Genshin Impact has plenty of sidequests and aspects that will frustrate players.
Mondstadt
- The "In the Mountains" world quest, which is needed to unlock both the "Peak of Vindagnyr" Domain (which contains Blizzard Strayer and Heart of Depth Artifact sets) and the Cryo Hypostasis boss. This quest takes quite a long time to complete (comparable to the "Chi of Yore" world quest), especially when compared to the effort it takes to open the other domains in the game. The biggest roadblock in this quest is the ice shard in Starglow Cavern, which requires beating a three-minute combat challenge over a partially frozen pond with nothing but Cryo Hilichurls and Abyss Mages, making it the most frustrating part of the quest by far. If that's not bad enough, you have to deal with falling icicles that crash into the ground at regular intervals for no discernable reason. The difficulty of the challenge arguably stems not from getting frozen (since you can avoid this as long as you don't touch the water), but getting hit constantly, which will disrupt your attacks. When fighting the second wave of enemies, it is very easy to accidentally walk right into the near-invisible barrier blocking the ice shard, which will knock you back. You will be in for a bad time if you don't bring a character that can generate shields to nullify hitstuns, whereas if you did, then the fight goes from hairpullingly difficult to somewhat manageable.
- There are 8 "Ancient Carvings" in Dragonspine that, when you've activated them all, give you access to a door that leads to a recipe for crafting the Snow-tombed Starsilver claymore. One of the carvings, however, is inside a locked room that has to be unlocked with 3 gold boxes. While the Priest's Box and the Scribe's Box are easy to obtain through interacting with the environment, the Princess' Box is a whole different story, being barred off behind a notoriously difficult and sadistic combat challenge even by this game's own difficulty standards. In it, you have exactly 1 minute to beat two rounds of Abyss Mages (one Cryo Mage in the 1st round, and then a Cryo Mage and a Hydro Mage in the 2nd round), while being inside a blizzard (which speeds up the duration of the sheer cold mechanic). Even with the best character setups possible and other players to help you, beating this one comes down to sheer luck, and you still have to worry about finding a nearby heat source to not keel over from the sheer cold after you have come out of it.
- “The Shadow over Dadaupa”. Part of Diona’s Hangout Event, this quest requires you to sneak past a group of hilichurls to get to the other side of the gorge. Genshin’s stealth mechanics are already a pain to deal with due to their proximity-based nature, but what makes this quest even worse is how well-grouped the hilichurls are and how there’s no room for error; get seen once, and you get sent back to start. The one saving grace is that this quest is optional; you can instead fight the hilichurls and still achieve every ending.
- The "Reliable Helper" Daily Commission has Tsarevich tasking you with clearing out hilichurls from either the foot of the mountain, the mountainside, or the mountaintop. Sounds simple enough, but Tsarevich requests that you do it in a certain way or it will not count towards the "Perfectionist" achievement for the Snezhnaya Does Not Believe in Tears: Series I set. For the foot, you have to clear all enemies and report back to Tsarevich in under a minute, yet there is no visible time limit to go by. For the mountainside, you have to clear all enemies, but ensure that none of the crates present at the site are destroyed by you or your foes. And for the mountaintop, you have to defeat the enemies in a listed order. It's because of this that players can't afford to screw up even once lest they wait a potentially long time for the commission to come back, with some claiming to have spent at least two years trying to complete it.
Liyue
- "The Chi of Yore" world quest. On top of being quite long by world quest standards, it involves numerous puzzles consisting of activating statues and takes you all over the northern half of Liyue. Once you finally reach the treasure vault, you're thrown into a defense fight that involves three Ruin Guards at once. Facing one at a time is annoying yet fairly easy, but three? Pure hell, especially when whichever ones you're not focusing down will instead focus on the relic, dealing ridiculous amounts of damage. You're still not out of the woods if you manage to get past them, as the fight is then capped off with a Ruin Hunter with double the usual health, whose massive attacks can eat away the last bits of the relic's health even if it's focusing on you.
