Rate the Nintendo Direct 17/09/13

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Hiku said:

They don't have Soraya Saga as a storywriter anymore, so I don't know what to expect from this game, but I'll tell you how Xenogears and Xenosaga did not present their stories. They didn't immediately introduce some sort of holy grail tropey item/goal like "the legendary sword" or "Elysium" as the the deus ex machina to strive for that's going to save the world, and repeat it over and over again. Concepts like that were not used as dangling carrots, but rather the culmination of slowly developing the stories. I'll give you an example:
In Xenosaga there may have been a counterpart to Elysium. But like I said, it wasn't intruduced as a mythical goal for your journey. It wasn't until the third game that it was revealed that this place was even possible to visit. Over the course of three games it was subtly built up in the story more and more, and eventually came as a surprise in the third game.

Tropey mythical locations and deus ex machina objects like "the legendary sword" were not the focal point of the story, or what made them intriguing enough to keep you interested until such concepts were introduced.
I don't have anything negative to say about the world of Xenoblade 2 aside from the legendary destination, but I also don't have anything positive to say about it yet.
And the character design hasn't exactly compensated for this either.

 

I am skeptical that Elysium is going to turn out to be what it is stated to be, just as the Monado, Bionis, and Mechonis in the first game weren't what they seemed throughout that game and the mythologies of them were unraveled as just that -- misleading mythologies. 

One must recall that these are self-contained games that come as a single title, unlike Xenosaga whose development was stretched over three titles, and which was intended for more than that, and Xenogears whose story was cut short a third of the way through and the rest provided in an abridged version with some necessary backstory through an artbook. Due to the nature of how things are paced you're going to have less long, multi-game build-up, nevertheless the original Xenoblade had a decent amount of foreshadowing, and I expect the same of Xenoblade 2. Taking "Elysium is a paradise which we'll aim to reach" and "the aegis is special" at face-value really tells us little, since it could be the case that most characters don't know much about Elysium or the aegis and there might be something more fundamentally interesting about them that we don't know about. Personally I feel that Xenogears and Xenosaga handled some of their plot-twists sloppily. For example, in Xenogears the wave-existence came out of nowhere, with very little relevant fore-shadowing of its existence. A good balance would probably be in between Xenogears/Xenosaga and Xenoblade where there is foreshadowing, but it isn't hitting you over the head with it, although in Xenoblade's case it might be that the explictiness of these plot elements is a red-herring. 

If Xenoblade X continues as a series, I see that as the analogue to Xenosaga, where the mysteries of Mira are slowly funneled in until the end of the series.