I'm going to disagree, on several accounts.,
Firstly, simply having lost something doesn't make characters interesting or engaging by any means. For example, Fire Emblem: Awakening, a game which I actually quite like, introduces a bunch of characters after the halfway point in the game (depending on how many people got married), all of whom lost their parents and were forced to live in terror from a monster destroying their world. And despite all of that...with the exception of Lucina and perhaps Morgan, they're all about as two dimensional as a sheet of paper. You need a deeper personality, one that gets fleshed out and expanded upon before I start caring about you, and Xenoblade X is sorely lacking in that for pretty much every single character in the game.
Another big point against the game is that nearly every character you interact with in a side quest is just, for lack of a better way of putting it, annoying. Generally this comes about by begging you to go find stuff for them or accomplish some menial task, which would be fine, except the tasks are so pathetic that it feels like busy work. Find a ring for this person so he can build up the confidence to ask some girl on a date. Find some catnip to help someone else lure his cat back. The fact that the game forces you into these certainly doesn't help matters. I'm already having trouble sympathizing with these characters due to how bland they are, and now you're going to make me do all their chores as well. Not helping the empathy factor here.