- The "Trails in Tianqiu" world quest. The quest requires you to enter three towers of a ruin to collect Light Actuators, with each tower having its own themed set of three challenges. The right tower isn't so bad, just being a torch-lighting puzzle challenge. The middle tower is harder, being a race to get up to the top of the ruined tower using platforms on top of poles that you can't just use the climbing ability to get on top of. If you don't have any other characters who can provide vertical mobility, then your only way of scaling to the top room is to use platforms created by a Geo-aligned Traveler's Elemental Skill. The left tower is the trickiest, being a series of three battle challenges where you have to defeat all enemies in a certain amount of time. The third and final battle challenge consists of several strong Hydro and Cryo enemies, including the dreaded Hydro Abyss Mage, in a small room, all of whom must be defeated within a minute. These enemies can easily stall the player by repeatedly freezing them or trapping them in Hydro bubbles. Worst of all, the quest automatically begins after interacting with a nondescript stone tablet that happens to be on the path to a world boss (Primo Geovishap) which another World Quest will direct the player to, and once players have started the quest, they are irreversibly locked out of the game's co-op feature and their Serenitea Pot on that account until they complete all of it. It's bad enough that you can find entire forum threads or comment sections full of people threatening to drop the game over being unable to access co-op due to the quest, or wondering why the developers added a restriction like that in the first place.
- The "Nine Pillars of Peace" world quest requires the Statues of the Seven in Liyue to be at maximum level in order to acquire all the progression items. Without a guide, you'll have to go gather materials for Geoculus Resonance Stones that can only find one Geoculus at a time, and there are 130 of them. You also can't make a lot of it in one go because it requires regional specialties that respawn after two days. The Geoculus are also in some hard to reach places like incredibly tall mountains that are difficult to climb without Venti or Kazuha's air lift and even in areas locked until you complete certain world quests. At the end of it, you'll be pitted against a Ruin Guard, two Geovishap Hatchlings, and a Ruin Hunter all buffed by Pyro Infusion stones.
- "Suspicious Trails". Yun Jin's Hangout Event features a stealth section that requires you to maintain a set distance between you and two reporters. However, the margin of error on this particular stealth section is just a few feet; try sprinting when you get seen, and there's a good chance you will be too far away and fail the challenge. And unlike Diona's hangout, this stealth section is required to obtain an ending.
Inazuma
- The Inazuma update brought the "Sacred Sakura Cleansing Ritual", which easily dwarfs every other quest in this section so far as the most annoying sidequest in the whole game. For starters, despite being a World Quest, it's necessary to unlock a significant amount of the Inazuma map, including one domain and one teleport spot, unlike previous quests that only unlocked small areas, such as the hole in Sal Terrae. To add insult to injury, some of those places are blocked by purple barriers, similar to the ones that players have to use Electrograni to pass through, fooling people into thinking that those places will be unlocked as you level-up the Sakura Tree, while in reality, you have to do this quest. The quest itself is also absurdly long, almost comparable to some Archon quests, and is split into many time-consuming subsections filled with puzzles that make the whole affair extremely tiresome, not to mention that some of the puzzles may confuse the player, whether by its own rules (such as not realizing there is more than one Mysterious Shadow in the Konda temple), whether because it forces the player to find hidden caverns and spots in a map that's still new for them. And after purifying the five roots... you have a final battle in the center of the Narukami Island, which adds Boss Arena Urgency with the Balethunder effect, forcing the players to run around grabbing the Electrograni while fighting mobs, dodging the core's attacks and solving variations of the puzzles you had already spent your last hours solving, lest you want to spend your entire food supply. Oh, and after all of that, you STILL have to do more puzzles to unlock the last domain and teleport. About the only redeeming thing this questline has to offer is Hanachirusato, the quest giver and fan-favorite NPC who accompanies you and whose story is considered to be one of the best-written quests in Inazuma, if not the entire game.
- Inazuma also brings us the "Tatara Tales" questline:
- While not overly complicated gameplay-wise, the quest takes seven Real Life days to complete, with players having to wait until the daily 'reset' to complete each quest in the story. What makes this one more Egregious is that it's required to lift the Balethunder around Tatarasuna and make more parts of it accessible to exploration.
- The final challenge of the Tatara Tales questline is a surprising Difficulty Spike for a side quest. You must defend an objective from two waves of three Elite Fatui enemies, but unlike similar quests, the Fatui can create barriers that make them very slow to kill, thus giving them free rein to damage the objective which is unusually fragile and can be killed in a few enemy hits. They also spawn far apart, preventing area-of-effect damage from wiping them out before they raise their barriers. And Balethunder is active, forcing you to either put up with the constant HP loss or keep running back and forth from the Electrogranum tree at the edge of the arena, far away from the Fatui who are then given more free rein to damage the objective.
