i just fell like natlan is like different game already. we are not even go to "different region" its as if we are going to whole another dimension. in my opinion, at least thats how i feel about it (no i havent played, i stoped played since 10 months ago, so i only see it from someone else stream and post on social media), on the way of trying to be creative on their gameplay core, they just make the new region feel disconected from the rest of the game
@@Narigane I mean it is kinda, region with the most dragon influence, region with no proper laylines, when the people leave they literally lose their memories, human Archon not one pretending to be human a genuine human, a normal woman. It implies the souls of the Natlanian people due to the layline issues don't get reincarnated via the same system also. Theres also the partnership with Saurians, the constant Abyssal attacks which no other region even Sumeru barely deals with. The Withering? Whats that compared to pure Abyssal corrosion and Eldritch eyes? The broken Firmament that Wanderer only spoke of the fact the sky is fake years ago. It genuinely just feels like people weren't paying any real attention to the story, or even using their eyes. The Night Kingdom even if you were skipping everything should of made you think something was different, there's nowhere else like it in the game. How about the Lack of Seeles? Theres like or 5 something in the entire game. The weapons bar possibly Mavuika's are all made by Xilonen, which just shows a testament to how smart her character is. Natlan is pretty much alone dealing with the Abyss its not wonder they utilise everything they can.
I stated i havent played the story didnt I? Last I touched the game was February, during Birb Momy if i remember correctly. "not paying attention". I dont want to bring this up, but Hoyo needs serious evaluation on how they present the story. I stated, from outside view without touching the actual story, the whole natlan thing is just disconnected from the rest of the game. But seriously tho, i still stand on what i said. Everything is "off" just like what you said. Even the whole characters concept. That graple hook dude with 8 bit creature, a DJ with roller coaster, and the latest a biker with helmet? I'm more convinced if it said they are collab character or if they say Natlan simply fused with other dimension because space unstability or something. I'm tired with weird "lore". I'm FGO player dealing so much bullsht lore to justify their genderbending character or questionable design/appearance/class.
@@Infelious yeah, "they utilize everything they can" and yet when faced with the Abyss, motorbikes are too precious to be used, they have to use slow balloons instead.
Natlan in free time: Enjoys DJ, ride rollarskate, motorbike, flying gun Natlan at war time: Riding a slowest balloon ever created by mankind while your friends and familes are dying
Theres such and easy fix to this- USE THE DRAGONS THE NATION HAS, fuck sake imagine how fucking cool it would be if chaska rode a dragon INSTEAD of a yknow- A FUCKING GUN
@@Woofles1227 this is exactly what im tryna say How cool is it if natlan had a same character to jinhsi from wuthering waves Or have the literal archon ride the damn dragon during her ult. But no, her bike is her claymore now, might as well make a bike banner for her instead of her claymore
I remember when i first started playing genshin during the release of inazuma i had an african friend hype me up about the story. He was so excited for natlan to come out because he was excited to see a character look like him and me(im puerto rican). Of course i knew they wouldn't add any real dark skinned characters much less make them important.(and i was right iansan is literally like a background character in the main story) for some reason i still held on to hope that they would at least make a majority of the characters some type of dark skinned at least the archon but boy when i saw the teasar did my heart sink. I think its easy for you to say you dont care cause you're light skinned, so of course you're represented, but think of it like this if a region based of china or japan or even russia were to have all characters that were dark skinned would you think youd be fine with that? Or the people from said culture ? No right? So why do I have to be reminded every day even in games i use to escape and relax that my skin color doesnt fit someones fantasy. For you its okay cause you dont know what that feels like. That same friend when streaming his game would hear the background music and be like "im hearing my people but not seeing my people". honestly i have a theory that the natlan characters werent supposed to be light i mean look at the their markings you can barely see them. The whole region suffers from poor designing with the whole modern technology not being to designed to fit with the world. It all feels slapped on.like when i think of genshin i think of anime medieval fantasy now it feels too modern for my taste. All in all i haven't touched genshin after the first natlan story quest cause it left a very bad taste in my mouth even the power of friendship thing. I wish i could get back all the money i spent
Im also light skinned but Im from south africa and so used to seeing so many types of skin colors these games always feel kinda boring design wise. its so weird seeing white npcs in dreads and everything... I think while representation matters, it isnt explicitly needed and not every game has to represent every type of person but... if you intentionally draw on someone elses culture then bastardise it or remove the people from that inspiration it just feels so icky. its fine to have inspiration but when you only take bits and pieces it does feel extremely pointed and on purpose. even outside of darker skin the skin they have in game is RIDICULOUS. im pale as a vampire, havent seen the sun in years bc I tan so easily and yet mavuika is sm paler then me!! why cant we just have healthy tans like its the nation of FIRE its HOT do they think desert ppl are paler than sand?? sumeru had mostly tan people in the desert and natlan doesnt even have a slightly different shade. its just boring and you can tell theyre avoiding skin variety which just makes the lack of variety feel worse and more pointed. hell even chinese people have tons more skin variety than in the game currently its just wild
As an African American my only issue is if they're gonna take inspiration from something at least have the decency to have a couple of representation of said character designs in the game. Do I expect a whole army of certain races? No but if this game is marketed to be world global I feel like it wouldn't be too much to ask for. If they can nail down liyue to a T I don't see why they can't put in the effort to the same for other regions. Doesn't need to be perfect but put more thought into it especially those outside of china playing the game look forward to this.
No one really cried much during sumeru, us brown gorlies didn't care much about it either tbh, idk why will you cre about it now. Just accept that they aren't gonna do jack about it and enjoy the game for what it is
@@Anika9691 I'm not sure when you played Genshin but when Sumeru's first leaks were introduces (NPCs and playable characters), people were hella mad which was why they changed the NPCs (sounds like Natlan again). There were debates about Dori's designs, why the desert enemies had features associated with POCs and why they were enemies while the 'good' people didn't have those features, etcs. The only good thing people liked were the music and food. Also, if genshin is still marketing towards it's global fanbase and taking inspiration from REAL WORLD PEOPLE AND PLACES with their own history (of colonisation), they should at the very least respect the source material and people they're profiting from.
the tech doesn't seem out of place to me at all b/c it just feels like afro futurism imo. the issue that makes it feel bad is what you mentioned though. I have feelings about why there's so much pushback but I'm not tryna get into it tbh lol. I think the original intent was to have a lot more melanin in the playable characters but somewhere between concept and production, upper management probably stepped in. there's too much stuff in natlan to make me feel like the artists didn't want to make a far more diverse cast of playable characters.
@@Anika9691 ppl DID criticise Sumeru. It was fucking weird seeing nahida be neon white and every Akademiya person be pale while the desert ppl who are slightly tan were called "savages" and former slaves. After that a lot of people's criticism was soothened by Fontaine being kinda good at first. However, the fact they did this TWICE now has helped solidify my and other people's distaste of Genshin. (Aside from the fact the gacha gameplay loop is annoying and cheap. Better games have better story, gameplay and representation.)
Kinda confusing for Ororon though, we assume from his very name that he came inspired by Yoruban mythos and culture; however, made as part of that Natlatian tribe (Master of Night-Wind) that was inspired heavily by the Javanese-Balinese Hindu cultures, where bats are symbolized as bringers of good fortune but also described as having the characteristics of being a fool/ignorant, with a Saurian companion that floats from rising warm air like typical bats but has the outlook of Grypphin with bats' fox-like big ear, while working as a free-spirited small land-owning gardener and rancher seemingly has no permanent place to stay? Ain't no way they intended for him to settle one cultural reference only, thus they're lazily clumping each other into one confusing mess.
in my opinion it is not the technology that is the problem, rather how it looks, the fontaine robots still look "fantasy-like" mavuika's bike looks like something I would be able to see out in the streets
@@hana-772 I believe it'll probably get explained, I mean we haven't seen it so far in the story, so maybe it has some in lore explanation, maybe it's dragon technology...
Yee, I have the same opinion. I love the technology designs for Sumeru and Fontaine :D but when it comes to Natlan it feels like the nation came from Hoyoverse’s other games set in the future/modern-ish times rather than Genshin
It's okay when technology looks out worldly enough. Technology in Sumeru looks mysterious, technology in Fontein gives me steampunk vibe. Meanwhile motorbike and DJ console are just something straight out of your world and it breaks immersion so much. Kinich' pixeled abilities and Chaskas flying gun are literally out of acid dreams. Like, how do you explain it even?
@@hana-772 yeah they could have made the design of the bike to align with the natlan automatons since they are from the technology of the previous civilization in natlan just make it like how master cycle zero is similar in design to the guardians in botw
All fun and games until in Snezhnaya Bronya will pull out to us in her fully immersive and medieval fantasy approved modern limousine Also i'm sorry, but NOTHING is standing out in the game as much as that pixel companion Kinich has. There is literally NOTHING else in the entire game like that thing is, and it's so immersion breaking i literally cannot even comprehend what was going in Hoyo's heads when they thought about making it. Mavuika's motorcyclie, Xilonen's DJ set or Chasca's Flying revolver? At least i could explain those that maybe it's some sort of creation made using fontane and khaenri'ah technology or something like that because it does make sense to think liek that, but Ajaw's whole appearance and existence? it's SO stupid and nonsensical i just can't.
@@信衞門 tbh it's their last region this game flopped hard already only thing that keeps it alive are kids that need to be oiled up and "mha fan base copy"
as a ukrainian i really hope it won’t be just stereotypical “russia” with magic and that’s it. i have some hopes since childe’s combat animations look hopak-inspired, but after natlan kind of being a mish mash of cultures i don’t know what to expect
@@xyippee as a fellow ukrainian, I agree, but I'm not getting my hopes up much for now. genshin has been disappointing for a while now, to the point that I quit a while back, so I can't help but feel a bit pessimistic lol. although, since snezhnaya is probably THE most anticipated region in the game's history, they might just surprise me this time. we'll see, I suppose.
@@yaoshusband i have hope that there is enough Russian culture to make a wholly cohesive theme compared to the mish-mash of Africa, Meso-America and Polynesia that Natlan was.
Natlan feels like all the workers had a burnt out and now going for cheap profits. Anyways I'm gonna get a lot of flack for this seeing the comments from your other videos, I have seen native africans, amazighs, brazilians talks about the mixed cultures evident in characters and how that is orientalism. For example, Xilonen is based on Brazilian women but somehow her name is from an Aztec origin. Mavuika is based on a Maori goddess but also reference Maori biker gang and also has Aztec culture mixed into her design, Mualani and her tribe being the ones to be about tourist attraction is a bad thing especially with Hawaiians protesting against tourists taking their land and Mualani doing the dance in her idle is a Hawaiian stereotype. Don't get me wrong there are obviously white americans screaming about orientalism during Sumeru about Tighnari (someone who is designed by Pako, an artist who designed indian characters in fgo) just because he didn't fit their aesthetic and did more racist redesigns. (If you talk to any other amazigh they will point out his cultural references) or Nilou and Kaveh who got called white by certain group of the fandom are actually loved by Persians. It's not just Natlan though Hoyoverse has been doing questionable stuffs even before that with Carole in Hi3rd who hates being black and never had a character development for it and her mom is a literal black woman stereotype and Hoyo making Inazuma and Liyue being the only regions inspired by a singular countries rub people the wrong way. While I agree that inspirations don't have to exactly because genshin is a fantasy game, Hoyo has shown they can execute it in certain characters like TIghnari, Nilou, Gaming, Yun Jin and Wanderer without making them stereotypes or having mixed cultural elements in them.
Regarding Mualani and the People of the Springs being a tourist attractions, her Tribal Chronicals quest is literally about teaching to show respect to indigenous cultures and land, and is very much a criticism of treating these indigenous areas as simple tourist attractions. I don't know if you've done it, but it's worth looking into. I think they've done a pretty good job with that quest.
