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Forums - Nintendo Discussion - Xenoblade Chronicles vs Xenoblade Chronicles X

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Which is better?

Xenoblade Chronicles 126 59.72%
 
Xenoblade Chronicles X 85 40.28%
 
Total:211

Xenoblade X plays more like an average dungeon crawler with just one hub city. The freedom of choice regarding missions and party members is heavily limited and the battle system feels boring, especially during the skell battles.

The original Xenoblade Chronicles however is one of the very best JRPGs ever made, on any system. It has a much longer and much better story and far better characters. There is not just one hub location to explore.



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the_dark_lewd said:
Almost statistically impossible that you'd have a turnaround.

It's a weird fact about statistics that randomness gives you a representative figure incredibly quickly. If you have a site with about 50,000 users, you only need to really poll the first 100 or 200 and it'll pretty much give you the same percentages as if you polled all 50,000.

Very few people seem to know this.

This is only true if the poll gets a reasonably random sample. Online polls are notorious for not being random samples, due to an inherent self-selection bias.

 

Anyway, my answer would be "I can't decide". Xenoblade Chronicles X has the open world that just challenges you to explore extensively while the original's exploration is relatively limited. The original's structure in terms of story is more solid, though, and it feels like there's a lot more story to it. The overall battle structure of X is better, but variations in battle style and the talent system was better in the original. Cross being able to change classes and learn special moves from various other characters felt good, but it also meant he (I made Cross male, so I'll be using the male pronoun) felt too generic - the original's characters all felt very different from each other.

The inability to have more than four fighting characters present in the team at any point in time felt restrictive compared with the original's seven - it would have been nice to have the ability to take a couple of extra characters with you and switch them out between fights. And beyond the story/affinity missions, the game's missions felt entirely arbitrary, whereas all of the original's missions felt like they were for a purpose. Oh, and when I first saw the city, I figured that it would get built as the story progressed... nope, the only change is when the Ma-non ship is parked above the undeveloped section.

But there were other aspects I quite liked. Many side-bar missions had choices that seriously had consequences, like NPCs dying if you made the wrong choice. Some of those consequences were to come significantly later in the game, too, so it wasn't just "oh, you chose this? now the character's dead". At least one of the missions, for me, ended up being a bloodbath for NPCs - I'm pretty sure that all of the key NPCs of that mission (the one that starts with a character falling from above without warning) ended up dead, because I made a couple of bad choices. In a few ways, it's depressing, but it also lends the game a little more of a sense of importance of your decisions.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment, though, is that Cross doesn't speak (except in battle). I could understand them keeping his speaking to a minimum, but it felt like we were missing a part of the conversation. There weren't that many different voiced scenes in the game, they could have just had each of the voice actors that provide the various voice options for Cross record the same lines.

Anyway, I wonder if, when XCX is completed, its story will be good enough to stand next to the original. What do I mean, "completed"? I mean, I suspect there's going to be a DLC expansion to the game, based on how it all played out. They left a few major plot points dangling at the end, such as Lao waking up on a beach, why Mira seems to be stopping the other species from leaving, what happened to the core's data and why are they all still alive, and given references made by Tatsu, what is the connection between this game and the original? I suspect that XCX was 'rushed' out because it was taking too long to finish, with the plan being to add the last of the content later. Why else would they provide a direct link on the title screen to the eShop when the only things available for it are free quick-load packs for the disc version (yes, I know that the Japanese version had dlc content that was included with the game in the West - they could easily have removed the eShop link from the digital version of the game, which has no use for the quick-load packs, if they weren't planning on adding dlc in the future).



The original by far.

I play JRPGs for their spine tingling unforgettable life changing epic stories of drama and tragedy and sweeping orchestra sound tracks. Not for their mini games and other such nonsense.

Greatly disappointed with XCX.

It's the FF7 of the Xeno franchise. Overhyped, looks pretty, great gameplay, lots to do, will probably be more loved by casuals, but in the end it's a hollow shallow shell of it's former self and not really Xenoblade anymore.  All glitz and glam and busy work but no meat.

 

Time to go watch the ending of Xenoblade Chronicles again.  Soul moving.  Dialog with emotional voices + music ramping up as you feel the chills creeping up your back.  Never gets old.  From the title screen the moment you put the disc in, to the cresendo of the credits music, just.... what a ride.

 

vs

 

Hey lets eat Tatsu .... 3 second clip of "uh uh yeah" looping forever.  Some robots fighting.



Aielyn said:
the_dark_lewd said:
Almost statistically impossible that you'd have a turnaround.

It's a weird fact about statistics that randomness gives you a representative figure incredibly quickly. If you have a site with about 50,000 users, you only need to really poll the first 100 or 200 and it'll pretty much give you the same percentages as if you polled all 50,000.

Very few people seem to know this.

This is only true if the poll gets a reasonably random sample. Online polls are notorious for not being random samples, due to an inherent self-selection bias.

True. Although only in some places. If it's a general question like "what was your favourite game of 2015?", I doubt there's much a selection bias going on. 



CarcharodonKraz said:
Nuvendil said:
I hold them as equals, but for entirely different reasons. There are areas where Xenoblade Chronicles tops X: while X's central plot (granted, the required story missions are only a small slice of the writing) while good doesn't match the sweeping epic of the original. Unless the last chapter just floors me :P. But then, side content is an area where XCX completely and utterly craps on the original. Almost all of it is tightly unified by the driving underlying narrative, giving the game a sense of unity and tasks a sense of greater purpose. And the game admirably avoids the issue of fragmentation, a problem many other open worlds suffer where the side content and central content are clearly segregated and exist almost completely parallel.

Those are examples of the sort of back and forth the comparison is like for me. Equal, but entirely different. And most importantly, both excellent.

hey..... that was one of the more insightful reads on this sight.   You've actually got me wanting to do the sidequests, and i'm not a sidequest kind of guide.  Nice.  Now heres hoping your comment is accurate.

Well yes, this is a subjective thing but I will stand by the idea of underlying unity.  But not in a "YOU MUST SAVE US!" way like other games but rather in a more low key manner that examines the variety of issues inherent in the premise from a variety of angles in a variety of tones.  I think the most interesting side quests start showing up when other alien races start living in NLA.  Some are simpler stuff, others are funny (sometimes quite funny), but others can be serious.  Very serious.  My advice is not to grab one quest and stick to it.  You can have as many normal quests active as you want.  Also, don't forget the reward ticket system.  It makes harvesting the drops from mobs a breeze.  But the key to all this is that it's all routed in surviving the circumstances.  The biggest challenge is the size of the game.  There are a lot of side quests so you can, theoretically, miss some of the good ones or get stuck in some less interesting ones.  Which is why I say this game is best experienced at a slower pace.



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i prefer XC more. Love the music, story, and characters. I'll give points to XCX for gameplay. Even I love dearly mechas, the monado is awesome.



I loved XC. XCX was pretty disappointing to me.



I can say as I haven't passed the first hour in Xeno X yet [no time available]. Also, Xeno Chronicles was a masterpiece [imho].



There isn't anything that the Xenoblade on Wii does that Xenoblade Chronicles X doesn't do bigger and better.

XCX has a superior world, a superior story, superior characters, superior gameplay, and is just a much more interesting game.

Most importantly, XCX actually feels like a Xenogame, whereas Xenoblade on Wii was more like a really slow paced Saturday morning children's cartoon.



I describe myself as a little dose of toxic masculinity.

First game was way better.... But X is prettier...