When I talk about how involving old characters and making the story not just like a date/121 actually helps the world feel alive, I get told "Not everything has to be like Genshin." And I'm just like bro, that's not a Genshin thing. That's a story thing. 95% of stories told in a serialised fashion have a recurring cast of characters. And when they don't there's usually some other artistic value they're going for instead. As opposed to monetary concern about selling one character.
It’s hilarious when you bring up the importance of ensemble recurring casts adding depth to characters and you get people brushing it off saying not every story has to be like “hoyos”. Like bruh, play any actual jrpg and you’d realize hoyo is just really inspired by jrpg stories .
This is exactly why I adore the Anecdote feature that gives you a quick look at what x character is up to today, even without it being tied to the main story. It's very slice-of-life, like I enjoy getting a peek at whatever new stupidity Itto got himself into from time to time.
The fact that u can always just see the meeting point characters even outside any quests is so awesome, i love seeing odette and her dancers on the stage and flins doing random shit on his island
I've been begging Hoyo for things like anecdotes for yeaaaars. I'm glad they're doing them more. I wish the characters that are playable were in the overworld all the time as NPCs. We don't even need voice for them outside of the anecdotes, just about living their lives. The next level would be for characters to actually be at the place they say they will on their birthdays.
The anecdote feature really is incredible for making the world feel alive. I especially love when other characters are out in the wild. Makes me feel like they do their own exploring too and it's a nice surprise.
I mean if I have to choose between a game that does good after sale and a game that does not, I would choose the former. And Genshin double down on having more interaction with the characters since they introduced travelogue and meeting points. Even 1.1 character like Childe gets tons of anecdotes, it’s reassuring that your character has higher chances of not being completely abandoned. Justice for Emilie though.
Adding to the list, Genshin also does their low rarity characters justice. Many are still relevant in meta like Bennett, Chevreuse, Iansan, Faruzan, etc., and they also get plenty of screentime (well, most of them anyway. some are not so lucky). Heck, even Heizou who doesn't have a big role in the main story and isnt meta, has SO MANY anecdotes available to him, even more than five stars.
It makes the world feel more... natural.
Also customers have more sense of security. Their favorite characters most likely will still have content down the road even if they're no longer new.
Emilie birthday art this year is so barebones if you compare it to albedo’s, ayaka’s. I legit thought they just put her 3d model a’la zzz birthday art too lmao
I do think tbf to WuWa that the story approach they take are still stories, it's just YMMV on how much you enjoy that type of self-insert super centralized main character type story. It clearly has an audience. That said, for me as well, not really a fan. One of my favorite things about HSR was with Amphoreus the way so many of the characters had these deep long-standing relationships with each other completely independent of us such that you could clearly understand what they were up to before we got there. Whereas when I was playing WuWa there were chars I liked where it was still like okay but what are you doing when we're not there?
You gotta give HSR its plaudits on this one too, if they're going to get slandered for the SPs. The SPs exist because they do focus heavily on integrating preexisting characters into the story. Obviously they could just integrate the old characters and have new characters as well such that they don't need SPs, but at that point, it's either way too many characters to give proper development to, or they don't have anything to put on banner.
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u/CausticCat11 6h ago
That's what I'm always saying, it's like a big breathing world, meanwhile other games just dump the old areas and move on