My main problem with Natlan racial subject is that every single culture was somehow respected and represented well until Fontaine and only now Hoyo decided to say it's all fictional. Also, I bet all of my money that people would go ape shit if the devs depicted Japan and China wrong, imagine if the Inazuma cast was all black? The asians incels wouldn't probably accept this "fictional world" excuse, and probably commit some crime against the devs.
@@AgentUltimate7 This is a big one, darker skinned people always have to hear that it's just fictional, it doesn't matter, it we all know if it was reversed (say all the Liyue characters looked like Xinyan), they would be livid. It's always the darker folk that are expendable in these cases.
@@Renteka-Bond exactly, the "it's fiction" card is only used when it comes to black people, but we should saw that coming Sumeru was already a bit whitewashed and they did what they did with Natlan, clashed multiple cultures together as if they were same (the very diverse arab culture, indian culture and Persian culture). So ofc they did it with Natlan, the main difference is that lighter brown (latino-like) skin colors get a pass as many would treat this as a tan instead of color, it's a shame, I was trying to return to Genshin during 5.0, but this gross me off.
Dont lump us with you race obsessed Muricans. We're tired of you guys imposing your racial politics on us. If you dont like how Asians do things then play your representation simulator games instead.
@@AgentUltimate7 you westerners arent satisfied with colonizing our lands back in the day so now it's cultural imperialism. Leave us alone and go obsess about your social politics in your own country.
What personally upsets me is that as an African Genshin continues to be disrespectful is the fact that they lie, and they say that these characters are not inspired off of real life things and real life people, yet I can name 5 or 6 people that are actually inspired off of real people successfully disrespecting people in the process, butchering African gods name's Mavuika is an African fire god it's the lying for me that really personally made me mad, because it's just like, why lie about it, if you know you're not doing anything wrong I won't sit here and take scraps that darker skin girl is probably useless in the game as i know how HoYoverse treats it's darker skin characters, giving them terrible kits and more I've also seen how Chinese players have started to call people the n word and more after they were open about it, and there's a lot of anti blackness in general, which is why people immediately called them racist stealing culture things lying about it, like, we're all some idiots that don't recognize this culture and saying that, oh, it's not inspired off real life things, and it's just like, I'm so done, I know it's anti blackness personally, I can't speak for anything else, but I know that it's definitely anti blackness, every darker skin character has a terrible kid and I don't want anybody to name Cyno or Candice they are not dark or brown they are pale or light the genshin community is anti black and so are the devs just based on their actions and just based on how they treat the people of color community in it :/ I've lost all respect, they continue to call themselves a game that caters to everybody what a lie more like it caters to the Chinese audience only which they should just start, saying that in every little notice that they've ever made, we only cater to the Chinese audience I'm just sick and tired of them saying they cater to everybody around the world it's a lie 🤥
i don't think people are holding genshin to an unrealistically high standard at all. it's not some "world-shattering" ask to have, just, more than a tiny handful of characters who are so pale it looks like they have no blood circulation; and all the people i've seen in my circle who complain about genshin either do not play other games like it or play other games with the same problem and bring up that problem just as often as they do genshin. it's really not possible to look at genshin (or any other game, really) lifting direct aspects of people's cultures without representing the people and see it as anything other than "we like the culture, we just don't like you", because if it weren't that way, why did they even have to base their fantasy cultures entirely off real ones instead of making their own where they have more creative reign and more of an excuse to sidestep that question? edit: oh also they have been hateful several times, like in that one god forsaken sumeru world quest with the racist djinn lamp, or that time paimon reacts negatively to sumeru food as if she doesn't eat literal slime, and some more instances in other smaller questlines. maybe a few times could be a fluke, but after a certain point they just pile on and on and it can just get tiring.
5:07 It doesn't matter if they try to explain why she uses a bike SHE'S STILL HITTING WITH A BIKE! They can add as many BS lines and do as many mental gymnastics as they want to try to explain it there is no valid reason to justify the GOD OF WAR USING A BIKE AS A WEAPON.
Hi. Decent video. I do think the part about racism is a bit off base. Mihoyo can choose to use whatever skin colors they want. But really think about why 90% of the cast is white / light skinned? It's because they devalue darker skin colors. And to me placing a higher value on lighter skin colors is colorist, if not racist. They'll take a multitude of different aspects of these cultures because they see the value and bring them into the game. But they conveniently leave out darker skin colors. Genshin draws influence from so many different parts of the human experience and a variety of cultures. And then they choose to prioritize lighter skin colors over dark skin colors. They place more value in lighter skin, or see it as more aesthetically pleasing. Either reason is pretty racist. I just don't see any explanation for why they have habitually prioritized lighter skin colors that isn't judt their racial preference. And having a racial preference, hmmmm, sounds pretty racist.
If they actually introduced NPC using vehicles or flying guns first, maybe the discrepancy wouldn't be so jarring. I probably still wouldn't like it because they just look tacky lol (I also don't like how Genshin changed their whole marketing identity to modern street art style.)
My problem with the technology is that they didn't integrate it well. Why is it that the same nation that uses hot air balloon's as their "This is an emergency vehicle." Also the same on that can create a literal motorcycle? When creating vehicles for war you would think they would make a vehicle much faster and more reliable then a hot air balloon such as trucks, helicopters, airplanes, hell even trains. From my understanding Mavuika's bike and Xilonen's dj set are made of the same thing. Why tf are they wasting time and resources on a dj set instead of proper vehicles to use in the war they have been fighting for hundreds of years??? On the skin color I agree some of them should have been darker purely for character design reasons. The fact you can't even see Xilonen's thigh freckles, because her skin is too light is dumb. I just don't agree with people who will just select the skin of the character change it to be darker and do nothing else. Not all of these designs look good with dark skin and if they skin color changes a lot of them has to change to. Otherwise imo your just making the design worst. There's this one mod for Mualani that redesigns her and in that mod she has darker skin, but she's also redesigned as a whole. Tbh that redesign looks awesome! If this was her official design I would have pulled for Mualani and she probably would have been one of my favorite designs in the game. Mualani I'm referencing: gamebanana.com/mods/549937
@@GrimlyVeiled That's a great redesign, I love the hair! I agree with what you said about not all skin color changes looking good, and that other things about the design need to change as well. But another problem is that sometimes people go to far and change EVERYTHING about the original design. To the point where instead of redesigning the artist just makes an OC and gives them the same name. I saw this one Chasca redesign a couple months ago and while it looked great besides the elf ears it was a completely different character. There is definitely a fine line.
@@bladimirvideos this reminds me of the chasca redesign i saw where instead of the colors of the flower feather clan, it had the colors of the master of the night winds and i felt like it completely ruined the design since it didnt have the warmish colors that chascas clan has
I agree with your takes on the character designs. It seems so me like the design team just looked up "tribal people" and attempt to roll with it. Natlan should have been based on one main region like the others (not including sumeru really) I think it would have been interesting to have natlan based on Polynesian culture primarily since there are plenty of volcanoes in those regions and it would have fit well for a Nation of Fire. It they were to take a more Afican based approach perhaps leaning into the cultures of central Africa and many major valcanoe reside their. For South American vibes, I think the animated show "Maya and the Three" is an excellent example of mixing indigenous Mexican vibes with high fantasy. Overall the character designs dropped the ball tbh because hoyo was pulling from too much and they ended up doing nothing with any of that haha.
It's racism, no matter how you slice it. If the people behind the game specifically choose to exclude only darker skin tones while directly, clearly using those regions as inspiration, on top of only having darker skin characters as NPCs, in 2 regions now, that's not an innocent mistake, an oversight, none of that. It's racism. That's the definition. They're specifically targeting darker races and choosing to exclude them while simultaneously making regions and characters using their cultures. If that doesn't bother anyone, that's one thing, that's a personal choice, but we have to stop making up excuses like this is for any other reason other than "We think light skin characters will sell better", and that just is both a racist decision and even if it were true, a direct result of racism and media constantly catering to appropriation. It shouldn't be the norm for only darker skinned people to have their cultures used while being totally excluded.
It's called Asian beauty standards actually. The paler you are the more beautiful, it's weird, and it looks discriminatory, but it's not racism. Racism would be choosing to never include their culture at all, racism would be making the Akademiya "totally in the right" for forcing the separation and lacking education of the desert dwellers, racism goes way deeper and is an entirely separate topic than the objective beauty preferences of Asians.
@jukesdtj656 It IS racism. If they only made regions based on Asian countries you could use "It's just beauty standards" but they aren't. The choice to specifically exclude dark skinned people, even from regions based on them while the same is not true for Asian or White regions, is racist. You can't spin it. If you're treating one race differently and excluding specifically the ones that are darker, that is textbook racism. You don't have to call someone a slur to be racist. It comes in many forms and appropriation and erasure are one of those forms. The fact this already happened with Sumeru and they did it again, makes it crystal clear. And the storylines don't change things. They made that the story but then made the choice to do this in Natlan. And it's not just Genshin, in HSR they had a whole racism/slavery storyline for Aventurine and they made him a blonde White guy and there are still only White and Asian characters there besides kind of Arlan. Making a story about racism being bad while doing their actions go directly against that, doesn't suddenly make the actions not racist or racially driven.
About technology, I personally was always under the impression that things like Xilonen's skates and turntables and Mavuika's motorcycle were just constructs made out of elemental energy or something. We know this can happen become of Geo and its constructs, but also Oz who is a result of Fischl's electro vision.
@@kittenhero568 could have something to do with phlogiston since it's supposedly raw elemental energy, the stuff that all 7 elements are made of, so maybe if they use phlogiston directly they can materialize anything they want to use as a weapon even if it's something made up, afterall guns don't fly and rollerscates can't make you climb on cliffs, meaning those objects got special properties that are impossible for the real life equivalent to do, so possibly there never was a motorcycle or revolver in teyvat before, and those character's just invented those using their powers or we're given some sort of inspiration when they got the powers in the first place.
@@kittenhero568 because it has to read like what it is to the audience, which is living in modern times. this is why old timey future stuff looks dated to us. it's based in the previously current times, so scifi future tech from the 50s looks hella ancient to us. if they made some abstract fantasy tech bike, ppl wouldn't really see it for what it is and it would be far more immersion breaking b/c ppl would always question it. it looks like a "modern" bike so that way we, the players, just understand it's a bike. that can fly. and hover over water. look... it's a game. just don't think about it too hard, lol. ...buuut *not* for the race stuff. that's cap, and they should've done better.
To be honest the whole representation issue in Genshin can be illustrated by one character: Ororon. Like, his design on its own looks kinda whatever. But just tell me why his gacha life emo alpha looking ass is named after an African deity? It’s such a nonsensical choice on Hoyo’s part that it becomes funny. Just… Why is the supreme deity of the Yoruba people from Nigeria, Olorun, a white guy??? 😭😭😭 On a more serious note, it shows that Hoyo just does not care about adding POC in their character roasters, all the while ripping off african, native american and Maori symbolisms, iconography and religion to make more white skinned characters. And so I think people are more than justified to complain and pick up on the very obvious colorist (if not racist) tendencies Hoyoverse has with their character designs.
8:49 As a deep admirer of Mexican culture it is sort of annoying to hear African chants when exploring a place named Coatepec or Ameyalco. That mix makes no sense at all.
