Ripping Off Breath of the Wild (and why more games should)

Just a few days ago, I was telling a friend on Twitter that I couldn’t get into gacha games like Fate Grand Order. I’ve been slowly making my way through the Fate/Stay Night franchise on Netflix, and the mobile rpg seems like it should be a logical step, but I just don’t have the mental faculties and focus to get through a game like that, even if the biggest draw isn’t the jRPG fights but the Visual Novel aspects and sprawling text based story. Especially because the biggest draw isn’t the jRPG fights, but the Visual Novel aspects and sprawling text based story. Then, not a day later, along comes Genshin Impact. A gacha game that seems designed for exactly the kind of thing that I like.

Who would have thought a Breath of the Wild clone could be so much fun? Me. I thought that. Please rip off Breath of the Wild more.

Lootboxes

The newest iteration of the original gacha game

First things first: Just what is a “gacha” game? Well, for one thing, by and large they’re phone games, which Genshin Impact already skirts around by being available on the PC (and PS4) as well as android and iOS. But overall, they’re mobile timewaster games, often with mechanics that facilitate being on mobile, like RPG gameplay and autobattling. In fact, in the one gacha game I played for a few weeks, Marvel S.T.R.I.K.E. Force, you could just entirely skip a battle in replay if you’d already gotten three stars or five stars or however many stars it considered perfect.

The thing that ties gacha games into a single vague genre is that they’re all about lootboxes and gambling, and have a crapload of features to encourage buying subscriptions and one time deals and other microtransaction offers. This is how they get their name, in fact. Its primarily a Japanese genre, with titans like Fate/Grand Order and Granblue Fantasy. The term “gacha” is a flippant shortening of the word gachapon. You know those little tiny collectibles that come in plastic bubbles for a few quarters at the supermarket exit? That’s a gachapon, and they’re big in Japan.

Gacha games are pretty exploitative, and if you’ve ever played a digital card game or anything with heavy microtransactions, you’re probably familiar with the balancing of six different in game currencies and the ability to break down or craft items to do conversions. Its basically the evolution of the original gambling pay-to-win system pioneered by Magic: The Gathreing all those years ago. I’m prefacing everything I say about Genshin Impact with that fact. Its definitely a gacha game.

You will constantly be stuffing garbage into your backpack and then smashing that one star garbage into your three and four star weapons so that you can level them up and increase their damage, and then you’ll take extra copies of those weapons and smash them together to increase their special bonuses. You will get hundreds of pages of adventuring advice and textbooks that you’ll make your characters binge read like they’re about to have an exam the next day to forcibly level them up. You’ll need to spend in-game currency to buy gambling tickets to use to get those characters if you want more than just the ones you get through the story (and usually you’ll just get more trash weapons). You’ll run around picking food off the ground to cook for minor bonuses or healing. I don’t even understand the rhyme or reason of how everything levels up. After reaching max level, you start having to switch to an entirely different system that requires specific combinations of items for each character.

Currently if I want to “ascend” my level 20 character I have to go fight a level 32 boss monster, and she can’t even participate because its immune or strong against her element (or I could buy the ingredient in a shop, but where’s the fun in that?).

I have dozens and dozens of crafting material objects that I don’t even know how to use, I just habitually pick them up because they all have a little shiny glitter, and I’m passing by anyway.

But here’s the thing about Genshin Impact:

Its not a jRPG.

Its not a game where you tap to make your heroes do their specials and can autobattle.

It has long and lengthy dialogue sequences, but I’m going to be honest I’m not paying much attention.

Genshin Impact is a Breath of the Wild clone.

And that’s amazing.

Breathing In The Wild

More games should rip off Breath of the Wild.

That’s it, that’s the tweet. That’s my thesis.

I have been playing this game for four days now. I absolutely can’t believe that I keep playing it, or that its held my attention so long that I haven’t even played anything else. This is a ridiculous little game and all of its mechanics are kind of bland. The combat is for the most part incredibly easy and you could button mash. I haven’t been keeping up with jamming the level up material into my characters or equipment, mostly keeping them all around the 10–15 mark. But it perfectly captures some of my favourite parts of Breath of the Wild.

