Was there a game you REALLY had to give up on?

[b00moscone]

Xenoblade Chronicles X. I do like the game, i like the things it does right, like the world, enemies and gameplay (to an extent), but the characters, the missions and the story are just....bad. For missions, they're repetitive, have no life in them, and the playable character rewards are meaningless, as they're likely severely underlevelled, or you just have other chars, so why pick them? Furthermore, it was a complete waste of resources, I would've much preferred if they instead focused on the main pool of characters, like Elma, Lin, Lao etc. etc.

The story is just a complicated situation. The actual concept is pretty neat and it's well-executed, and the atmosphere is made fairly well...until you play the story missions. The first story mission is quite densely packed and is quite interesting...but then it drops off, and becomes incredibly slow and uneventful. All these characters also come in, allies and enemies alike, which you just don't care about, because in no way have they been fleshed out or made for us to care about. Okay, they wanna kill humans...but why? They only say "They're a virus", and give no actual reasoning. Even if they did, I doubt they would be able to actually follow through with it, and have enough depth to it, unlike the original Xenoblade. The main characters are weak as well. Having the MC silent in a JRPG is just simply bad, and the others that do talk are bland as heck, and cannot compete at all with what the original had to offer. I get that story was not their focus in this game, but they could've done a lot better.

Another bad thing is the result of the open world backfiring on this, which is the pacing of levelling up. You control how fast or slow you level up...in a way. As expected, you have to fight enemies to level up, but you're not forced to fight them, and it's hard to keep the player engaged in wanting to level up since you don't progress steadily through different areas. Furthermore, the missions as stated earlier are boring and not fleshed out at all, and the missions that do have things like voice acting and are a bit more fleshed out are usually fairly uninteresting too, and some require you to level up certain characters, which do not level up with the characters fighting (Unlike XC), so it's just huge pain. While there are level requirements to story missions, the minimum still is typically not enough for some missions, as if you're not enthused to level up, then it's simply not fun.

I'll just end it on the balancing, since i've been rambling for too long now =_=. Simply put, skells are way too powerful. They are a MASSIVE leap over fighting on foot, and makes it useless, unless a story mission requires you to do so. That results in all those little mechanics for fighting on foot meaningless, and to top it off skell-fighting isn't deep at all, you simply just keep on clicking on your moves and you typically win the fight, which isn't really engaging.

I could go on for ages, but I think i've gotten my point through One day i may complete it, but today is not that day.