These three topics really are the biggsst issues and honesty really valid ones too. I agree on your take on the technology and design part but the racism part i just dont agree with it. If genshin's and other players logic of fantasy dictate that insipration does not equal reping the real life people than dark skin characters should be a normal acurance through out the game. But sadly the reality of the physical game is that through out all the nation all the non and playable character are very pale in complextion. If dark skin characters has been a normal thing through out the game the out cry on it in natland would probably have not been as extreme. Also i personality really hate the deflection and excuse of "its fantasy" as a way to excuses the horrible rep. Why is it that in a fantasy game whith cultural inspiration from black and brown people none of them can be found and why is thier more pale characters than black and drown ones. Yes pale people exist in these culture but by that logic thier should have been a buntch of darker skin charcters in the other nations too since darker skin people does exist in said irl places. As for the situation with Ororon alot of his hate comes from Ororon (Olorun being a west afrian god, my appologies if i get his name wrong) even though his in game character may have not been the manifestation of the west african god i think most people would see that it is wierd how they gave a west african god's name to a very pale charcter who has thematic designs from said culture. The cultural picking in natland is honestly very blatant and purposeful design and lack of skin reputation. A billion dollar company that has been priased of in its research for some reason can not figure out that when it come to culture with majority brown and black people for some reason only pale playble characters exsist? (its even more outrageous that thier is quite literally enimies in the games that has better reputation than the playable charcters) we have past the labeling of ignorance at this point. Oh and another note the singers oh my gosh the people that who sand the songs are black!!! Yet no black "playable" charcters can be found in the game. Also the tribal marking when characters use thier skins is hardly noticable on thier pale complextion. Leading to many players beliving that somwhere along the process some one with authorities might had made the characters lighter. If this is true is really is just racism/ colorism. Over all Genshin/hoyo's blatant ignorance is what makes me so angery about Natland. But ofcourse I am not from any of these cultures so my input will not be as important as someones who is from said cultures.
The fact that Genshin is not unique in how it goes out of its way not to have dark-skinned playable characters despite taking obvious influence from dark-skinned cultures doesn't make it not racist, imo. Teyvat may be fictional, but it's made by real people and they are choosing not to have them. No one is asking for perfect, but the cast should have more dark-skinned people in it. Iansan should not be the only one and even then she likely only is because we would know they changed it. Light skinned people don't have to worry about not having light skinned characters. Dark skinned wanters have to feast for crumbs and Natlan' and Sumeru are the only regions where there's not much excuse to not have them, which is why those 2 regions get the most scrutiny in this regard, even though there's no reason Fontaine or Mondstadt, for example, couldn't either. Also, Raiden DID get tons of backlash for her design.
i mean, we do at least have Kaeya, Xinyan, Candice, Iansan, Dehya, (who are very dark) and to a lesser extent Cyno and Xilonen and given Kachina yearns for the mines and Ororon was born half-undead, it makes sense theyre fairly pale
@edenengland1883 Dehya and co are barely past a tan(Xinyan is the darkest of the set) and they all get incredibly washed out in most of the lighting in the game. Iansan is the only undeniably dark skinned character in the game.
@@Renteka-Bond im just gonna have to take your word on the lighting thing since ive had fairly scuffed graphics ever since sumeru's start, but they seem ok when i play
Why can’t I dislike this video? Anyway… I agreed with everything up until the part about racism, because I don’t understand why you content creators are so afraid to call it out directly. Brazil, the largest country in South America, has a majority population of Black and "pardo" people (a term for mixed Black heritage that’s still commonly used here). Neighboring countries like Bolivia, Guyana, Paraguay, Colombia, Suriname, and others also have high percentages of Afro-descendants and overall dark-skinned populations. The excuse that “well, it’s not based on South America or Africa alone” doesn’t hold water either. Look at Oceania-it has significant dark-skinned populations due to its Indigenous peoples. Australia has Melanesians, and New Zealand has the Māori, for instance. And the whole aesthetic of Natlan IS based off of INDIGENOUS/TRIBALISTIC culture so why would the people not be based off of it as well??? Just stop trying to sugarcoat Genshin’s blatant lack of diversity. We didn’t ask for dark-skinned representation through a handful of NPCs. We wanted the dark-skinned player base to see themselves in main characters, too. I quit the game long before Natlan, realizing it’s not as great as it seemed. It’s just a glorified, lackluster mobile game with recycled gameplay. Sure, it started strong with a promising story, but each new update became lazier and more inconsistent and now they literally threw it in a trash bin. I had hopes they’d at least do justice to the Black and brown player base with Natlan, but I was wrong. To my fellow melanated players: I hope you see through the disrespect and quit this game. China can be a really racist place for their very own dark skin Chinese population so the lack of representation in this game, even if not intentionally racist, is actually pretty much racist. To waste you time and money in something like this is crazy.
WDYM "do justice to the Black and brown player base" 😂😂😂😂 It's a freaking game. And other games doesn't do it at all???????????? I barely see other games trying to represent different cultures irl. I have never seen other games that do it put so much effort into representing different culture this hard. And you guys still complain cuz u guys try to set Genshin in the standard of Perfection. Even the game like Civilization V (and its franchise) that supposed to represent each respective culture very much cuz their game is based on building IRL civilization, the city and the units are instead just copycat of each other (only unique units get their looks changed, thats 1 unit). The BGMs are repetitive af. You get the same set of BGMs for each continent even if its not related. Im Asian. Im not white, im brown to the point of being called black. Most of ppl here are not white, but I don't complain??? Im content with what we have in a casual gacha game. The dev team put a lot of effort into the game, especially the OST, and I can see it. And im going to debate to hell as a person playing games non-stop for 16 years that THIS game got it done good.
@@digadeh its not a call for perfection, what we can ask for is at least keep the same standard, in inazuma, mondstat, fontaine we know what they were representing at least in the buildings or the banner characters. but in natlan there is either no black/dark banner character and the houses don’t represent any part of africa. Now the stuff that disappoints me the most is as a yoruba native, i keep seeing characters been named after our dieties and yet they are either white as fuck or have no kind of dressing related to them. For me i will say it bothers on racism due to the developers lack of creativity/ carelessness in handling this map heck blending three continents into one map when others have been countries or regions speaks volumes. Am i outraged no but i will always call it what it is.
@@danielashekun7001 dont u know, like inazuma, based on Japan culture, there are countless ethnics and culture in Japan but trying to representing all (that at least relevant) takes a lot of resources and is deemed uneccessary. And no one complain????? I don't either cuz i see it as enough. While in Natlan case there are like gazillion number of African tribes in the world even in 1 countries thats enough to cause countless war that wreck the whole continent for the past 60 years. And you still hope that a casual game from a Chinese company should get every bits of your culture represented appropriately in your likings. That ia absurd. I am happy they try to represent you at all, because it is not bounded by law or necessary at all. Not in one bit. And you call this racism. Come on.
@@digadeh And? Like someone else said, if the people behind the game specifically choose to exclude only darker skin tones while directly, clearly using those regions as inspiration, on top of only having darker skin characters as NPCs, in 2 regions now, that's not an innocent mistake, an oversight, none of that. It's racism. That's the definition. They're specifically targeting darker races and choosing to exclude them while simultaneously making regions and characters using their cultures. And what are you on about bringing the fact that genshin is a gacha game into this? If you think that the standard in gacha games to whitewash and/or exclude people of color is acceptable, you have no place in this comment thread. It shouldn't be the norm for only darker skinned people to have their cultures used while being totally excluded. Also, if you think that being "brown to the point of being called black" gives you the right to speak on behalf of actual black people and decide what is and isn't racism for them, newsflash for you: you're not part of that culture, you're not black, and it isn't your place to argue with people who are underrepresented in media about how they should or should not be included in said media. It's actually pathetic to watch.
Fontaine: we have steampunk automatons as a security force Sumeru: the triangle automatons are a Security since a lot of time Natlan: In a war since centuries, needing technology to save lives Let's go die as a tribe! use technology for commodities
I thought so too, but apparently they were all made by Xilonen 😛 Anyway, it's a fantasy game and I couldn't care less. People are overthinking it way too much, but it's cool to pick on Genshin nowadays, so there you go.
all of the advanced tech in Natlan comes from Xilonen (according to Kachina, Xilonen, and Chasca's stories), meaning it does exist in universe, how exactly she constructs it however is a mystery something else to note, Ajaw is a construct made of pyro energy being projected by Ajaw's soul within Kinich (edit: also, the "Chasca is racist because cowboys have roots in latin and latin is known for colonization" is.. i mean i dont wanna be mean, but comedically "jessie wth are you talking about?", because that makes characters like Barbera, Rosaria, Cyno, and Sethos also "racist designs" [even moreso even] due to being modeled after real world religions that carry heavy explicit racism in their religious texts)
Ajaw is the only one more or less explained. It’s a projection that manifests from Kinich’s power, it’s not its own physical being. My questing is why is it pixelated? Makes no sense since they have no reference to that type of art. Xilonen is very Brazilian from the late 80s early 90s. As a half Brazilian myself, mixed race, the skin colour really doesn’t bother me as much as the flying shotgun does. The game never represented anybody, not even the Chinese people! Find me a Chinese person who looks like Chongyun. Japanese people also don’t look like Inazumans.
Yes, not every Chinese person looks like Chongyun but look at how they respectfully represent Chinese culture in game. Meanwhile in Sumeru they weirdly mix West Asian / Middle Eastern and North African culture. In Natlan they mix South American and African and lowkey Polynesian culture??? Like huh. Yes, Mondstadt mixes German and English culture, too but that's because they share Indo-Germanic and Anglo-Saxon origins. Character design and portrayal of culture are twice as important for less represented groups. People want to be represented well in a game that claims to be inspired by their culture. If they didn't want to be held to that standard, they should've never marketed themselves like that.
It's not the technology that upsets some players, but it's how it feels weirdly "Earth". It's not only modern but also feels like "OUR" own world breaking into a fantasy world. I hope there will be explanation for all of these later but I have no problem if it was just out of Devs saying "Ambatuscrew".
Educate yourself on the ancient dragon civilization and their use of phlogiston. Then you can remake the video when you know where the tech is coming from.
I missed fontaine so quickly when I entered natlan😅 Everything about Fontaine was so beautiful and fun in every way I was disappointed when I walked into natlan and i got bored of it quickly The only good thing about it is the Capitano story with Mavuika
If the natlan tech were ancient relics from the dragon kingdom would be more easy to accept them, like Mavuika and Chasca find their bike and giant revolver on some dragon ruin and use them to fight, just like kinitch find ahal on a ruin.
I'd say mihoyo isn't necessarily racist but is a Chinese game whose core audience are chinese or asian people so all the characters look asian to a degree to be relatable to those masses whilst also me being an indian dark skinned guy thinks the world is not all people being pale and all people being dark so genshin should actually try implimenting a little skin tone variations you know
Wrong. Mihoyo is racist. Past design employees have already come out and said that while designing Natlan and Sumeru characters, the higher ups forced them to make the characters lighter and asked why they were so dirty.
Kinich's 'living being' is his bracelet, and it projects that pixelart guy with phlogiston. His clothing has patterns similar to mayan architecture, probably from Itza people mostly. It appears that Natlan's human culture is mostly mayan-inspired and dragon culture is mostly aztec-inspired. There is no need to delve so deep into the technology of Natlan's six chosen ones, Mavuika and Kachina. We already know that Xilonen built most of these things with scraps of dragon tech and is building a motorbike for Mavuika, in a similar sense as Xianyun building a motorbike by herself (yes she also has one). Kachina has an excuse for having a vehicle too if she has a close relationship with Xilonen, and Mavuika is the Archon. Also, I'd like to double down on the looks of these technologies being too earthilke: I believe it could be intentional for 4 reasons: - There is a high chance dragons have been able to travel through space because the Tonatiuh is suggested to be able to travel through the false sky (or before it was there). - The Traveler knows that bikes have license plates in other worlds in a conversation with Mavuika. - In HI3, we can see Dvalin being observed by Otto in a computer in Earth. - Barbara knows what idols are because of a magazine Alice gave her. Dragons might have had knowledge of Earth's tech and culture. Great take on Chasca's cultural representation, it clears up a lot of common misunderstandings of her. Her having elf ears is a trait shared with Nahida, Klee, Iansan and Layla. There's actually not much to read on long-eared people, we just know that they are a long-lived race (or at least Klee and Alice are). Questioning their ties to real world culture is like questioning why Lynette has cat ears and how that relates to the Fench (It's not a failure of Natlan but more of a general one). Genshin's problem with racism is very true but hard to fix: You make characters white, you piss off one part of the community. You don't make them white, you piss off the CN community. What would you choose? I assume the choice is made easier when one guy from the CN community appears at your office building with a knife because of a decision in a game and you end up joining a political party for future protection. I'd make them white too in their situation. I believe Natlan is based on the Earth's ring of fire. (Look up "ring of fire" in Google Images) The pandemonium with Mavuika's bike originates from two things: She's an archon and archons always bring drama, and people wanted her to be Goku and the whiplash from the bike hit them hard. I haven't seen this level of drama when sumeru had invisible ai drones shooting lasers, people with vr glasses operating holographic monitors in a hivemind-shared experiment and a cyborg piloting an Evangelion mecha. You were constructive in this video and I appreciate that. Thank you.
