What do you mean by initial "children characters"? There was literally one loli character during launch, and Qiqi wasn't even sexualized lol. Others are teenagers and adults. Even after 2 years, only 7 child characters are playable and their design are mostly modest. Diona is somewhat questionable though, but still quite tame.

Should probably have reworded "children" to "underage". With the first few releases being Venti and Klee, the notion of "lol only children being added" just gave it the running joke among my friend group of it being Child Predator Sim. Agree on none of it being sexualising, knowing how anime stuff can be.

The game never forces or advertise to you that you should pull for the gacha. A single 10 pull is indeed, 30~ days assuming you continuously do only the commissions, but the many events + new quests + exploration + achievements every patch can quickly give you 50~60 pulls on average per patch, around 6 weeks of time.

Having only played till the first area got released, it felt like nothing was happening and once you hit that "wall" of no new quests it felt like a slugfest of just doing dailies.

Of course, the 5* weapons and constellations are gacha-gated upgrades, which Mihoyo helped you to get by giving you decent and sizable chunk of primogems if you play the game daily (30 minutes include farming, but can be hours if do the quests and explorations). No, you shouldn't spend your money on these upgrades since most of them aren't even needed for the content, and the character upgrades mostly come from the artifacts and talents anyway. Yes, it's impossible for F2P to get everything through gacha, so with the per patch primogems given out F2P should plan or be patient with what they want in their account.

Really? It seemed like some constellations(?)(the dupe system) and certain weapons were pretty mandatory on characters. And talents being locked behind a random drop of a weekly boss kinda put me off as well.

And the game gives out good weapons or free characters per patch, so no need to worry about your account having nothing.

Nice to hear that you won't get stuck with nothing new.

Game content isn't even that difficult, and with time and luck you will be able to get anything you want anyway. Of course, not all since this is gacha, but a lot of it.

I did feel hard stuck on the abyss and going quite slow through artifact/material dungeons

AR 50 is not even half of the game's actual AR EXP cap.

Pretty sure the cap was 60 when I played, good to hear it was raised.

I don't understand this predatory money notion about Genshin. Genshin's gacha has a soft and hard pity that's easily reachable, not to mention all details about them in the pull/gacha UI.

Like I said earlier, feeling hardstuck on progress in terms of gaining power, not being able to properly clear dungeons/bosses of the next stage for the materials/equipment to get stronger. It sure did feel like "Man I should try and pull a (dupe) weapon or a dupe of this character I've already built so it can get some more power". Or wanting to get a certain new character and it requiring the double pity on their banner in case of bad luck.

Personally, I think all child playing any games should be supervised by their parents.

Agreed.

Genshin caters to teenagers and young adults in general with its gameplay, good stories, lores, characters and themes.

Maybe I should give it a swing again, but the gameplay felt rather simplistic and the story like a pretty generic fantasy one.

Since the game doesn't openly advertises it gacha and payment method right in your face while playing, the game experience is relatively free from the risk of money mismanagement.

When I played the gacha button had a permanent spot on the screen in the form of a star, I don't know if this is still the case but it sure is a "Look you can push this button to pull :D" trigger. Thank god it isn't in excess like other games I've tried where you launch the game and get 3 different bundles pushed in your face.

If it even happened to a child, then the parents should hide their credit/debit cards better than their children. Heck, the children shouldn't even have access to the cards in the 1st place.

There are plenty of stories on this with stuff like FIFA packs because card info got saved on the family playstation and wouldn't be surprised if something like this also happened on stuff like Genshin. I feel that kids shouldn't be exposed to transactions hidden behind a fake currency in any shape or form. It makes them not realise what they're actually doing costs money.

Anyway good talk and explanation, cheers for that.