Xenoblade Chronicles is a Masterpiece!

[Jumpin]

sc94597 said:

Jumpin said:

I preferred Xenogears and Xenosaga. Xenoblade was not as detailed as those games.

Xenogears was great, but has some control, platforming and camera issues, pacing was also inconsistent. Xenosaga's story was not as great as Xenogears, and the gameplay was boring. Xenoblade had a good balance of both a decent story and excellent gameplay, and didn't have pacing issues in its story. 

I disagree with Xenoblade having anything on any of the other games.

There wasn't a good balance between story and gameplay, as neither were particularly good in Xenoblade compared to the prior games. First and foremost, Xenoblade was weak on story compared to all other games in the Xeno franchise. It was a huge decline from Xenosaga, and no where near the level of Xenogears excellence. Story is the most important element in RPGs, especially in the Xeno games, where they were known for being the best of the best when it came to story.

But you don't need to compromise on gameplay to have a great story, Xenogears did both fantastically, much better than Xenoblade.

gameplaywise, the world of Xenoblade was oversized for what there was to actually do in it. The difficulty balance was also wonky, and so you have to grind or do boring side-fetch-quests starting at around Colony 6 mines, and you had to navigate that oversized world, even with warping it was annoying and time consuming. So I disagree that the pacing was any better than most of the other games. Xenosaga episode 2, 3, and Xenogears all had much better pacing (and that includes disk 2). Xenosaga 1 is the only one that really had worse pacing as it didn't integrate story and interaction very well, and many of the locations were needlessly oversized and took too long to navigate, much like Xenoblade.

Due to the grinding and boring side quests of Xenoblade, I didn't find the gameplay to be in any way superior to the other games. It had a neat battle system, which is superior to other similar games, but spamming abilities while running around enemies gets monotonous after a time, for me it was around Makna Forest that I tired of it. The slicker battle systems of all the other games were better. Even at their worst, at least I don't have to worry about always having to run around to the backs and sides of enemies while trying to set up topples EVERY SINGLE TIME. That said, it's still better than other recent RPGs that implement action stuff just to make every battle a actiony chore, but Xenoblade still has that shit on it. It would be better if you could just tell your characters what to do, rather than control them to do it after you mastered it 35 hours earlier.

Also, every town except frontier Village and Hidden Village were uninteresting and annoying to navigate.

One good thing about Xenoblade that I felt was top notch, was that it was one of the few games I've played where I really enjoyed the voice acting. The Mechons were particularly entertaining. Xenosaga's sucked in comparison. That is aside the points you mentioned though.

the most disappointing part of Xenoblade was that it had zero connection or commonalities to the other games aside from little furry creatures (Nopon). Xenoblade X at least can be conceivably connected to Xenosaga and especially Xenogears due to it following almost the same plot trajectory as the back stories of those games.