Ngl the whole racism part of the video did threw me off a bit. Like yes them as a company are not obligated to do perfect representation and everything, but is still weird using the cultures of those places and not the characteristics of the people who have them. As someone from Brazil, just feels weird seeing our culture being represented without any bit of the diversity our people have, it truly feels like its the most fantasy part of it (can say the same about ZZZ, there is no reason for a last bastion of humanity to have only pale / white human characters)
I don’t need a perfect representation of African culture. Just give us a few playable dark skinned characters. That’s it. People will be happy if you just give them that. Well, the normal people.
it's not just Americans players who are pissed, West African here (Sierra Leonean) and personally I think it's super lame how Mihoyo went about taking inspiration from African cultures and then slapped it on a bunch of fair skin characters for the Chinese market, on the other hand a buddy of mine who plays Genshin and is Kenyan absolutely loves the Natlan region, especially the Natlan Live Performance since it was sang in Swahili so he doesn't need subtitles to understand it lol, so even for us there's a variety of reactions to how Genshin is handling its African inspirations, but at the of the day, it's Mihoyo''s game, they can do what they want
Xilonen's gun was mentioned in the flower clan reputation's quest and it was made by xilonen herself and no other than chasca can use it well, in theory from that conversation anyone could use it if they are skilled enough but for gacha purposes chasca is going to be the only one.
Another explanation for the technology issue could be that those high tech items are all created from elemental energy and aren't actually real, and just a power invented by the vision bearer by simply imagining what they want to create, just like how Obvious Hu-tao and Arlecchino don't have the same exact attacks despite borh using pyro, the reason why its natlan specific could also be phlogiston...maybe phlogiston can be molded into objects while regular elemental energy can't.
Maybe its phlogisten being like an imported resource , i am not digging far into it but natlan is a mix of aztec and african culture , so is it like an import from an outside world like how the colinizers brought some tech from Europe. Aka Fontaine?? Id love to see more opinions from it .
Or mavuika's tattoos could be a different color... Honestly these whole rainbow coloured tattoos thing is strange and i can't tell when characters got it active looking at them during a fight... Its a dumb design, would've been more fitting to give them a glowing aura like a super saiyan or something, tattoos are not a great thing anyways and even if it does have some sort of connection with these cultures, if it doesn't fit in the game, better remove it altogether.
Honestly i think that hoyo isn't racist. They are however highly colorist and prejudice. Like the fact they have so few characters that have skin tones darker than eggshell white is annoying on a lagistical level. The fact that people who live in a desert aren't darker to reflect that, makes no sense. And on the fact that they are blatantly using aspects of real world cultures is annoying when they do nothing to try and depict the range of skin tones that come with different cultures. Especially when they are doing this with cultures that have wider rangers of dark tones it is important to show that not every character is lighter than baige in skin tone. All i want is for there to be a range of characters with a variety of skintones from dark to midtonesto complement and contrast the super light ones they have already created.😅😅😅 Natlan would have been a great time to diversify the cast of playable characters by making them visually distinct to reflect the area they come from after not really taking the chance to do that with sumaru. It feel like the characters designs are just clothing slapped haphazardly onto a preselected pool of skintones that don't go darker than white with the smallest of tans that you can only see if you squint.
Ok also I think that the reason that people have less issues with the nations outside of sumaru and natlan having no brown people or anyone with darker skin tones is that places like German, France, Japan, and China have proportionately less brown people per capita then "the entirety of the middle east" and "large swaths of south America, Africa, and many indigenous cultures around the world". Don't get me started on the fact that the nations that would make sense to have more brown people in are amalgamations while the nations that are based on places that tend to have less brown people are based on one country. Just seems a bit weird to me that that was a choice they made alongside not really depicting characters having darker skin tones even when they are drawing on places that tend to have people with darker skin.
Honestly it wouldn't be that out of place if regular people just had revolvers for fighting the abyss and bikes for riding on pholgistan. The real problem is that they took no effort to intergrate it properly and its jarring. Like why doesn't Xilonen make more of them and/or teach others how to make them? Of all the nations they need it the most for fighting the abyss. IMO it would still work if they added characters/enemies with revolvers or bikes now or even later in the future and just say the bike(s) run on phlogistan and xilonen makes them. I think this is an easy fix and I hope they do it.
@@jerryeljeremy7790bruh natlan npcs have them just not to the extent chasca has... We literally saw that in fight with kachina, plus we fight them everyday. Regular enemy Girl with surfborad and gun who rams into us, npc with infused weapons, that bodybuilder dude with a weapon that yeets phlistogen stomes at us and many more. They all use that tech just not to the same extent as chasca or mavuika which makes sense since they are the best warriors of the nation..
@@AdityaBharat-by7zq I'm talking about pixel, dj set, flying gun, and bike, like how many NPC do you think have similar weapons? Best they can do are guns, and gun in times like these are nothing special, fontaine have that too, and not even half of Natlan NPC use it. But then they jump from gun to flying gun, what's the point of hot air balloon if you have that kind of tech anyway? The tech aint teching here.
lmao, It's always...always about representation this, representation that, skin tone this, skin tone that. I wonder why you westerners are so obssessed with it. Also, "Chasca's elf ears have no connection to Peru" lol...I can't. If you expect 100% accuracy in representation, just make your own game. If you dislike how Mihoyo handle things, stop playing their games. If you dislike the artist, don't enjoy the art, as simple as that.
I'm just gonna correct you on the cultural aspect, Natlan is the ring of fire, not Africa in any way shape or form. The reason there's a black culture aspect is because of Brazil and south america in general. Chasca is a north american cowboy. People need to stop assuming the representation is bad because they actually dont realize a nation that runs on futuristic magic lava is based around the most active volcanic areas in the world.
I'm gonna correct you too because Natlan is based on Aztec, North Africa (some parts of it) and Australia. YOU need to stop assuming. The representation IS bad.
Actually some of it actually is!the chanting you hear in the game is sung in swahili which is from central Africa and is spoken by 50 million people there! Ororon named after an african diety with the same name so yeah
I just want them too add mount for every every region, like i would love if we could ride a cool carnivore siberian tiger or sabertooth cat analogue in snezhnaya, a camel or sumpter beast in the desert, just mount specific animals but ywah they kinda did dino thingie which is fun, but i just want to interact with animals. 1) they dont make much meat eating animals 2) they could add so much variety in each region I just want more animals and more interactions with them
Yes it is. Do you NOT play the game. Even past hoyo employees have straight up come out and said the quit due to higher ups being racist or were fired.
@@seungjoonkin8970 The difference is that these games added dark skinned characters not because of the representation, but because some players find these characters attractive. Azur Lane in particular, since it's a quintessential coomer game. You think Azur Lane added black characters for representation? No, they've added them to satisfy a kink.
@@peckneck2439 I think a dark lady would sell so well in genshin i really don't understand why they dont do it. Like, imo they should do it out of respect regardless, but even if they were 100% money and not morally driven, a dark woman with white hair is like the staple in anime/games. It's a tried and tested fan-favorite at this point. They could make a lot of money, if trhoughout these past 4 years they had even made just 3 genuinely dark characters they would've probably managed to clear peoples' low bar as well.
People complaining about technology of Natlan is like those kid in the cinema who keep asking why this, why that, every 5 minutes. Watch. The. Movie, ffs.
Okay we watched, and what we got? Lazy explanation for the techs. "Oh those techs? Xilonen made it" & "but these came from acient dragon kingdom" Okay, so why didn't Xilonen make these techs more to help the war against the abyss? She prioritizes DJ set over war ig lmao. Also why do Dragons of all people need a bike?
@@jerryeljeremy7790 Keep watching, we're just 10 minutes into the movie and you asking for explanation for everything already? might as well asks how it ends. As I said, sounds much like those kid in the cinema. The important thing when you read/watch these kind of media is to think for yourself, like "hey, so the dragons have advance technology after all, this might be very far into the future than we thought, maybe we are inside of a simulation. oh oh, what about the sky is fake!?", and not to let them spoon-fed you the information. Not everything has to be explain explicitly.
@@jerryeljeremy7790 The Dragons may not be the one using the bike, and they might not be dragon in the first place, remember, these are from the people living there with low tech, misunderstanding bond to happen. Considered how low tech they are, I don't think they even know how these high-tech artifact really works, they might just inherit them from being a name-holder without the knowledge of it's inner working, who know? as I said, keep watching.
@@XiaZ 10 minutes, more like 4 years of lore thank you, and I've read them fyi. The only logical explanation is if the bike came from "people" and the dragons might not be a dragon, but even so there should more of these relics scattered across Natlan like what happened to Khaen'riah. But nope, it suddenly just magicly appear with these playable characters, and ONLY these playable characters have used it. It is clear that hoyo just want to hype up Natlan with these techs but failed to implement it in lore and they ended up using "there's an acient civilization with futuristic techs" card. That's lazy writing there.
![[5.1] Phlogiston and the Abyss - A Genshin Impact Theory](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Z2p0gV-5J4Y/mqdefault.jpg)
![[5.1] Phlogiston and the Abyss - A Genshin Impact Theory](/img/tr.png)
This is just my opinion, you are more then welcome to disagree with me. But please try to remain respectful.
i just fell like natlan is like different game already. we are not even go to "different region" its as if we are going to whole another dimension.
in my opinion, at least thats how i feel about it (no i havent played, i stoped played since 10 months ago, so i only see it from someone else stream and post on social media), on the way of trying to be creative on their gameplay core, they just make the new region feel disconected from the rest of the game
@@Narigane I mean it is kinda, region with the most dragon influence, region with no proper laylines, when the people leave they literally lose their memories, human Archon not one pretending to be human a genuine human, a normal woman. It implies the souls of the Natlanian people due to the layline issues don't get reincarnated via the same system also. Theres also the partnership with Saurians, the constant Abyssal attacks which no other region even Sumeru barely deals with. The Withering? Whats that compared to pure Abyssal corrosion and Eldritch eyes? The broken Firmament that Wanderer only spoke of the fact the sky is fake years ago. It genuinely just feels like people weren't paying any real attention to the story, or even using their eyes. The Night Kingdom even if you were skipping everything should of made you think something was different, there's nowhere else like it in the game. How about the Lack of Seeles? Theres like or 5 something in the entire game. The weapons bar possibly Mavuika's are all made by Xilonen, which just shows a testament to how smart her character is. Natlan is pretty much alone dealing with the Abyss its not wonder they utilise everything they can.
I stated i havent played the story didnt I?
Last I touched the game was February, during Birb Momy if i remember correctly.
"not paying attention". I dont want to bring this up, but Hoyo needs serious evaluation on how they present the story.
I stated, from outside view without touching the actual story, the whole natlan thing is just disconnected from the rest of the game.
But seriously tho, i still stand on what i said. Everything is "off" just like what you said. Even the whole characters concept. That graple hook dude with 8 bit creature, a DJ with roller coaster, and the latest a biker with helmet?
I'm more convinced if it said they are collab character or if they say Natlan simply fused with other dimension because space unstability or something.
I'm tired with weird "lore". I'm FGO player dealing so much bullsht lore to justify their genderbending character or questionable design/appearance/class.
