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So…Natlan Is A Disappointment

It’s been almost two years since the release of Sumeru in Genshin Impact Version 3.0, two years since the last time that Genshin faced a sizable backlash from players over the pervasive issue of racism and colorism in the game’s character design, two years during which the developers have been hard at work on Natlan, the Nation of War, set to release about a month from now in Version 5.0 – and in those two years, Genshin Impact has not gotten better in this regard…if possible, it’s actually gotten worse somehow. Because while there is no one in Natlan (yet) with a design as blatantly offensive as Sumeru’s Dori, for which I suppose I should be grateful, there is also no one whose design bears out the idea, put forward by the music, environment design, architecture, and the characters’ names, that this region is inspired by the cultures and mythologies of pre-colonial North, Central, and South America, Polynesia, and West Africa.

The character of Kinich from the region of Natlan in Genshin Impact, swinging through a canyon. He has shaggy dark-blue hair with blue-green highlights, and green eyes. He is wearing a black short-sleeved shirt under a black sleeveless vest with gold and blue geometric motifs on the front. He has large earrings, and a green-and-gold headband. He is holding an orange-and-purple ball. Beside him flies a dragon rendered in 8-bit animation for no discernible reason, bright orange with green scales and wearing sunglasses.
Kinich (based on the Mayan sun god Kinich Ahau) | youtube.com

Is this exactly shocking, after the Sumeru debacle? Well, no. To be honest, my expectations for Natlan were already extremely low, and had been ever since Sumeru. But I was still holding out hope that something would have changed, and I can’t help but be disappointed to learn that HoYoverse doesn’t care how many surveys you send back with complaints about the game’s lack of diversity in skin-tones, or about viral tweets and petitions. They make too much money off of Genshin as it stands for them to have to care, and unless players stop spending exorbitant amounts of money on this game every month to get six copies of every new character and five copies of their signature weapon, frankly, change isn’t happening. If Genshin can get away with not including Black and brown playable characters in a region inspired by majority Black and brown cultures, they’re not going to suddenly start in the next region, Shezhnaya, inspired by Tzarist Russia.

Some context on Natlan: it’s the sixth region players will visit on their journey across the world of Teyvat, after Mondstadt (probably still the region with the least culture, but just enough to tell that it’s supposed to evoke Germany, anytime between the Renaissance to the 1800’s), Liyue (rooted in a rich and beautiful depiction of late Qing Dynasty China, with subareas representing various Chinese subcultures; no surprise there, seeing as Genshin Impact is a Chinese game), Inazuma (unmistakably inspired by Meiji Restoration-era Japan, with specific islands aligning closely to Hokkaido and Okinawa), Sumeru (a messy assortment of disparate cultural references, from Algeria through ancient Egypt and Abbasid-era Iraq all the way to Iran and India), and Fontaine (grounded in 18th to 19th Century France, but built on the ruins of an older, Celtic civilization and a Roman Atlantis). Four of the five regions in the game to date are based in a pretty specific period of time in one specific real-world region’s history (and Shezhnaya, as mentioned, seems likely to continue that trend). Sumeru and now Natlan are the odd ones out. No bonus points for guessing what else they have in common.

With Natlan, the vibe Genshin seems to have been going for is “what if all the Indigenous peoples in the Global South had formed an intercontinental, pre-colonial utopia…with dragons”, which is an intriguing premise, even if Genshin‘s writers probably aren’t the best people to pull it off. But somewhere along the line, and maybe I’m naive for believing it was relatively late in the development process because of how the character designs all look so much more cohesive with darker skin, as though the colors of their clothes and hair were deliberately chosen to complement darker skin-tones, I have no doubt that someone higher-up demanded that the characters’ skin be lightened…a little more….and then a little more…until what was meant to be a pre-colonial utopia came out looking distinctly post-colonial in the final product because almost everyone was now white.

