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dkniade · 2 years

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Praise for Liyue’s Visual Design and Musical Style from a Chinese Fan

August 8, 2022. Monday.

Liyue is praiseworthy when it comes to its visual identity in its character designs and environment designs, its musical style, and the themes it explores.

I’ve realized I don’t really talk about Liyue characters much. It’s not because I dislike them but rather I just haven’t gotten to the Archon quest yet (as someone who doesn’t play very often) so I don’t know enough about them to talk about them.

But I’ll say that as a Chinese fan, I’m really glad Liyue’s environment design and soundtrack is the way it is, and the character designs too. It was really touching to step into the Liyue region for the first time and hear the soundtrack immediately shift to something that has lots of Chinese musical style (I think there’s a better term for this). The environment (trees, ruins, lanterns, etc) all communicate well that this area is based on Chinese culture.

Visually speaking, I’d say my favourite Liyue characters are Yun Jin, Zhongli, and Xingqiu. Maybe it’s the darker colours and elaborate details in their clothes. It’s really cool how lots of Liyue characters have dark hair, but it’s varying shades of brown, indigo, or navy, so it’s colourful and not all black/brown hair, but at the same time still retaining the Chinese physical feature of straight, dark hair. I think it’s through Liyue’s character designs that I got interested in Chinese cultural clothing in character designs (and naming characters in Chinese), where previously I’ve never quite seen confident, dramatic, and positive representation like this.

I don’t really watch many Chinese wuxia dramas (or costume dramas in general) because I don’t really relate much to themes of bringing honour to the family (dramas with a focus on clans) or spiritual self-discovery (dramas with a focus on the martial arts). Though I’m still not very sure what’s the plot in the Liyue Archon Quest to be honest, from the visual and musical aspects alone, it’s already a very nice representation of Chinese culture.

The few Chinese drama shows I watch are period costume dramas so there’s not a focus on modern Chinese culture, and even in real life the topic doesn’t really come up amongst my Chinese friends. I guess what I’m saying is I think it’s really nice that Liyue encompasses both traditional Chinese culture and more modern aspects of it. The Liyue Opera singer Yun Jin in particular demonstrates this idea well.

Yun Jin’s Chinese character demo has this line.

“璃月多传说，所以璃月戏里…最多的都是神仙戏。但如今是人的时代。我想多写写…属于人类的故事，把天下人心唱给大家听。”

Which translates to—

“Liyue has many legends, so Liyue Opera… mostly consists of operas about gods and the adepti. But now is the age of humanity. I want to… write more stories about the people, and sing out the stories of the people so everyone could hear them.”

I think she represents Liyue pretty well, from what I can gather about the region. I’m also really touched by the PV for the in-game Liyue Opera, “神女劈观”(officially known as “The Divine Damsel of Devastation”, though the better translation would be “The Legend of the Girl Who Split the Altar”), probably to the point of crying when Yun Jin started improvising at the end…

(If anyone’s curious, the matching line from the official English character demo is this: “Many of Liyue’s legends are centered around stories of gods and the adepti, so most operas focus on the supernatural too. But… in this age of humanity, I would rather like to tell stories about ordinary people.”)

The clash between traditional ideas and modern ideas explored through a region like Liyue… I think it’s really nice.

Even though I’ve yet to play through the Archon Quests, the Liyue region’s identity is very touching to me as a Chinese fan. All in all, Liyue is executed extremely well in terms of its character and environments, its music, and its themes.

#dusk analysis #analysis #video game analysis #Liyue #Genshin impact #yun Jin #game analysis #Chinese culture #Chinese

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