Kotaku: Xenoblade Chronicles Import Preview -- 'in one word, it would be “boredom.'

[Mnementh]

SubiyaCryolite said:

Tachikoma said:

Thanks for your response

• I think he acknowledged that "There a numerous side quests to be done in between story missions—one or two of which are usually prerequisites for starting the next story mission". Also, taking a long time to complete a task doesnt necessarily mean he had a satisfying(meaty) experience doing so. This is his job so I guess he has to play games for a significant amount of time before he can even write about them. Which leads to...
• Just how engaging (varied, complex, interesting, fun etc) are regular sub and side quests? Particularly those that aren't labelled "simple".
• Tricky, your word against his. Why does it take so long to level up and get a mech? is that time spent on quests or "grinding"?
• Nothing to say here
• "The combat and overclock systems just fine, the storyline is fine, not amazing but certainly not boring either" fine as in good, very good or excellent. There's too much room for interpretation here and RPGs are usually judged as a whole. This isn't like Bayonetta where you can dismiss the story or characters as not important for example.

As I initially said expectations in the RPG genre as a whole have been raised, will the game meet those expectations? If Dragon Age Inquisition was released today for example, it would score a hell of a lot less just because of everything introduced in The Witcher 3. The main point of this thread was to find out how western reviewers and customers would react to the game post Witcher 3 (lol). For example, character relationships, dialog, npcs and side quests will never be looked at the same way again. Many people are talking about it, even in Fallout 4 discussions [on GAF at least].

 Lastly Amazon.co.jp has 493 reviews for Xenoblade Chronicles X(3.5) and 530 for Xenoblade Chronicles(4.5) so I'll still lean towards those till further notice [Amazon bias]. Just how big are those other retailers?

Well, interesting. At times every second post in this thread is from you and all are trying to put some credit behind the claims of some random writer who disliked the game. At the same time you try to discuss down the opinion of Tachikoma, another random writer who happens to like the game. You are entitled to your own opinion, but it is interesting that this topic is seemingly so important to you that you post a lot. Why do you want to push a point of view so hard? And thats for a game most of us couldn't play yet and that most likely includes you (except you imported).

It is one thing to be sceptical. I personally think it is dumb to buy first day anyways (I still do it for Atlus and Intelligent Systems, some games with forst week sales or bundles and some with online events). But if you want to avoid a desaster on the scale of The Order you can simply wait until two weeks after release. Until then it should be clear what to think about the game. For example, by now you can already say that Bloodborne and The Witcher 3 hold to their hype and are good games, despite what some people might think. Cherry picking some vague hints that the game sucks is strange, even more as Tachikoma showed us that you also can find plenty of hints in the other direction.