I’m not absolving the character designers themselves of all fault, however, because I have issues with the playable cast of Natlan that go beyond their skin-tones and are baked into their designs at a fundamental level. To start with, all of Genshin Impact‘s 84 playable characters (95 if we include the eleven revealed in the Natlan teaser trailer) use one of just five basic models (tall female/male; short female/male; and child-height female) with hardly any variation in facial features apart from eye color and the occasional mole or marking. Natlan didn’t need to break the mold to still do a good job, but it’s a missed opportunity to give characters body-types, facial features, and hair textures that diverge from the Eurocentric beauty standards that Genshin‘s characters currently adhere to almost by default.

The character of Citlali from the region of Natlan. She has purple eyes and long violet hair, loose in the back with pig-tails in the front, and a headdress of purple feathers. She is wearing a dark purple sleeveless top with fabric gauntlets on her arms and gold bracelets. She is holding an orange and purple ball in her hands.
Citlali (the Nahuatl word for “star”) | youtube.com

But while that would have been a nice touch, it was not nearly as imperative as simply getting the designs right. Clothes, accessories, and hairstyles make up each character’s distinctive and highly individual silhouette, allowing you to identify each character’s cultural background at a glance. Fantastical elements are to be expected in a fantasy game – there are characters with animal ears, antlers, wings, and tails, sometimes multiple tails – but most of these characters are based in the mythological creatures or native wildlife of their home region’s real-world equivalent. Ganyu, from Liyue, is part-Qilin, a horned beast in Chinese folklore. Gorou, from Inazuma, has the ears and tail of a Shiba Inu, a Japanese dog breed. And their outfits, apart from being a bit more revealing than historical clothing, are still very clearly Chinese and Japanese, respectively. The same largely holds true for Mondstadt and Fontaine.

Genshin Impact, in the past, has even boasted of its commitment to historical accuracy and cultural sensitivity, releasing a twenty-minute long video breaking down the development process for the character of Yun Jin, an opera singer from Liyue who is based in traditional Chinese opera culture, in which the developers speak of their extensive research, of how they tried to reference the costumes used for historical Chinese heroines in Yun Jin’s design, how they landed upon the concept of “striking a pose” as a key element in her combat animations, how they went out of their way to hire an opera professional to be the character’s singing voice. They did something very similar with the character of Furina in Fontaine, with a video describing how the original song “la vaguelette” came to be, and how the decision made upfront to write the song’s lyrics in French for the purposes of authenticity posed a challenge for the team until they got into contact with a French opera singer. HoYoverse is not incapable of accuracy; they make it a priority and use it to their advantage when it suits them.

Not in Natlan, though. If you run down the list of newly revealed characters, you’ll quickly discover that everyone is named after a deity or historical figure – Mualani, after a Hawaiian princess; Kachina, after an entire category of spirits in the beliefs of the Pueblo Native Americans; Kinich, after the Mayan sun god Kinich Ahau, and so on. A few are conspicuous misspelled in English, perhaps in an attempt to make the appropriation less egregious – but Ororon can only be in reference to Ọlọrun, the Supreme Deity of the Yoruba religion, and Mavuika, the name of the Pyro Archon, is a very slight variation on Mahuika, a Māori goddess of fire. You wouldn’t be able to guess any of their backgrounds from their designs, however, without squinting (and even then, I think, you’d have a hard time of it).

The character of Ororon from Natlan in Genshin Impact, standing against a dark background. He has shaggy dark-blue hair and heterochromatic eyes, one blue and the other pink. He is wearing a blue-and-purple scarf with a half-hood over a black leather sleeveless vest, with black fingerless gloves and gray skintight pants. He has a tattered black cloak. His face, shoulders, and forearms are heavily tattooed.
Ororon (a misspelling of Ọlọrun, the Supreme Deity of the Yoruba) | br.ign.com

Ororon is probably the best/worst example of this, as his design is not only isolated from cultural context but downright boring – a blue-green scarf the only pop of color in an outfit comprised of a black leather sleeveless vest and ripped-up skintight jeans with fingerless gloves. I have not seen anyone point out so much as a single cultural reference on his person, and I am highly doubtful that any will be found. The rest are not much better, to be honest. Kinich appears to wield an oversized macuahuitl (a bladed wooden club used by Aztecs and Mayan warriors), which is something, and I suppose there are some vaguely Mesoamerican-ish motifs in Mavuika’s jewelry and the patterning on her…black leather zip-up bodysuit.

