Genshin Impact Snezhnaya World Quest - Eye of Graeae, Belyi Tsar and a gundam?!
Among the many quests that the new Snezhnaya region provides, the most important one is clearly the line surrounding the Eye of Graeae, the very item we found the moment we arrived in the region. It's a weird, intelligent construct capable of controlling trains and generally being useful to the Traveler. He is searching for the missing pieces needed to make him whole.
Yes, this alone should already raise some suspicion, but Paimon and Lumine are always trusting toward others, so we embark on a journey to retrieve the pieces and try to understand what happened in that era long before the Tsaritsa took control of Snezhnaya, back when the Belyi Tsar ruled.
Honestly, it's been a wild ride. The first encounter was with Pavlina and the whole "marriage" thing in an attempt for Fae to learn what love is, set against the time-looping, mysterious atmosphere of the manor. I was interested, but it still felt like a typical world quest. Sure, it had a few teasers with Aksinya's appearance, but I didn't think much of it at the time.
The main shock didn't come until the second part of the journey. Yes, that's when we encounter the testing grounds created by Koshchei. Honestly, that ramped the creepiness up to a thousand, featuring a village full of tree people and a little girl trying to find the "doctor" and reunite with her mother.
There, we go through various areas of exploration to reach the inner sanctum and uncover more and more info. I knew things were dark, but I wasn't expecting them to really go through with this plot. Everyone was "merged" into a single entity by Koshchei in an attempt to find a way to stop wars and achieve eternal peace. The child herself joins the merged entity and disappears into the embrace of her mother, or whatever that entity had become.
This established a pattern: both were searching for a way to solve their problems, so the third scenario had to be something similar. We get to the castle where the Belyi Tsar resides, and Lumine starts having flashbacks of what happened back then, even though she wasn't there in the first place. And of course, Aksinya betrays us to use the Eye of Graeae to revive the Belyi Tsar as the Primordial Human.
It turns out the Belyi Tsar wasn't a human or a Fae, but an entity (sort of a Gundam, really) built by the Hyperborean civilization using the remnants of the Cryo Sovereign. The idea was to replicate the powers of Nibelung, but things quickly went out of control, causing the current climate of Snezhnaya.
Fast forward, and we're forced to fight our former ally. Honestly, the battle felt more epic than anything we've gotten in recent patches, comparable to the first Dottore fight in Nod Krai, which is unheard of when it comes to mere World Quests. The moment the cubes built by other players appeared to help us fight against it was amazing. It was a scripted battle, but it felt great to move around with the gun shooting at this huge Gundam while jumping between platforms to get closer to it.
The ending was melancholic, of course, with both Aksinya and the Primordial Human falling into the shadow realm. They seemed content, but seeing this as the result of their hundreds of years of effort still feels a bit sad. We still have an Eye of Graeae with us for the journey, but it's not the original anymore, just a machine this time around.
I don't know what awaits us in the coming patches, but if this is the level of quality we're heading toward, I hope Genshin Impact continues forever. Sure, I would've liked voice acting in this quest, but even without it, the story managed to keep me glued to the screen.