Genshin Teyvat Expo in Paris Quick Report
When Japanese games release in Japan, they always have a limited edition that includes an OST CD and artbook. But the CD never includes the full OST, and the artbook is incomplete. Complete versions get released a few months/years later separately.
This expo was basically a limited edition artbook. Lacked a lot of designs and characters. And sadly, unlike the regular artbook there weren't any commentary from the staff and designers, only drawings. But this is what I expected so I wasn't particularly disappointed. In the first place Genshin doesn't properly credit its in-house charadesigners, who did what etc, and only credit "Hoyo Mix team" "art team" etc, in the same way NPCs' seiyuu aren't credited. So I wasn't expecting any comments from specific staff members to be displayed to the public. This is a major problem in the sociage industry that few people bring up sadly. Most people only repeat that "it's predatory" without explaining any of the issues.
It's an OK expo overall, maybe a bit small for the 20€ ticket price. You can end up spending up to 80-100€ if you buy merch too. I can't really recommend going if you don't live near Paris. Especially since photos are allowed and you can find the concept art shared on social media.
Maybe it's still worth it if you're a huge Genshin aficionados, plan to visit some other places in Paris for a day, and you live in London or Berlin or Brussels and can easily visit via train. The expo is like 5m of subway/train away from the Gare du Nord station of the Eurostar.
I went to the expo on September 16, at 10 AM, opening hour. It took us around 20m to enter. There were only like 120-130 people queuing with me I think? Most French fans were at school/work, so around half of the visitors were non-French fans. The message board at the end had a lot of variations of "expo is great but the queue was too long, I waited over an hour to enter". So yeah if you're planning to go, you should go this Friday instead of the weekend. Expo ends on Sunday September 21.
The expo is divided into several rooms each containing concept art for one of the Teyvat regions. Some rooms are smaller than other and kinda cramped. I remember how in the Nata room in particular, only one person at a time can stand in front of the Iansan concept art lol, it's cornered in a really small space.
There are a lot of characters with no concept art displayed, only having official art already found-in-game or on official socials. For example the first room is Mondo and Liyue, but it only has concept artwork for Venti, Shenhe, Baizhu, Albedo, a few others I forgot/didn't take photos of, and then Zhongli + Xiao and their (deceased) comrades. No Diluc, no Sucrose, no Diona, no Ganyu, no Lisa, etc. It has some other cool things though like brand new artwork of some of the characters' childhood.
Those are the major points I guess.
Gonna try to do a more professional, longer report for Ko-fi subs at some point insha Allah.