Now, in a world where knights in armor and rock’n’roll musicians exist simultaneously, anachronistic clothing choices are pretty much inevitable, but with that said, I do think it’s worth examining why every other region’s fashion is (for the most part) historical with some modernizations, while Natlan’s is the exact opposite: modern clothing – including puffer-jackets, short-shorts, vests with zippers, and visors – with a few scattered and debatable references to traditional Indigenous clothing and patterns. I would not be surprised to learn that this choice was made to avoid having to use actual traditional clothing almost entirely.

Almost, I say, because there is one character in the trailer wearing non-modern (not necessarily historically accurate) clothing; Iansan, named after the Candomblé goddess Iansã, one of the very first characters revealed back in 2020, and still the only character in Natlan with brown(er than the rest) skin. She is one of the very few characters I can see myself pulling for in the upcoming patches, on account of her having darker skin, though I’m not sure what to make of Natlan’s darkest-skinned character being the only one wearing non-modern clothing, with a skull (originally thought by some to be the skull of a water buffalo, sacred to Iansã, now very clearly a cartoonish dragon skull) as a headdress and a necklace of dragon teeth. They already have a habit of casually referring to the brown-skinned Eremites of Sumeru as “barbarians”, and anyone who’s played the Dirge of Bilqis world quest remembers how aggravating it was to have the game force you to stand aside and say nothing while Liloupar, the spirit of a slave-owner, heaped shockingly racist vitriol on Jeht, an Eremite NPC and a friend of the player character’s, so I’m nervous to see how Iansan especially is handled.

The character of Iansan from the region of Natlan, walking determinedly through a forest underneath a waterfall. She has short shaggy white hair with a black, yellow and purple headband, to which a dragon skull headdress is attached. She has long, elf-like ears and bright green eyes. She is wearing an orange and purple tunic with detached black sleeves and a fur collar, with a necklace of what look like dragon teeth and a large circular medallion.
Iansan (based on the Candomblé goddess Iansã) | youtube.com

So…Natlan is a disappointment. I’ll be honest with you, I have very little hope left that HoYoverse will make any changes to the existing characters’ designs or skin-tones at this point. I appreciate that several of the game’s English voice-actors have put their jobs on the line to publicly call out the company, and that some high-profile content creators have done the same, but as I said earlier, unless players rally to make sure that Genshin Impact suffers a financial loss, by not spending money on the game, I do not believe they will pay attention. Now, just to be clear, I don’t think anyone’s necessarily a bad person for continuing to spend money on Genshin, and if you’re from any of the cultures represented in Natlan and having a certain character means something to you, I understand that…but this is where we’re at. Two years since Sumeru, and the conversation hasn’t changed because HoYoverse hasn’t changed; and I don’t know if they ever will on their own.

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Everything We Learned From The Genshin Impact Version 3.8 Special Program

Before Genshin Impact players leave behind the golden sands of Sumeru for the fjords of Fontaine, HoYoverse has prepared one last desert adventure for the Traveler to undertake in Version 3.8, meaning that this year there will be no sojourn to the Golden Apple Archipelago that has traditionally brought players so much joy every summer since the game’s launch. Still, we’ll have a new map to explore for a limited time that will provide rich rewards ahead of Fontaine’s release, a grandly whimsical Event Storyline which we can safely assume will segue into the upcoming nation’s Archon Quest, a main cast of four seemingly random characters with entire chapters worth of hidden lore between them, and a voice cameo from the Hexenzirkel’s mysterious leader, Alice. So it’s basically the Golden Apple Archipelago, in all but name and aesthetic.

