NightDragon83 said:
^^^ Yeah Xenoblade seemed more appealing to me too judging from what I've read and seen of it so far. Visuals look pretty good for a 3rd party Wii game I must say. Already have a Classic Controller thanks to my decent library of VC games, so I'll let her know to use that when playing.
And 100+ hours of game play is always a good thing. |
1st party. Both of them are first party, actually. Monolith Soft is now a majority-owned Nintendo subsidiary and Mistwalker teamed with Ninty to make The Last Story, similar to Mistwalker's work with Microsoft on Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon (or with Nintendo again on ASH, but that never made it out of Japan at all)
The Last Story is more of an action-RPG. Battles occur in near-complete real-time, where you can pause the action to issue new commands to the AI (or call commands in real-time in certain context-sensitive events, like if you want your mages to do enemy sniper cleanup). That's what really makes The Last Story unique, because it feels like Gears of War married a stock JRPG, and the results are very inventive. The battles and especially bosses often require you to think on your feet. The story is simultaneously both more straightforward and more convoluted, but the game also doesn't quite take itself as seriously as Xenoblade (which still isn't a super-serious game, but The Last Story almost borders on self-parody at times, to great effect).
Xenoblade plays like an MMO, where you pick a shortlist of techniques to use in battle, and each technique has a cooldown time before it can be used again. The focus, then, is far more technical (although auto-attack is a valid option for some characters, namely the one who shall not be named, and also Dunban).
The Last Story is a great flash-in-the-pan experience. Fast-paced, very unique, but too-soon over (i logged about 35 hours, skipping only one of the post-game chapters and getting all other optional chapters). Xenoblade is, as others have said, easily a 100 hours if all you do is the main story. I hit something on the order of 120, and i skipped most of the sidequests except those i needed to do the bonus stuff i wanted to do.
If you like more action and don't want to play forever, go with Last Story, if you are unafraid to kill time, easily Xenoblade.
