You can avoid the grind at first since the game is PvE, but the further you go the more the game demands you to increase the World Level, and the more grind you need to do to get each character playable at that level.

I didn't max out my World Level because at some point it felt like undoing my work of powering up the characters, but the game definitely pushes you that way. Not only story quests, but doiing Abyss levels for more free currency requires high level characters.

That's not even mentioning Artifacts which have so many layers of randomized stats that you could be basically grinding forever to get one which has exactly the stats you want.

I can never shake off the feeling that if Genshin wasn't gacha, if you could get characters from quests and weapons and artifacts from exploration, it would be a much, much better game, even if it was smaller and shorter. But more and more, this seems to be the kind of game that companies want to make.

China seems to be showing a bit more pulse than many countries as far as reining in lootbox games goes, but it's still not enough, and it doesn't seem the benefits of these efforts can be seen worldwide.