GOTY? I think not.
So Xenoblade Chronicles and I have no history. I've not played the first game and as much as I wanted to play X, I didn't want to buy a Wii U for it. Now that the second game is on the Switch and I had one of those anyway because it's....frankly a surprisingly good system, I am able to play a game series which I've always been interested in.
I know the "Xeno" games aren't technically the same thing, but they all share themes that I really like namely the use of big fuck-off robots in a traditional JRPG set up. Xenogears is one of the best games ever made with simply the best battle system to ever appear in an RPG ever, and if you disagree I'll fucking fight you on it. Xenosaga was an epic trilogy of games with very decent combat systems and way too long cut scenes. However the story on characters are great and there is a reason Kos-Mos appears in a ton of other games, she's badass to the core.
But as far as the Xenoblade series went, I only knew about what was on the box art.
Xenoblade starts you as a boy/guy (age late teens maybe?) named Rex who makes his living diving into the sea (which is made up of clouds for reasons) for salvage. The world no longer has land masses and people instead live on the backs of these huge creatures called Titans. These titans are so big they might as well be land masses, complete with biomes and ecosystems of life in addition to supporting small cities and towns. Rex lives on a very small titan by comparison named Gramps who seems to be a father-figure to young Rex.
The story really begins when Rex gets hired to join these warriors called Drivers to salvage up a hidden Blade. Blades are living weapons that bond to Drivers giving them combat abilities and the like. So these Drivers that hire Rex are after a exceptionally powerful Blade but need his salvage expertise to retrieve it.
Of course things don't go as planned and in a twist of fate Rex ends up bonded to this rare and powerful Blade they call the Aegis, together they escape and set off on their adventure. As a premise I enjoy the story, and the interactions you have between your party member's and your blade are great. And while the big world ending plot hasn't yet cropped up in the first 12 hours or so, the set up stories and things I've done in the game so far have been interesting and entertaining.
Sadly the story is really the only thing good about this game, and even that is up for grabs depending on how many cliche JRPG tropes you can ignore.
First off let me talk about the presentation. While the world, the music, and the graphics are all up to par for anything the Switch can handle without tanking fps like a wheezing gorilla, the animations and the voice acting is royally fucked. Most of the cut scenes are jarring because the characters will often be doing animations or inflections that represent the Japanese Voice over, not the English ones. So you have these characters acting out stuff, only to have the English voices begin talking partway through the animation. The lip flips are worse then ever the cheesiest Godzilla movie and it really takes me out of the emotion of the story when everything is so fucking off.
Now I know what you are gonna say, "Well Critical, its a Japanese game so of course the animations and stuff will be meant to match the Japanese dialog not English." To which I am gonna call bullshit, because it is just fucking lazy in 2017. Let me point out a game ten years old called Final Fantasy 13. If you look at the game, you'll see that the productive of that game actual cut and modified everything to fit the English translations. From full CGI cut scenes to in-engine cut scenes everything was tweaked to match. Now Square Enix has the means to put in that kind of production value. But in looking at who developed this game I found it was backed by Nintendo itself, and Monolith soft who is owned by Warner Bros., which means that money was not an issue and considering FF13 was ten years ago I find it hard to believe that a little animation editing would have been that difficult with today's computer tech.
All in all it makes the game fucking hard to watch.
Then you have the actual gameplay, which is also terrible. The way combat works is that there is supposed to be a flow. You have basic attacks, which allow you to perform specials, these specials charge up super attacks, rinse and repeat. Well that's all fine and dandy, except basic attacks are not controlled by the player, they are automatic and don't work if the player is moving.
So here is how combat flows. You position yourself next to an enemy and you stand there while you attack it. You watch your special moves (of which you have three different ones on your bar at any given time) each of which charges at a different rate, but using one doesn't reset the others so you end up using one, then the next, then the next over and over as each bar fills up. Depending on how much health the enemy has you'll either use your super when it's ready or let it charge up to a max of level 4.
This combat system requires no thought, and no planning, you simply use abilities when the game decides to let you use them. Oh and your party members do shit by themselves and require no input from you other than to press a button to use their supers. Now supposedly there is some system where you time auto attacks with the activation of your specials to get them to do slightly more damage but I've never purposefully done that and it hasn't mattered in combat at it. There is also some kind of extremely poorly explained combo system where you use a super of one element then use a super of another element to trigger debuffs and such on the enemies, but 12 hours in and I haven't been able to figure out how to make any of that happen regularly. The times I have done it, it was pure chance.
Not only is the combat system boring, but even the most basic enemies have tens of thousands of HP. This is probably an attempt to make combat last long enough for things to charge and you to use abilities. But fuck me it's slow and it's boring. I'm level 21, fighting level 18 Squirrels and shit and they take upwards of three minutes to beat because of these over inflated health bars.
I don't know, I'm probably missing some key combat mechanic that would make all my characters be drastically more damage and thus reduce the time in combat, but if I am it isn't explained very well anywhere in the game at all.
The only thing keeping my going right now is the story, because it is genuinely interesting and the characters around me are fun. But unless something happens to the combat to suddenly make things fun, I doubt I'll be able to slog through the game for much longer.
If you are on the fence about picking up this game. I really wouldn't unless you already are familiar with the combat and how to make it all work, because otherwise you'll not have a good time.
