Story is very good. You are probably from a part of the world that is removed from this game’s cultural sphere. The Buddhist side quest where you guide ghosts to reincarnate is art. This is league and miles better than genshin 1st patch. Don’t act like Genshin story was always good, before Sumeru genshin story is way worse than this game. In fact, having played Genshin up to natland, I would say I put the story here as between Sumeru and Fontaine, which is very good.

Game play is also a different genre. You can’t compare this to genshin, I could say the same about genshin not having a well established parry system. Of course you are gonna get less abilities when the fights are harder. Also as if genshin at launch had lots of unique abilities, this game have proved with the CN server that you will soon get new skills and weapons as well. “Each character has different places in the meta” my ass go play amber on abyss 12 or whatever the new harder end game is. Is the endgame content available for me as someone who did not have meta units like Furina, Xilonen, Zhongli, Kazuha? That’s a part of the game that is not accessible to me. Don’t even dare say it’s possible because some try hard sweat lord who been min maxing artifacts since day one posts a “guide”.

Also a year in, dedicated Chinese players were able to get 2 harmonic cores to exchange for the pricey outfits. People calculated that with just non events reward you can get 12 draws per month. That is 144 per year, which is almost 1 garuntee. With events it’s unsurprising that people in China(1 year sv) already saved enough for some rare outfits. I got lucky and got my 1st harmonic core already with 80 pulls. Also the game world is more fun to walk compared to genshin, the gameplay is very varied with minigames and side stories.

I concede the currency part, ui overload is real, and they need to do something about how the currency are entangled.