- Getting the total of 40 Rusty and Golden Koi needed for The Catch, while tedious due to the fact it takes three real-life days for fish pools to refill, is otherwise nothing to write home about. Getting the Raimei Angelfish, on the other hand, is an entirely different kettle of fish. First of all, they only spawn at night on a remote shipwreck off the coast of Tatarasuna Island. Due to Tataragami influence, the water's turned electric, and there aren't that many footholds, so expect your active character to lose health quite a lot in the process of jumping from wreck to wreck. Compounding the issue is that the place is crawling with Cryo Slimes and Electro Abyss Mages, to which the aforementioned electrified water isn't a problem (the former can walk on water due to automatically freezing it, while the latter floats,) and the way their elements react mean that they'll be slapping you around with Superconduct. Just getting to the island is an issue in and of itself, as the Slimes and Abyss Mages can deal enough damage to sink the Waverider if you try to park too close. They're also too tanky to be killed with the Waverider's armaments, so your only choice before you can get to fishing is to take them out on foot. The fish themselves are also some of the hardest ones to catch, with their Ideal Tension Zones constantly shifting and requiring a lot of effort to reel in. And to top it all off you need to fish a total of 18 to obtain The Catch and the necessary refinement material (while only 5 spawn every 3 days), meaning you'll have to endure the entire ordeal 4-6 times. Crafting the End of the Line in Sumeru is much less irritating, as the Peach of the Deep Waves spawn in an easily accessible area free of enemies.
- The Thunder Manifestation drops the world boss ascension materials for the Raiden Shogun and Kujou Sara. However, to even unlock the thing, you have to go through the "Seirai Stormchasers" questline, which sees you running all over the island to activate four Warding Stones by touching the paper talismans associated with them, then turning the stone so it matches the talisman patterns. The first and second sets aren't that bad, even with the Balethunder gnawing at your health, but the third and fourth ones are where it really sucks. The third stone has you use a Phase Gate to get up to a series of floating islands, which you traverse by spawning a series of temporary Thunder Spheres you can zap along with the summoned Electrogranum. However, the islands the talismans themselves are located on are somewhat far apart, and lack Electro Spheres, meaning that you have to leap between them and hope it sticks. And if you fall, you have to use the Phase Gate to get back up, and you have no choice but to watch as the little Electro ball slooowly floats along the track until it gets where it needs to be. Needless to say, this gets annoying quickly. The fourth and final stone ups the ante by reusing the P Switch-like Electrograna, but this time it also adds crumbled platforms that get pulled back together by the Electrogranum. Take too long and the Electrogranum despawns, disassembling the platform and sending you on a long fall. At least you also get a pair of Precious Chests after beating the Thunder Manifestation for the first time and completing the questline.
- The location of Enkanomiya released in the 2.4 update has "Hyperion's Dirge", which is required to finish the "The Phaethons' Syrtos" quest as well. First, the seals at three separate locations have to be unlocked, so you need to search almost the entire map of Enkanomiya to acquire 5 different types of key sigils. After unlocking each set of seals, you will be put into a timed combat trial. The fights at The Evernight Temple and Serpent's Heart each last 60 seconds and have Rifthounds and Abyss Mages respectively. However, the one at The Narrows is exceptionally difficult for an overworld encounter. You need to fight three Primordial Bathysmal Vishap Hatchlings that are mobile and tanky (totaling approximately 450,000 HP at WL8). Their signature attack shoots an orb which can bypass shields and drain energy from your characters (followed by HP once your character is out of energy). And to make things even better, that fight has a 30-second time limit. This trial's difficulty is on par with 3-starring Spiral Abyss Floor 11 chambers and is near-impossible, even with food buffs, without a Spiral Abyss-capable team that can deal large AOE damage note .