A screenshot from Genshin Impact Version 3.8. A small wooden vessel, shaped vaguely like a boat with helicopter blades on top, propels itself forward along a slender wooden track suspended in mid-air above a jungle.
Adventures in Bottleland | gematsu.com

“Bottleland” is perhaps not the cleverest name for the setting of this summer’s cornerstone Event, whose participants have been personally selected by Alice to fill the roles of archetypal characters in an in-game series of short plays collectively titled The Magic Bottle, but the area itself is visually distinct, an emerald-hued oasis encircled by the desert, where an abandoned theater and carnival rides in various stages of dilapidation are linked by the circuitous track of a treacherous roller-coaster that I can’t wait to climb onboard. The Traveler has appropriately been cast in the prominent role of the “Adventurer” seeking the Magic Bottle of legend, with Paimon, Collei, Eula, and Sangonomiya Kokomi joining the ensemble in bit-parts, but the stars of the show are Alice’s own daughter, Klee, playing the “Little Mage”, and Kaeya, the “Dagger Thief”, who are also the only two actors who have made any effort to get into-character with new outfits, soon to be available as alternate skins (Klee’s can be purchased in the shop for roughly $30, while Kaeya’s is a reward for collecting tokens scattered throughout Bottleland).

Other activities in Bottleland include minigames galore, and if tons of easily obtainable Primogems aren’t incentive enough for you to shoot balloons with a water-cannon, dance in the spotlight to burn up enemies on the theater’s stage, or play pinball with finches (I didn’t fully understand that last one, either, it’s not just you), then a free copy of Layla might sweeten the deal. No new characters will join Genshin Impact‘s roster in Version 3.8, but players will have the extremely rare chance to pick up Cryo claymore-user Eula, who holds the record for the fewest reruns of any five-star character (exactly one, over five-hundred days ago) in a game that has the ability to rotate character banners either more frequently, or consistently, but won’t, for whatever reason. If you don’t pull on Eula’s banner now, there’s no knowing when she’ll come back, if ever, but is it worth it when Fontaine is right around the corner and even in Version 3.8, other tantalizing options include Sangonomiya Kokomi, who synergizes beautifully with Bloom-reaction based teams, Wanderer, an exceptional Anemo unit, and Klee, who is not great but might see more use with her new alternate skin coming out?

Version 3.8 will wind down with a couple of smaller-scale Events – Shared Sight, in which players will use an experimental device to locate animals by seeing through their eyes; Perilous Expedition, a classic combat Domain; and a rerun of Adventurer’s Trials, a really fun Event where specific characters’ special abilities must be utilized to complete challenges tailored just for them (for instance, using Heizou’s unique combination of punches and high kicks to play soccer with Slimes). Additionally, a Hangout Event for Kaeya was announced, but very little of the story was teased. It’s not much, but there’s never much to do in the last few weeks before a major update, which I figure is intentional as it encourages players who didn’t speed-run an entire nation upon release to go back and finish up outstanding quests.

A screenshot from Genshin Impact. Melusine, a diminutive pink creature wearing a blue police uniform, strolls down a wide boulevard between rows of tall, elegant buildings advertising, among other things, fine clothes and whimsical mechanical toys. Outside the stores, colorfully-dressed aristocrats are window-shopping, small dogs wearing wigs and hats wait for their owners, and golden robots trudge along carrying heavy bags for their owners. The atmosphere is one of lazy opulence.
Fontaine | Twitter @GenshinImpact

But I can’t blame any player for having their sights set on Fontaine, to the exclusion of all else, especially today, following our first (official) look at the upcoming Nation of Justice, where colorfully-dressed ladies and gentlemen waited on by servient automatons flaunt their exorbitant wealth on the wide, straight, boulevards and in the plazas, for the most part blissfully unaware or deliberately ignorant to the fact that their pride and joy, their beautiful, modern capital city, stands precariously poised above a seething crowd of lower-class laborers who make their cushy lifestyle possible, but are forced to live in the sewers that sunlight does not breach. Why does the Hydro Archon allow the scales of justice to be unbalanced, and who does she serve; her people or the gods who reside above Fontaine? Perhaps she is to them what her nation’s poor and oppressed are to her, barely of note? Whatever’s going on, one thing is for certain: Fontaine’s glittery façade hides ever-widening cracks in the nation’s foundations that could swallow all of its people, rich and poor, gods and mortals alike.

Also, mermaids. Fontaine has mermaids. Specifically melusine, a lesser-known sea-spirit from Western European folklore that has as much in common with descriptions of dragons as with mermaids, typically being depicted as a woman with a fish’s tail and wings, often with the ability to shapeshift. The Melusine of Fontaine are a diminutive species like the Aranara and Pari of Sumeru, not particularly humanoid but fully integrated into human society and working alongside them, and I can’t wait to find out how that came to pass, and whether the connections between the French melusine and dragons implies a similar link between the Melusine of Fontaine and the dragons that once ruled Teyvat.

