Xenoblade Chronicles 2 flawed but GREAT ...

[Nuvendil]

Johnw1104 said:

NightlyPoe said:

All I can say is that maybe you're a great note-taker, but I would have been totally lost if they'd just tossed me into the deep end.  I'm not the most accomplished JRPG player, particularly for modern takes on the genre and my brain melted during the Nintendo Directs when they were explaining all the mechanics.

The extended tutorial was extremely well-paced for me.  It felt like each new tool they gave me fell into the rest and I could start experimenting with them while juggling my old skills as well.  So I could simultaneously move my character around for maximum damage as I built up blade combos and driver combos while deciding when to cancel an art or switch blades to build up my blade arts, all while working towards finishing with a big chain attack.

Having all those mechanics come to me as easily as they did, felt satisfying as I got a sense of mastery from the game's scaffolding approach to teaching me.

Well I'm glad it worked for ya. I don't mean to suggest that I'd just nail the combat perfectly if it were all presented to me initially by any means, but I've always liked to have the tools presented to me early and learned for myself as increasing difficulty demands more from me as I go.

It's a bit like the Crusader Kings and Europa Universalis grand strategy games I adore; despite playing them for many hundreds of hours over a decade+ I still find myself learning new things from time to time (though some of that is due to the many expansions that keep it fresh), and the best way to learn those games really was to just throw yourself into the deep end, get your butt kicked, and adapt your strategy lol

I think this game (and others) could have used something akin to the "Newbie Island" of Crusader Kings known as Ireland, where you really get to experiment with the mechanics and such in an easier but still challenging setting (by virtue of being disunited and on the edge of the continent there isn't the same risk of instant death as other starts, though the Vikings will arrive soon enough :D). There's something fun about having all of the tools available and just trying to figure the game out for yourself with impending doom encouraging you to investigate the mechanics further. The challenge is to keep the interest high enough that players don't jump ship when confronted with that difficulty, and while Xeno 2 definitely did that for me, I can see why it's often not a risk studios want to take.

With all the glowing praise in this thread, though, I think I'll certainly press on with the game... I may just blitzkrieg through the rest of the early portion of the story until it really opens up into what I've been reading about in the comments here.

Just do pay attention to these tutorials, these systems all feed into each other.  If you brush them off as being shallow trinkets thrown at you, you are going to wind up in a position like some others have where you are the same level or higher than some bosses and getting absolutely destroyed because you aren't properly making use of all your options :P