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

[DivinePaladin]

Torillian said:

DivinePaladin said:

If you're going to use the sales argument to show critical revival, stop now. That's not how it works. Let's talk about Earthbound's sales in that case. Xenoblade had a myriad of issues with its NA release, not the least of which was the fact that it came out months before the next console and after two years of fan begging. And that's not even touching the fact that Valkyria Chronicles didn't exactly stomp out Xenoblade in sales despite this a critical lack of JRPGs on the PS3 at the time.

 

But that's not the argument here. NnK got good praise but that was about it. It was a good story with a mediocre combat system. Persona has been as cult as could be until P4G, which even then only got praise from the Vita owners that could play it; moreover it came out around the same time as Xenoblade in the West. FF has been widely considered (with good reason) to be in the shitter since at least XIII. You're not exactly making a good argument as to why Xenoblade ISN'T a marked turning point for what was for a decade a genre falling down the mountain - especially not when you're saying "sales for some games were better, therefore you're wrong."

How can Persona be cult as cult can be and sell 340,000 in NA compared to Xenoblade (savior of the subgenre) 440,000?  Either you are arguing critical reception (which Persona 4 had a 90 compared to Xenoblade's 92) and sales/cult status don't come into it or you're arguing sales which several JRPGs had sold more than Xenoblade.  

I didn't realize P4 regular was as popular Stateside as it apparently is, so that's on me. I'll rescind that comment in favor of a more accurate one. Persona as a series, more broadly the whole of SMT, was as cult as cult could be until about 2012. Xenosaga, a game considered cult, sold more than several games in the SMT series combined in the West alone. The same is true of Xenoblade, I know, so let me elaborate. 

 

What I've been trying to get at (and this addresses DonFerrari's reply as well) is that Xenoblade changed the West's mindset on the genre. Even if you didn't play it, you talked about it for a good while. Sort of like how thousands of people praise Mother 3 despite never touching it once. Critical and public reception was high for both Persona and Xenoblade, but you heard the shouts more often for the latter until recently. Nobody talks about NnK today, but Xenoblade is listed pretty often near the top of the genre. 

 

THAT's more what I mean when I call Persona "cult." Those shouting about how great it was only came about relatively recently. Hell, as a whole, this camaraderie only came around recently among JRPG fans where we started shouting about awesome games that weren't FF or rarely DQ. I can't attribute that to Xenoblade, that'd be insanely hard to argue and insane outright. But the fact that it's continually listed near the top of the RPG lists I see around (ones that are published by "journalists," obviously, not just gameFAQs threads) shows its impact, and the fact that not too long after we started seeing this effort by Square to finally get it together in a big way, and we see a company like Atlus becoming an RPG powerhouse, can all be arguably drawn back to a change in widespread perception that I'd say came from Xenoblade bringing almost the total package that traditional JRPG fans were looking for for about a decade. 

 

Hopefully I've cleared up what I've been trying to get at here. So far most of my contribution to this thread has been responses to somebody questioning a single sentence out of a much larger post! Lol