Clyde32 said:
|
I'm assuming people who don't think it is up to par with Xenogears/Saga's standards either rushed through/didn't complete Xenoblade's story, missed a lot of the hidden depth provided through side-quests and exploration, didn't do a literary analysis as much as they did Xenogears/Xenosaga, or just are remembering Xenogears/Xenosaga differently. While those games are quite fantastic in scope and layering their story, Xenoblade provides some of the same themes and even goes more in depth into some of the themes (while discarding others), and pacing the plot much, much, better. There is also a level of completeness without compromises. It never was suppose to be an episode in a six part epic. For that, its story is extremely well done for what it was meant to be. Xenogears had the problem of its story being separated on many different formats. First you experienced it through gameplay. Then through a monologue in game. And then to have the full picture you need to read Perfect Works. Xenosaga had the problem of not being fully realized because it was cut in half. I think Xenoblade X will have a good balance of a concise and complete story, but maybe a long timeline and layered story like Xenogears/Xenosaga to provide the historical foundation of the universe it takes place in. The aliens, and ancient artifacts littered through the landscape definitely give creative freedoms for this.
Overall, I enjoyed Xenogears' story in hindsight more than Xenoblade's, but while I was playing the game Xenoblade's felt more interesting. Xenogears had a lot of conflict, but the pacing was quite inconsistent, and that ruined a lot of the motivation in some parts, while making the player overly motivated to find out more about the story in others, so much so that they didn't care about the gameplay. You have to play the game multiple times, and read perfect works to enjoy the core of the story beyond a surface level. This was both an advantage and disadvantage for the game, in my opinion. Xenoblade on the other hand had perfect pacing. The plot twists came at the right time, and the external characters didn't go into random gibberish dialogues with a lot of jargon which you wouldn't get unless you went back and watched the cutscene again (you remember it instead.) There was a particular set of cutscenes in Xenogears which annoyed me. It involved external parties who are controlling the strings using a billion words I didn't even know about yet in the game commenting on the situation of the world. Later on you find out about most of things they were talking about, but you don't really remember what the heck they were saying 20 or so game hours (or weeks/months in real life) before you found out about these things. You just remember bits and pieces match up. This gives you the feeling that you are suppose to understand something at that point, but you are missing it. That is very frustrating. Still when you go back to watch the cutscene again you didn't really miss anything. Everything they were talking about you found out 40 hours into the game. Honestly it made it feel like that cutscene was there just to make you feel like there was a mysterious group of "people" controlling the strings, and that's all it was there for. It was really annoying to have all that build up with such a sequence of cutscenes, where you are confused as hell, and then have a single character or a number of single characters just explain to you things as a matter of fact, "oh yeah there are these things you need to go collect." Having said that, when everything does come together Xenogears is an excellent story. The amazing plot was just ripped to shreds and glued together, that's all. Xenoblade has the benefit of a consistent budget, and that definitely shows.
