Trench Coat Categories

Saw a comment that described Genshin Impact as 'a sci-fi game, just wearing a fantasy coat' and this was while I was exploring the moon. It is very true. What starts out as a lovely cute cookie-cutter fantasy game complete with the (very new trope) cliché Adventurers' Guild and the city knights etc., soon becomes a game rife with philosophical introspection, difficult dilemmas, and questions about Fate, destiny, moral and ethical rights and righteousness; all strung together with time travel and parallel realities, the vast empty cosmos, unknown depths of space, veiled skies and absent deities.

I mean, when we talk about hey, you start off as a lowly adventurer, work up to saving the continent, then the world, then the star, then reality, and at some point go from rummaging in forgotten caves to visiting technologically advanced civilisations on the Moon - which is itself no longer just a chunk of rock but an irreplicable feat of technological might - I just like to point out that FFXIV did all of this first.

I'm not even joking.

But to return to my original point, Genshin is getting far enough into its storyline to start losing the trench coat of another genre and showing its sci-fi basis without filters and obscuring fantasy window dressings. The result is some pretty fucking good landscapes and scenery, and a moment I couldn't get on Kamera that was straight out of something like Dune or Star Wars.

Spoiler alert: huge, insane levels of spoiler-ness to follow. Stop scrolling if you ever want to experience the progression from fighting a maddened dragon to this madness for yourself.