curl-6 said:
When I finished the game I'd played for 90 hours, and that's without doing all that many unnecessary sidequests. You're probably right as far as there being 15 hours of actual story, but that's a big problem when so much of its runtime is filler. |
See I think that's a terrible way to look at XCX's narrative. The strength of it comes not from big cutscenes telling some linear adventure, it's about the survival of mankind and the challenges faced both personally by your team members and the city of NLA as a whole. There's not a clean divide between X's core story content and side content a la TES. It all bleeds together. Comparisons have been made to Majora's Mask and it's very appropriate. If you take MM's "core" story you get one of the most barebones (though still charming) stories in Zelda history. But that would be completely missing the point. X is the same. The Affinity missions and even most Normal missions factor into the overall narrative on some level. The weakness I suppose being that unlike MM which has an ideal experience run time in the tens of hours, X has an ideal experience runtime of over 100 hours :P.
And I felt there was payoff for a lot of things and some great revelations that explain a lot of the circumstances setup at the very opening. It felt like the season finale of a great show. One arc raps up (humanity getting settled on Mira, defeating the Ganglion) and then new questions are raised for the next season. Some people aren't going to like that of course but it's hardly like the game just up and stopped. It's not like the story just gave up 2/3 of the way through like in Bravely Default. There are FAR worse endings in RPG history and game history and partial payoff is better than a game just stopping in which I've seen :P
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