This post is a April 2026 transcription of this video. The text has been edited for readability while preserving my original sentiment.

Originally, this video was meant to be a response to my video called Nod-Krai. Will it be as good as you say? But if you see my playthroughs or my discussions around Nod-Krai I’ve been extremely positive about my experience. So instead, I just want to understand the many criticisms people have towards Nod-Krai I feel like it’s important to not dismiss many valid criticisms and open my eyes to a different perspective. The criticism I have collected were across my Discord, a YouTube community post, and an anonymous Google form. And the occasional chat message that I happen to remember.

Let’s dive in and see what you all had to say about Nod-Krai. First, I actually want to share this chart, which was just ranking people’s best to worst regions. It just helps me understand where someone is coming from when they criticize Nod Krai. Out of the nine people who responded to the Google form, five had Nod-Krai as their number one, and four had their Nod Krai as their number two. So people still overwhelmingly enjoyed Nod Krai despite the criticism.

And what many of you didn’t enjoy was the restrictions on Lunar Reactions, which are still exclusive to five-star characters. This was something that I didn’t even realize during my time playing through the Archon Quests. Now that I’m going through the Lantern Rite and getting the opportunity to utilize Lunar Reactions in gameplay challenges, this is hugely disappointing.

At most, this feature is behind a $475.20 paywall, and I understand we can use the excuse that you can save up primogems, and if you were lucky at the pulls, you can only spend $1.98. But realistically, the reason Nod-Krai can get these incredibly voiced Archon Quests, these beautifully incredible visuals, well-designed characters, expansive stories, is because there are many people out there, some who are very vulnerable, who are spending money on this game.

I don’t like that this Lunar mechanic is behind an event banner character. That sucks. Someone did mention that it would have been really cool if the Traveler got an opportunity to have a Lunar Reaction. I think that is the perfect solution to this mess, and I wouldn’t even like worry about that if the Traveler had that ability.

But from mess to not enough mess is the exploration. People didn’t enjoy the lack of exploration in Nod-Krai because it was too small and that there were a lot of traversal mechanics that had you skipping over some fun exploration stuff. I was personally excited to see how Nod Krai is because I mean, I don’t have to spend as much time playing the game, but I understand, especially coming from such an expansive region like Natlan, that Nod-Krai can seem disappointing.

World Quests also fell into a similar pocket by feeling too short and not being as exciting compared to the expansive lore heavy World Quests from Natlan. Now, I haven’t played enough World Quests to provide my own thoughts, so I’ll return to this criticism once I have decided to start writing and recording my World Quests of Nod-Krai video.

I did see one criticism, which I absolutely, strongly agree, which is where the hell is the Narzissenkreuz Ordo recap? They even included an exclusive Narzissenkreuz cutscene during the Moon Prayer Festival. A game that actually did this correctly was Final Fantasy 14. There’s a raid series called Crystal Tower, and this was an optional raid series when it was released in 2013. However, due to their Shadowbringers story arc in 2020, they made the Crystal Tower a required quest to play before finishing the story arc in Shadowbringers.

Narzissenkreuz Ordo needs to either be a required quest, a hefty recap, much like what was done in Paralogism, but I feel like that was a bit lacking, or a story teaser style video. The quest felt way too important that they needed to better prepare the players before doing these quests.

Another criticism. I saw a lot of is that the Nefer’s quest felt forced. Now, the issue actually wasn’t that Nefer’s quest was being bad, but the fact that it felt unnecessary. And I actually kind of agree to that point. The first time experiencing that quest, I was even asking like, why are we doing this? Like, what is this? Even removing her story quest would have little to no change to the overall Archon quest.

The blending of story quests and Archon quests is just not the right mix. I watched behind the scenes videos about Genshin Impact challenging themselves to change things they originally thought weren’t possible. This is one of the changes to have character development within the story as well as the open world, and although this is a bit of a misstep for someone like Nefer, because it’s very clear that we were going through a story quest compared to an Archon quest. But for characters like Sandrone and Columbina, it was so excellently done.

And speaking of story quests, many people wanted to learn more about Flins. Where’s his story quest? And a few critiques also want to learn more about Flins, Varka, Alice and Nicole. To be honest, although I am happy with the current results of Nod-Krai, I would have loved to see more from these characters as well. Why is the game telling Nicole to stop talking, man? This is what we wanted.

People also wanted more time to mourn. The game gave no emotional breathing space to let us sit with Sandrone’s death. Even characters in the game don’t even say their goodbyes to her. No funeral. Are we getting another Winter Night Lazzo video soon? Like this entire moment, I thought was a fake out death. I didn’t believe that she died until 40 minutes in where Arlecchino was like, I’m heading to Fontaine to give the core to the Institute.

One person even mentioned that we didn’t even get a chance to sit with Columbina when she disappeared either, which I do feel like there were a couple of moments that we could have gotten more emotional impact. Columbina’s disappearance and Rerir’s resolve, which was like interrupted by Columbina making a joke.

Lastly, some have also brought up criticism about this being a last minute expansion, which is why some of the world quests don’t feel as deep or the characters felt forced or not fully fleshed out. And I feel like there is a lot of validity to this criticism.

But also after watching the behind the scenes that Genshin Impact released in April of last year, I began to understand a little bit more about some of the missteps HoYoverse made in trying to correct this. They are in the process of better communicating the lore and character development to players. Players believe that the pace of information was too fast and it led to players not getting meaningful information from their lore.

They specifically showed the amount of lore hidden inside books. Nod-Krai is Genshin Impact’s attempt at forging a new path and trying new things. I think for the most part, a lot of us have appreciated these attempts at tying some loose ends, interacting with characters in the open world.

And although the story might not have been as fully developed as we have wanted with maybe some of the characters or maybe some of the lore pieces and maybe the region just felt a little bit too small. I think that this is such a perfect sampler of what we can expect in Snezhnaya. And for that, I am extremely excited about.

So huge thank you to everyone who submitted their criticism. Of course, we still have a bunch more patches left before we even get this Snezhnaya. So who knows? Things can possibly change. But huge thank you to all who submitted their criticisms I read them all. These last few months playing Genshin have been absolutely fun. Being able to express myself and share my experience with those quests with all of you have been so rewarding. So thank you.