People are like "Ew that's a child you sickos!" but like, bruh - Look at that thing. There is nothing human about those proportions. This isn't a human child. It's some kind of hideous changeling, a humanoid abomination from beyond the stars sent to infiltrate our world, subvert our governments, and presumably steal all our brains to be put in jars for further study. The fact that it doesn't reflexively trigger the uncanny valley response is horrific in and of itself. It's already overcome our instinctual defense against infiltration. It's already in our homes and the halls of government. It's already won.
(I know the lizard people from space control our government thing is a white supremacist dog whistle for Jewish people. I actually spent a lot of time thinking about whether or not to post this because the whole genre of "Alien infiltrators" stories is so tied up in white supremacy, anti-communism, anti-immigration, racism, and so forth. But, eh. Dumb jokes about Genshin probably aren't harmful? But feel free to call me out if you think I should take it down or that there's aspects I'm missing.)
I mean, you are functionally the central character. That's who the story revolves around. You've just got companions that you can swap to for their respective power sets and for the completion of sidequests. Its no different than any Final Fantasy game, save that you can only access one character at a time rather than your whole team at once.
You get a handful of these characters as the story progresses by default. But because every one has to be specially equipped and upgraded, I tended to focus on the four with their particular element specialization, then maybe grab one or two more if I was particularly impressed by their powerset. I'm not an obsessive completionist (particularly in MMOs), so I wasn't trying to get every single character by any stretch. And, in many ways, it was preferable to the traditional MMO system in which you'd have to start a new character from Level 1 if you wanted to try out a different role. In Genshin, you just have a team-wide Level, and the only thing you fuss about is the gear and upgrades to your specialty skills.
In the end, the game was more accessible and engaging than WoW, even. And that game was at the peak of the MMO industry for the better part of a decade.
If I actually had friends who played MMOs regularly and I didn't have $X/mo to throw at a game, it would have been a natural top pick for me. But I don't have time for MMOs, I don't have friends with time for MMOs, and I don't really care about dropping $20/mo on a game. The game still isn't as good as, say, Guild Wars or Star Wars: The Old Republic. But at the Free-on-Point-of-Entry price point, its hard to ignore.
Yeah i don't want that in an mmorpg, Iv wanna play 1 character at a time not have this whole thing going on
That's fine. But I'll keep drinking their garbage.
Lol