Not a whole ton to say, the areas in Fontaine are mostly just relatively neat but a bit samey. Sure, there are locations like the steampunk underwater prison and the destroyed laboratory with water cubes, but I feel that after the amount of effort it took for them to make the underwater diving segments, they deserve a bit of a break.
I must also really say that the design of the story in Fontaine is really nice! It's probably my favourite region, story-wise.
Deepwater Assault Mek
Some of the enemies introduced are kind of 'expansions' to the previous batches of enemies. And the Deepwater Assault Mek kind of rounds off the underwater mechas. This one has a visual design that looks a bit more evocative of a vehicle that attacks rapidly and fiercely. In lore, this one is explicitly meant to be designed for attacking as opposed to the 'surveillance' underwater meks that we've encountered before.
Functionally, the Deepwater Assault Mek is just more or less the same as the other underwater meks, just a bit bigger. But the lore is that this thing was designed specifically to fight larger monsters -- like the giant dragons that menaced Fontaine in the past; the corpse of the greatest dragon actually forms one of the islands of the region. Pretty interesting.
Fatui Frost Operative & Fatui Wind Operative
It's been a while since I merged multiple humanoid enemies together, huh? Inazuma and Sumeru have been pretty great at making their humanoid enemies feel and look distinct from each other. Northern Fontaine introduces a brand-new group of Fatui agents, the "Operatives" that dress very well in suits and coattails, and run around with fancy weapons. The Frost Operative has a cool lightsaber-rapier thing, and the Wind Operative has a cane.
Some of the most prominent characters in Fontaine (Lyney, Lynette and Freminet) should technically be counted among these espionage operatives. And it would be interesting if we've had some quests where these Operatives have infiltrated society in a not-as-sympathetic way that the siblings were, but the way these guys are depicted... they just walk around in the wild and waiting for battle, not really making them any different behaviourally from the other Fatui agents we've faced before.
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BOSSES
Millennial Pearl Seahorse: Nameless Lord of the Great Lake
Foreshadowed in the description of the Emperor of Fire and Iron (a.k.a. the crab boss), we get another powerful Fontemer Aberrant, this time the fully-mutated form of the seahorse enemies. I do really like the design of this thing, much more than the crab. the Millennial Pearl Seahorse has transformed (if we're talking Pokemon terms) from a monstrous seahorse into a literal hippocampus, a literal seahorse. It's got legs and everything, and I really enjoy the algae-like feathers and fins that sprout out of its head and body. I'm still not sure why the seahorse is assigned the element of Electro, but eh.
I do really like its description, too, where it talks about how so many poets and authors ascribe the names 'emperor' and 'suzerain' and 'lord' to these powerful elemental animals, and how there are so many different legends about these giant aquatic creatures that lead armies and courts of their own... but it's all just the romantic imagination of people who are exaggerating about just some really powerful aquatic animals that just happen to be able to unleash elemental energy.
Prototype Cal. Breguet: Experimental Field Generator
Named, after all things, after a watch manufacturer, the Prototype Cal. Breguet is... it's a mass of mechanical gears, parts and greebles surrounding a central rotating core. It's the antithesis of a robot boss compared to the two dancing robots that were introduced earlier, in that Breguet here is completely inhuman, nor does it mimic an animal. It does make it really hard to describe anything about it without showing off the animations -- which are admittedly pretty cool. I also like that within the internal core seems to be an event-horizon singularity or whatever, which fits with the lore of the thing.
Breguet here is found in the ruins of the Fontaine Research Institute, just lying dormant in one of the ruins. When you fight him, turns out that the Breguet is able to manipulate gravity, which doesn't toss your characters into the sky but does weaken gravity enough for your characters to jump high and avoid the Geo-element ripples that it unleashes. Interestingly, Breguet here is apparently designed in order to turn the entirety of Fontaine into a city in the sky to avoid the prophesized 'great flood' that would consume all of Fontaine. That's a neat little lore reason, and the fact that the research institute itself has exploded and turned into a bunch of gravity-defying cubes of water means that experimentation with the technology that led to the creation of the Prototype Breguet is likely the reason the institute itself blew up.
This isn't really my cup of tea in terms of monster design, but I do really appreciate a more non-standard, non-humanoid robotic enemy that's just a mass of interlocking, rotating gears.
