With the Gears involved, it looks like they’re making more of a full fledged Xeno-game. This might be the closest game to a Xenogears style game yet (including Xenosaga which had some truly horrific map design, but typically made up for it with some very juicy cinematics). Not making a Xenogears-like game to this point isn’t necessarily a creative desire so much as a creative necessity; the transition to full 3D massively increases the scale of what needs to be done to replicate the experience. But Monolithsoft seems to be reaching that productive capability.
I have a few hope based on what I’ve seen from the trailer, largely based around (maybe most of) my biggest gripes with the past games:
1. A Xenoblade Chronicles X scale world, with NLA sized cities and other XC2 sized towns. XCX had my favourite world of the bunch by far, but it had one big flaw IMO - no major towns outside of NLA, there were expanding camps (which was awesome) but too much emptiness. So yes, towns + cities like Xenoblade has never seen before - with lots of side quests to build out the world, but less in the way of cheap ones with fetch goals and flavour text, and more in the way of fully developed ones—can’t let Witcher 3 get away with topping them on side quests. Also, no more of the maze-maps from XC2, I hated wandering around for hours trying to find one damn thing. Luckily, it looks like a map designer from XCX/BotW is handling this one, rather than the horrendous XC2 map designer
2. Denser storytelling. Takahashi has been making a lot of light beer stories with the Xenoblade Chronicles series. The games are exceedingly long, but relatively light and less potent in substance: twice as long as Xenogears, but about 1/4th as much happens. Takahashi built his rep on making the best premium whisky stories. No more of this lowest common denominator light beer crap, that’s not how to achieve greatness or even make it into the mainstream, FAR too many RPGs are already writing light beer stories, give us the Premium Single Malt.
3. Stop with the convoluted battle systems.I’m not against complex battle systems if they mean highly complex strategies, I’m a strategy fan, after all. But that’s not what we got with Xenoblade Chronicles 2. We got a battle system that was the most complex to operate in the history of the Xeno series, but also the least strategic in the history of the series. The challenge shouldn’t be about learning how to do a puzzle game, it should be about learning how to build a character and using strategy to smash an enemy. Using strategy in XC2 often means long, sluggish, drawn-out, religious battles (yes, I used the synonyms to drag out the sentence more and more and more to illustrate how the battle system feels). The easy shortcut is the convoluted combo system - which is an elaborate puzzle game that will deal lots of damage if you score well. It makes the whole battle system annoying. Maximize the fun and satisfaction of the battle system by expanding the viability of strategic battling, and instead make combos a rare thing that can be done maybe once every 10 battles or so. Making the game about executing combos every battle is annoying and boring-asses bullshit.
4. No more field actions. XC and XCX were perfect with the automated pickups. The stupid field actions in XC2 felt ultra reputations and were a massive headache. Also, the locks were bullshit, as it was difficult to tell if you were supposed to get that ability to proceed, or if there was another path - this bullshit further aggravated the pain of the maze-like map design.
Run those four bases, and as far as I’m concerned, this game could be a home run hit.
Those are my opinions at least.
, Monolith Soft are magicians of game development.
