The way I remember Genshin Impact is that you start off in the boring generic green land of Mondstadt. It is an Ubisoft styled open world where there are lots of POIs everywhere on your map that you need to slowly run to. You have a sprint meter that quickly runs out, and there are no mounts, so alternating between slow walking and slow running doesn't feel very good. You have a glider but it doesn't feel very good to use. Climbing is also very slow. Overall getting around feels like a chore. Now as you visit more POIs and uncover more places to teleport to, this experience is somewhat alleviated but now the game world starts feeling incoherent as you are no longer seamlessly traveling through the world, but instead teleporting between seemingly disconnected, isolated places. But you will still have to do a lot of travel if you want to play this game, because to upgrade your characters and your equipment you have to go around farming mats, and you had better stay on top of upgrading your stuff because there is level scaling in this game and you need to keep up. The basic overworld enemies can become quite damage spongey after the first world level increase.
The next issue is that much of the map is covered in chests, which give you tiny tidbits of the premium currency of Primogems, which is used to gamble for the characters. You have to travel so far to each chest, and each chest gives so few primogems, that it feels like you should just work a minimum wage job and just straight up buy primogems to get the character you want. Another issue with Genshin that quickly becomes apparent is that you are supposed to be travelling with a party of characters in the cutscenes, but you don't get the story characters for free like in Granblue Fantasy. So Jean and Dilluc are talking to you, but they aren't there with you in gameplay because you didn't pay up. The game is NOT generous like Granblue Fantasy which gives you many story characters for free and then throws hundreds of more characters at you for free just for logging in during certain times of the year, nor does Genshin give you a lot of the premium currency for free to buy the characters you want.
The rates for Genshin are quit high. $1 USD gets you 60 primogems (IIRC there is a $100 pack that gives you a rate of 80 primogems per dollar). Like GBF, Genshin has a pity system where if you pull enough times, you are eventually guaranteed to get the thing you want on the current banner. Genshin's pity system for the current banner is 90. Each pull costs 160 primogems. So you may have to pay up to 14,400 primogems or or $240. But Genshin is dirty and they make it so that you only have a 50/50 chance of getting the one of the two characters you want on banner from pity. If you lose the 50/50, then you have to do more pulls - maybe until you reach pity again - until you get the other character you wanted. So in the worst case scenario, you may have to pay 28,800 primogems, or $480 to get the 5 star character on the current banner you want.
Now you can ignore the gambling for characters if you want, but then you will be playing with the main character, Amber the archer, the maid-knight girl Noelle, and I think the girl with the panda (Xiangling) is also given away for free if you do an easy dungeon. She is bae. But if none of those characters appeal to you, then you are not going to have a very enjoyable time. Also, new characters added during the Natlan expansion have coveted traversal abilities/mounts, so there is a bit of P2W/pay for convenience going on.
Another issue with Genshin is that you don't actually just play as one character all of the time. Genshin characters have abilities with cooldowns like in WoW, but you can instantly swap on the spot between your four characters. So instead of maining one character and using their basic attacks while waiting for your abilities come off of cooldown, what you are incentivized to do is to be constantly cycling through all of your characters and using their abilities as they come off of CD. The characters do not fight with you on the field, and the instant switching is very unimmersive.
Lastly, the game world overall feels static, movement does not feel very good, combat does not feel that good, etc. I feel that Wuthering Waves has marginally better movement and combat feel. Genshin does have a nice colorful world, though the art direction can be a little basic. The starting zone of Monstadt does suck and you have to spend a lot of time slogging through the story before you can get to visually more interesting locales like Inazuma (the first expansion) or Natlan (the current expansion, requires at least a few hundred hours to reach).
The English dub is mediocre. You have some okay VAs here like Sean Chiplock as Dilluc, but overall you should probably switch to professional Japanese dub.
On a related note, a lot of your enjoyment of the story is going to made or broken by the omnipresence of your diaper fairy companion Paimon, who does all of the talking for your character, effectively making the MC a noncharacter in most scenes. Another issue with Paimon is how repetitive her writing is. Characters will explain something, but then rather than us being able to get on with accomplishing that thing, Paimon will instead stop us and explain that thing a second time in a childish way. This becomes unenjoyable pretty fast, but you cannot skip dialogues or cutscenes.
