| the_dark_lewd said: Almost statistically impossible that you'd have a turnaround. It's a weird fact about statistics that randomness gives you a representative figure incredibly quickly. If you have a site with about 50,000 users, you only need to really poll the first 100 or 200 and it'll pretty much give you the same percentages as if you polled all 50,000. Very few people seem to know this. |
This is only true if the poll gets a reasonably random sample. Online polls are notorious for not being random samples, due to an inherent self-selection bias.
Anyway, my answer would be "I can't decide". Xenoblade Chronicles X has the open world that just challenges you to explore extensively while the original's exploration is relatively limited. The original's structure in terms of story is more solid, though, and it feels like there's a lot more story to it. The overall battle structure of X is better, but variations in battle style and the talent system was better in the original. Cross being able to change classes and learn special moves from various other characters felt good, but it also meant he (I made Cross male, so I'll be using the male pronoun) felt too generic - the original's characters all felt very different from each other.
The inability to have more than four fighting characters present in the team at any point in time felt restrictive compared with the original's seven - it would have been nice to have the ability to take a couple of extra characters with you and switch them out between fights. And beyond the story/affinity missions, the game's missions felt entirely arbitrary, whereas all of the original's missions felt like they were for a purpose. Oh, and when I first saw the city, I figured that it would get built as the story progressed... nope, the only change is when the Ma-non ship is parked above the undeveloped section.
But there were other aspects I quite liked. Many side-bar missions had choices that seriously had consequences, like NPCs dying if you made the wrong choice. Some of those consequences were to come significantly later in the game, too, so it wasn't just "oh, you chose this? now the character's dead". At least one of the missions, for me, ended up being a bloodbath for NPCs - I'm pretty sure that all of the key NPCs of that mission (the one that starts with a character falling from above without warning) ended up dead, because I made a couple of bad choices. In a few ways, it's depressing, but it also lends the game a little more of a sense of importance of your decisions.
Perhaps the biggest disappointment, though, is that Cross doesn't speak (except in battle). I could understand them keeping his speaking to a minimum, but it felt like we were missing a part of the conversation. There weren't that many different voiced scenes in the game, they could have just had each of the voice actors that provide the various voice options for Cross record the same lines.
Anyway, I wonder if, when XCX is completed, its story will be good enough to stand next to the original. What do I mean, "completed"? I mean, I suspect there's going to be a DLC expansion to the game, based on how it all played out. They left a few major plot points dangling at the end, such as Lao waking up on a beach, why Mira seems to be stopping the other species from leaving, what happened to the core's data and why are they all still alive, and given references made by Tatsu, what is the connection between this game and the original? I suspect that XCX was 'rushed' out because it was taking too long to finish, with the plan being to add the last of the content later. Why else would they provide a direct link on the title screen to the eShop when the only things available for it are free quick-load packs for the disc version (yes, I know that the Japanese version had dlc content that was included with the game in the West - they could easily have removed the eShop link from the digital version of the game, which has no use for the quick-load packs, if they weren't planning on adding dlc in the future).
