I just couldnt understand the whole "passive gameplay" thing where characters just act on their own against the bullet sponge enemies.
If I wanted to watch the game play itself, I would watch a video or a streamer. Not whatever the fuck this "gameplay" is supposed to be.
On the other hand, Xenoblade copies the combo system Xenosaga created for itself and Xenosaga plays way slower but the story went to coomershit after episode 1 and was overly apparent in episode 3 then the story rightly died there with an in game lore bible that makes the mass effect codex look like a coloring book and for some reason requires a 100% save from both episode 1 and 2 to unlock proper functionality to navigate the clusterfuck that is the Xenosaga story. There is a certain charm to it that seems to have been lost to the xeno series ever since Episode 2.
Xenosaga plays more like a Final fantasy clone without the retarded "timer" thing that lets enemies spam their attacks on your turn while you navigate the menus trying to find the attack you want to use.
Finished it last Friday, I've got a lot to say about it, overall not very good. Overall I'll recommend it only if you really like the series.
Starting with the visuals of the game, it appear to me worse than XB2. The game feels a lot greyer and less vibrant and the character designs are very boring and repetitive. Really hate they didn't have every special character drawn by some hentai artist like in previous game and instead it's extremely uniform despite all the extra races. Ditto music wise none of the tracks were memorable as the previous games besides the Consul fight (mainly because it is ridiculously grandiose). Also fuck whoever translated this game with a trident, those constant slang terms are godaweful and even if I played in Japanese I'd have to read them (and it will be worse since I understand enough of the weaboo language to know there is made up shit).
The combat is slow, every fight feels more like trying to outlast the enemy rather than taking active role in combat, which is just terrible in a 70 hour RPG. Switching to Hard mode can make fights harder necessitating more focus during battle but it makes fights even longer, and in the last 10 hours when I tried it again I was so laughably powerful due to better classes that even on hard difficulty I barely needed to do anything, even if I had a lesser level than the enemies. The one mechanic I grew to loath was the chain attack because it completely breaks the flow of combat and takes forever to complete. I ended up not using it by the end since just wailing on the enemy and going level 3 mechs was enough.
Speaking of the mechs they are incredibly underused despite being the best designed aspects of the game. Having mech only battles (like in Xenosaga) or at least having them in world exploration would have massively improved the flow of the game.
Another huge problem in the combat is that having only 3 class archtypes makes it extremely repetitive, the game really needed more class diversity (especially since you already have a lot of characters) that don't adhere to this "only attack/heal/aggro" BS.
On the subject of exploration, the world feels a lot more boring than in previous games, with no real interesting areas. And there is very little reason to explore in the game, your only equipable items are accessories which are usually only improved only incrementally or have retardedly pointless abilities. This kinda makes me appreciate the Gacha element in 2 only because it gave a good reason to always explore. You can also get items to fuse gems but the game will be idiotically obsessive with what kind of items you need and I ended up just fusing whatever gems I could.
Finally there's the plot and holy shit it just doesn't work. I will spoiler it out since maybe some of you still hasn't finished it. But beforehand I'll say the whole themes of the games are actively hurt by its gameplay. In a plot motivated by lack of time and pointless mass killing, pretty much every side content end with you fucking around halfway across the world to kill some monster colony or collecting pointless shit.
The main plot has the heroes discover they are pretty much in a pointless endless war perpetuated by some evil guy who's barely a character. There are no surprises or twists, it's what you expect from the first time you see the cabal of evil guys. This makes XB3, despite the more serious tone, the least complicated game of the series. The justification for the evil guy's plan is very much Persona 5's extremely childish "evil old people want to perpetuate status quo because it benefits them". The game tries to pull some point about power, and the protagonists not having the right to do anything because they don't get the viewpoint of weak people, but it's completely contrary to the game since the world itself only favours strong people, and there is never a reason why the world couldn't have been anything else considering the main antagonist is functionally god.
If anything, the ones who will get the most benefit from the heroes are the weakest part of society who can't fight. Speaking of which this comes up with two characters who somehow do the same action for completely opposite reasons: The first character is a weakling who joins the baddies (who are outside the system) because he is stuck in a cycle of death and rebirth where he is always weak and ends up dying young, while the other wants to join the cycle of death and rebirth because she is weak and so wants to get a second chance in life, despite that from the former, she'll still be weak irregardless. I just don't get what was the writer's point.
More than that, you end up finding a city full of people outside of the system, who become your allies for the rest of game, and discover near the end that you succeeding ends up killing all of them while everyone inside the system lives. Wouldn't it make more narrative sense to have the city be your enemy, and then the villain would have had a point since you would have sacrificed the city?
