Introduction

In this essay, I create a musical map of Liyue, the China-inspired nation in Genshin Impact, in order to examine how subregional musical diversity is constructed within a nation in game. Released in 2020, Genshin Impact is a Chinese open-world action role-playing game whose nations are each designed around distinctive real-world cultural inspirations, with music playing a central role in shaping their environments and identities. Rather than being presented as a single homogeneous cultural space, Liyue emerges musically as a large and varied landscape including harbors, villages, mountains, ruins, and frontier-like zones.

This question matters not only because Genshin Impact is one of the most globally successful Chinese games of the 2020s, but also because its soundtrack has become a major transnational point of contact with Chinese music. In 2025, HoYo-MiX was reported as the most-streamed China-based artist in the United States by on-demand streams, suggesting that for many listeners outside China, the music of Genshin Impact may function as an accessible encounter with Chinese instrumental timbre, regional musical color, and cultural imagination. HoYoverse has also linked the game’s landscapes to real-world scenic collaborations, including Guilin- and Zhangjiajie-related promotional activities, showing that the game’s cultural geography can extend beyond the screen.

Existing discussions of Genshin Impact music have largely focused on nation-level cultural representation, asking how a region such as Liyue, Inazuma, or Natlan sounds broadly “Chinese,” “Japanese,” or otherwise culturally marked. For example, Thomas B. Yee’s study of Inazuma examines how Genshin Impact communicates Japanese musical identity through parameters such as instrumentation, mode, harmony, and idiomatic composition, while Tan, Gao, and Li’s article on Natlan analyzes the region’s cross-cultural style through melody, rhythm, and harmony. These studies are valuable, but they largely treat the game region as a coherent national unit. Inspired by Patrick E. Savage and Steven Brown’s method of musical mapping, which seeks to move beyond the “one culture = one music” model by tracking stylistic frequencies within a region, this essay asks how music is distributed inside Liyue itself rather than only across nations.

Drawing on location data from the Genshin Impact Wiki and a corpus built from three Liyue soundtrack albums, I analyze the distribution of instrumentation, texture type, and environmental placement across Liyue’s subregions. Rather than treating Liyue as one generalized Chinese soundscape, I argue that HoYo-MiX constructs an internally differentiated musical geography: some areas are marked by hybrid urban-orchestral textures, others by chamber-like plucked-string intimacy, others by string-dominant sacred or scenic atmospheres, and still others by unusual electronic-acoustic or regionally marked instrumental colors. In this sense, Liyue is not only a nation with music, but a musical geography.

By mapping how instrumental profiles cluster in different subregions, this essay shows that Genshin Impact constructs cultural identity not only at the national level, but also through local variation within a nation. More broadly, it suggests that video game music can model culture as internally layered, spatially distributed, and socially complex rather than as a single fixed style.