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curl-6 on 29 February 2016
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Volterra_90 said:
curl-6 said:

The side stories in XCX bored the shit out of me to be honest. Yeah, XBC's were no better, but ultimately like I said, I can't muster any enthusiasm for missing cats or other trivial nonsense. In XBC at least I actually cared about the main plot; XCX just couldn't keep me engaged narratively because the few interesting bits were spaced out with so much bland filler.

Same with characters; in XCX not one of them really made me care about them, while in the original I found the likes of Shulk, Fiora, Dunban and Riki to be endearing and likeable.

As for the score, while XCX certainly had some great pieces, the New LA music made me want to blow my brains out.

But to each their own I guess.

Yeah, the fact that the worst songs for me were the ones playing in NLA didn't help, that's the low point of the score by miles. XCX has its fair numer of flaws, but I don't think most of the side quests were trivial. Yeah, some of them are (and they are shit), but I found recruiting new races for NLA and expanding my sphere of influence, some side stories talking about racism, religion, and meaningful subjects and the focus on character relationships in the affinity quests very, very compelling. The problem is that it's very uneven, and I maybe would prefer that they have ditched those "cat-type" missions and just keep the meaningful ones. It's a great game if you could overlook some annoyances, because there are some of them. 

And I really hate Shulk. That's one of the reasons I prefer XCX. But, obviously, in the end it's all a matter of tastes. 

I know it must sound like I dislike XCX, but I should point out for the record that I consider it really, really good. It's world is amazing. The combat system rocks. Flying seamlessly across a vast alien planet in a giant robot is orgasmic.

It just falls slightly short of greatness in my view, due to the issues I've outlined. I wanted so badly to care about XCX's story, but the way it kept teasing this epic narrative only to put it on hold to send me off chasing unrelated side stories for hours on end really rubbed me the wrong way, as did its failure to really explain the many mysteries it presented. I wanted to know more about the other race who fought at Earth, about the Vita, the Tainted, the Telethia. At so many points the story seemed poised to take flight, only to wimp out and slump back down to earth by not following through on its promises.