Screenshot from Genshin Impact. Melusine, a diminutive pink creature in a blue police uniform, creeps through the dimly-lit sewers of Fontaine, where underpaid laborers in aprons toil away at dangerous jobs. In the distance, a circular window lets in a little natural light.
Sewers of Fontaine | Twitter @GenshinImpact

But now you know what I think, I want to hear what excites you about Version 3.8 and about Fontaine, as well as what worries you, like the possibility of some infuriating oxygen mechanic hindering endless underwater exploration, or of squid enemies that hit you with ink and leave you blinded, hopelessly disoriented, in the dark (can you tell I have thalassophobia, a fear of the deep ocean, and teuthiphobia, a fear of squid?) As always, I’ll ask you to refrain from discussing leaks regarding unreleased content, but feel free to share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!

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Everything We Learned From The Genshin Impact Version 3.6 Special Program!

HoYoverse, the game studio behind Genshin Impact, has been fighting (and losing) the battle with leakers since before the game even launched. In recent months they’ve gone to great lengths to try and deplatform particularly prolific leakers like the notorious Ubatcha, subpoenaing Discord and later Twitter to expose users’ information, and they’ve been partially successful at what they set out to do, forcing all but a few of the most high-profile leakers using both these platforms to deactivate and go into hiding…for a little while, at least. Not long enough, evidently, because the contents of yesterday morning’s Version 3.6 Special Program were already being distributed on social media weeks ago by leakers who have probably deliberately remained low-profile because they’re the very same people resuming operations under new identities.

Baizhu from Genshin Impact, standing in the doorway of Bubu Pharmacy. He is tall, with long green hair and spectacles, and a white snake wrapped around his throat. He wears a purple-and-black crop-top, trousers, and a white coat as a cape. A jade orb levitates over his gloved left hand.
Baizhu | clutchpoints.com

Now, I have no personal problem with leaks, and I think they can be very helpful for players who want to be strategic about where and when they spend their money (even if it’s just in-game currency, because that stuff is hard to earn). But there’s leaking details about an upcoming character’s kit to give folks a slight head-start when pre-farming Ascension Materials and Artifacts, and then there’s spilling an entire version’s worth of information, right down to the minigames – and this is the latter. I mean, you’d think HoYoverse would have learned from the wildly positive reception to the completely unexpected announcement of the Genshin Impact anime during the Version 3.1 Special Program that they should always have something more to offer than what leakers have already spoiled, even if it’s just a tease of future content, but the bare minimum is too difficult for them most of the time, so…

Anyway, what did we learn from yesterday’s Special Program? Well, not much, but for the sake of my upstanding readers who don’t look at leaks and were genuinely surprised, I’ll feign shock wherever necessary, although I personally suspect that HoYoverse knows they were beaten to the punch this time, given how little energy was put into organizing this Special Program. Not convinced? The limited-time character banners and weapon banners were “announced” during an intermission, fighting for attention with redemption codes. And it’s not like Yoimiya’s on the banner or anything. Version 3.6 features the return of Nahida, one of Genshin Impact‘s most successful characters, alongside the extremely popular Nilou, followed by the release of fan-favorite Baizhu and his signature weapon (and a random Ganyu re-run). Two new Artifact sets were later revealed in the same fashion, including the Vourukasha’s Glow set supposedly designed to buff Dehya (it won’t, unfortunately, but it’s a nice gesture).

The release of a whole new area in the desert of Sumeru was almost as hastily glossed over during the actual program, remarkably given the sheer size of this map-expansion and the amount of content waiting to be discovered there, including a new weekly-boss – the leafy dragon Apep, unlocked after completing Nahida’s second Story Quest, which explores what happened to the dragoniform deities named Sovereigns who once ruled Teyvat – a new world-boss – the Iniquitous Baptist, whose ability to wield three Elements at once will make her a pain to fight in the Spiral Abyss – and a whimsical new gameplay mechanic that allows the player to maneuver through difficult terrain in the form of an adorable dragon. A limited-time Event in Version 3.6 will also make use of this mechanic, giving players the ability to drop bombs on enemies.

