By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
MTZehvor on 07 January 2016
Edit Thread
AAA300 said:
MTZehvor said:

...I think something got missed along the way.

I was more referring to the way the story constantly tells you to hurry up, which serves as a constant encouragement to do the story missions. But the game blocks you from doing the story missions until you do one or two affinity missions and go around surveying a high enough percentage, creating what was for me a rather annoying gap inbetween narrative and mission design. On the one hand, (spoilers for Chapter 5 and beyond) humanity is going to die if I don't hurry up, so clearly I should be dedicating all my efforts to finding the lifehold. On the other hand, the mission design dicatates that (spoilers for a couple required affinity missions, the last of which is before chapter 11) I have time to help people find a present for their date and retrieve someone's cat, to name a few examples.

I don't mind playing through less serious missions, though I do think the ones requiring you to explore a certain percentage of the territory in order to proceed is rather arbitrary. What I find jarring is the disconnect between the story consistently telling you to hurry up, while the missions required to continue with the story communicate that you have a good bit of free time.

You don't get games do you? The point of doing those missions and setting those probes is to explore this massive world that they made! Plus with out those probes you can't mine or make money for those expensive skells. And as for the story of course there wanting you to hurry because there all going to die if you dont " that's the story"!!!!! But like any game you can take your time play it however you want to you can beat it in a day or a year from now. It's like worrying in Mario that your not beating the castles fast enough because the princess is already raped/killed by bowser. It's urgent and you need to save the princess fast but its not like you can't play that easy stage ten more times to get more lives. : )

...I more than "get" the game, and I'm all for encouraging people to explore the world. But like any game that tries to tell a semi-serious narrative, story should inform gameplay, not simply co-exist with, or in this case, contradict it. If just about anyone at this point got seriously invested in Mario stories, then yes, that would be a fair point. Call me naive, but I had gotten the sense that Xenoblade X wanted me to take its story just a little more seriously than the usual Mario affair.

Take Okami for instance; one of the PS2's biggest games. It encouraged exploration by all means, but when it was trying to create a sense of urgency, it did so by encouraging you to get there as quick as you possibly could and actually allowing you to do so. Could I, as the player, have simply stood there and done nothing for the next year? Or walked a mile in the opposite direction and gone fishing? Sure, I could have. The player can always make the story look silly if they want. But the game shouldn't prevent the player from trying to get invested in the story by setting up arbitrary roadblocks that completely contradict the main message of the narrative every mission.