@@Infelious yeah, "they utilize everything they can" and yet when faced with the Abyss, motorbikes are too precious to be used, they have to use slow balloons instead.
Natlan in free time: Enjoys DJ, ride rollarskate, motorbike, flying gun
Natlan at war time: Riding a slowest balloon ever created by mankind while your friends and familes are dying
@@seungjoonkin8970 chasca infiltrating with her sis was goofy cause she literally could just speed in and go out without any issue in game
like chychu ddnt have to die
Theres such and easy fix to this- USE THE DRAGONS THE NATION HAS, fuck sake imagine how fucking cool it would be if chaska rode a dragon INSTEAD of a yknow- A FUCKING GUN
@@Woofles1227 exactly what i thought!
The thing is, I didn't hate chasca's design, BUT THE GUN WAS SO UGLY OML
@@Woofles1227 this is exactly what im tryna say
How cool is it if natlan had a same character to jinhsi from wuthering waves
Or have the literal archon ride the damn dragon during her ult. But no, her bike is her claymore now, might as well make a bike banner for her instead of her claymore
Or mabika riding a flaming horse. That will be cool
@@seungjoonkin8970 exactly !! imagine a blazing phoenix or anything fantastical - and all we get are a mundane pair of wheels.
I remember when i first started playing genshin during the release of inazuma i had an african friend hype me up about the story. He was so excited for natlan to come out because he was excited to see a character look like him and me(im puerto rican). Of course i knew they wouldn't add any real dark skinned characters much less make them important.(and i was right iansan is literally like a background character in the main story) for some reason i still held on to hope that they would at least make a majority of the characters some type of dark skinned at least the archon but boy when i saw the teasar did my heart sink.
I think its easy for you to say you dont care cause you're light skinned, so of course you're represented, but think of it like this if a region based of china or japan or even russia were to have all characters that were dark skinned would you think youd be fine with that? Or the people from said culture ? No right? So why do I have to be reminded every day even in games i use to escape and relax that my skin color doesnt fit someones fantasy. For you its okay cause you dont know what that feels like.
That same friend when streaming his game would hear the background music and be like "im hearing my people but not seeing my people".
honestly i have a theory that the natlan characters werent supposed to be light i mean look at the their markings you can barely see them. The whole region suffers from poor designing with the whole modern technology not being to designed to fit with the world. It all feels slapped on.like when i think of genshin i think of anime medieval fantasy now it feels too modern for my taste.
All in all i haven't touched genshin after the first natlan story quest cause it left a very bad taste in my mouth even the power of friendship thing. I wish i could get back all the money i spent
Im also light skinned but Im from south africa and so used to seeing so many types of skin colors these games always feel kinda boring design wise. its so weird seeing white npcs in dreads and everything...
I think while representation matters, it isnt explicitly needed and not every game has to represent every type of person but... if you intentionally draw on someone elses culture then bastardise it or remove the people from that inspiration it just feels so icky. its fine to have inspiration but when you only take bits and pieces it does feel extremely pointed and on purpose. even outside of darker skin the skin they have in game is RIDICULOUS. im pale as a vampire, havent seen the sun in years bc I tan so easily and yet mavuika is sm paler then me!! why cant we just have healthy tans like its the nation of FIRE its HOT do they think desert ppl are paler than sand?? sumeru had mostly tan people in the desert and natlan doesnt even have a slightly different shade. its just boring and you can tell theyre avoiding skin variety which just makes the lack of variety feel worse and more pointed. hell even chinese people have tons more skin variety than in the game currently its just wild
As an African American my only issue is if they're gonna take inspiration from something at least have the decency to have a couple of representation of said character designs in the game. Do I expect a whole army of certain races? No but if this game is marketed to be world global I feel like it wouldn't be too much to ask for. If they can nail down liyue to a T I don't see why they can't put in the effort to the same for other regions. Doesn't need to be perfect but put more thought into it especially those outside of china playing the game look forward to this.
No one really cried much during sumeru, us brown gorlies didn't care much about it either tbh, idk why will you cre about it now. Just accept that they aren't gonna do jack about it and enjoy the game for what it is
@@Anika9691 I'm not sure when you played Genshin but when Sumeru's first leaks were introduces (NPCs and playable characters), people were hella mad which was why they changed the NPCs (sounds like Natlan again). There were debates about Dori's designs, why the desert enemies had features associated with POCs and why they were enemies while the 'good' people didn't have those features, etcs.
The only good thing people liked were the music and food.
Also, if genshin is still marketing towards it's global fanbase and taking inspiration from REAL WORLD PEOPLE AND PLACES with their own history (of colonisation), they should at the very least respect the source material and people they're profiting from.
the tech doesn't seem out of place to me at all b/c it just feels like afro futurism imo. the issue that makes it feel bad is what you mentioned though. I have feelings about why there's so much pushback but I'm not tryna get into it tbh lol. I think the original intent was to have a lot more melanin in the playable characters but somewhere between concept and production, upper management probably stepped in. there's too much stuff in natlan to make me feel like the artists didn't want to make a far more diverse cast of playable characters.
@@Anika9691 ppl DID criticise Sumeru. It was fucking weird seeing nahida be neon white and every Akademiya person be pale while the desert ppl who are slightly tan were called "savages" and former slaves.
After that a lot of people's criticism was soothened by Fontaine being kinda good at first. However, the fact they did this TWICE now has helped solidify my and other people's distaste of Genshin. (Aside from the fact the gacha gameplay loop is annoying and cheap. Better games have better story, gameplay and representation.)
Kinda confusing for Ororon though, we assume from his very name that he came inspired by Yoruban mythos and culture; however, made as part of that Natlatian tribe (Master of Night-Wind) that was inspired heavily by the Javanese-Balinese Hindu cultures, where bats are symbolized as bringers of good fortune but also described as having the characteristics of being a fool/ignorant, with a Saurian companion that floats from rising warm air like typical bats but has the outlook of Grypphin with bats' fox-like big ear, while working as a free-spirited small land-owning gardener and rancher seemingly has no permanent place to stay? Ain't no way they intended for him to settle one cultural reference only, thus they're lazily clumping each other into one confusing mess.
in my opinion it is not the technology that is the problem, rather how it looks, the fontaine robots still look "fantasy-like" mavuika's bike looks like something I would be able to see out in the streets
@@hana-772 I believe it'll probably get explained, I mean we haven't seen it so far in the story, so maybe it has some in lore explanation, maybe it's dragon technology...
@xrosslegends1279 I mean... they probably will, but I'm still not a big fan of how modern it looks...
Yee, I have the same opinion. I love the technology designs for Sumeru and Fontaine :D but when it comes to Natlan it feels like the nation came from Hoyoverse’s other games set in the future/modern-ish times rather than Genshin
It's okay when technology looks out worldly enough. Technology in Sumeru looks mysterious, technology in Fontein gives me steampunk vibe.
Meanwhile motorbike and DJ console are just something straight out of your world and it breaks immersion so much. Kinich' pixeled abilities and Chaskas flying gun are literally out of acid dreams. Like, how do you explain it even?
@@hana-772 yeah they could have made the design of the bike to align with the natlan automatons since they are from the technology of the previous civilization in natlan
just make it like how master cycle zero is similar in design to the guardians in botw
Mauvika ride a bike before anyone ride horse, at that point I shut my brain down
All fun and games until in Snezhnaya Bronya will pull out to us in her fully immersive and medieval fantasy approved modern limousine
Also i'm sorry, but NOTHING is standing out in the game as much as that pixel companion Kinich has. There is literally NOTHING else in the entire game like that thing is, and it's so immersion breaking i literally cannot even comprehend what was going in Hoyo's heads when they thought about making it. Mavuika's motorcyclie, Xilonen's DJ set or Chasca's Flying revolver? At least i could explain those that maybe it's some sort of creation made using fontane and khaenri'ah technology or something like that because it does make sense to think liek that, but Ajaw's whole appearance and existence? it's SO stupid and nonsensical i just can't.
Please Hoyo do NOT let Snezhnaya be like Natlan please make the country actually have technology that fits the aesthetics of the culture
@@信衞門 tbh it's their last region this game flopped hard already only thing that keeps it alive are kids that need to be oiled up and "mha fan base copy"
as a ukrainian i really hope it won’t be just stereotypical “russia” with magic and that’s it. i have some hopes since childe’s combat animations look hopak-inspired, but after natlan kind of being a mish mash of cultures i don’t know what to expect
@@xyippee as a fellow ukrainian, I agree, but I'm not getting my hopes up much for now. genshin has been disappointing for a while now, to the point that I quit a while back, so I can't help but feel a bit pessimistic lol. although, since snezhnaya is probably THE most anticipated region in the game's history, they might just surprise me this time. we'll see, I suppose.
@@yaoshusband i have hope that there is enough Russian culture to make a wholly cohesive theme compared to the mish-mash of Africa, Meso-America and Polynesia that Natlan was.
Natlan feels like all the workers had a burnt out and now going for cheap profits.
Anyways I'm gonna get a lot of flack for this seeing the comments from your other videos, I have seen native africans, amazighs, brazilians talks about the mixed cultures evident in characters and how that is orientalism. For example, Xilonen is based on Brazilian women but somehow her name is from an Aztec origin. Mavuika is based on a Maori goddess but also reference Maori biker gang and also has Aztec culture mixed into her design, Mualani and her tribe being the ones to be about tourist attraction is a bad thing especially with Hawaiians protesting against tourists taking their land and Mualani doing the dance in her idle is a Hawaiian stereotype.
Don't get me wrong there are obviously white americans screaming about orientalism during Sumeru about Tighnari (someone who is designed by Pako, an artist who designed indian characters in fgo) just because he didn't fit their aesthetic and did more racist redesigns. (If you talk to any other amazigh they will point out his cultural references) or Nilou and Kaveh who got called white by certain group of the fandom are actually loved by Persians.
It's not just Natlan though Hoyoverse has been doing questionable stuffs even before that with Carole in Hi3rd who hates being black and never had a character development for it and her mom is a literal black woman stereotype and Hoyo making Inazuma and Liyue being the only regions inspired by a singular countries rub people the wrong way.
While I agree that inspirations don't have to exactly because genshin is a fantasy game, Hoyo has shown they can execute it in certain characters like TIghnari, Nilou, Gaming, Yun Jin and Wanderer without making them stereotypes or having mixed cultural elements in them.
Regarding Mualani and the People of the Springs being a tourist attractions, her Tribal Chronicals quest is literally about teaching to show respect to indigenous cultures and land, and is very much a criticism of treating these indigenous areas as simple tourist attractions. I don't know if you've done it, but it's worth looking into. I think they've done a pretty good job with that quest.
My main problem with Natlan racial subject is that every single culture was somehow respected and represented well until Fontaine and only now Hoyo decided to say it's all fictional.
Also, I bet all of my money that people would go ape shit if the devs depicted Japan and China wrong, imagine if the Inazuma cast was all black? The asians incels wouldn't probably accept this "fictional world" excuse, and probably commit some crime against the devs.
@@AgentUltimate7 This is a big one, darker skinned people always have to hear that it's just fictional, it doesn't matter, it we all know if it was reversed (say all the Liyue characters looked like Xinyan), they would be livid. It's always the darker folk that are expendable in these cases.
@@Renteka-Bond exactly, the "it's fiction" card is only used when it comes to black people, but we should saw that coming Sumeru was already a bit whitewashed and they did what they did with Natlan, clashed multiple cultures together as if they were same (the very diverse arab culture, indian culture and Persian culture).
So ofc they did it with Natlan, the main difference is that lighter brown (latino-like) skin colors get a pass as many would treat this as a tan instead of color, it's a shame, I was trying to return to Genshin during 5.0, but this gross me off.
Dont lump us with you race obsessed Muricans. We're tired of you guys imposing your racial politics on us. If you dont like how Asians do things then play your representation simulator games instead.