Now, it doesn’t capture everything, I wanna say that up front. The cooking for instance, has none of the experimental charm of Breath of the Wild, and it takes a little bit of the environmental changes, like setting things on fire or getting things wet, but it never really goes all the way with it. You can burn things, you can set the grass on fire and it’ll cause large groups to start burning, but it never really stays on fire for very long, and you can’t catch the updrafts to fly even though the game also copies Breath of the Wild’s glider with a “Wind Glider”, which is actually just a pair of wings. The game refers to the Wind Glider as having a wooden frame, but its practically just a cape. Fire also doesn’t cook apples or burn sticks. In fact, you can’t pick sticks up at all.

But it does have an overworld absolutely rife with environmental puzzles. Every few meters is another puzzle. My favourite parts of Breath of the Wild weren’t the amazing stunts that any% speedrunners get up to, but all the little things to explore. I loved climbing a mountain and seeing a single rock and picking it up and having a Korok appear to tell me “yahaha! You found me!”.

I’ve done a handful of actual quests in Genshin Impact, but the thing I love the most, the thing that has me spending so many hours playing it when I probably should be doing other things — and even writing this is me once again putting off that daunting Control essay and hoping that I can finally get some good medication first — is just how much the game rewards exploration. I don’t even care about all the little trash I get, I just really love doing a thing only to see a treasure pop up to say “you solved the puzzle, congratulations!”

I often didn’t even know it was a puzzle! But even better is when you see something out of place and go “I bet that’s a puzzle”, only to see the chest appear. There are even a few times when I completed complicated, multi-step puzzles only for a whole dungeon to appear. A dungeon that is too high level for me to even enter, so the unlocking was ultimately its own reward.

I absolutely love seeing something off in the distance and saying “ooh, what’s that” and going out to poke at it and getting a little fanfare. I love games with this kind of box ticking where I can simply waste a day and almost meditatively seek out things to poke. The Assassin’s Creed franchise is known for this kind of thing, but the only thing that gave me half as much enjoyment was the Cultists in Odyssey. Simply opening boxes doesn’t do it for me. At least Black Flag had those little bits where you had to use Eagle Vision to find where X marks the spot.

Last night I figured out that one of the little icons that occasionally pops up on the map, a little star, actually shows the location of one of the little collectibles that you use to worship at the statues, which among giving you XP and other goodies, also gives you more Stamina, which just like in Breath of the Wild is extremely important for climbing and running and gliding. Also combat, I guess.

Speaking of the combat…

Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock… Lightning Fire Ice Water Earth Air Nature

Breath of the Wild has extremely unforgiving combat. Link is a tiny fragile little buttercup and without copious amounts of armour or stuffing his face with hearty dishes and iron shroom saute, he’ll quickly die in a few hits. Tactics is everything, and knowing the tells of enemies is extremely useful. Even bokoblins can prove to be a problem when you’re kitted out. Knowing what will burn well, how to take advantage of lightning and fire and ice, if you’ve got the ability to make them, can be extremely useful. There are even a few times you can cheese a puzzle with an alternate solution by knowing how to burn things or get lightning channeled through metals.

Like I said before, Genshin Impact doesn’t have fire spread nearly as much, and you can’t tactically boost yourself into the sky with it, even if you use the wind element to spread the flames. But you can spread the flames. One of the first puzzles I completed was a little set up of three lit torches and one unlit torch. I hadn’t gone to the very next quest marker and gotten the fire character, but I wanted to solve it anyway. I couldn’t make fire myself. But I could make gusts of wind. Maybe something would happen if I could put out the other three torches instead?

THIS WAS AN ACCIDENT

Nope! It turns out wind spreads fire! But that’s just as useful, so a little bit of creative pyromania later and I was opening my reward chest. And also burning.

This is the one place that Genshin Impact actually shines, in terms of combat. Overall so far I’ve found it to be a bit button mashy. Its fun, but in a sort of “zone out and murder things” sort of way. But when you add in the relatively complex elemental reaction system, that’s extremely fun. In the end all it does is make the enemy numbers go down quicker, but its also fun to pull off, and fun to watch happen.