So Xenoblade Chronicles and I have no history. I've not played the first game and as much as I wanted to play X, I didn't want to buy a Wii U for it. Now that the second game is on the Switch and I had one of those anyway because it's....frankly a surprisingly good system, I am able to play a game series which I've always been interested in.
I know the "Xeno" games aren't technically the same thing, but they all share themes that I really like namely the use of big fuck-off robots in a traditional JRPG set up. Xenogears is one of the best games ever made with simply the best battle system to ever appear in an RPG ever, and if you disagree I'll fucking fight you on it. Xenosaga was an epic trilogy of games with very decent combat systems and way too long cut scenes. However the story on characters are great and there is a reason Kos-Mos appears in a ton of other games, she's badass to the core.
But as far as the Xenoblade series went, I only knew about what was on the box art.
Xenoblade starts you as a boy/guy (age late teens maybe?) named Rex who makes his living diving into the sea (which is made up of clouds for reasons) for salvage. The world no longer has land masses and people instead live on the backs of these huge creatures called Titans. These titans are so big they might as well be land masses, complete with biomes and ecosystems of life in addition to supporting small cities and towns. Rex lives on a very small titan by comparison named Gramps who seems to be a father-figure to young Rex.
The story really begins when Rex gets hired to join these warriors called Drivers to salvage up a hidden Blade. Blades are living weapons that bond to Drivers giving them combat abilities and the like. So these Drivers that hire Rex are after a exceptionally powerful Blade but need his salvage expertise to retrieve it.
Of course things don't go as planned and in a twist of fate Rex ends up bonded to this rare and powerful Blade they call the Aegis, together they escape and set off on their adventure. As a premise I enjoy the story, and the interactions you have between your party member's and your blade are great. And while the big world ending plot hasn't yet cropped up in the first 12 hours or so, the set up stories and things I've done in the game so far have been interesting and entertaining.
Sadly the story is really the only thing good about this game, and even that is up for grabs depending on how many cliche JRPG tropes you can ignore.
First off let me talk about the presentation. While the world, the music, and the graphics are all up to par for anything the Switch can handle without tanking fps like a wheezing gorilla, the animations and the voice acting is royally fucked. Most of the cut scenes are jarring because the characters will often be doing animations or inflections that represent the Japanese Voice over, not the English ones. So you have these characters acting out stuff, only to have the English voices begin talking partway through the animation. The lip flips are worse then ever the cheesiest Godzilla movie and it really takes me out of the emotion of the story when everything is so fucking off.
Now I know what you are gonna say, "Well Critical, its a Japanese game so of course the animations and stuff will be meant to match the Japanese dialog not English." To which I am gonna call bullshit, because it is just fucking lazy in 2017. Let me point out a game ten years old called Final Fantasy 13. If you look at the game, you'll see that the productive of that game actual cut and modified everything to fit the English translations. From full CGI cut scenes to in-engine cut scenes everything was tweaked to match. Now Square Enix has the means to put in that kind of production value. But in looking at who developed this game I found it was backed by Nintendo itself, and Monolith soft who is owned by Warner Bros., which means that money was not an issue and considering FF13 was ten years ago I find it hard to believe that a little animation editing would have been that difficult with today's computer tech.
All in all it makes the game fucking hard to watch.
Then you have the actual gameplay, which is also terrible. The way combat works is that there is supposed to be a flow. You have basic attacks, which allow you to perform specials, these specials charge up super attacks, rinse and repeat. Well that's all fine and dandy, except basic attacks are not controlled by the player, they are automatic and don't work if the player is moving.
So here is how combat flows. You position yourself next to an enemy and you stand there while you attack it. You watch your special moves (of which you have three different ones on your bar at any given time) each of which charges at a different rate, but using one doesn't reset the others so you end up using one, then the next, then the next over and over as each bar fills up. Depending on how much health the enemy has you'll either use your super when it's ready or let it charge up to a max of level 4.
This combat system requires no thought, and no planning, you simply use abilities when the game decides to let you use them. Oh and your party members do shit by themselves and require no input from you other than to press a button to use their supers. Now supposedly there is some system where you time auto attacks with the activation of your specials to get them to do slightly more damage but I've never purposefully done that and it hasn't mattered in combat at it. There is also some kind of extremely poorly explained combo system where you use a super of one element then use a super of another element to trigger debuffs and such on the enemies, but 12 hours in and I haven't been able to figure out how to make any of that happen regularly. The times I have done it, it was pure chance.
Not only is the combat system boring, but even the most basic enemies have tens of thousands of HP. This is probably an attempt to make combat last long enough for things to charge and you to use abilities. But fuck me it's slow and it's boring. I'm level 21, fighting level 18 Squirrels and shit and they take upwards of three minutes to beat because of these over inflated health bars.
I don't know, I'm probably missing some key combat mechanic that would make all my characters be drastically more damage and thus reduce the time in combat, but if I am it isn't explained very well anywhere in the game at all.
The only thing keeping my going right now is the story, because it is genuinely interesting and the characters around me are fun. But unless something happens to the combat to suddenly make things fun, I doubt I'll be able to slog through the game for much longer.
If you are on the fence about picking up this game. I really wouldn't unless you already are familiar with the combat and how to make it all work, because otherwise you'll not have a good time.
