Actually, the story segments in Xenoblade were often considerably longer than those of Xenogears. Yet they didn't convery as much information, nor did they add to the game in the same way as the story dominated segments in Xenogears.

If anything, all aspects of the game of Xenogears are heavily augmented by the brilliant story of Xenogears, and the way it was so expertly crafted to fit into the game. Everything in Xenogears shines much more brightly as a result of being carried by such a fantastic story. It makes the already wonderful and mysterious world that much more wonderful and mysterious. It is why many gamers consider this the best RPG to date. The only portion I would say there is a problem with is the over-reliance on exposition during a 1.5 hour portion on disk 2.

It is Xenoblade that feels "bogged down" a lot of the time. A lot of it has to do with the tidal wave of tutorials at the beginning of the game, and the plague of fetch/grind quests to get past certain choke points throughout the rest of the game. It also gets bogged down by the huge amount of overhead required to manage your equipment.

In Xenogears, the story takes users through a variety of different gameplay scenarios; you've got Gear battles, chases, treasure hunts, fight club, murder mysteries, zombie mysteries, invasions, excavations and uncovering history, warfare, tournament battle arenas, soylent green, etc.. The story really immerses you into this. Whereas in Xenoblade it is pretty much the same "run to this spot, fetch/battle that, now run to that spot" thing all the way through with the only thing that is really striking and enjoyable is when there's a change of scenery - for me at least, these were the only really memorable moments for Xenoblade, outside of the boss fights I got to where I realized I had to grind.

I think people who do not play Xenogears due to being Nintendo fans, are really robbing themselves of a great amount of joy by ignoring Xenogears. I am one of the biggest Nintendo fans on this site, but I am not going to delude myself into believing that Xenoblade is better than Xenogears. You play 40 hours of Xenogears, and you'll experience SO much more than you will in 40 hours of Xenoblade. Xenogears is Tetsuya Takahashi and Soraya Saga's masterpiece.

That was pretty much my experience exactly. The first Xenogears was a lot of exposition, and didn't really get into the storyline, and the exposition also failed to really explain anything. The only thing that I can even really recall from it was how twisted Albedo was... Oh and walking across long areas battling hordes and hordes of monsters. Especially int he encephalon.

The second game is where the story got rolling, and instead of hordes of battles, there were maybe ~100 battles in the whole game that just required more to beat them. Unlike the first game, most of these battles had a chance at killing you if you fought poorly.

The third game was speeding all the way through, lots of interesting locations, and one final epic universe changing battle. It may have felt a little rushed because from what I understand, this game essentially covered the time period of 3 games, and a fourth game was completely cut out which would have taken place between episode 2 and episode 3. One thing that can be said, there were a LOT of portions that would be the equivalent of the climactic ending of mostly any other RPG. I am guessing that perhaps a lot of these were actually meant to be battles fought at the end of episodes had the entire series been realized.

On the comment above about disatisfaction with episode 3, it was more disatisfaction by people when the series didn't connect cleanly up to the beginning of Xenogears. It would have been really cool if it did, but it didn't exclude the possibility, it just left the gap. We can assume that Abel, the deus weapon, and the immigrant ship Elderich still did what they did later on. I think people were just expecting that segment to be in the ending.

Xenoblade's story exists as an excuse to justify its design structure, and the narrative segments are ultimately a fraction of the total package. Also, Xenoblade as a whole aims for a different type of RPG gamer than the previous Xeno games, and is probably better judged by how it appeals to that particular segment, not how it compares to a very different game with very different goals in mind.

Xenoblade Chronicles gives me faith that Nintendo has a appreciation for long in depth RPG's outside of Fire Emblem.