When Genshin Impact launched in September 2020, most gaming journalists reached for the same comparison: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The climbing, the gliding, the open-world exploration loop — the similarities were undeniable on the surface.
The comparison was also completely wrong about what mattered.
Breath of the Wild was the skin Genshin wore for its open-world mechanics. What was underneath — the character design, the storytelling structure, the world’s cultural architecture, the monetisation logic — came from somewhere else entirely. It came from two decades of anime, JRPG tradition, and the specific subculture of Chinese gaming that had been building toward this moment since the early 2010s.
miHoYo: Three Students and a Company Name
Genshin Impact was made by miHoYo, a studio founded in 2012 by three graduates of Shanghai Jiao Tong University: Cai Haoyu, Liu Wei, and Luo Yuchan. They were 22 years old. Their stated mission was to create games for the generation that grew up on anime — specifically Japanese anime and manga.
The company name itself encodes this identity. “miHoYo” is a transliteration of the founders’ internal shorthand for the culture they were building around: the world of 二次元 (ni-ji-gen — literally “2D”), the Japanese term for the anime/manga world as a distinct cultural dimension separate from reality. They weren’t building games. They were building an on-ramp into a culture they loved.
By 2012, China had the world’s largest gaming market by player count but almost no globally successful original IP. The founders’ ambition — building anime-inspired games that could compete internationally — was considered improbable by most industry observers at the time.
Honkai Impact 3rd: The Anime Dress Rehearsal
Before Genshin, there was Honkai Impact 3rd (2016). This is where miHoYo developed the visual and mechanical language that Genshin would later scale to the entire world.
Honkai was a mobile action RPG with an unmistakably anime character design philosophy: large cast of distinctly designed playable characters, each with their own story and personality, collectible through a gacha system. The combat was fast, stylish, and built around character-specific abilities. The narrative was serialised, episodic, and emotionally melodramatic in exactly the way shōnen and seinen anime are.
It was also a significant commercial success in Asia. By the time Genshin entered development, miHoYo had millions of players who had spent real money on Honkai characters. They understood what that audience wanted: anime characters they could fall in love with, in a world built to feel meaningful.
Genshin was built to deliver this at a scale Honkai couldn’t. An open world instead of a stage-based structure. A persistent, explorable Teyvat instead of cutscene-driven missions. But the DNA — the character philosophy, the gacha system, the anime emotional register — came directly from Honkai.
The Real Anime Influences
Ask which anime influenced Genshin’s character design and you won’t get a clean answer, because the answer is “approximately all of them.” But several specific lineages are visible:
The JRPG Ensemble Tradition
The structure of Genshin’s character roster — a large cast with distinct visual identities, elemental powers, and individual story arcs — comes directly from JRPG tradition: Final Fantasy, Tales of series, Xenoblade Chronicles. Each character is designed to occupy a clear visual and personality space, instantly distinguishable at a glance.
Magical Girl Aesthetics in Combat Design
The elemental burst animations — long, elaborate transformation sequences where characters summon visual spectacles — are structurally identical to magical girl transformation scenes. Sailor Moon, Madoka Magica, Cardcaptor Sakura. The design philosophy is the same: these moments should feel ceremonial, personal to the character, and visually excessive in exactly the right way.
Neon Genesis Evangelion in the Enemy Design
The Abyss Order enemies and particularly the boss encounters carry the DNA of Eva’s Angels: geometric, incomprehensible, enormous in scale, with designs that feel genuinely alien rather than conventionally monstrous. The contrast between the bright, anime-soft character designs and these geometric horrors is a deliberate tonal move.
Breath of the Wild taught Genshin how to build an open world. Two decades of anime taught it what to put inside one.
The Seven Nations: A World Built from Cultural Blueprints
Teyvat’s defining architectural decision is the seven-nation system. Each nation is built on a real-world cultural and historical blueprint, filtered through an anime aesthetic lens. This is itself an anime tradition — Fullmetal Alchemist’s Amestris, Attack on Titan’s world — but Genshin applies it with unusual consistency and depth.
Each nation functions as a self-contained world with its own architecture, music, NPCs, and mythology. The musical team scores each region in a style drawn from that culture’s classical tradition — Mondstadt has a Germanic medieval feel, Liyue uses guqin and traditional Chinese orchestration, Inazuma draws on shamisen and koto. The music is as important as the visuals in grounding each nation’s identity.
Gacha: From Gachapon Machines to $4 Billion
No Origins article about Genshin is complete without addressing the monetisation system, because the system is itself a piece of cultural history.
The word “gacha” derives from gachapon — the Japanese capsule toy vending machines that became ubiquitous in the 1970s. You put in a coin, you turn the handle, you get a random toy. The core mechanic — paying for a randomised reward — migrated into Japanese arcade games in the 1990s, then into mobile games in the 2010s.
By the time Genshin launched, gacha was the dominant monetisation model across all of East Asian mobile gaming. What miHoYo did differently was attach the system to characters that players genuinely cared about — characters with stories, with relationships, with distinctive aesthetics built to appeal to the anime-native audience miHoYo had been cultivating since 2012.
The $1 billion in six months figure is the one that shocked the industry. For context, it was the fastest any mobile game had ever reached that milestone at the time. And Genshin was free to play — every dollar came from players who chose to spend on characters or wishes, not from a purchase price.
What Genshin Changed
After Genshin, the open-world anime game became a viable commercial category. Before Genshin, it was an experiment. After, it became a template.
The games that followed — Tower of Fantasy, Wuthering Waves, Zenless Zone Zero from HoYoverse itself — exist because Genshin proved the market. More importantly, it proved that an anime-native design philosophy, built by a studio that genuinely loved the source culture, could compete with and outperform Western AAA productions in global markets.
The three Shanghai students who started miHoYo in 2012 with the stated goal of building games for anime fans had, eight years later, built the highest-grossing mobile game ever released. Not by abandoning anime culture for mainstream palatability — but by going deeper into it, and trusting that the rest of the world had been watching the same shows they had.
Genshin didn’t crossover anime into gaming. It revealed that the crossover had already happened — it was just waiting for someone to build the right door.