Xenoblade 2 is exactly what I thought early on. You can tell the game was rushed (voice acting all over the place quality wise, more frame drops than there should be, game bugs and crashes, ect). It isn't as graphically updated as it should be, the characters look from a range of okay but generic, mediocre and generic, to down right hilariously bad looking waifu designs. Whoever quality controlled must have never bothered with the map, or the ui. It's an incredibly cliché story.

It's not bad, but does absolutely nothing to elevate it from X or the original. When you got a story not as good as the original, and a world not as big as X and instead go a middle ground between the two you never really feel like you've gained anything from this experience.

It easily deserves the metacritic score lowest in the series by both critics and users, as well as the lower opencritic score. It's not a bad game, but one that misses the mark of mastery the other games hit. This is a game of "this works, this doesn't" tradeoff moments that never really stays in the this works territory as long as it should at all.

I agree that the english voice acting is pretty bad. I watched some cutscenes like Nia's true nature reveal, and they just lost everything in the english voice over. Graphics don't really matter in games IMO. It could look like a Wii game and I'd still play it. I like a lot of the designs, and then there are some that are just bad like you said. One of the Earth element healers looks like a piece of furry deviantart. And then there's the poorly modeled Tits-Mcgee Ice Healer. The map was patched yesterday, and works way better. There's a new setting to the map overlay, that shows you the entire map at once. Hitting X brings up your local map and area instantly.  I haven't finished the story yet. 

It doesn't really deserve the meta/opencritic score it got. There are at least 7 reviewers that clearly hate JRPGs in general, and unfairly brought the score down. Reviews like Slant/Stevivor are uncalled for. If the Japanese patch had been included in the shipped game, I think a lot of reviewers would have been able to forgive the lazy cheap VO job. 

Edit: Oh yeah, I forgot to ask you this. With X did you ever figure out the time it takes to get enough money for a party full of perfect Skells? I want to know, because that's a big factor on where I place X in the series. Let's say you have a perfect probe setup. How long would it take to farm all the Miranium for a single perfect Skell? 

For perfect skells it doesn't depend on money, it depends on miranium and tickets/farmed items. As far as time, and what is considered perfect skells it depends. End game you should already have plenty of miranium thanks to probes, but how many of the required items you have and how many tickets you have determine the length it takes to get all lvl 60 or Ares 70/90 skell. With the global nemesis spamming of tickets it takes roughly two weeks of playing give or take how long you play, and whether you change it up and hunt the easily dropped farm items or just want to ticket every part.

So how many hours of grinding would you say that is? I can't remember what global nemesis entailed anymore. 

But what about the gameplay? I agree that storywise it's pretty forgettable and I too am not a fan of the skimpy character designs or poor voice acting, but I can forgive everything else as long as the gameplay is there. Compared to the original I'd say X2 easily wins on that front for being much more engaging, though I haven't played XCX for more than 10 minutes so can't say anything about that.

Except both the gameplay, structure and Story are leagues above X I don't know how far you've played to say it's cliche story because it's far from that as you progress it's even better gameplay wise than the original.

I strongly disagree with this. The story is the best in a Xeno game since Xenogears. It is self-contained, unlike Xenogears (required an art-book to understand; disc 2), Xenosaga (cut-short three episodes; and episode 2 dragged) and Xenoblade Chronicles X (depends on a sequel to reach full potential), well-paced (like Xenoblade Chronicles and unlike other Xeno-games), but also has much more world complexity and developed characters that aren't flat in comparison to the original. 

If Xenoblade Chronicles X doesn't get a sequel, the story will be strongly disappointing, and Xenoblade Chronicle's story was great for what it was - a simplified Gnostic allegory with little character development, but Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is more ambitious than that. 

Every cliché  that exists in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 existed in the original. 

Okay beat the game. Story/lore thoughts:

The connection between Xenoblade and Xenoblade 2 is pretty concrete now. I am fully convinced Ontos = Alvis, and Logos/Pneuma/Ontos are all parts of the Trinity processor which access the Conduit (Xenoblade's equivalent of the Zohar) to use its power to manipulate the universe(s.) The world in Xenoblade 2 is the renmants of our world after the trinity processor was used. When Klaus used the trinity processor Alvis/Ontos went to the universe where Xenoblade takes place with his other half. The Klaus that remains tried to recreate the Earth using Logos/Pneuma after regretting what he'd done.  In Xenoblade Alvis uses the power of the conduit to empower mayneth/zanza with monados. Basically all of their power comes from Alvis' ability to access the conduit. 

Interestingly, BLADE in Xenoblade X is an acronym for Beyond the Logos Artificial Destiny Emancipator. 

Which makes one think, maybe X connects as well ,but I am unsure how they'd connect X because Earth is seemingly destroyed at the beginning of the game. 

Plus the story being disarmingly safe at the opening is a common tactic in some of the best JRPGs, like Chrono Trigger and yes, the first Xenoblade.  

Add to the fact that XC's story is more or less just a heavily stripped down version Xenogears re-skinned for the Bionis/Mechonis setting; with 90% of the escalation, characters, and politics removed.

* Character forgets his past.
* He goes on an errand for the Citan archetype.
* Enemy Mechs land in his home town.
* He grabs ahold of a powerful weapon to fight them off
* His crush gets killed in the process of the battle.
* Some kind of super power is revealed inside of him.
* Leaves his home town resulting from these events.
* Gets tied up in a conflict.

Rather than a series of events stemming between the political situation with the Gebler/Aveh alliance against the Kislev Empire, with Nisan caught in the middle - Shyulk and co are instead moving through the world in a very linear fashion because Shulk has to get to the top due to wanting to go to Sword valley for revenge, and this dream of Prison Island he had.

They end up in the same place, though.
* Discovers an entity inside him that is the male archon of the world's creation.
* His girlfriend has the female archon of the world's creation implanted inside of her.
* The conflicts all date back to some ancient thing that happened, and the new leader wants to reawaken a god in response to the pain he felt from that past war. He used to be good a long time ago.
* It turns out that life is actually just manufactured to be consumed by a giant body of "god"
* All those purebloods of a superior race get turned into monsters.
* The former nation of the enemies gets completely destroyed.
* You fight God at the end.
* Time for a new era without gods.

I find it a little funny that people call Xenoblade, "story focused" when the story is very sparse and simplified for the most part; even when compared to Final Fantasy titles - but especially when compared to Xenogears and Xenosaga.

Xenoblade is "plot driven" in that all of its progression is dependent on the plot, with a few features tacked on - but story is far from its focus. Its focuses were the vertical world design and pacing a game out in an expansive world. It was otherwise a very light and simplified derivative of Xenogears; it was to Xenogears as "Final Fantasy Mystic Quest" was to Final Fantasy IV.