Genshin Impact's Irodori Festival Rerun: I Still Can't Choose a Poem Stanza Without a Crisis

I’m standing in Inazuma’s festival grounds, staring at a poetry prompt like it’s a tax audit from the Raiden Shogun herself. The Irodori Festival has drifted back into Genshin Impact for a 2026 rerun, and with it comes the exact same brain-wrinkling dilemma that nearly sent me to a therapist back in 2022: which poem stanza should I pick? The event, dubbed “Hues of the Violet Garden: Irodori Festival,” is slathered in nostalgia and fireworks, but under all that confetti lies a tiny, cruel existential test. It’s like being handed a menu where every dish is called “Delicious Surprise” and the chef refuses to elaborate.

The Moon and Stars Inscribe sub-event is the culprit. This time around, it’s been polished with a few new frills—slightly smoother camera controls for the mandatory snapshots, a new hint system for animal spawns—but the core absurdity remains untouched. You chat with Ootomo and Lenne, two NPCs who radiate the serene, unhelpful energy of librarians who’ve never had to face a deadlines. They send you on a photo-safari for Inazuma and Mondstadt specialties and animals, a task that feels like a wildlife documentary filmed by someone who keeps forgetting to take the lens cap off. I spent twenty minutes circling the same two Crystalflies, swearing they were deliberately photobombing each other.

Once you’ve satisfied the digital photography gods, the game leans in close—metaphorically, not literally, though Paimon’s face fills the screen often enough—and asks you to pick a poem stanza. Here’s where the panic begins. The options float before me like a trio of jellybeans that all taste like sugar but are ominously labeled “Destiny,” “Fate,” and “Lunch Break.” My cursor hovers. My hand cramps. I’ve fought Abyss Heralds with less emotional strain. I start Googling in a frenzy, which I should know better by now because the outcome is, and always has been, completely identical no matter what you choose. Yet every time, my brain constructs an elaborate headcanon in which picking the wrong stanza causes Klee to explode in a cutscene and Yoimiya to frown at me forever.

The humor lies in how the game designs this pressure cooker. Earlier parts of the Irodori Festival are straightforward—the “Friendship in Writing” event literally tosses a free Xingqiu at you, a gesture so generous that I half expected the character to emerge from the screen and pay my internet bill. Xingqiu’s hydro swords have been dismantling enemy shields since 1.0, and getting him for free in 2026 feels like the Traveler’s birthday came early. Then “A Story For You” gives us precious bonding moments with Klee and Yoimiya, a pairing that’s cuter than a teru teru bozu in a doll’s raincoat. These sections are joyously linear. Click, progress, smile, collect primogems. The poetry segment, however, is where HoYoverse plants their little ironic flag: a moment of absolute narrative weightlessness dressed up as a crucial decision, a sort of narrative trompe-l’œil.

The stanza-selection screen is a masterclass in false stakes. It’s a hall of mirrors where every reflection is slightly different but leads to the same exit. I recall a friend, a seasoned AR60 player with artifact luck that could power a small hydro dam, who once refused to progress until she’d consulted three different lore discords about the “correct” poem line. Forty minutes later, she emerged with the revelation that all options were thematically coherent and the quest just keeps chugging along. We laughed like onikabuto who’d rolled the same log uphill. I imagine Ootomo and Lenne behind the scenes, exchanging knowing looks, silently tallying how many Travelers have spiraled over this non-choice. It’s the game’s most subtle psychological experiment, and I respect the audacity.

Mechanically, you pick a stanza, any stanza—perhaps one about the moon’s reflection on water, or the wind through the sacred sakura—and then the game says “Great job, hero” and gives you the exact same rewards. The primogems, the mora, the enhancement ores, they all tumble out regardless. If you tilt your head and squint, it’s a metaphor for life: sometimes the agonizing decisions don’t change the outcome, but they do build character. Or in my case, they build a nervous twitch that surfaces whenever I see a poetry book.

The 2026 rerun brings a few quality-of-life tweaks that make the whole ordeal slightly less twitchy. The snapshot part now has a built-in checklist that shows which specialties you’ve captured and which ones are still playing hide-and-seek. Animal hints are less cryptic—no more “near a cliff” when every cliff in Inazuma looks like it’s about to host a dramatic vision reveal. And the poem selection now has a tiny disclaimer (added after the 2022 flood of panicked tweets) reading “All stanzas share the same outcome,” which is the game’s equivalent of a parent patting your head and saying “it’s okay, honey, the monsters aren’t real.” Yet here I am, still weighing the aesthetics of each line as if I’m choosing a tattoo.

The rest of the Irodori Festival is a firework of generous freebies. The free Xingqiu from Friendship in Writing is a standout; in 2026, with constellations uncapped by the latest world-level expansion, a C6 Xingqiu is basically a hydro archon in disguise. New players get a top-tier support, veterans get a Stella Fortuna that might push them over the edge to that final constellation, and everyone gets an excuse to talk about how Xingqiu writes better romance novels than most of Fontaine’s published authors. The “True Tales of the Violet Garden” story acts wrap up with such warmth that I momentarily forget the game is also a goblet of resin-gated suffering.

I’m not alone in this stanza-shaped madness. Forums are once again lighting up with “WHICH STANZA FOR IRODORI POETRY??” threads, only for the top reply to be a deadpan “yes.” Veteran players have evolved into benevolent guides, posting flowcharts that loop back to “just pick one you mango.” The community has turned the whole thing into a meme, complete with tier lists where every option is ranked “S+ tier (literally the same).” It’s the kind of collective shrug that makes this game’s community so endearing, a communal exhale after holding our breath for nothing.

In the end, I choose the stanza about “stars reflected in a cup of sake,” because it sounds like something Zhongli would recite while nursing an osmanthus wine and making me feel uncultured. The game blinks, rewards me, and sends me on my way. The tension evaporates, replaced by the gentle rain of post-event completion satisfaction. Next year, if they run the festival again, I’ll probably panic just as hard. It’s tradition now, like Paimon demanding food or Timmie’s pigeons existing solely to be struck by lightning. The Irodori Festival is a reminder that in Genshin Impact, the most memorable choices are sometimes the ones that don’t matter at all—and that’s a pretty good stanza to end on.