Someone can have an opinion on whatever they want, but releasing a negative preview to a game with so much hype/praise does come off as clickbait, it's well known that sites drum up such articles to generate revenue, how many times do you go to the 20th site who say a game is good to see the reviewer state he also finds it good? In comparison to the first site to give a game with a lot of praise a bad preview.

Because people are very insecure and feel the need to attack anything negative about something they're going to buy to justify their purchase. So what they do is put their head in the sand and say, "LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" to anyone who doesn't give it universal acclaim. 

Let's just wait for more reviews. Right now, we only have the opinion of 3 relevant magazines (kotaku, dualshockers and famitsu). Before commenting like a fanboy, I suggest we just see how the critic will score the game on avg.
Oh, btw rejecting some scores/opinions and accepting others just because they must fit an agenda is just sad. Please, stop.

The fact that the story is poor is a huge issue for me, hopefully it's not so bad or the guy had problems understanding it because he doesn't know japanese so well...

Likewise to the people who defend garbage gaming sites, regardless of the monumental amounts of data to suggest they have other agendas.

Exactly. People are buying too much into hype and creating unrealstic expectations about something literally 99% of users on this site haven't played. I have no problem with the game not being the absolute best thing in gaming, I wasn't expecting it to. People need to learn to take a breath and think, "Hey! Maybe someone can have a opinion different than my own!" instead of "lol guyz ferm kotaco, hiz opinin sux lmfao lol"

Sure, sure. Yeah, it's actually part of Kotaku's ultimate agenda to eventually rule the world, actually. Didn't you hear?

Seriously though. It's a persons opinion. It'll be fine. This review won't kill anyone or ruin the experience. I'm fine with defending a less-than-glowing review.

Not sure why you expect to me to care one iota about what you have to say, when you so casually disregard the volumes of data there is showing Kotaku's problems, which you so casually cast aside as conspiracy theory.

And yeah, Kotaku may have been interested in ruling the world, fortunately, Gamer's control their future, and their future is bleak.  Even bleaker if they keep breaking NDA's and leaking information about studios, which gets their invites to certain show conferences revoked (ala Ubisoft and E3).

PS. I won't be getting XCX, I was never planning on getting it, and I frankly don't care about whether the reviews are negative or positive.  Simply using Kotaku as any kind of source is a questionable practice, at best.

I will buy the game regardless of what any review will have to say.

This is point. You don't have to care about what I say just like you don't have to care about what this dude says. However, by continually responding to me and this thread you're giving both him and I the attention you don't want us to have. Now maybe to you, this game could be the second coming Jesus, and that's totally fine. But for me, I very much doubt it'll blow my expectations away. And that's fine too because that's just my opinion. But to completely disregard a person's opinion based off the site they come from is a bit ridiculous. 

Thanks for your response

• I think he acknowledged that "There a numerous side quests to be done in between story missions—one or two of which are usually prerequisites for starting the next story mission". Also, taking a long time to complete a task doesnt necessarily mean he had a satisfying(meaty) experience doing so. This is his job so I guess he has to play games for a significant amount of time before he can even write about them. Which leads to...
• Just how engaging (varied, complex, interesting, fun etc) are regular sub and side quests? Particularly those that aren't labelled "simple".
• Tricky, your word against his. Why does it take so long to level up and get a mech? is that time spent on quests or "grinding"?
• Nothing to say here
• "The combat and overclock systems just fine, the storyline is fine, not amazing but certainly not boring either" fine as in good, very good or excellent. There's too much room for interpretation here and RPGs are usually judged as a whole. This isn't like Bayonetta where you can dismiss the story or characters as not important for example.

As I initially said expectations in the RPG genre as a whole have been raised, will the game meet those expectations? If Dragon Age Inquisition was released today for example, it would score a hell of a lot less just because of everything introduced in The Witcher 3. The main point of this thread was to find out how western reviewers and customers would react to the game post Witcher 3 (lol). For example, character relationships, dialog, npcs and side quests will never be looked at the same way again. Many people are talking about it, even in Fallout 4 discussions [on GAF at least].

 Lastly Amazon.co.jp has 493 reviews for Xenoblade Chronicles X(3.5) and 530 for Xenoblade Chronicles(4.5) so I'll still lean towards those till further notice [Amazon bias]. Just how big are those other retailers?