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

[DivinePaladin]

JMD said:

DivinePaladin said:

Lawlight said:
Or maybe while everything is good in the game, it's not great?

Something tells me that's probably not it since from what I've seen from more neutral sources, it's very, very solid. The only major complaints I've seen are nitpicks and admitted as such. For once I'd say a Nintendo game is under-scored so far, considering this is the sequel to the game that pretty much saved the classic-style JRPG. 

Not to nitpick too much but Xenoblade Chronicles did not "save" JRPGs. The genre's standing in the industry has not shifted one iota since before or after Xenoblade Chronicles release. I'm not trashing the game but let's not use romantic language like "it saved JRPGS". It barely sold a million units. It may have performed very well critically but 95% of gamers have never heard of the game or played it. What would actually save JRPGs would be an amazing title from one of Square's three big franchises, something we've not seen in almost a decade.

If you're saying it saved JRPGs from a critical sense, that makes a bit more sense but I'd still point to games like Ni No Kuni and Lost Odyssey that came out around the same time as Xenoblade and were extremely well received and good advertisements for JRPGs. But I still think that kind hasn't arrived yet.

Without having played Xenoblade but wanting to and wishing I had the means to, I think a world that is too big is totally a valid argument even though the OP mocks the reviewers for saying so. He/she can mock me too. The narrative can suffer when there are way too many side quests and the player can simply burn out on the game before they've reached the ending. There are some players who play JRPGs and they're more into the story and others are more into the grind. I am of the former. This is a pretty common and I don't know why this type of criticsm comes as a shock to the OP. In my personal experience the best RPGS I've played were around 40 hours long and told well crafted stories with the story telling unfolding evenly over the course of the 40 hours. That's just me. Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger are perfect examples.

The JRPG is a genre that has struggled and continued to fall for a decade in the West, and that fact is the main reason we have Japanese ARPGs like the Souls games. The JRPG genre has diminished in Japan until recently but it never reached the low that it did here in the 7th gen. Recall that we didn't get Ni no Kuni until 2013, months after Xenoblade originally hit the US and over a year after it hit Europe. And Lost Odyssey came out five years before either, on 360 only. Critically it did fairly well but it didn't reach universal praise like the other two you were discussing. Plus, how much it was ignored worldwide sort of helps my point out a bit here lol. The JRPG was essentially dead in the West as early as Morrowind's launch. Xenoblade was the first game in the genre to generate some real hype here since XIII, and XIII practically buried the genre in the West because of that hype. 

 

You can continue to argue it if you like but this isn't coming from a place of bias. I've beaten Ni No Kuni (nearly 100% at that), and I've played maybe 25 hours of Xenoblade. Ni no Kuni solidified the comeback that Xenoblade started way back in 2010 when localization requests started. I won't speak to a sales revitalization because like you noted, Xenoblade didn't sell well; yeah there are a thousand asterisks we can throw on that, but that's not my place to argue here. I'm talking critically, and about what it did for the genre.  It helps that it was the first forward thinking JRPG in years, what with making quests immediately end without having to backtrack to the quest giver, among other things. The genre was stagnant for years before that, just repeating the same trends without a care for what the West thought. I mean, now we're getting a main series FF ARPG, and I don't know how to feel about that yet, but at least they're listening and taking us into consideration. Same goes for the DQ ports, remastering Type-0, and games like Bravely Default being exactly what fans in the West wanted out of the FF series.

 

Pin all this wherever you want, but the fact of the matter is Xenoblade's fan reaction before and after launch, and the game itself, have a hell of a lot to do with why we even have the genre here as much as we do. So, yes, in a nutshell, it saved the genre in the West. I probably should've specified those last three words beforehand, my bad on that.