The next time you find yourself struggling to obtain a rare item in a video game, abandoned by lady luck and and dismayed by drop rates, ask yourself this question: has somebody ever made a 60-hour video chronicling your suffering at the hands of RNG? If not, take comfort in the fact that you are at least doing better than Zy0x, a Genshin Impact content creator whose legendarily awful luck has been immortalized in a YouTube video that would take you two and a half days to watch without rest.
First of all, I didn’t know you could make 60-hour YouTube videos. As my boss Rollin Bishop reckoned, surely “some physical law has been crossed” here. Secondly, do not watch this video without rest. There are some things for which the human mind just is not equipped.
The Echoes of Vermillion will stay Hereforever… – YouTube
Zy0x is one of the biggest content creators in the Western Genshin space, and his devotion to Xiao, a character released years ago in update 1.3 (the game is now in 5.5), has become such a widely known meme in the English-speaking community, it’s rare for me to see a Xiao-related post or trailer without seeing Zy0x mentioned (or, indeed, posting) in the replies.
Improving his Xiao was the whole point of Zy0x’s ill-fated grind, and that grind has ended with a conclusion that no fiction could hope to match.
The 30-feature-film-length video about Zy0x is nothing short of testament. It’s testament to the cruel and unflinching RNG of Genshin Impact’s main grind, artifact itemization, which uses everything short of bear traps to stall your progress.
It’s testament to the dedication of whoever runs the Zy0x Archives channel, who collected dozens of streams going back to October 2022 to assemble this melancholy marathon.
And, undeniably, it’s testament to Zy0x’s dedication to Xiao.
But the real tragedy of this video isn’t so obvious. It’s about Zy0x’s years-long grind to get good artifacts on Xiao’s signature artifact set, Vermillion Hereafter, long regarded as the character’s best-in-slot option, which is only found in a domain that drops terribly inflexible artifacts rightly avoided by most players.
But this video has only been released now because Vermillion Hereafter was recently outclassed by a new artifact set, Long Night’s Oath, released in update 5.5 as the signature set for new character Varesa.
As Genshin theorycrafter Zajef77 found, this new artifact set is mathematically better for Xiao. The kicker is that it was released mere weeks after Zy0x finally obtained the keystone piece – a good Anemo-type goblet – that his Vermillion Xiao build had been missing.
(I say that, but this video plainly shows he had a good build long ago, just not good enough to satisfy whatever impulse demanded his grind.)
The fact that Varesa, the character this set was actually designed for, is generally stronger than Xiao – who has held up reasonably well for such an old character – just puts the boot in.
To sum all of this up: one Genshin Impact player spent hundreds, if not thousands of hours over the course of several years farming extremely limited-use gear specifically to upgrade one character, only for a better gear set to arrive mere weeks after it finally appeared that his watch had ended, and that interminable grind has now been preserved in a 60-hour video which, in any sane universe, will serve as a lighthouse to warn other players to avoid this.
Also: a pink cowgirl dunked on Xiao in the same update.
Condensing a dramatic Twitter thread that has over a million views according to the app’s analytics, Zy0x said it best in the top comment on this video: “What am I doing with my life”.
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