Echoes of a Golden Autumn — Remembering Genshin Impact’s Main Theme

There are moments in time that music can preserve more faithfully than memory itself.
For me, one of those moments will always be the autumn of 2020 — when Genshin Impact first opened its gates to the world.

The main theme of the game, composed by Yu-Peng Chen and performed by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, did more than introduce a fantasy RPG; it summoned a whole world that felt alive, fragile, and impossibly vast. The very first swell of strings carried the scent of wind over Mondstadt’s hills, and the choral echoes seemed to whisper of journeys that had not yet begun.

That autumn was a season of wonder.
We were all explorers stepping into a landscape painted in impossible hues — a realm where the sky itself seemed to breathe. The theme’s melody was both solemn and hopeful, built on simple intervals that unfolded like a promise. It spoke not only of adventure, but of longing — that quiet yearning which defines the best of fantasy.

Listening now, years later, I realize how rare that feeling was.
It wasn’t just the music’s craftsmanship — though its orchestration was flawless — but the context in which it arrived. A time of uncertainty in the real world, and yet, for a brief moment, Teyvat felt more real than the streets outside.

The Genshin Impact main theme became a vessel for emotion, carrying the warmth of that first autumn — the laughter of discovery, the quiet awe of the unknown. Its notes linger still, like the memory of sunlight on glass, refusing to fade.

Perhaps that is what great ACG music does: it suspends a fragment of time, letting us revisit it whenever we listen again.
And every time I hear those first few chords, I am once more standing in the autumn of 2020 — when fantasy felt boundless, and the world of Genshin Impact was still entirely new.