Xenoblade 2 thoughts (no spoilers)

[Nuvendil]

Arminillo said:

Nuvendil said:

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.

I haven't played it, can only go by what I have seen and heard, but the story seems to have a concrete direction.  But his desire to blend genres in story is just a Takahashi thing.

Also, the battle system is a real time battle system, as I have come to call it.  It's an established fixture of RPGs for years.  WoW, Dragon Age Origins, Final Fantasy XII, numerous games make use of this.  So it isn't a mix of turn based and action, it is it's own thing they've been using since the first Xenoblade.  Also, same thing for region based open world vs a seamless open world.  Multiple games have and still do use that structure.