@@AgentUltimate7 you westerners arent satisfied with colonizing our lands back in the day so now it's cultural imperialism. Leave us alone and go obsess about your social politics in your own country.
What personally upsets me is that as an African Genshin continues to be disrespectful is the fact that they lie, and they say that these characters are not inspired off of real life things and real life people, yet I can name 5 or 6 people that are actually inspired off of real people successfully disrespecting people in the process, butchering African gods name's Mavuika is an African fire god it's the lying for me that really personally made me mad, because it's just like, why lie about it, if you know you're not doing anything wrong I won't sit here and take scraps that darker skin girl is probably useless in the game as i know how HoYoverse treats it's darker skin characters, giving them terrible kits and more I've also seen how Chinese players have started to call people the n word and more after they were open about it, and there's a lot of anti blackness in general, which is why people immediately called them racist stealing culture things lying about it, like, we're all some idiots that don't recognize this culture and saying that, oh, it's not inspired off real life things, and it's just like, I'm so done, I know it's anti blackness personally, I can't speak for anything else, but I know that it's definitely anti blackness, every darker skin character has a terrible kid and I don't want anybody to name Cyno or Candice they are not dark or brown they are pale or light the genshin community is anti black and so are the devs just based on their actions and just based on how they treat the people of color community in it :/ I've lost all respect, they continue to call themselves a game that caters to everybody what a lie more like it caters to the Chinese audience only which they should just start, saying that in every little notice that they've ever made, we only cater to the Chinese audience I'm just sick and tired of them saying they cater to everybody around the world it's a lie 🤥
i don't think people are holding genshin to an unrealistically high standard at all. it's not some "world-shattering" ask to have, just, more than a tiny handful of characters who are so pale it looks like they have no blood circulation; and all the people i've seen in my circle who complain about genshin either do not play other games like it or play other games with the same problem and bring up that problem just as often as they do genshin. it's really not possible to look at genshin (or any other game, really) lifting direct aspects of people's cultures without representing the people and see it as anything other than "we like the culture, we just don't like you", because if it weren't that way, why did they even have to base their fantasy cultures entirely off real ones instead of making their own where they have more creative reign and more of an excuse to sidestep that question?
edit: oh also they have been hateful several times, like in that one god forsaken sumeru world quest with the racist djinn lamp, or that time paimon reacts negatively to sumeru food as if she doesn't eat literal slime, and some more instances in other smaller questlines. maybe a few times could be a fluke, but after a certain point they just pile on and on and it can just get tiring.
5:07 It doesn't matter if they try to explain why she uses a bike SHE'S STILL HITTING WITH A BIKE! They can add as many BS lines and do as many mental gymnastics as they want to try to explain it there is no valid reason to justify the GOD OF WAR USING A BIKE AS A WEAPON.
Hi. Decent video.
I do think the part about racism is a bit off base.
Mihoyo can choose to use whatever skin colors they want. But really think about why 90% of the cast is white / light skinned? It's because they devalue darker skin colors. And to me placing a higher value on lighter skin colors is colorist, if not racist.
They'll take a multitude of different aspects of these cultures because they see the value and bring them into the game. But they conveniently leave out darker skin colors.
Genshin draws influence from so many different parts of the human experience and a variety of cultures. And then they choose to prioritize lighter skin colors over dark skin colors. They place more value in lighter skin, or see it as more aesthetically pleasing. Either reason is pretty racist.
I just don't see any explanation for why they have habitually prioritized lighter skin colors that isn't judt their racial preference. And having a racial preference, hmmmm, sounds pretty racist.
If they actually introduced NPC using vehicles or flying guns first, maybe the discrepancy wouldn't be so jarring. I probably still wouldn't like it because they just look tacky lol (I also don't like how Genshin changed their whole marketing identity to modern street art style.)
My problem with the technology is that they didn't integrate it well. Why is it that the same nation that uses hot air balloon's as their "This is an emergency vehicle." Also the same on that can create a literal motorcycle? When creating vehicles for war you would think they would make a vehicle much faster and more reliable then a hot air balloon such as trucks, helicopters, airplanes, hell even trains. From my understanding Mavuika's bike and Xilonen's dj set are made of the same thing. Why tf are they wasting time and resources on a dj set instead of proper vehicles to use in the war they have been fighting for hundreds of years???
On the skin color I agree some of them should have been darker purely for character design reasons. The fact you can't even see Xilonen's thigh freckles, because her skin is too light is dumb. I just don't agree with people who will just select the skin of the character change it to be darker and do nothing else. Not all of these designs look good with dark skin and if they skin color changes a lot of them has to change to. Otherwise imo your just making the design worst. There's this one mod for Mualani that redesigns her and in that mod she has darker skin, but she's also redesigned as a whole. Tbh that redesign looks awesome! If this was her official design I would have pulled for Mualani and she probably would have been one of my favorite designs in the game.
Mualani I'm referencing: gamebanana.com/mods/549937
@@GrimlyVeiled That's a great redesign, I love the hair! I agree with what you said about not all skin color changes looking good, and that other things about the design need to change as well. But another problem is that sometimes people go to far and change EVERYTHING about the original design. To the point where instead of redesigning the artist just makes an OC and gives them the same name. I saw this one Chasca redesign a couple months ago and while it looked great besides the elf ears it was a completely different character. There is definitely a fine line.
Ya Fontaine can have these technologies because of their advancement
@@bladimirvideos this reminds me of the chasca redesign i saw where instead of the colors of the flower feather clan, it had the colors of the master of the night winds and i felt like it completely ruined the design since it didnt have the warmish colors that chascas clan has
@@Erissie ya unlike kinich, mulani and kachinka they have perfect colour
Wow I cant believe this is the first time I'm finding out about Mauvikas markings missed oppertunity.
I agree with your takes on the character designs. It seems so me like the design team just looked up "tribal people" and attempt to roll with it. Natlan should have been based on one main region like the others (not including sumeru really) I think it would have been interesting to have natlan based on Polynesian culture primarily since there are plenty of volcanoes in those regions and it would have fit well for a Nation of Fire. It they were to take a more Afican based approach perhaps leaning into the cultures of central Africa and many major valcanoe reside their. For South American vibes, I think the animated show "Maya and the Three" is an excellent example of mixing indigenous Mexican vibes with high fantasy. Overall the character designs dropped the ball tbh because hoyo was pulling from too much and they ended up doing nothing with any of that haha.
It's racism, no matter how you slice it. If the people behind the game specifically choose to exclude only darker skin tones while directly, clearly using those regions as inspiration, on top of only having darker skin characters as NPCs, in 2 regions now, that's not an innocent mistake, an oversight, none of that. It's racism. That's the definition. They're specifically targeting darker races and choosing to exclude them while simultaneously making regions and characters using their cultures.
If that doesn't bother anyone, that's one thing, that's a personal choice, but we have to stop making up excuses like this is for any other reason other than "We think light skin characters will sell better", and that just is both a racist decision and even if it were true, a direct result of racism and media constantly catering to appropriation. It shouldn't be the norm for only darker skinned people to have their cultures used while being totally excluded.
It's called Asian beauty standards actually. The paler you are the more beautiful, it's weird, and it looks discriminatory, but it's not racism. Racism would be choosing to never include their culture at all, racism would be making the Akademiya "totally in the right" for forcing the separation and lacking education of the desert dwellers, racism goes way deeper and is an entirely separate topic than the objective beauty preferences of Asians.
@jukesdtj656 It IS racism. If they only made regions based on Asian countries you could use "It's just beauty standards" but they aren't. The choice to specifically exclude dark skinned people, even from regions based on them while the same is not true for Asian or White regions, is racist. You can't spin it. If you're treating one race differently and excluding specifically the ones that are darker, that is textbook racism. You don't have to call someone a slur to be racist. It comes in many forms and appropriation and erasure are one of those forms. The fact this already happened with Sumeru and they did it again, makes it crystal clear.
And the storylines don't change things. They made that the story but then made the choice to do this in Natlan. And it's not just Genshin, in HSR they had a whole racism/slavery storyline for Aventurine and they made him a blonde White guy and there are still only White and Asian characters there besides kind of Arlan. Making a story about racism being bad while doing their actions go directly against that, doesn't suddenly make the actions not racist or racially driven.
@@jukesdtj656 Yep. And Asian beauty standards are racist. Are you only just finding this out...?
About technology, I personally was always under the impression that things like Xilonen's skates and turntables and Mavuika's motorcycle were just constructs made out of elemental energy or something. We know this can happen become of Geo and its constructs, but also Oz who is a result of Fischl's electro vision.
But why does it look the way it does, at least Oz looks like a fantasy space raven
@kittenhero568 Uhhhhh, yeah I don't have an answer for that
@@kittenhero568 could have something to do with phlogiston since it's supposedly raw elemental energy, the stuff that all 7 elements are made of, so maybe if they use phlogiston directly they can materialize anything they want to use as a weapon even if it's something made up, afterall guns don't fly and rollerscates can't make you climb on cliffs, meaning those objects got special properties that are impossible for the real life equivalent to do, so possibly there never was a motorcycle or revolver in teyvat before, and those character's just invented those using their powers or we're given some sort of inspiration when they got the powers in the first place.
Yeah but they shouldn't even be knowing anything about skateshoes or motorcycles.
@@kittenhero568 because it has to read like what it is to the audience, which is living in modern times. this is why old timey future stuff looks dated to us. it's based in the previously current times, so scifi future tech from the 50s looks hella ancient to us. if they made some abstract fantasy tech bike, ppl wouldn't really see it for what it is and it would be far more immersion breaking b/c ppl would always question it. it looks like a "modern" bike so that way we, the players, just understand it's a bike.
that can fly.
and hover over water.
look... it's a game. just don't think about it too hard, lol.
...buuut *not* for the race stuff. that's cap, and they should've done better.
I don't play Genshin and even I can tell that Kinich doesn't fit in this world
To be honest the whole representation issue in Genshin can be illustrated by one character: Ororon.
Like, his design on its own looks kinda whatever. But just tell me why his gacha life emo alpha looking ass is named after an African deity?
It’s such a nonsensical choice on Hoyo’s part that it becomes funny. Just… Why is the supreme deity of the Yoruba people from Nigeria, Olorun, a white guy??? 😭😭😭
On a more serious note, it shows that Hoyo just does not care about adding POC in their character roasters, all the while ripping off african, native american and Maori symbolisms, iconography and religion to make more white skinned characters. And so I think people are more than justified to complain and pick up on the very obvious colorist (if not racist) tendencies Hoyoverse has with their character designs.
8:49 As a deep admirer of Mexican culture it is sort of annoying to hear African chants when exploring a place named Coatepec or Ameyalco. That mix makes no sense at all.
These three topics really are the biggsst issues and honesty really valid ones too. I agree on your take on the technology and design part but the racism part i just dont agree with it. If genshin's and other players logic of fantasy dictate that insipration does not equal reping the real life people than dark skin characters should be a normal acurance through out the game. But sadly the reality of the physical game is that through out all the nation all the non and playable character are very pale in complextion. If dark skin characters has been a normal thing through out the game the out cry on it in natland would probably have not been as extreme.
Also i personality really hate the deflection and excuse of "its fantasy" as a way to excuses the horrible rep. Why is it that in a fantasy game whith cultural inspiration from black and brown people none of them can be found and why is thier more pale characters than black and drown ones. Yes pale people exist in these culture but by that logic thier should have been a buntch of darker skin charcters in the other nations too since darker skin people does exist in said irl places.