Every element reacts with other elements, and there are seven of them to go around. Cryo will slow enemies down, but when Cryo and Hydro meet, it causes Freeze. Hitting a frozen enemy with Pyro will cause Melt damage. Pyro and Hydro causes Vapourize damage. Hydro and Electro result in Electro-Charged, which deals persistent damage and jumps from one target to the next. My favourite is Electro and Cryo, which is Superconduct, which deals huge area damage and also lowers defense. I love using the electric witch against Cryo Slimes because they fold like tissues. My second favourite is the way that Electro interacts with Pyro to create Overload, which is a massive fiery AoE. Honestly Electro is my favourite, and the one character I did jam with rare candies to level 20 was the Electro witch that you get from the first questline.

Mixing Anemo and Electro, Cryo, Hydro, or Pyro creates a Swirl that spreads the effect. Just like Anemo, Geo is a bit different and reacting with Electro, Cryo, Hydro, or Pyro creates “crystalize”, which pops out a little crystal you can grab to give yourself an elemental shield for a bit. Dendro is really the odd one out in that there isn’t any way to give it to an enemy, but some slimes have it, and wooden shields or obstacles have it, and when an enemy with Dendro is hit with fire, they burn more than usual.

Its simple and mostly intuitive, and you’re never punished for screwing up. Thawing out a frozen enemy with a fire attack is usually the domain of clumsiness, but here the attack will get the bonus multiplier that comes from Melt, and attacking it would have broken it anyway, so it feels good. The ability to carry four party members at a time from all the people you’ve gotten in the story or from gambling and swap between them more or less freely means you have plenty of opportunities to line up your party for ultimate elemental chaos. You even get bonuses from having party members of different elements, or for having two of a specific element, though like I said, I haven’t really felt the increased percentages really do much more than make the enemies fall faster.

The game is really simple, at least so far at Adventurer Level 15. I haven’t had a party wipe, and I’ve really only had a character die at all maybe two or three times. Healing items take about two minutes to cooldown, but I’ve got a character whose special attack grants the whole party regen, and I can give my characters equipment that gives them healing whenever I pick up money that drops from fallen enemies (which I’m currently rolling in, since I haven’t seen a point to buying anything). Even then, you can always just pause the game and go stuff your face, though I’m wondering how that will work in multiplayer.

All the enemies have fairly telegraphed attacks, and your characters even at the lower levels have thousands of health. I’m primarily playing the game on my PC, but I’ve played a few boss fights on my phone and while the controls are a good deal clunkier, I still felt like I had an ample window to move out of the way of the red circles on the ground that signified where bombs would fall or enemies would drop. Especially when you get more Stamina, and can dash out of the way, and keep up the charged attacks. Which are especially good with Catalyst users, since their magical attacks are always elementally empowered. The charge attacks of wizards will do a distant AoE, which is especially great when you drench a bunch of enemies and get them Wet only to follow up by switching out to the Electro wizard and zapping them all.

This is the first game where if I could have an all magic user party, I would, if not for the need to have someone with a claymore to break rocks and barrels. But I have a Geo catalyst user, and Geo is great for breaking rocks! Maybe I’ll get a Pyro catalyst user eventually, to burn barrels. You do get a Pyro bow user, and she gets a tight in aiming mode that charges up for a fire blast, but that’s way too slow and without my Steam controller’s gyro, aiming is too awkward, especially in fights.

I don’t know if the game gets super hard later on, and I imagine that playing on the PC will always give me an advantage. So far, I’ve gone up against enemies whose names were in red (the first enemy I faced was level 12 when I was level 1 in fact), and I keep going up against big boss monsters and defeating them handily. I assume that at some point the game’s difficulty will ramp up and I’ll be encouraged to spend my fake money to buy gambling tickets, and I’ve seen some people familiar with gacha to talk about how the drop rate for five star characters seems exceptionally low, but for now I’m really enjoying running around and just… finding things. Exploring.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t comment on a few of the elephants in the room…

Oh no, colonialism in a fantasy game???

