Well, I did all branches of the Noelle hangout, and of course MiHoYo couldn't help but jam a bunch of NPC fetch quests in there. God dammit. I was hoping for a nice story with some interactions between traveler and the character, but 90% of the bullshit is "help me kill these slimes" or other boring awful quests.
The whole Liyue merchant quest branch felt like I was in the beginning of a bad NTR hentai.
Two of the 6 routes were ok though, and I like the idea of making you play as the character for their quests. It'd be even better if it was your current traveler along with your current *hangout quest target* character. I noticed for Noelle's part, they were using my actual Noelle with her R2 whiteblind, then for whatever fucking reason they swapped in a pre-built Noelle at the end with a greatsword of favonius. It's like 5 separate dev teams designed this mode without talking to each other. I also don't see any point of the heart meter that's in the cutscenes. Wonder if there's some mechanic behind it or if it's truly as useless as it looks.
At any rate, it's content, but they could have done so much better with it. The fact that they're fully voiced, even the NPCs, likely means that they're going to come slooowwwwww too. I'd have been just fine with text only if we were going to get 5 or 6 per patch. I hope there's an eventual part 2 for characters that get one too, there's plenty of room left to go for individual character stories. They really should have looked at FGO for how to write little character driven side stories, they're one of the best at it, and they're literally just using text and .pngs (not even animated).