As for the situation with Ororon alot of his hate comes from Ororon (Olorun being a west afrian god, my appologies if i get his name wrong) even though his in game character may have not been the manifestation of the west african god i think most people would see that it is wierd how they gave a west african god's name to a very pale charcter who has thematic designs from said culture. The cultural picking in natland is honestly very blatant and purposeful design and lack of skin reputation. A billion dollar company that has been priased of in its research for some reason can not figure out that when it come to culture with majority brown and black people for some reason only pale playble characters exsist? (its even more outrageous that thier is quite literally enimies in the games that has better reputation than the playable charcters) we have past the labeling of ignorance at this point. Oh and another note the singers oh my gosh the people that who sand the songs are black!!! Yet no black "playable" charcters can be found in the game.
Also the tribal marking when characters use thier skins is hardly noticable on thier pale complextion. Leading to many players beliving that somwhere along the process some one with authorities might had made the characters lighter. If this is true is really is just racism/ colorism.
Over all Genshin/hoyo's blatant ignorance is what makes me so angery about Natland.
But ofcourse I am not from any of these cultures so my input will not be as important as someones who is from said cultures.
The fact that Genshin is not unique in how it goes out of its way not to have dark-skinned playable characters despite taking obvious influence from dark-skinned cultures doesn't make it not racist, imo.
Teyvat may be fictional, but it's made by real people and they are choosing not to have them. No one is asking for perfect, but the cast should have more dark-skinned people in it. Iansan should not be the only one and even then she likely only is because we would know they changed it.
Light skinned people don't have to worry about not having light skinned characters. Dark skinned wanters have to feast for crumbs and Natlan' and Sumeru are the only regions where there's not much excuse to not have them, which is why those 2 regions get the most scrutiny in this regard, even though there's no reason Fontaine or Mondstadt, for example, couldn't either.
Also, Raiden DID get tons of backlash for her design.
i mean, we do at least have Kaeya, Xinyan, Candice, Iansan, Dehya, (who are very dark) and to a lesser extent Cyno and Xilonen
and given Kachina yearns for the mines and Ororon was born half-undead, it makes sense theyre fairly pale
@edenengland1883 Dehya and co are barely past a tan(Xinyan is the darkest of the set) and they all get incredibly washed out in most of the lighting in the game. Iansan is the only undeniably dark skinned character in the game.
@@Renteka-Bond im just gonna have to take your word on the lighting thing since ive had fairly scuffed graphics ever since sumeru's start, but they seem ok when i play
Why can’t I dislike this video? Anyway… I agreed with everything up until the part about racism, because I don’t understand why you content creators are so afraid to call it out directly. Brazil, the largest country in South America, has a majority population of Black and "pardo" people (a term for mixed Black heritage that’s still commonly used here). Neighboring countries like Bolivia, Guyana, Paraguay, Colombia, Suriname, and others also have high percentages of Afro-descendants and overall dark-skinned populations.
The excuse that “well, it’s not based on South America or Africa alone” doesn’t hold water either. Look at Oceania-it has significant dark-skinned populations due to its Indigenous peoples. Australia has Melanesians, and New Zealand has the Māori, for instance. And the whole aesthetic of Natlan IS based off of INDIGENOUS/TRIBALISTIC culture so why would the people not be based off of it as well???
Just stop trying to sugarcoat Genshin’s blatant lack of diversity. We didn’t ask for dark-skinned representation through a handful of NPCs. We wanted the dark-skinned player base to see themselves in main characters, too.
I quit the game long before Natlan, realizing it’s not as great as it seemed. It’s just a glorified, lackluster mobile game with recycled gameplay. Sure, it started strong with a promising story, but each new update became lazier and more inconsistent and now they literally threw it in a trash bin. I had hopes they’d at least do justice to the Black and brown player base with Natlan, but I was wrong.
To my fellow melanated players: I hope you see through the disrespect and quit this game. China can be a really racist place for their very own dark skin Chinese population so the lack of representation in this game, even if not intentionally racist, is actually pretty much racist. To waste you time and money in something like this is crazy.
WDYM "do justice to the Black and brown player base" 😂😂😂😂
It's a freaking game. And other games doesn't do it at all???????????? I barely see other games trying to represent different cultures irl. I have never seen other games that do it put so much effort into representing different culture this hard. And you guys still complain cuz u guys try to set Genshin in the standard of Perfection.
Even the game like Civilization V (and its franchise) that supposed to represent each respective culture very much cuz their game is based on building IRL civilization, the city and the units are instead just copycat of each other (only unique units get their looks changed, thats 1 unit). The BGMs are repetitive af. You get the same set of BGMs for each continent even if its not related.
Im Asian. Im not white, im brown to the point of being called black. Most of ppl here are not white, but I don't complain??? Im content with what we have in a casual gacha game. The dev team put a lot of effort into the game, especially the OST, and I can see it. And im going to debate to hell as a person playing games non-stop for 16 years that THIS game got it done good.
@@digadeh its not a call for perfection, what we can ask for is at least keep the same standard, in inazuma, mondstat, fontaine we know what they were representing at least in the buildings or the banner characters. but in natlan there is either no black/dark banner character and the houses don’t represent any part of africa. Now the stuff that disappoints me the most is as a yoruba native, i keep seeing characters been named after our dieties and yet they are either white as fuck or have no kind of dressing related to them. For me i will say it bothers on racism due to the developers lack of creativity/ carelessness in handling this map heck blending three continents into one map when others have been countries or regions speaks volumes. Am i outraged no but i will always call it what it is.
@@danielashekun7001 dont u know, like inazuma, based on Japan culture, there are countless ethnics and culture in Japan but trying to representing all (that at least relevant) takes a lot of resources and is deemed uneccessary. And no one complain????? I don't either cuz i see it as enough. While in Natlan case there are like gazillion number of African tribes in the world even in 1 countries thats enough to cause countless war that wreck the whole continent for the past 60 years. And you still hope that a casual game from a Chinese company should get every bits of your culture represented appropriately in your likings. That ia absurd. I am happy they try to represent you at all, because it is not bounded by law or necessary at all. Not in one bit. And you call this racism. Come on.
@@digadeh Hello? YOU DONT COMPLAIN BECAUSE YOU AREN"T PART OF THE CULTURE BEING DISRESPECTED???? stfu..
@@digadeh And? Like someone else said, if the people behind the game specifically choose to exclude only darker skin tones while directly, clearly using those regions as inspiration, on top of only having darker skin characters as NPCs, in 2 regions now, that's not an innocent mistake, an oversight, none of that. It's racism. That's the definition. They're specifically targeting darker races and choosing to exclude them while simultaneously making regions and characters using their cultures.
And what are you on about bringing the fact that genshin is a gacha game into this? If you think that the standard in gacha games to whitewash and/or exclude people of color is acceptable, you have no place in this comment thread. It shouldn't be the norm for only darker skinned people to have their cultures used while being totally excluded. Also, if you think that being "brown to the point of being called black" gives you the right to speak on behalf of actual black people and decide what is and isn't racism for them, newsflash for you: you're not part of that culture, you're not black, and it isn't your place to argue with people who are underrepresented in media about how they should or should not be included in said media. It's actually pathetic to watch.
xilonen made it she litterally made all the tech in the skills with the exception (maybe) of kinich's band that projects ajaw
Fontaine: we have steampunk automatons as a security force
Sumeru: the triangle automatons are a Security since a lot of time
Natlan: In a war since centuries, needing technology to save lives
Let's go die as a tribe! use technology for commodities
I assumed that the modern tech that is part of character movesets isn't technology, but Elemental Energy constructs.
I thought so too, but apparently they were all made by Xilonen 😛 Anyway, it's a fantasy game and I couldn't care less. People are overthinking it way too much, but it's cool to pick on Genshin nowadays, so there you go.
all of the advanced tech in Natlan comes from Xilonen (according to Kachina, Xilonen, and Chasca's stories), meaning it does exist in universe, how exactly she constructs it however is a mystery
something else to note, Ajaw is a construct made of pyro energy being projected by Ajaw's soul within Kinich
(edit: also, the "Chasca is racist because cowboys have roots in latin and latin is known for colonization" is.. i mean i dont wanna be mean, but comedically "jessie wth are you talking about?", because that makes characters like Barbera, Rosaria, Cyno, and Sethos also "racist designs" [even moreso even] due to being modeled after real world religions that carry heavy explicit racism in their religious texts)
Ajaw is the only one more or less explained. It’s a projection that manifests from Kinich’s power, it’s not its own physical being. My questing is why is it pixelated? Makes no sense since they have no reference to that type of art.
Xilonen is very Brazilian from the late 80s early 90s.
As a half Brazilian myself, mixed race, the skin colour really doesn’t bother me as much as the flying shotgun does. The game never represented anybody, not even the Chinese people! Find me a Chinese person who looks like Chongyun. Japanese people also don’t look like Inazumans.
Yes, not every Chinese person looks like Chongyun but look at how they respectfully represent Chinese culture in game. Meanwhile in Sumeru they weirdly mix West Asian / Middle Eastern and North African culture. In Natlan they mix South American and African and lowkey Polynesian culture??? Like huh. Yes, Mondstadt mixes German and English culture, too but that's because they share Indo-Germanic and Anglo-Saxon origins.
Character design and portrayal of culture are twice as important for less represented groups. People want to be represented well in a game that claims to be inspired by their culture. If they didn't want to be held to that standard, they should've never marketed themselves like that.
It's not the technology that upsets some players, but it's how it feels weirdly "Earth". It's not only modern but also feels like "OUR" own world breaking into a fantasy world.
I hope there will be explanation for all of these later but I have no problem if it was just out of Devs saying "Ambatuscrew".
Educate yourself on the ancient dragon civilization and their use of phlogiston. Then you can remake the video when you know where the tech is coming from.
I missed fontaine so quickly when I entered natlan😅 Everything about Fontaine was so beautiful and fun in every way I was disappointed when I walked into natlan and i got bored of it quickly The only good thing about it is the Capitano story with Mavuika
If the natlan tech were ancient relics from the dragon kingdom would be more easy to accept them, like Mavuika and Chasca find their bike and giant revolver on some dragon ruin and use them to fight, just like kinitch find ahal on a ruin.
I like most characters but i feel mauvuika clothing looks a bit too revealing
Personally i think its less revealing compared to other designs. However I understand your point. (The zipper going all the way around is just dumb)
@hellomynameisphia2082 some revealing designs are ok in natlan like citlali and mualani while .... xilonen , chasca ( the half pant are kinda weird)
@@abdulrahmanzubairu8371 I was mainly referring to how Raiden's design is ruined for me because of how they valued sexualization over character.
No granny nahida her clothes are perfectly fine
@@Mc_DeusAuri OK zhongli
I think Hoyoverse is facing backlash because the 2 dark skin characters who are playable are pretty bad.
why couldnt we just have dragon characters? HELLO each dragon could thematically have it's own element! (wind dragon, lightning dragon)
I'd say mihoyo isn't necessarily racist but is a Chinese game whose core audience are chinese or asian people so all the characters look asian to a degree to be relatable to those masses whilst also me being an indian dark skinned guy thinks the world is not all people being pale and all people being dark so genshin should actually try implimenting a little skin tone variations you know
Wrong. Mihoyo is racist. Past design employees have already come out and said that while designing Natlan and Sumeru characters, the higher ups forced them to make the characters lighter and asked why they were so dirty.
@@Phentic that's actually disgusting bro wtf 💀 DIRTY?
Kinich's 'living being' is his bracelet, and it projects that pixelart guy with phlogiston. His clothing has patterns similar to mayan architecture, probably from Itza people mostly. It appears that Natlan's human culture is mostly mayan-inspired and dragon culture is mostly aztec-inspired.
There is no need to delve so deep into the technology of Natlan's six chosen ones, Mavuika and Kachina. We already know that Xilonen built most of these things with scraps of dragon tech and is building a motorbike for Mavuika, in a similar sense as Xianyun building a motorbike by herself (yes she also has one). Kachina has an excuse for having a vehicle too if she has a close relationship with Xilonen, and Mavuika is the Archon.