The male version of The Traveler from Genshin Impact, wearing a black-and-gold outfit with a long blond ponytail, facing off against Apep, a giant leafy green dragon under a dome of what looks like green stained glass.
The Traveler fighting Apep | theloadout.com

The centerpiece of Version 3.6 is the Akademiya Extravaganza being held on the grounds of the Sumeru Akademiya, during which representatives from all six Darshans (schools of thought) will be competing for a grand prize in what is described as a trial of wits as well as physical and martial prowess. Representing Amurta, the school of biology and environmentalist philosophy, Forest Ranger Tighnari is returning to Sumeru City all the way from Gandharva Ville. Faruzan, the four-star Anemo bow-user available as a reward for participating in the Event, represents her alma mater Haravatat, the school which studies semiotics. Kaveh, the so-called “Light of Kshahrewar”, is the obvious choice to represent that Darshan, the school of technological sciences and innovation. Rtawahist, the school of astronomy and astrology, has put forward the sleepwalking Layla as their champion. Spantamad, whose members specialize in studying the Elements that make up Teyvat, settled on Cyno, the Akademiya’s General Mahamatra. And Vahumana, the school of historical studies, has selected a mysterious new student at the Akademiya whose name will be different for each player.

Each Darshan will have their own booth set up at the Akademiya while the Extravaganza is ongoing, and players will find minigames here that represent the schools’ six highly individual ideologies. For instance, Kshahrewar challenges you to create the shortest possible path to a destination by assembling random objects in different ways, while Haravatat tests both your skills of deduction and your ability to read between the lines by presenting you with a puzzling story and letting you guess what really happened. Meanwhile, unrelated to the Extravaganza, Akademiya scholars wandering in the desert will enlist the player’s help defeating giant sandworms known as Wenut in the Fulminating Sandstorm Event, and a maverick student will hire you to test out a potion that provides your team with random buffs in the Brewing Developments Event. And finally, the Overflowing Mastery Event will make a comeback, boosting rewards in various Domains for a short while.

Besides Nahida’s second Story Quest, a Story Quest for Baizhu and a Hang-out Event centered around Layla will also be made available in Version 3.6, giving players the opportunity to get to know these two characters better at their leisure. No Hang-out Event for new playable character Kaveh, though, which is extremely disappointing given that he might just be one of Genshin Impact‘s most popular characters already, despite having appeared only two or three times in-game. Claymore-users are generally known for their brute force and aggressive animations, but Kaveh, the first Dendro claymore-user, refuses to get his hands dirty while fighting and lets his sentient toolbox Mehrak do all the heavy lifting for him, while he strikes a pose. He’s not only ridiculously endearing, however – Kaveh brings to the game an interesting new playstyle built around the Bloom reaction (as opposed to Hyperbloom or Burgeon, its offshoots), with an Elemental Burst that immediately detonates all Dendro Cores in its vicinity. Obviously, he’ll need to be paired with someone who does an insane amount of Hydro application, and with Nilou on the banner preceding his release, I’m guessing that would be her.

Kaveh from Genshin Impact, standing in Sumeru City in front of a fountain. He has light-blond hair, and wears a billowy white shirt with a red shawl, and carries a suitcase in his left hand.
Kaveh | genshinresource.tumblr.com

As for Baizhu, the five-star Dendro catalyst-user is a nice addition to our current line-up of healers and shielders, his ability to heal the whole party during open-world exploration just by picking up certain plants and flowers would be incredibly helpful, his voice is soothing, and his attack animations are graceful, so I see the appeal. I’m probably not gonna pull for him (though I might pull for Kaveh on his banner), but that’s fine: I spent most of my Primogems on Dehya’s banner anyway, and I want to start saving up for the new Hydro characters that will presumably release alongside the region of Fontaine in Version 4.0 or earlier. Unless a new Geo character comes out before then and throws a wrench in my plans.