I’d be slacking in my SJW duties if I didn’t mention this, but, yeah, wow. This copies Breath of the Wild in that it has enemy monsters that are simply Othered humanoids who are placed outside of society and exist solely to do harm and cause chaos.

The bokoblins, lizolfos, and other monsters that dot Hyrule are all inherently evil beings, who exist only to further the plans of Calamity Ganon and keep the good and honest folk cowering in their beds and warily traveling the roads. That they have clothing and rudimentary architecture and at least enough language and communication to understand horn signals doesn’t seem to matter much, they’re monsters. When they’re slain, they explode in a puff of smoke and disappear. Meanwhile the members of the Yiga clan that betrayed the Shiekah and tried to resurrect Calamity Ganon are evil, but considered human enough that their deaths would be unwholesome, and they usually disappear in a puff of smoke, vanishing like the ninja they are.

Genshin Impact is similarly problematic in this regard. There are bokoblin-esque enemies known as hilichurls all around, usually sitting around not bothering anyone in their own little camps. Sometimes they’ll be dancing around. They’re dressed in loincloths and have wooden weapons, and wear masks with big manes. They’re incredibly African coded, and despite the fact that they clearly have architecture of their own and there are places with houses that don’t match the local human styles, they’re characterized as completely monstrous, just wild animals who appear out of nowhere and threaten Civilization™. This kind of Othering is always a downside to games, but then again the entire concept of violent slash-’em-ups thrives on that sort of thing.

Its especially a bit 😬 when looking at the upcoming areas. Each element has a country. At the moment there’s Mondstadt, a Netherlands style country of windmills and wine and Liyue, the Earth focused Chinese inspired land and economic capital. Eventually there will be places inspired by Japan, India, France, Russia, and even possibly the Aztecs (judging from the name “Natlan”, though the images from the manga don’t look remotely Aztec, and only even slightly Amerindian). No chance to show a version of Africa that isn’t a stereotype of barbarian monsters.

This is clearly advanced infrastructure, they aren’t just living in tents. They have crossbows! That requires mechanical knowledge! Some of the big guys have metalwork axes!

There’s even one rather involved quest to literally help someone pilfer the graves of previous heroes who died in a great battle that involves the quest giver talking about how its okay for the two of you to break the magic barriers and go digging around in the graves, it was warded to protect against the barbaric hilichurls, not good adventurers. She goes on about how the hilichurls — whose camps each guard one of the elemental totems you have to activate to bring down the barrier — are all lazy, and lack courage and motivation, which is why they can never be gifted Vision (the magical elemental gemstone that humans can get when they face hardship and are blessed by the Gods). These lazy subhumans have architecture and the knowledge enough to create crossbows, though, and if they can’t get Visions, that means their shaman can perform magic without it! One book even suggests that the jewelry they wear can’t have been made by them. I haven’t completed but one part of the quest yet, so there’s still a chance that the whole thing is subverted and its actually the grave of hilichurl heroes and that’s why the three camps guarded the totems, but I won’t be holding my breath.

[[Also just as a side note, popping in to add this in post: The Hilichurls are communists.]]

Even if you ignore the usual problems with games creating subhuman enemies that exist only to be murdered and threaten Civlization™, there are still problems that are common to these type of fantasy settings. The Traveler’s first companions are all members of the Knights of Favonius, which as it sounds like are essentially Mondstadt’s fantasy cops. At one point when you’re being given a glider exam by one of the Knights that joins your party, another knight attempts to arrest you for not having a license, so clearly they lean more towards actual officers of The Law™ than they do simply town guards who keep the city safe from bandits and marauders.

When you continue with the gliding exam questline, you even learn that the character herself, the “gliding champion of Mondstadt”, has repeatedly lost her license and had to take the exam over again, the equivalent of a cop who gets away with multiple traffic tickets. But she’s a cute ditzy anime girl, so we overlook it.

At least the law still applies to cops, so that’s something.

