...I think you're confusing fantasy with SciFi. X is definitely not fantasy. Like not even a little. Fantasy is magical, natural, and almost medeival. X is futuristic, alien, and mechanical. It's SciFi all the way. I would say XV is strict fantasy, but compared to X, it may as well be. Even if it's modern, it still retains those core fantasy elements. Medeival elements like knights and kings, giant castles, and fights with swords when there is clearly superior gun weaponry. Mythological creatures as enemies as opposed to alien ones, magic everywhere, large and rustic expanses. It oozes fantasy. X does not.

I respect your opinion.

Not even mentioning multiple moons and the floating islands. You know... The fantasy stuff.

Yet again you're basing your view off of other things than the environment. The genre of the game is science fiction, but Planet Mira has many fantasy elements. 

There is mostly no scientific influence on the native creatures that live on Planet Mira. With little to no scientific influence it is extremely hard to say that the world and its environments are science fiction. 

We inhabit a fantasy world using science fiction.

I wouldn't call that an opinion. It's a defined catagory. None of what you posted is that of a fantasy setting, and multiple moons is definitely not a fantasy trope. It's a Sci-Fi one. Those are all alien settings with alien creatures. The plantlife is unfamiliar, yet biological. The stuctures are alien and often times mechanical. The wildlife is alien in design. They are meant to look completely unfamiliar and strange. Even gross looking. Not inspired to be remenicnent of mythological creatures or uncannily familiar to Earth animals like with fantasy. Even the floating island can be explained away with a science mcguffin involving gravity and atmosphere.

And that's completely ignoring all the futuristic alien cities, militant alien races, existance of alien races at all, giant mechanical flying robots, futuristic space ships, alien space ships, blah blah... 

It's not stylistically or practically fantasy. Not even a little bit. And there's nothing wrong with that. There are very few works that actually attempt to blend the Sci-Fi and Fantasy. Star Wars is one of them. Xenoblade X definitely is not one of them. Xenoblade 1 was fantasy. Xenoblade X is sci-fi. Maybe Xenoblade 3 will blend the two. Or maybe it'll be something completely different like steam punk. Who cares? I guess I do. I like catagorization and organization. They matter. That's an opinion. X being science fiction is a fact.

Oh, I see. Your definition of science fiction is wrong. Science fiction doesn't mean that the areas and creatures are influenced by science. It means that they are expected to be explained (loosely) by science. Hardly anything organic in science fiction is meant to take influence directly from science. The creatures aren't influenced by science at all. They aren't technolical or gene spliced or anything. But they are alien. They can be explained scientifically by the unique alien enfironment the live in, the type of gravity they are exposed to thanks to the many moons, the almost prehistoric look in some cases and ice age look in other cases to all the creatures that almost tease what wild life on earth could have looked like if natural occourances didn't cause their extinction. The giant fungi and pollonous plants largely replacing the more grounded trees, leaves, and flower of traditional fantasy settings. Irregularly shaped langmarks caused by strange occurances of erosion. You can call them fantastical, but you can't call them fantasy.

In fantasy, your expected believe the fanstastic settings you're thrown in, purely based on the fact that you're in a magic and fantastic world where anything can happen. In science fiction, you expected to believe that everything you're seeing can be explained, to some loose degree, by science. There are rules to science fiction grounded in scientific principals and laws. Fantasy is the polar opposite, completely throwing away those principals infavor of allowing what ever your imagination can come up with with no consequence because magic.

bigtakilla said:

Just because something has fantasy element doesn't mean it has to take inspiration from mythological creatures or uncannily familiar to Earth animals (though I will say that the horses are remniscant of pegasus). 

Most of the cities, militant races, flying robots, space ships are not what we are talking about in this thread. 

Agreed that there is nothing wrong with something being science fiction.

You'll be hard pressed to find any creature in fantasy that isn't inspired by myth or real life animals on earth. And yes, the cities, militant races, flying robots, and space ships are all an integral part of the open world which is presicely the topic of the thread. Yet even without all of those intergral elements, you're still left with a strictly science fiction planet. Especially the cities, which are literally a physical part of the environement.

That is assuming that they are explained by science and not magic. 

Yes, but cities can also be a part of fantasy....

...What? No, that is knowing that they are explained by science and not magic. There is literally nothing in XCX to lead anyone to believe that anything in the game is supposed to be explained by magic instead of science.