For a while, I was fascinated by a game character named Qianzhi. It was not because she was beautiful, nor because of the sword in her hand, but because she looked very much like my deskmate in high school physics class who was always ignored but never absent – you thought she was insignificant, but in fact she was the focus of the exam.
The game of Genshin Impact focuses on numbers, mechanisms and krypton gold – these three together are called “fate”. And fate is predictable, just like your heartbeat when you take out your wallet. Ver4.5 version has not yet started, but the news has arrived. Qianzhi, as a new rock character, slowly debuts with a sophisticated logical structure. To put it bluntly, she is not here to steal the limelight, she is here to make you think “why the limelight is always someone else’s”.
It is said that she can interact with various elements. Water makes her heal, fire makes her hotter, ice makes her calm and precise, and thunder makes her excited and charged. As for rock? She herself is rock, which is equal to doubling her “self-identity”. This design sounds like a literary youth in love: It doesn’t matter who you are, I can become anyone for you. But don’t think this is a kind of personal charm, it’s more like a multi-faceted strategy – a qualified spare tire.
Her ultimate move is more interesting, entangled with enemies, weakened resistance, increased teammates’ shields, plus a “Phantom Butterfly Suit”. When I heard this name, what came to my mind was not the game screen, but a girl at a dance party in Shanghai in the 1930s. She danced foxtrot, fragrant wind, but secretly took out a pistol.
Qianzhi’s skill setting is such a pantomime. She doesn’t speak, but every action is related to whether you want to draw more shots. What is more admirable is her constellation system, especially the sixth constellation, which can ignore 45% of the enemy’s defense. I have always believed that in this era of numerical speaking, what can be ignored is not the enemy, but the rules. She is like a person who goes through the approval process and writes a macro to free herself from punching in at work.
Speaking of her special weapon, “Luanqi Kuobazhimu” – the name is mysterious, like the title of the last chapter of an old novel, but if you really appreciate it as a literary work, you are wrong. This sword is very practical, it can be used for both offense and defense, and it can also increase elemental damage. Refining it is like successfully speculating in stocks. Even if real life is a mess, at least you still have a decent income in the game.
But I want to tell you that the most interesting thing about Qianzhi is not these. Whether she is powerful or mediocre, it is not the point. What really attracts me about her is: she proves that the virtue of “omnipotence” has a price in the game world. Her bonus is diluted because of the full coverage, like a person who does a little bit of everything in the workplace but never gets promoted. She does not specialize in one aspect, so she can never become META (optimal solution), but can only be a panacea. But you say she is useless? Not really. If you are short of people on the battlefield, Qianzhi must be there. She is a systematic spare tire and a strategic mean.
So, when you are facing a character with complex mechanisms and versatile talents, you might as well think about it: Do we also demand the same of ourselves? We hope that we have strong working ability and stable emotions, we must know how to communicate but not be emotional, we must be able to fight monsters and cook. As a result, we become Qianzhi, not Ye Lan.
Ver4.5 has not been launched yet, and the planner has already cast the dice of fate in the wind. And you are on the other side of the screen, clicking on the original stone, wondering whether Qianzhi is worth drawing. I can’t decide for you, but I can tell you a little philosophical common sense: you are not for the sake of being strong, but to find the illusion of meaning in every card draw.
And Qianzhi is the container of that illusion – rocky, solid, and can hold anything.