Sumeru
- The Aranyaka quest chain is infamous among the playerbase for being the longest and least linear quest chain to date. What starts as a bog-standard side quest helping a forest ranger named Rana eventually becomes a side-quest fractal with side quests branching into another set of side quests, some of which in turn branch off into another set of side quests, all of which are nontrivial and often introduce new mechanics and puzzles. The entire chain takes more time to complete than all of the main story content launched at the same time! Like "Sacred Sakura Cleansing Ritual", these quests unlock overworld content and mechanics, including some Dendroculi, songs for solving puzzles around Sumeru, unveiling two regions of the map, the tree for spending Dendro Sigils and the Sumeru craftable weapons. The quest chain is so long and complex that the game gives you a logbook called "Aranyaka", so that you can keep track of what quests you need to do next to progress. The developers likely realized how absurdly long and drawn out the "Aranyaka" quest chain is by sidequest standards, as (I) later released sidequest chains necessary for unlocking world content in Sumeru, namely "Golden Slumber", "The Dirge of Bilqis" and "Khvarena of Good and Evil", are significantly shorter and more linear by comparison, (II) Yoimiya's second Story Quest requires progression of Aranyaka to unlock, but only up to just before the side-quest fractal, and (III) Fontaine's lore content is split into multiple interlinked world quest chains of more limited length, which were delivered over multiple patches. If it is of any consolation, this quest chain allows players to meet and bond with the Aranaras, who won over many fans for their design and their interactions with the player.
- Finding all 76 Aranaras across the entirety of the forest zone of Sumeru (yes, you read that right) can be a staggeringly painful experience, especially if you are not relying on a guide to locate them. While some Aranaras can be easily found in freeroaming or while doing sidequests, some of the little guys can be located in very obscure locations such as deep within caves, and there is no item or in-game progress tracker that can help indicate where they are located. Finding and helping the Aranaras in the open world is required to unlock the 15 treasure chests (one for every 5 Aranaras, with the last three chests unlocked simultaneously with the final 5 Aranaras) located in a cave near Vanarana, which itself can only be unlocked by completing part 1 of the Static Views quest and finding the first ten hidden treasures (the tenth one being in the Chasm instead of Sumeru) shown in the "Mysterious Clipboard" section of your Aranyaka book.
- The "Khvarena of Good and Evil" World Quest chain is disliked by a good portion of the playerbase for its excessive and over-embellished dialogue and lore. While the proper nouns in the dialogue are well-researched Zoroastrian references that contribute to Sumeru's positive cultural representation, the large quantity of such nouns are hard to read, remember and pronounce for a Western playerbase. In addition, the main character, Sorush, is arrogant and insufferable until she receives Character Development - a far cry from the likeable Jeht and Rana from the previous three Sumeru flagship World Quest chains. The cherry on top is that the World Quest chain is the flagship World Quest for Sumeru's third desert expansion in a row, with the playerbase already fatigued from two large areas' worth of desert exploration.
- In its initial state, the Daily Commission "Hey, Come Out!" was criticised as being disproportionately difficult. Players would be tasked to follow a burrow containing a Weasel Thief as it and a few other burrows moved around. Originally, the burrows would change positions around 4 to 5 times, virtually mandating that the player carefully follow the correct burrow on foot. Eventually, the difficulty of this Daily Commission was severely nerfed in version 3.3, reducing the number of burrows to 3 and reducing the number of times the burrows would change position.
- The Daily Commission "Supreme Hookshot?" has you get one of three possible items, with the worst of the three being egg fetching. Getting eggs involves you climbing up a massive tree to fetch three of them. There's no easy way to immediately get up the tree from within the village, and the closest convenient teleport point is at least 200m away, so you're shortest way to it is gliding for roughly a minute. Climbing the tree isn't the easiest thing to do exploration wise, and you have to reach two different spots far from each other. Also no, the thousands of eggs you are already carrying don't count towards the commission, it explicitly has to be the three sitting in the massive tree over the village. If it's the first time you've done the quest then it may not even be apparent you're supposed to climb the tree because your view is obscured by something it's resting on and there's several, much easier to reach trees in the area where Paimon mentions the tree you need to climb. You can put a temporary teleport near the tree, but then you're spending resources every week on something that may not see use for the week even if you set Daily Commissions to Sumeru only. Worst of all, the quest ends with the fisherman failing to catch anything but a wet package no matter what he sends you to get in the first place!
