a bit of whimsy, if you will

If you were a designer for Genshin, how would you have handled designing them to better represent their cultures while also fitting genshins early aesthetic? i, from a non artist standpoint, saw their early designs as more culturally accurate while also purposefully inaccurate to make them pop out more or fit the fighting-game thing, but I agree that it’s definitely changed with the earlier nations.

Which characters do you think have the best mix of culturally accurate/marketable and which ones have the worst mix? Like how do you feel about yae mikos design? It’s definitely more obvious that she’s wearing shrine maiden clothing but I’ve seen criticism that it’s way too sexualized and it makes me think about how they give the female characters cookie cutter outfits (boob window and short shorts) but seem to branch out more with male characters.

That’s!

Difficult to answer. I have ideas but it would be such a grand undertaking for the later nations trying to design things from ground up. Maybe I’ll do it someday but likely not?

As far as best designs go, I’ve always said the best design in the game is Kazuha, and I continue to stand by that. Kazuha’s is the kind of outfit where you can point at anything and say exactly why it’s there. It’s the kind of design that just has a lot of things that make Sense.

Since you asked specifically about Yae Miko, yes. I think she’s somewhere close to the bottom in terms of Genshin character designs. Here are a few things that bother me:

And here’s probably how I would design it instead, very roughly:

I’ll make a separate post at some point about the sexualization of female characters in Genshin because that would get quite long but suffice to say I really don’t think they handled Yae well.