So Xenoblade X has an 84 on metacritix because there is too much to do and the world is too big?

[DivinePaladin]

Lawlight said:

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.

I never said grinding SHOULD be part of the genre, I said it is. That's a fact, one lessened in recent history as some JRPGs have diminished grinding this past few years, but it's a fact nonetheless. And from what I've heard from those that I can at least know played the game enough to warrant a solid stance on this, the amount grinding isn't much. It's only gonna need grinding if you focus on the main plot alone, from what I can tell. 

 

On design flaws: It depends on how glaring they are if they warrant a whole point on a review scale (this game was never gonna be a 10 because JRPG, so I'm starting with a max of 9.5). The game design oversights seemingly exist primarily in the basic missions, and only one of them has been notable. Outside of that, it's mostly an issue of if you're gonna knock down points because it has pop-in. 

 

The biggest spot where scores should drop is the multiplayer because nobody knows how it works, still, despite it coming out on Friday. That's the biggest flaw and the least arguable.

 

As for your final counter, these players whose reviews we're reading are by and large not going to be the kind that are thorough, at least not yet. Remember that it's a race to get the review out first, and that everybody is starting at the same time relatively. So you've got two weeks at most to dive into this game, and your editor needs the campaign done by then. That's not enough time to review any RPG, let alone a Fallout or Xenoblade, so you're gonna cut corners and talk about how big the world is as filler so you can pretend you explored as much as you'd have liked. A key phrase that pops up when you look through current reviews is that it's a hard game to pin down; there are some times where the writers admit they lose focus or something doesn't make sense. You can argue that the game may be at fault for that, but given how poor the state of reviews are nowadays - more than one writer admits they didn't even finish the game, both in good and bad reviews - it can't fall chiefly to the game here. Look at GR's review: It's pieced together very poorly with disjointed, often unfinished thoughts. That's sort of a trend, both for good and bad scores here. Nobody seems to have gotten a good enough grasp on the game, period. Not just good reviews, not just bad ones, all of them. And that's a consequence of the way we review games by launch day nowadays. 

 

Not that I'm gonna argue what score the game should have without experiencing it myself, of course. I'm just pointing out a very clear issue that comes with reviewing this sort of game on a time limit. 

 

Interesting side comment: Both this game and Fallout 4 seem to have gotten considerable flak by critics for not handing out all the answers on a silver platter. It's a shame reviewers have leaned so casual this past year outside of the obligatory Souls game 9.5/10, because at least with Fallout the learning curve actually turned me even more onto the game than I would have been. I'm sure X will have the same effect on me too.