Also, I'd like to double down on the looks of these technologies being too earthilke: I believe it could be intentional for 4 reasons:
- There is a high chance dragons have been able to travel through space because the Tonatiuh is suggested to be able to travel through the false sky (or before it was there).
- The Traveler knows that bikes have license plates in other worlds in a conversation with Mavuika.
- In HI3, we can see Dvalin being observed by Otto in a computer in Earth.
- Barbara knows what idols are because of a magazine Alice gave her.
Dragons might have had knowledge of Earth's tech and culture.
Great take on Chasca's cultural representation, it clears up a lot of common misunderstandings of her. Her having elf ears is a trait shared with Nahida, Klee, Iansan and Layla. There's actually not much to read on long-eared people, we just know that they are a long-lived race (or at least Klee and Alice are). Questioning their ties to real world culture is like questioning why Lynette has cat ears and how that relates to the Fench (It's not a failure of Natlan but more of a general one).
Genshin's problem with racism is very true but hard to fix: You make characters white, you piss off one part of the community. You don't make them white, you piss off the CN community. What would you choose? I assume the choice is made easier when one guy from the CN community appears at your office building with a knife because of a decision in a game and you end up joining a political party for future protection. I'd make them white too in their situation.
I believe Natlan is based on the Earth's ring of fire. (Look up "ring of fire" in Google Images)
The pandemonium with Mavuika's bike originates from two things: She's an archon and archons always bring drama, and people wanted her to be Goku and the whiplash from the bike hit them hard. I haven't seen this level of drama when sumeru had invisible ai drones shooting lasers, people with vr glasses operating holographic monitors in a hivemind-shared experiment and a cyborg piloting an Evangelion mecha.
You were constructive in this video and I appreciate that. Thank you.
Ngl the whole racism part of the video did threw me off a bit. Like yes them as a company are not obligated to do perfect representation and everything, but is still weird using the cultures of those places and not the characteristics of the people who have them. As someone from Brazil, just feels weird seeing our culture being represented without any bit of the diversity our people have, it truly feels like its the most fantasy part of it (can say the same about ZZZ, there is no reason for a last bastion of humanity to have only pale / white human characters)
I don’t need a perfect representation of African culture. Just give us a few playable dark skinned characters. That’s it. People will be happy if you just give them that. Well, the normal people.
it's not just Americans players who are pissed, West African here (Sierra Leonean) and personally I think it's super lame how Mihoyo went about taking inspiration from African cultures and then slapped it on a bunch of fair skin characters for the Chinese market, on the other hand a buddy of mine who plays Genshin and is Kenyan absolutely loves the Natlan region, especially the Natlan Live Performance since it was sang in Swahili so he doesn't need subtitles to understand it lol, so even for us there's a variety of reactions to how Genshin is handling its African inspirations, but at the of the day, it's Mihoyo''s game, they can do what they want
Xilonen's gun was mentioned in the flower clan reputation's quest and it was made by xilonen herself and no other than chasca can use it well, in theory from that conversation anyone could use it if they are skilled enough but for gacha purposes chasca is going to be the only one.
ups i mean chasca's gun i think it is kinda obvious right?
Another explanation for the technology issue could be that those high tech items are all created from elemental energy and aren't actually real, and just a power invented by the vision bearer by simply imagining what they want to create, just like how Obvious Hu-tao and Arlecchino don't have the same exact attacks despite borh using pyro, the reason why its natlan specific could also be phlogiston...maybe phlogiston can be molded into objects while regular elemental energy can't.
I swear if they misuse Anansi 💀💀💀
Maybe its phlogisten being like an imported resource , i am not digging far into it but natlan is a mix of aztec and african culture , so is it like an import from an outside world like how the colinizers brought some tech from Europe. Aka Fontaine?? Id love to see more opinions from it .
Or mavuika's tattoos could be a different color... Honestly these whole rainbow coloured tattoos thing is strange and i can't tell when characters got it active looking at them during a fight... Its a dumb design, would've been more fitting to give them a glowing aura like a super saiyan or something, tattoos are not a great thing anyways and even if it does have some sort of connection with these cultures, if it doesn't fit in the game, better remove it altogether.
"Did you know that your average Salvadorian is made of 90% pupusa"
Stealing this
Honestly i think that hoyo isn't racist. They are however highly colorist and prejudice. Like the fact they have so few characters that have skin tones darker than eggshell white is annoying on a lagistical level. The fact that people who live in a desert aren't darker to reflect that, makes no sense. And on the fact that they are blatantly using aspects of real world cultures is annoying when they do nothing to try and depict the range of skin tones that come with different cultures.
Especially when they are doing this with cultures that have wider rangers of dark tones it is important to show that not every character is lighter than baige in skin tone. All i want is for there to be a range of characters with a variety of skintones from dark to midtonesto complement and contrast the super light ones they have already created.😅😅😅
Natlan would have been a great time to diversify the cast of playable characters by making them visually distinct to reflect the area they come from after not really taking the chance to do that with sumaru.
It feel like the characters designs are just clothing slapped haphazardly onto a preselected pool of skintones that don't go darker than white with the smallest of tans that you can only see if you squint.
Ok also I think that the reason that people have less issues with the nations outside of sumaru and natlan having no brown people or anyone with darker skin tones is that places like German, France, Japan, and China have proportionately less brown people per capita then "the entirety of the middle east" and "large swaths of south America, Africa, and many indigenous cultures around the world".
Don't get me started on the fact that the nations that would make sense to have more brown people in are amalgamations while the nations that are based on places that tend to have less brown people are based on one country.
Just seems a bit weird to me that that was a choice they made alongside not really depicting characters having darker skin tones even when they are drawing on places that tend to have people with darker skin.
Hey bery brave of you to coment on this, sorry for the wave of hate that might come your way, you got yourself a new subscriber.
Please, let Snezhnaya be more Genshin and less Natlan😢
Complains. . . .
But only in the western side of things
lol >_
Iirc xilonen made the bike and even the chascas revolver rifle.
Honestly it wouldn't be that out of place if regular people just had revolvers for fighting the abyss and bikes for riding on pholgistan. The real problem is that they took no effort to intergrate it properly and its jarring. Like why doesn't Xilonen make more of them and/or teach others how to make them? Of all the nations they need it the most for fighting the abyss. IMO it would still work if they added characters/enemies with revolvers or bikes now or even later in the future and just say the bike(s) run on phlogistan and xilonen makes them. I think this is an easy fix and I hope they do it.
@@GhostEmblem guns aren't new, bikes aren't new, i mean we fight a gundam in sumeru which also has internet
@@eddieboston6540 your point tho? Natlan people don't even use them, they are tribal. Yet only playable characters have those. That's the problem.
@@jerryeljeremy7790bruh natlan npcs have them just not to the extent chasca has... We literally saw that in fight with kachina, plus we fight them everyday. Regular enemy Girl with surfborad and gun who rams into us, npc with infused weapons, that bodybuilder dude with a weapon that yeets phlistogen stomes at us and many more. They all use that tech just not to the same extent as chasca or mavuika which makes sense since they are the best warriors of the nation..
@@AdityaBharat-by7zq I'm talking about pixel, dj set, flying gun, and bike, like how many NPC do you think have similar weapons? Best they can do are guns, and gun in times like these are nothing special, fontaine have that too, and not even half of Natlan NPC use it.
But then they jump from gun to flying gun, what's the point of hot air balloon if you have that kind of tech anyway? The tech aint teching here.
lmao, It's always...always about representation this, representation that, skin tone this, skin tone that. I wonder why you westerners are so obssessed with it.
Also, "Chasca's elf ears have no connection to Peru" lol...I can't.
If you expect 100% accuracy in representation, just make your own game. If you dislike how Mihoyo handle things, stop playing their games. If you dislike the artist, don't enjoy the art, as simple as that.
I think youre quite ignorant to bring the racism to the table. Truly. Get over it and get over yourself. Please, stop playing the game.
I'm just gonna correct you on the cultural aspect, Natlan is the ring of fire, not Africa in any way shape or form. The reason there's a black culture aspect is because of Brazil and south america in general. Chasca is a north american cowboy. People need to stop assuming the representation is bad because they actually dont realize a nation that runs on futuristic magic lava is based around the most active volcanic areas in the world.
I'm gonna correct you too because Natlan is based on Aztec, North Africa (some parts of it) and Australia. YOU need to stop assuming. The representation IS bad.
Actually some of it actually is!the chanting you hear in the game is sung in swahili which is from central Africa and is spoken by 50 million people there! Ororon named after an african diety with the same name so yeah
@@Phentic which part of north africa is in natlan ?
L
I just want them too add mount for every every region, like i would love if we could ride a cool carnivore siberian tiger or sabertooth cat analogue in snezhnaya, a camel or sumpter beast in the desert, just mount specific animals but ywah they kinda did dino thingie which is fun, but i just want to interact with animals.
1) they dont make much meat eating animals
2) they could add so much variety in each region
I just want more animals and more interactions with them
You have the right to criticize, and even complain, but racism is not what's happening here.
Yes it is. Do you NOT play the game. Even past hoyo employees have straight up come out and said the quit due to higher ups being racist or were fired.
Me when I lie.
@@Phentic do you have a source for that ?
Did you know that mihoyo as a Chinese company would be penalized for adding too many people of colour to their game?
I don’t know. Azur lane and Arknights have dark skined characters and they are all chinese games
they have split western branches, mihoyo is centralized, outside of language localization, to my knowledge
Doesnt reverse 1999 and distyle all have black skinned characters?
@@seungjoonkin8970 The difference is that these games added dark skinned characters not because of the representation, but because some players find these characters attractive. Azur Lane in particular, since it's a quintessential coomer game. You think Azur Lane added black characters for representation? No, they've added them to satisfy a kink.
@@peckneck2439 I think a dark lady would sell so well in genshin i really don't understand why they dont do it. Like, imo they should do it out of respect regardless, but even if they were 100% money and not morally driven, a dark woman with white hair is like the staple in anime/games. It's a tried and tested fan-favorite at this point. They could make a lot of money, if trhoughout these past 4 years they had even made just 3 genuinely dark characters they would've probably managed to clear peoples' low bar as well.
People complaining about technology of Natlan is like those kid in the cinema who keep asking why this, why that, every 5 minutes. Watch. The. Movie, ffs.
Okay we watched, and what we got? Lazy explanation for the techs.
"Oh those techs? Xilonen made it" & "but these came from acient dragon kingdom"
Okay, so why didn't Xilonen make these techs more to help the war against the abyss? She prioritizes DJ set over war ig lmao. Also why do Dragons of all people need a bike?
@@jerryeljeremy7790 Keep watching, we're just 10 minutes into the movie and you asking for explanation for everything already? might as well asks how it ends. As I said, sounds much like those kid in the cinema.
The important thing when you read/watch these kind of media is to think for yourself, like "hey, so the dragons have advance technology after all, this might be very far into the future than we thought, maybe we are inside of a simulation. oh oh, what about the sky is fake!?", and not to let them spoon-fed you the information. Not everything has to be explain explicitly.
@@jerryeljeremy7790 The Dragons may not be the one using the bike, and they might not be dragon in the first place, remember, these are from the people living there with low tech, misunderstanding bond to happen.
Considered how low tech they are, I don't think they even know how these high-tech artifact really works, they might just inherit them from being a name-holder without the knowledge of it's inner working, who know? as I said, keep watching.
@@XiaZ 10 minutes, more like 4 years of lore thank you, and I've read them fyi. The only logical explanation is if the bike came from "people" and the dragons might not be a dragon, but even so there should more of these relics scattered across Natlan like what happened to Khaen'riah. But nope, it suddenly just magicly appear with these playable characters, and ONLY these playable characters have used it.
It is clear that hoyo just want to hype up Natlan with these techs but failed to implement it in lore and they ended up using "there's an acient civilization with futuristic techs" card. That's lazy writing there.
@@XiaZyoure just clowning yourself at this point please stop
The racism is my favorite part.
Wish we had more of it.