Then you have the actual story. The first arc of Mondstadt is mediocre and forgettable, and there is a lot of time wasting. Also, you have the age old gacha problem where it is hard to be invested in the story when you know nothing is going to happen to main characters, almost all of whom are playables and no company is going to make people gamble hundreds of dollars for an individual character fantasy only to then kill off/dismember/cripple/marry off/retire that character. At most people will just leave an organization and become a wanderer after a story is over, but there is no meaningful change in their lives. Also, because this is a live service game, and such games have struggled with blowing up towns, you just know it is unlikely Mondstadt will actually be destroyed by the storm, Fontaine will actually be drowned, that Celestia will actually nuke a city, etc. So there is not much tension to maintain interest.
One thing I am about to touch upon in my next HSR post, but Mihoyo has a bad backstory/codex problem, where there is a tremendous amount of important lore and flavor that is hidden away in huge codex paragraphs and item descriptions that are not fun to read and that most people don't even know exist. There is this whole side to their stories that they are not conveying to audiences through the normal gameplay.
Another issue is that almost every single playable and major story character is a young beautiful teenager or twenty-somethings, and all of the same slim physique. Not a single bulky or broad shouldered man, no one with facial hair, no one who looks older than thirty, etc. And a lot of the rich businessmen and generals and nation leaders and world renowned scientists and so on are these incredibly young people too. So it makes for a really odd world feel. The other 3D Chinese gachas have this problem too. Not GBF though.
EDIT: Another thing I forgot about is that Genshin has limited timed events and content that never returns. There are also questlines in these events that were plot important. The villain of the Sumeru storyline was introduced in one of these events, but if you didn't do it then he just suddenly appears in the main story as if you two had already met.
There is a co-op mode, but IIRC there were issues with it such as people being able to steal resources from other players worlds like the chests which did not regenerate. I cannot recall.
You can't just ignore the Ubisoft stuff or the daily chores to just focus on the story. Early on, at around Adventurer Rank 16, the game forces you to stop following the story and to go hunt for more POIs/chest/do daily quests to raise your AR so you can continue the story, which is very frustrating.
The soundtrack is grossly overrated. Last year I listened to all of the Genshin soundtrack albums (it is a lot of runtime), but only walked away with a small handful of memorable tracks worth adding to a playlist. That being said there are some good tracks in here. Again, the intro region of Mondstadt isn't very reassuring because it's just generic european orchestras which you have already heard a lot of in the movies and over the radio. The more exotic stuff like Sumeru or Natlan's OSTs don't come until very far into the game.
One positive I will say is that Genshin started off with a promise that the Teyvat world storyline would span 7 chapters. The sixth chapter of Natlan just ended and the final chapter in the enemy Russian kingdom Snezhnaya will happen this year and will deal with the current main antagonist, Tsaritsa and her Organization XIII ripoffs. After that, there might an extra final chapter where you go to Celestia and maybe kill evil Paimon or something. So you might actually get an ending here to a years spanning RPG storyline like with Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker a few years ago. And then since this game makes billions of dollars for Mihoyo, maybe they will start a new saga on another planet. You might not get that complete story with these other gachas that have started up years after Genshin and are nowhere near as successful and guaranteed to continue getting funding.
If you want to look at alternatives, the current ones out on the market are Honkai Star Rail, Wuthering Waves, and Zenless Zone Zero. HSR feels very similar to Genshin, but it is space fantasy, turn based, has some mild technical improvements. Wuthering Waves is a different flavor of Genshin with slightly more adult proportioned characters, has better feeling combat. However, it apparently loses whatever identity it had very quickly, as the initial region started out with a modern/futuristic sci fi theme but then the second expansion takes place in Renaissance era Venice. Zenless Zero is Mihoyo's latest game and seems to be more comical in tone (ie, no somewhat serious plot like Genshin/HSR/WuWa), and has a GTA themed world. And if you want a serious, long running RPG story, then you will get more fun per hour with Trails and FF14, even if they aren't perfect and have major flaws too. The reoccurring issue you are going to see in all of these stories is that there aren't many satisfying payoffs for the longterm overarching storylines (the immediate arc storylines are usually fine), an aversion to consequences, and also varying amounts of padded dialogue scenes.
I don't think Genshin is irredeemably bad, but the time investment required is enormous when there is so much lacking about the experience IMO. But you can play for a couple hours and decide for yourself if you want to continue.