That questline also has you attacked by “Treasure Hoarders”, which are all labourer coded characters who fight with things like shovels and molotov cocktails, both that toss out elemental aligned damage. Sometimes you’ll just get hit by crossbow bolts or thrown knives, though. These Treasure Hoarders are all dressed in plain tunics and slacks, and usually wearing bandanas over their faces. They’re supposed to be greedy, but how exactly is “Treasure Hoarding” supposed to be different than any of what I do as an Adventurer? Why are the hired goons of the man who stole an artifact from the cathedral all just poor people? Shouldn’t the authorities do something about that? Or are we, as characters who constantly plow through anything in our way, just supposed to not think about structural inequality?

I mean, it is probably that.

Of course, these people are still humans, so unlike hilichurls and all the other humanoid enemies, when they die they take a page from the Yiga clan handbook and throw a pellet at the ground, vanishing in a puff of smoke to show that you definitely didn’t do a murder, don’t write it down that you did a murder, because you definitely didn’t.

Aside from the characters you can get from the slot machine that are fantasy cops, you can also get what seem to be celebrities as well. My friend refuses to use her Geo Catalyst user because she’s a wealthy merchant. The wealthiest character in the world, according to her bio. My friend called her fantasy Jeff Bezos, but let’s be honest, Jeff Bezos is too unrealistic for a fantasy world.

I’ve even got what seems to be a famous bard. She’s also a fantasy cop, though. But I do have a made for battle battle maid, who is the domestic servant of the fantasy cops (and wants to join them).

Cops as playable characters and dehumanized Others as enemies. That’s unfortunately standard fantasy fare. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth talking about, even if I’m really just here for the vast open valleys and mountains and forests.

They have language. They have poetry.

More games should rip off Breath of the Wild

Once again, that’s the thesis. The best parts of this game are shamelessly straight from Breath of the Wild. More games should have that. Honestly, there’s a lot of stuff from Breath of the Wild that this doesn’t have that it probably should. Make aiming bows easier. Give me a horse. Put these statues at the top of huge towers I need to climb to open my map (you can have them shrink back down, I won’t mind). Let me look at things in first person and Pin them on my map so I can always have a guide marker that shows where it is in the distance. Let there be actual momentum when you stop gliding.

But at the end of the day, Genshin Impact isn’t really what I want here. I just want more Breath of the Wild. There’s tons of boxes to tick, with hunting down challenges, finding treasure chests out in the open, and even doing the things listed in the Achievements pages or the Adventurer’s Guide, or doing daily commissions. Doing something new and cool for the first time and seeing that little achievement notification is so exciting. Its a meaningless little drip of serotonin. And I need that right now.

Although to be fair, I probably should actually go back to Breath of the Wild itself. I’ve beaten the four Divine Beasts twice, and I figured out how to get the DLC on cemu, so I even went through the one for the motorcycle, but I’d have to defeat the giant shrine guardian, and that’s such a tedious boss fight. I just wanna explore.

Its amazing to me that so many games are open world box ticking events, but so few of them have actual exploration rewards and puzzles. Let me stumble across something out of place and slightly more than a spray of confetti. Let me do Korok puzzles. Give me puzzle shrines, which is something Genshin Impact doesn’t have an equivalent of.

Make exploration fun, and give me a reason to go for it by putting pieces of candy all over the place. You could take out the combat and I’d still be happy to play that.

Anyway, you know the drill, its the call to action. If you liked this little writing on my current hyperfixation, or my other, more detailed writings, please support me. You can do so financially by going through Patreon, or if you’d prefer a one time donation I have tip jars at Ko-Fi, CashApp, and Paypal.

Its my birthday month, if that helps encourage you. I’d like to have moneys for my birthday.

You can also support me simply by Like, Share, and Subscribing. Although on Medium “Likes” are called “Claps”. But there’s still Liking on Twitter. You can also check out some of my other writing, such as this one about the thing that was grabbing my attention two weeks ago: Eldritch Horror the board game. Or where I wrote probably more words than anyone ever has about B game Murdered: Soul Suspect.

I really will try to get on that Control analysis soon enough, assuming anyone is still reading this far. If you are, comment telling me what your favourite thing from Breath of the Wild is, or if there are other games you think capture that feeling of exploration.