Genshin Impact’s Lantern Rite Tales Are a Missed Opportunity

Genshin Impact‘s Lantern Rite event is extremely rewarding. The daily login bonuses are great, the new tower defense mode is one of the highlights of the entire game thus far, and the rewards you get for participating in the event are insanely attractive. More ascension materials, more money, more Hero’s Wits, and a free 4-star character? You can tell MiHoYo really wanted to give back to its community.

There’s just one big problem with the Lantern Rite event as a whole: the Lantern Rite Tales daily quests, which are a total drag.

At the time of writing, the final tier of Lantern Rite Tales are out, and you can complete them to max out your Festive Fever gauge and complete the event. Over the course of the past week or so, MiHoYo has been rolling out the quests slowly so that players would have a small handful of new quests to do each day.

The goal of these quests is to spread the cheer of the Lantern Rite all across the region of Liyue. And how are you supposed to do that? Well, MiHoYo seems to think that boring, inane fetch quests are the way to go.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that a large majority of these quests revolve around talking to random NPCs (most of which you’ve never spoken to over the course of the game) and doing mundane things for them. Some are extremely simple, only requiring you to craft a couple of Xiao Lanterns for them, but others are tedious, tasking you with hitting up various locations to pick up very specific items and bringing them back.

While the tail-end of the quests, which revolve around setting up festivities in Qingce Village are a little more engaging, the rest of them are just painfully boring.

What’s worse is that there was so much potential for the Lantern Rite Tales, especially when you consider how many Liyue-based characters there are in Genshin Impact’s roster. Keqing and Ningguang, for instance, are some of the most popular characters in the game and they play a large role in Liyue. And yet, they’re nowhere to be found.

Some sort of interaction with them would’ve been nice; quests showing off what the Lady of the Jade Chamber does in preparation for the biggest event in Liyue would’ve helped to flesh her out further, and it certainly would’ve been well-received in the community considering how she’s been prevalent in the meta for so long.

Characters like the time-locked Zhongli and Ganyu are missing as well, and even as the player base has been endlessly teased with Hu Tao’s upcoming character banner, she’s also missing. The only character we get to interact with over the course of the Lantern Rite Tales is Kaeya, which seems strange considering that he’s a Mondstadt character and barely has anything to do with the goings-on in Liyue.

Of course, we’d be remiss to mention Xiao, who’s the star of version 1.3. But while he is heavily involved in the overall storyline, his involvement with the Lantern Rite festival itself is also limited.

The event ends with a beautifully animated cutscene where Xiao, Paimon, and the Traveler watch the lanterns rise up from Liyue Harbor at a distance, but the lead-up to that breathtaking moment feels empty. And just like that, the event’s over.

All in all, the Lantern Rite Tales were… fine, but there’s no doubt that they could’ve been even better. With rumors or a similarly major event coming up in Mondstadt later this year, there’s always the chance that MiHoYo could improve upon things when that finally drops.