Xenoblade 2 thoughts (no spoilers)

[Arminillo]

Nuvendil said:

caffeinade said:

Yeah, Xenoblade has lots of enemies in close proximity.
I don't think the Switch could handle: 3 player characters, 3 blades, 6+ enemies in combat, with large high level enemies running around in the background at BotW detail.
The game is clearly taxing on the hardware: 720p docked and much lower in handheld mode.
It is a launch year game that is built on an engine that was made for a very different architecture, so there is plenty of room to improve.

You do have to admire Monolith Soft's commitment to their vision.
Not many first party devs would be willing to push their hardware quite as far as they have in this title.
Naughty Dog's Uncharted 4 runs at 1080p; imagine if they were willing to push their tech so hard, that they were forced to render at 720p.

Yeah, one thing you have to admire with Monolith Soft and Takahashi is ambition.  I mean, his vision for Xenogears and Xenosaga was so grand his publishers at the time wouldn't back his play the whole distance.  And then you look at his goals with Xenoblade on the Wii, the scale and the level of environmental detail within that scale was just beyond what many would have thought the Wii could do.  And then with X, their FIRST HD game, they aimed to build an open world RPG in an alien world that dwarfed many comparable games on more powerful hardware.  While also dabbling in online passive multiplayer and cooperative play.  And then we have 2, where they had from what we can gather just 1.5 or 2 years to work with the Switch hardware in their hands and they didn't back down.  Their ambition is sometimes excessive, but you got to admire their confidence to go for it.  

I dont know, I feel like this game didnt have a clear vision, which is its biggest problem. What does it want to be? A shonen? Philosophical? A gacha? Is it an action rpg or realtime turnbased? Should one explore or jump from level to level?

It does all of these things ok to good, but nothing great. I think they just decided to throw in whatever they thought was neat.