sc94597 said:
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. |
@Bold. Which is what I meant when I said Xenoblade's execution is what made it so well. Xenogears had the better story, Xenoblade had the better execution. It makes you live in the moment, it gets your blood pumping, and it gets you excited for the next part.
As far as Xenosaga goes, I like the story because of how unique it is. But it really is a bunch of jumbled up garbage you don't understand until you get to Xenosaga III, when you can truly appreciate the depth of the story.
I had no idea what the Miltian Conflict was until I played through it.
I agree with you on everything here. Those two games have better stories in retrospect, but that's only because you understand it. Xenoblade presents it well enough for you to understand right away, and it does it in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat. Something I found extremely disappointing in Xenosaga is that it didn't have these moments until the third game.