Hydro Tulpa
Introduced in the 4.2 patch that concludes the primary Fontaine storyline is the 'Hydro Tulpa'. The term 'tulpa' is being a Tibetan Buddhism concept that means roughly "a materialized being or thought-form". The Hydro Tulpa itself has the subtitle of an 'Awakened Egregore', with Egregore being a word that means 'an autonomous psychic entity that is composed of, and influences, the thoughts of a group of people.' Similar to an Oceanid we saw earlier in the storyline, the Hydro Tulpa is described as 'countless wills dissolved in the water'. But unlike the Oceanids, the Hydro Tulpa is seemingly born out of 'souls that are wished to be born', with all the descriptions surrounding it being rather ambiguous on what it is.
Design wise... it's not something we haven't seen many times in video games before, since the Hydro Tulpa is just a giant genie-like water elemental. It sure is a pretty one, with a cool mono-ocular face and giant coral-looking growths around its shoulder and head. It summons little babies called Half-Tulpas that helps it in combat.
One of the major world quests in Fontaine involves a group of ancient extremists, one of whom have turned himself into a dark-coloured Hydro Tulpa, planning to eventually 'drown' everyone's consciousness as part of this not-quite-hivemind. It's something rather similar to the lore that we learn about the Oceanids in Fontaine, where it turns out that some of them have the ability to merge with each other while others have enough shreds of individuality to split from each other. All nice overarching concepts... but the Hydro Tulpa itself isn't the most exciting or innovative design on its own.
All-Devouring Narwhal
The 'weekly boss' this time around is the All-Devouring Narwhal, an extradimensional creature from the abyss that has been foreshadowed all the way back from the Liyue arc with Childe -- whose attacks involve summoning and creating a giant whale out of water. Turns out that it ties with all the Abyssal dimension stuff, where this otherworldly creature dwells.
This extradimensional Narwhal is actually the true, overarching threat of calamity that basically causes all the problems in Fontaine, both the main 'Archon Quest' story as well as several smaller world quests. A lot of the stuff that happen in Fontaine had to do with preventing a giant, impending doom... which is this big-ass whale from beyond that's attracted to the region of Fontaine, and, if kept unchecked, would devour all of Fontaine and reality.
(The presence of certain themes of the All-Devouring Narwhal is also one of the most blatant nods that Genshin Impact takes place in the same universe/multiverse as its sister games, the sci-fi themed Honkai Star Rail and Honkai Impact, but discussing that is beyond the scope of this review.)
The fight against the All-Devouring Narwhal takes place in its own dimension, but before you do that, you actually see the Narwhal burst out of portals like a whale breaching out of a surface of water. When you do fight the whale in its bizarre dimension that's almost entirely made up of an endless sea and a starry sky, it keeps diving in and out of the 'sea' and the 'sky'. Combine that into the effects of glass or surface breaking apart, and it does help to give us the idea that this is a creature that's fucking up our mental perception of it.
As a whale monster itself, the Narwhal's main body is mostly made up of see-through material, with its tail looking somewhat polygonal -- almost like a CG render that's not finished rendering yet. Its fins and its eyeless head is encrusted with some sort of rocky chitin, leading to that massive giant narwhal horn. On the surface, it's not the most exciting whale enemy, but combined with the moon and the otherworldly music, the Narwhal does work pretty well at selling an otherworldly boss.
Interestingly, around halfway through the battle, the Narwhal will open its mouth and suck you into a singularity within its mouth, where you fight with this entity called as 'Shadow' on a different battlefield that looks like a destroyed arena. The 'Shadow' itself isn't the most exciting enemy design-wise, just some big black knight holding a sword. But what is it? Is it the whale's true form? Some kind of parasitic creature within the whale? What the whale looks like when perceived differently? Why is the giant black hole singularity at the back of the Narwhal's throat now in the background of the battlefield?
If you fail to do some boss fight mechanics while fighting the Shadow, it will summon some rather odd enemies -- Geovishaps, Jellyfishes or Consecrated Fanged Beasts -- to fight you.
Beat up the Shadow knight enough, and then the screen/reality itself will break, and you're transported back to the whale dimension, where it falls down stunned. And... I get that the whale is basically an eldritch space-creature that's here to nom-nom-nom on the Teyvat dimension, but what is this shadow creature? None of this is explained, because in the story an extradimensional traveler arrives to 'seal' the Narwhal away and reveal that it's merely the equivalent of an overgrown, overfed, non-housebroken puppy, which I thought was a pretty cool way to showcase just how powerful the endgame antagonists of this universe is.
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