curl-6 said:
Nuvendil said:
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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The sidequest stories didn't really do it for me cos I just couldn't summon the will to care about someone's missing cat or their awkward anime-esque relationship problems, I wanted to know more about the other race that fought at Earth, the Tainted, the Telethia, the mystery of Mira, etc.
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The cat quest is rather infamous but I honestly didn't mind cause it was honestly ridiculously easy :P.
But the conflict between alien races, a dangerous cult, the conflict between a xenophobic militia and a civil rights activist group. The interactions with the Orphe I found very interesting. I also enjoyed seeing glimpses into the personalities of various party members either in the affinity missions or story missions. Don't get me wrong, I did want to know more about Mira and not every quest is a winner. But I enjoyed the narrative on the whole. And I guess I'm less miffed about the cliffhanger since 1) I watch a ton of shows with overarching plots that almost always conclude seasons exactly like this, 2) chapters 11 and 12 were just really, really excellent, and 3) this is Tetsuya freaking Takahashi. I kinda saw the sequel hook coming almost as soon as we hit Mira and because this is the guy who once tried to do a six part saga. Not saying he's that crazy every time, but I'm not shocked to see a hook at the end here.
But give how this thread currently is, I'd rather not try to argue here. I honestly probably shouldn't have even posted :P.
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