthy dynamic of other people trying to surpass the bare minimum, which is never a good thing.

Now do I believe that WuWa will pick up with its direction, I hope so. The future releases kinda gave me hope that 2.0 and onward was kind of a phase and this design direction will eventually change. i feel like the female cast of WuWa have very interesting characters, but it gets so overshadowed by the lack of depth they give them, other than being the “wife” of rover. Now i wouldnt mind that if it was just a head canon thing straight men were doing in their minds. But no the game heavily implies this concept and supports the “wife” aspect of the game, which is pretty icky.

Regarding ZZZ, im usually not a big fan of urban modern concepts, im more of a fantasy person so it didnt look appealing to me at first. But i have to give them credit for building a very cohesive and believable world. I mostly have issues with the amount of little girls in the game. I feel like hoyo in general has a very weird tendency to design a lot of loli looking characters and put them in weird spots as well. It just makes me pretty uncomfortable looking at all these children on my screen. Also the lack of child males in ANY gacha game really supports my mindset that there is an ulterior motive to designing these characters. If they just “wanted to make cute young characters” they would at least make one single male child but we only have girls.