I mean Natlan era was the one that they tried to do things extra way but it didn’t worked out. It still gave the devs experience and some of the features were developed to what we see in Genshin today. I can’t wholeheartedly say that Natlan was bad, it just wasn’t really my thing.
I loved Natlan World quests tho I think it was Natlan that saw a huge improvment on how they present world quests and since then it has only improved.
I feel like Natlan finale left a bad impression to a lot of people including mine....but tbh everything but the Finale was really solid Archon quest wise, it wasn't Nod-krai lvls of good but much better than Inazuma for sure.
I think the way they took the story was too much ‘Mavuika&friends feat. Capitano,mc and Ororon’ where Mavuika has the most screentime. But even then they didn’t do justice to her story since she’s such a cool and strong character inside out, failing to showed off her complexity of being the ‘perfect sun’ human archon (where she is too selfless that it hurts, they never managed to make people understand her at all if they didn’t read her character story and did some reading between the lines) was on them.
Otherwise Natlan was the nation that they started upping story presentation. Longer cutscenes with better quality, more characters animation like hugging or holding things, interactive maps for only story usages etc. Even the meeting point was born from the feedback of tribal quest. People praised Nod Krai to high heaven but without Natlan it wouldn’t have been that good. And I actually had so much fun with events and exploration. They can never make me hate Natlan.
Tbh they handled Capitano perfectly it was Mavuika that they fumbled. Capitano's entire life goal after the cataclysm was to die and since he had so many souls inside him that also needed to be put to rest he had an even greater responsibility and the way he challenged Ronova to trigger a paradox due to his curse was awesome to witness.
Right now he is certainly not really "Dead" his soul was absorbed by the Lord of the Night kingdom and that's also is what's powering her up to help her maintain Natlan's leylines.
I disagree. I find his story to be rushed and convenient plot device to spare Mavuika from dying. And I feel it didn't really help that he had so little screen time, and not doing much for most of the final archon quest, other than aura farming and dipping out.
Having an end of goal wanting to die feels like a convenient way to push him out of the spotlight and remove any potential for playability.
As far as his story and reasoning goes it all makes sense given the Kanriah'n lore...but at the same time having so little screentime is the result of the entire region story being cramped into just a few acts...that decision hurt all the characters tbh.
In retrospect, the only thing I wasn’t so enthusiastic about during Natlan was the AQ. The WQ remained excellent (even if I couldn’t care about the Little One at the beginning), the world designed remained interesting even though I didn’t like the idea of it getting more and more linear, and the lore remained great. The music too remained excellent. If you’d consider that a flop, that’s on you and your own expectations. I would’ve loved to see more melanin but from the few ones we got, Mualani and Xilonen are still among my favourite character designs in Genshin ever.
It wasn’t the most successful experiment definitely but I think it’s still a worthwhile endeavour by the devs if only to see what works and what doesn’t.
Considering how successful Nod-Krai and now Snezhnaya are, that makes only a single “flop” since they doubled down on scope since Sumeru. That’s a 80% batting average any RPG series would love to have.
They already had successful formula from Sumeru and Fontaine but still decided to try and bring changes, did different things for Natlan. And I gave them credit for that, no one can tell me the devs don’t love this game. It wasn’t all that successful and there were weird things but it was a fun ride. And the ending patch with Benny was perfect.
The entire discourse of Genshin allegedly phoning it in that has been so loud since Natlan is so confusing to me. If anything, how much they tried to mix up the gameplay and the world design are only showing they did the exact opposite.
The worst is that we had to wait a whopping 3 months just to play that Act V… which was disappointing. Act IV was great for an ending and Act V should have just been the epilogue, cuz we mostly ride the wave and beat that Abyss without much tactics or brain, just trust in the power of friendship. Then spent half the Act dancing and celebrating. Thankfully they learnt and upped their game for NK and Snez.
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u/Dramatic_endjingu 5h ago
After paralogism patch it’s been running crazy strong and stable, like everything just works out fine for them. It’s insane.