I Had a Blast with Genshin Impact's 'Reel Ad-Venture' Event

Event Overview#

Impressions#

It was ridiculously fun. I used to love those sentence-reordering questions that very occasionally showed up on Japanese or English exams, and this brought back all the fun of that.

What Made It Fun as a Game#

Every time there’s a Genshin Impact event, I’m genuinely impressed by how amazingly polished the minigames are, despite having nothing to do with the main storyline. A lot of the time, the gameplay is so easy it feels underwhelming, or the rip-off is so blatant it makes you worry for them, but this event hit such an exquisite difficulty sweet spot that it left just the right amount of room for thinking, making it deeply enjoyable. Plus, the gameplay system didn’t feel like a clone of an existing game; it seemed to have a decent amount of originality (though that could just be my own ignorance).

Now, the clues for reordering basically fall into two categories:

• Context
• Character names appearing in the synopsis (domain knowledge)

And the balance between the two was exceptionally well done. In every stage, if you already know what the characters look like, their personalities, and how they relate to other characters, solving it is a breeze. But even without that knowledge, it’s designed so that you can still deduce the right answer purely from context.

The brilliance of this balancing act shows up in the stage progression too. The early stages place high importance on domain knowledge, but as you move to the later stages, that requirement gradually fades. By the final stage, it’s framed as a tabletop role-playing game scene, requiring almost no knowledge of the Genshin world whatsoever. This was probably done out of consideration for players who haven’t progressed the story as far as Fontaine yet.

About the Parodies#

I burst out laughing when the first stage turned out to be an El Shaddai parody.

I wondered if El Shaddai was famous outside Japan too and looked into it. Sure enough, there was a Know Your Meme entry for it, but I could only find a single example in the English-speaking sphere actually mentioning this parody.

El Shaddai | Know Your Meme

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron (Japanese: エルシャダイ アセンション オブ ザ メタトロン), also known as El Shaddai (エルシャダイ) for short, is a 2011 action-platforming video

knowyourmeme.com

That made me think English-speaking players might not have gotten much out of this gag… but digging a bit further, it turns out this is also a parody of HELLDIVERS 2. And in the English-speaking community, there were way more comments pointing that one out!

INTRO CINEMATIC - HELLDIVERS™ 2

#steam #steamgames #cinematic Game link https://store.steampowered.com/app/553850/HELLDIVERS_2/☑️ Please support the channel with a LIKE... and turn on notif...

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Scenes like this are happening throughout the galaxy

Scenes like this are happening throughout Mondstadt

Layering in a double parody so that it works across multiple cultural spheres is incredible. Even in terms of the difficulty tuning I mentioned earlier, having knowledge of the parody source act as an extra clue alongside context and domain knowledge—and executing that in the very first stage, which doubles as a tutorial—feels genuinely brilliant.

So, I decided to do some more digging into the parodies featured throughout this event.

For Stage 2, I caught subtle vibes of the classic “Bunmeido 3 o’clock snack” commercial (a famous retro Japanese TV commercial with dancing puppets). Nobody else seemed to point this out, though, so this might just be me overthinking it (hiyayakko, Japanese otaku slang for reaching too far).

As for Stage 3, it’s an outright parody of a Monster Hunter: World TV commercial. The nostalgia is real.

モンハンワールド お年玉 顔芸CM 山田孝之 PS4 ゲーム

モンハンワールド お年玉 顔芸CM 山田孝之 PS4 ゲームよろしければ高評価ボタンをお願いします。他の動画も見て行って下さいね～。面白い、かっこいい、かわいい、感動、話題の日本のテレビCM動画をご紹介していますので、チャンネル登録よろしくお願いします。2018山田孝之の秘密◆PON!https://www.yo...

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I couldn’t find any information about parodies for Stage 4.

In Stage 5, Navia apparently strikes the exact same pose as a Wojak meme.

On a More Serious Note#

I started thinking that parodying all these memes carries a deeper significance beyond just being funny. It’s really fascinating that aside from the Wojak meme, every single one is a parody of a video game commercial. In a way, it feels like a message from the developers to the players, saying something like, “Don’t worry, we’re gaming geeks just like you.”

To say something a bit provocative, the reason I’m disappointed in the vast majority of Japanese domestic games is that far too often, they fall into the pattern of: “I can’t believe this was made by people who actually love games.”

A recent symbolic example was the shutdown of BLUE PROTOCOL. There are plenty of differing opinions on what went wrong with that game, but the criticism that left the deepest impression on me was: “It doesn’t feel like it was made by people who love games.”

Blue Pro was just one spectacular explosion; personally, I tend to get pretty much the same impression from games released by almost any domestic publisher.

What’s more, I feel like this criticism applies not just to games, but to all kinds of media. Far too often, I find myself thinking: “Did you make this because you genuinely love [insert content here]? Or did you just want to make a quick buck?”

And the reason I consider Genshin Impact a great game is because I can say with absolute confidence that behind it are geeks who genuinely love games. At every turn, you can feel these bizarre obsessions that couldn’t possibly contribute to direct profit, and in that, I can’t help but sense an authentic love for games and a quiet, comforting reassurance.

Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I can’t really say. If you take a cynical view, you could see it as a clever strategy designed to boost sales by exploiting the camaraderie that memes evoke, and that I’m just happily playing into their hands…

Still, for my part, I prefer to believe these parodies are the pure, honest expression of a geek’s worst habits.