ReCore

game looked like ass at times graphically, animations were awkward and sometimes just bad, game clearly needed more time in development and it's smaller budget was immediately evident

had a good story, gameplay concept, and soundtrack though which I think made up for a lot of the flaws and was the game's saving grace 

I still loved it regardless, and the definitive edition at least seemed to improve on a lot of the original problems it had

This is one of the two games I was thinking of when I clicked into this thread.  Recore is am awesome game.  But, yeah, it was rough in many respects.  

This is the other game I was thinking about.  Frankly, I didn't think it was really all that flawed.  The animation was significantly improved in the first few days, and was tolerable from that point.  The rest of the game was great, IMO.  I was really disappointed that there was no DLC.  I'm also afraid that Mass Effect will be taking a long break.  That sucks.  

Aren't you forgetting Dragon's Dogma? You literally create a pawn for other players to hire as support characters :P 

Other than the bolded I completely agree (though to be fair i'm only 35 hours in and am not really close to seeing the whole world). i still love the game and find it pretty addicting but they're quite a few things that I think were just bad. I especially don't like all the tutorial stuff. I thought Zelda before Breath of the Wild was bad but XC2 is on  whole new level. I'm still getting tutorial bits 30 hours in and I don't feel like reading it, so I end up skipping some of it and try to figure it out on my own or forget about it. The tutorial should've been cut down and more optional imo.

Oh damn. Can you give me a rough guess as to how much I would have to play without the DLC and how much I would have to play in order to make Poppi broken? I was thinking of Grinding a bit on Tiger! Tiger! to help make Poppi really good but if its too much I won't bother.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2. The UI is crap. The map is ABSOLUTE TRASH. The lack of english lip sync is EXTREMELY noticeable, often to the actual detriment of cutscenes. The animation for said cutscenes is often stiff. The audio mixing is garbage. The amount of the damn Tiger! Tiger! mini game the game wants you to play to satisfactorily upgrade Poppi is absolutely disgusting (and that's WITH the season pass that cuts that SIGNIFICANTLY. While it wasn't a significant problem for my personally, the fact that the game doesn't let you reread text tutorials is dumb for a game this complicated and dense. All of this in mind, Xenoblade 2 is still one of my favorite games of all time, my GOTY for 2017. I love the combat, story, world, and characters that much.