If you spend some time in the Genshin Impact lore community, you may think that the game has a fantastic storyline with great dialogue. Unfortunately, that is the farthest thing from the truth. While the game features profound lore, I cannot say the same about their story. Although Genshin Impact has a decent storyline going for it, it is deeply dragged down by its lackluster dialogue. This claim comes from someone who has spent years playing this game and experienced all the patches.
Let me make it clear. I’m not saying that Genshin Impact has the worst dialogues compared to other games. However, the characters have this tendency to talk too much. It’s as if they don’t understand how to speak straight to the point and must spend several lines of dialogue to finally say what they want.
This constant beating around the bush makes it feel like the game treats its players as children. They need to make sure that everyone understands what’s going on, so they repeat things that are already clear the first time several times. Did you fail to get it the first time? Oh, you did? How about I repeat it again to make sure?
The first example that came to my mind is when the Traveler and Paimon were talking during a main mission. I won’t tell you the details, but there was this big revelation about the Traveler’s sibling that made me very engaged with the story. After that climactic cutscene, the Traveler spoke with Paimon, and she decided to force me to listen to her summary of the events.
The game even allowed me to say, “No, I get it. You don’t need to explain again,” but she continued to summarize the events! I told the game that I understood and was paying attention, but it treated me as if I was stupid. That utterly ruined my mood to the point that I’m still convinced that Genshin Impact writers have no confidence in their dialogue or are underestimating their players’ intelligence.
A Paimon-Shaped Problem
Paimon is another factor that made reading the dialogues in Genshin Impact frustrating. HoYoverse intends to make this character this cute mascot who accompanies the Traveler. They want to make fans like her, but they fail spectacularly. I believe most of the player base just tolerates or even dislikes Paimon.
Most of the time I only tolerate her presence, but the moment above made me hate her. HoYoverse always uses her as their mouthpiece whenever they want to emphasize something. Unfortunately, the things they usually want to emphasize are something that I already noticed or knew beforehand.
The fact that HoYoverse rarely lets the Traveler talk and makes Paimon the one interacting with other characters makes it worse. Sometimes, I wonder which one of them is the true protagonist, considering how much screen time this gremlin gets. It doesn’t help that I don’t enjoy her humor. She always tries to fool around, and her jokes rarely land.
My other complaint about Genshin Impact‘s dialogue is the slow text speed. I don’t understand why HoYoverse can’t be bothered by making the text appear faster. I also play Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero, and they don’t have this issue. Even when I’m skipping ahead, the texts are still crawling slowly as if they’ve been shot.
It’s disheartening to see Genshin Impact‘s story dragged down by its subpar dialogue. I believe that if HoYoverse starts to trust its players and write dialogues that are complex, mature, and contain subtext, the story will be elevated. Yet their insistence on treating their player base as children makes it hard for me to take the game’s story seriously.
