DivinePaladin said:
Repetition and grinding are a given in JRPGs, and moreover I've barely seen talk of grinding being a problem if you're not running solely through the main campaign. There are clear design flaws with the side missions, but the other two are nothing if not nitpicks with this genre. If the repetition is truly excessive, okay, but from what I've seen it's not unlike finding the Eagle views in AC games.
I haven't gone through the GI review but from what I've read and seen from Xenoblade players the game is very solid. The key to experiencing X correctly, and the key to apparently seeing the story as more than shallow, is to do the side content. Discovering each map segment, doing affinity missions, etc. all seem to flesh out an otherwise bland main campaign, because these are the focus of the game. Many reviews seem to ignore this fact, and I think that's arguably the big issue right now. The reviewers that did do a sizeable amount of side content besides the basic fetch missions have discussed this; it's very similar to Majora's Mask - if you're only gonna do the dungeons, don't bother playing it. |
I don't agree that grinding should be an inherent part of a JRPG. I think grinding should be left for optional bosses like the weapons in the FF games but to go through the the main story, I don't think grinding should be there. Skimming through the quotes from metacritic, it seems that a number of outlets felt that it got a bit tedious. How much grinding is a problem or not is entirely subjective.
And about design issues, I think that's enough to bring a score down.
And not sure about that last since it seems to me that those who scored the game below 8.5 did spend a lot of hours on the game. And it's likely that those who like the game in the first place would spend more time on the game.