- Certain Daily Commissions in Sumeru's desert areas are unusually difficult to access due to the rugged terrain, overhanging cliffs (which cannot be climbed straight up) and lack of Four-Leaf Sigils for a quick route to the top. Completing such Daily Commissions often involves frustrating detours from the nearest teleport point just to find terrain gentle enough to traverse.
Fontaine
- As of Version 4.2, there are 16 Local Legends scattered across Fontaine, and be prepared for a world of hurt when fighting any of them. Local Legends are significantly buffed regular enemies, sometimes with new attacks or mechanics. 9 of these are underwater, and require specific Xenochromatic Creatures to defeat lest these fights go on for an eternity. The other 7 are on land, and are capable of one-shotting your units on top of having around 3 million HP to boot. It says something when you get an achievement just for beating a single Local Legend.
- The Daily Commission "Their Childhood: Good Times" is a repeatable NPC Daily Commission that replaces the non-repeatable "Their Childhood" Daily Commission chain when the chain is completed. The mission? Play hide and seek with three kids in the Fleuve Cendre. If you haven't memorised where each child will be (or refer to a guide), you will waste an unusually large amount of time for a Daily Commission.
Other
- The two types of balloon-based Daily Commissions can be massive annoyances, which may explain why they have not been sighted in Sumeru and Fontaine:
- The "Dangerous Haul" Daily Commission tasks players to destroy an Anemo slime-powered balloon before it delivers dangerous goods to a Hilichurl camp. Not only is there a time limit, the balloon is also very sturdy and the player is constantly under fire by the Hilichurls. To make things worse, most of the commissions take place near bodies of water, so getting hit by a Cryo or Electro attack will greatly hinder the Traveler while the balloon is drifting further towards the Hilichurl encampment. Better have maxed out equipment or food that buffs up attack. For most players, Xiangling is probably the best character for this, since her Elemental Burst can deal a ton of damage to the balloon as long as you can stay next to it for 10 seconds; but if you don't have her yet or haven't powered her up, this can be a stressful mission. Having the rare Yoimiya, who specializes in single target damage at range, makes it much easier. Of course, it becomes much easier the stronger your team is.
- On the other end is the “Rules of Safe Transportation”, a balloon escort mission. The problem lays less with protecting the balloon as it is ridiculously durable and more with how boringly long the mission takes, due to how ridiculously slow the balloon is, taking a lengthy amount of time to reach the goal, even with no obstacles in the way. For example, the rendition in Nazuchi Beach, if you eliminate all the obstacles (and you likely will if you know the path and how much of a slog the balloon is) takes about 2 minutes and 50 seconds to finish, longer than most story-based Commissions. You’ll likely just be waiting at the end every time the Commission pops up, waiting for it to finally be over with as the enemies pelt the balloon to no avail.
- The "Made to Order"/"While it's Warm" event quests were basically the delivery quests you'd often receive for Daily Commissions made much, much harder. The time constraints are much stricter, and the game forces arbitrary conditions onto you such as no sprinting, no making contact with elements, or no gliding or climbing to make it even more difficult to reach the customer on time. note It doesn't help that most of the customers complain about how long their order is taking, even if they set themselves up in particularly remote locations such as cliffs, islands, and within the proximity of a Hilichurl camp. To top it all off, the timer keeps ticking through loading screens, so if your load times are longer than average, you'll have even less room for error. In some cases you may have no choice but to cheese the mission with a portable teleporter, though setting one up costs crystals and other resources.
- Any sidequest that is locked behind Daily Commissions is sure to frustrate players. Even if the quests themselves aren't all that hard, what drives many players insane is completing the commissions they are locked behind at least once in order to access them. This would be fine and dandy, except for the fact that Daily Commissions are randomly assigned each day. There are players who have been playing since launch that still haven't received "Tales of Winter" as a Daily Commission and thus are completely unable to mark "Equivalent Exchange" off their list of Mondstadt quests, which is absolutely infuriating for completionists. This is even worse with quests locked behind multiple Daily Commissions such as how "Storytelling Method" requires the completion of both "This Novel... Seems Familiar?" and "This Novel Seems... Problematic?" which both in turn require the completion of "Is This Novel Amazing?" several times in order to get either one of them. This attracted so much criticism that a "commission cycle" system appears to have been quietly introduced, making sure that every unique commission will be eventually encountered.
