So he decided to improve them in one crucial way, include packaging. The popularity of vending machines would continue until the 1960s, but these Gacha predators would dispense loose products, which Japanese entrepreneur Ryuzo Shigeta reportedly found gross and frustrating. Some of the earliest vending machines would dispense a certain product, but buyers were never quite sure exactly what type of stamp, toy, or gumball they'd receive. This evolution of gacha has drawn hundreds of thousands of players to forums like Reddit to brag about the powerful characters they rolled and commiserate over their gacha misfortunes. Instead, it simply bakes the Japanese vending machine system into a well-made RPG. Genshin Impact is the cutting edge of a new spin on the subgenre: gacha games that don’t bombard players with ads and pop-ups to spend more money. It’s this feeling that’s led players, including Washington Post reporter Gene Park, to spend more than $100 before they even realize what they’ve done. Genshin Impact is a “AAA gacha game” that “almost feels like stealing” because of its enormous open-world design and buttery smooth hack-and-slash combat. Pocket Gamer reviewer Dave Aubrey put it best. In other words, miHoYo uses the wallet-draining schemes of every spammy mobile game but packages them in a premium experience that gamers have found irresistible. Items used to power-up those characters also need to be rolled out of Genshin Impact’s virtual slot machines. Instead, there are two dozen pre-made protagonists you can unlock using an in-game currency. Unlike competing online RPGs - like Blizzard’s World of Warcraft - players don’t create their own characters in Genshin Impact. Instead of creating your own custom character, 'Genshin Impact' lets gamers play a roster of pre-made characters they need to "pull" from the title's gacha store.