>>979504
I can't comment on the story just yet, I'm still slogging through Natlan. I used the quick start event thing to go to Natlan so I could level my Lama and the quality difference feels insane. Whenever I go back to Natlan, I want to kill myself.
>regional traversal gimmick
Natlan's is very unfun. I can't explain why.
>aesthetic
Natlan loses. It feels like red Liyue?
>OST
Nod Krai wins again.
I've picked it up again (stopped actively playing around Fontaine, lost basically all interest around Natlan) because Columbina sex and while the game has flaws I feel as if I can better pinpoint them now.
Exploration isn't like fast-fast. It's a bit slow. Sometimes a bit too slow, especially with how running consumes stamina. This is mostly an issue when climbing / swimming. But at the same time, and I realized this when exploring some Nod Krai parts to get regional mats, this adds a sense of scale to the world. Areas feel big, it feels as if you're actually exploring something, traversing big ruins, climbing steep hills. The OST choice (fuck you Natlan) usually adds a sense of ethereal feel to the whole thing.
I'm probably going to get some flack for bringing up another game but if you compare this to WuWa, you notice a very different design philosophy. The latter feels like an open world exploration game with the exploration tacked on after the fact. Chests aren't spread out, they're now consolidated to three locations. You can fly at 10x walking speed. This is great if you just want to treat your world like a walking simulator but absolutely compromises the sense of scale and exploration accomplishment. You should not be able to 100% a new zone an hour after it's out. The speed does feel good but the world feels smaller for it - while also resulting in you visiting an area once and never returning to it afterwards. It's a weird trade-off.
I think it's a bit of a shame a lot of gacha players are as tribalistic as they are and absolutely refuse to acknowledge that another game may do things well.
Thanks for reading my blog. I'll go back to the Natlan interlude story chapter soon. Surely I'm past the worst part by now.