Through monstadt, it really does feel like a clone. Though as the game opens up, yeah it does carve out its own identity.

At the beginning before you get any good teammates, your party members are basically just the different BOTW weapons, and their skills are the different shieka slate tools. Kaeya’s your Cryo, Amber’s your Bombs, Noelle’s your hammers, and you need them to get to korok seed stand-ins. Domains are obvious parallels to shieka shrines, but they mostly get abandoned after the prologue chapter as anything other than gear grind spots. Even the grind of ascending characters and their weapons feels like doing great fairy fountain gear grinds.

edit: oh, and you climb and glide around to traverse the massive environment; it’s a surface level feature comparison, but worth mentioning.

The comparison does begin to fall apart when you find out that the meat and potatoes of genshin is the (mostly self contained) main storylines, and once you start unlocking character storylines, it becomes even further distinct. You’re not building up to reunite with your sibling by just picking a direction and exploring (or even just making a mad dash to the cryo nation), you’re sequentially building up and knockign down local threats, only occasionally getting glimpses of the main thread. And of course, the mobile game mechanics that permeate the whole thing after AR 30 or so really pull it further away.

I stayed out of the game for nearly a year and then went back, ah the sweet sight of a quest list with actual quests in it ^^‘’’