What do you think of Genshin Impact Version 3.6 so far, and which characters are you planning to pull for? Share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!

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Baizhu And Kaveh Revealed For “Genshin Impact” Version 3.6

If you thought the two-year wait for playable Scaramouche was unbearable, just think of how Baizhu mains (to be) have been suffering since before Genshin Impact was even released, when the green-haired, Dendro Vision-wielding doctor was among the characters first introduced in the game’s early closed beta tests – only for him to be a quest-exclusive NPC upon launch. Now, it’s not uncommon for a future playable character to appear in the game shortly before their release, giving them a chance to develop a fanbase, but few characters have had as long an interval between their introduction and their official release as Baizhu, or disappeared for so long during that interval period. Even Scaramouche became a major antagonist whose story spanned several Events and two Archon Quests. Baizhu, by contrast, has only appeared a few times, and it is still unclear if he’s actually all that relevant.

Baizhu from Genshin Impact, standing against a white and green background. He is pale, with long blue-green hair, spectacles, and a white snake wrapped around his throat.
Baizhu | videogames.si.com

But it seems that HoYoverse has finally remembered Baizhu exists, or else he has some role to play in the story yet to come that requires him to be playable, because in Version 3.6 the long wait ends and Baizhu will join Genshin Impact‘s ever-growing roster alongside Kaveh, another Dendro character. We know next to nothing about either character’s kit and playstyle, so today’s post will be brief, focusing exclusively on the characters themselves (of course, there are the usual number of leaks going around, but I won’t be discussing any of that or entertaining discussion of leaked content in my comments section…what I will say, however, is that every leak I’ve seen pertaining to Baizhu has directly contradicted another, so take them all with a grain of salt until the Version 3.6 beta test begins).

Baizhu, from what we currently understand of his backstory, was born frail and sickly, and has spent his entire life working as a doctor in the hopes of one day stumbling across a treatment to his own relentless maladies. At some point, however, he became discontent with surviving and started aspiring to live – forever, that is. I imagine this is about the time when Baizhu received his Dendro Vision, although the green gemstone has probably proved less useful to his pursuit of immortality than the whispered advice of the magical white snake named Changsheng, who remains loosely coiled around his neck, and his study of the undead child Qiqi, who is something like an adopted daughter and apprentice to him now. Baizhu manages Liyue’s Bubu Pharmacy with assistance from Herbalist Gui, and has established a reputation for being one of Teyvat’s greatest doctors – though in early appearances of the character, it was suggested that he might be overcharging or even swindling his patients. I believe HoYoverse abandoned that idea, for there is no trace of Baizhu’s deceitful side in more recent months.

Kaveh, dubbed the “Light of Kshahrewar” by students of that Darshan which studies technology, is Sumeru’s most in-demand architect and interior designer – although you wouldn’t guess it from his current living conditions, which leave much to be desired. Conned by an elusive client out of his fortune, a frantic Kaveh had no other choice but to ask for help from Alhaitham of the Haravatat Darshan, his financially well-off rival. As roommates, the two men do everything in their power to avoid each other during the day, because when they absolutely must interact, one of them always finds something trivial to quarrel about (redecorating Alhaitham’s apartment, in particular, poses a challenge for two people so fundamentally at odds on the matter of interior décor), but that hasn’t stopped players from shipping them – quite the opposite! And you know I don’t even like Alhaitham all that much, but him and Kaveh both being so goddamn irritating is exactly what makes the “frenemies-with-benefits” trope work in this instance.

Kaveh, a character from Genshin Impact, sits at a table with a goblet in his hand, smiling. He is pale, with short blond hair, red eyes, and wears a red-and-brown shawl over a loose white tunic with a plunging neckline.
Kaveh | pockettactics.com

Assuming that Baizhu and Kaveh will debut together on the first banner of Version 3.6 (technically, it’s not officially confirmed that Baizhu is a five-star and Kaveh a four-star, but it’s pretty likely), will you be pulling for them or skipping their banner entirely based on what you know of the two characters thus far? In time, we’ll start to see kit leaks, and then there’ll be all the usual discourse about whether you should pull for either one, but which one do you want? Share your own thoughts, theories, and opinions, in the comments below!