The game does try to be more character focused, but a lot of the character scenes are just repetitive and you can really sum up every character issue in a sentence. While they have importance in the plot, they get solved sequentially and afterwards the characters pretty much vanish to the background. The weirdest one for me was Sena's plot line which deals with her seeing herself as a faker and weak, but this never really explained, she supposedly mimics Mio but Mio is completely different in every aspect to Sena, which makes me think the plot line was made for Mio's dead protege who fits the mold much nicer. The late game character plotline doesn't really ends their arc, and in Sena's case doesn't even feel like it has anything to do with her.
The heroes are even worse that they don't get any character arc, and instead we get boring ass questlines, including in one case an hour of going around to plant a potato farm. But the worse is Ethel's plot line, which actively goes against everything you do in the game. Basically what happens is that a character named Ethel ends up dying ingame, only to be reincarnated and aged to 12 years old, you then find a chamber that can her up to her 20 year old, half a year left to live body, and the game expects of you to say yes. This goes against the whole point of the fucking story, which was to prevent more people from losing their humanity to play war, and your party just prevented a character from having a chance for full life in favour of one more guy to sit in the backline, what fucking bullshit.
The villains in the game are all terrible, like I said the main baddie is the most generic godlike evil villain possible. All the lesser baddies are cartoonishly evil. The only bad guy with possible death is the previous reincarnation of the main protagonist (who're somehow simultaneously alive) and his plot resolution is basically "I know you did bad stuff since you got mentally broken by never succeeding killing the main baddie, but your mistake was not trying hard enough".
As a fun aside, I looked at the game's page on Tvtropes and holy shit the amount of western politics shoved in there is insane. It's pretty much this:
Game: "We are now no longer being able to depend on our former masters, we must go back to agrarian society where one helps the other."
Tranny Janny: "Holy shit you mean you support Communism?"
Dunkey and the Xenoblade fandom are basically at eachother's throats now.
Or, well, Dunkey fans are at the Xenoblade fans throats. Compare the subreddits and you'll see what I mean. Xenoblade fans have basically resumed normal posting, while Dunkey's sub have been mentioning it as early as a couple hours ago.
Also worth noting that Leah got involved in the drama and yeah, she's full of shit and playing it up for drama.
Leah's comment:
The two comments Leah's referring to (censored names cause I don't like posting uncensored names for people who aren't public figures):
Now maybe I'm an illiterate. But as stupid as that guy is, I never actually saw him suggest to band together to sue Dunkey. And even then, look the the downvotes. Most people don't agree with the guy.
I just freed the Lady that was in the Sky Castle, I've unlocked all the Heroes.
The Game has grown on me, I still hate the AI being absolute fucktarded about Popping into Interlink randomly and absolutely fucking up Aggro, though I am not sure it is all the AI's fault because I have leveled some tanking and the Mob AI decides to just...lose all Aggro and turn around to punch someone else (not a tank) despite Me having Monica's taunt Aura going, the Taunt Aura Accessory and the Extra aggro on arts gem.
I do think CP gain is way to low, especially given that it gets lower against lower level enemies, I can understand the reasoning behind it but holy fucking shit the fun of the game is tinkering with Arts/Skills combos from Various classes, don't make that absolutely Miserable to fucking do.
Edit : I also have to take issue with not being able to get all the skills/arts from classes, like Jesus fuck they don't give ANY of the cool shit the Seraph class has Skill wise to use on other classes and instead give you the horse shit that you can get from Accessories.
I do think CP gain is way to low, especially given that it gets lower against lower level enemies, I can understand the reasoning behind it but holy fucking shit the fun of the game is tinkering with Arts/Skills combos from Various classes, don't make that absolutely Miserable to fucking do.
That is my biggest complaint with the game so far damn its annoying. Im in the start of chapter 5 and Im like level 50. Im running around trying to unlock classes on other characters and Im not getting anywhere and Im doing shit meant for like chapter 6 or 7 or something, but Im still getting experience enough that I keep leveling up more, and then you get experience for finding new landmarks, and all this shit. I guess I get that they want you to be able to feed exp to be able to do the postgame "iconic" meme monsters that are level 125 or whatever, but that should be what the campfire exp boost is for.
Like damn scale the exp after a bit the same way you do with the CP and let off on the "btw this class is level 10, every fight you fight using it is kind of a waste because youre leveling up but not advancing in any build for your character and later on youll be too overleveled to unlock the new classes" stuff. And then I cant really even craft some of the stuff they want you too because Im not fighting as many monsters because its going to cause me to level up too much. Im aware you can use nopon coins for it and I am, because some of the other nopon stuff seems too niche to bother with but the finite amount without grinding makes me hesitant and even then, if I dont have the class unlocked, I cant do it. Let me unlock the class with nopon coins.
I havent had to learn the combat that well because Im so overleveled which is fine because the AI sucks cock and then pukes all over the place. On major bosses it can be too flashy and chaotic and you can feel like youre on a knifes edge as to whether or not youre gonna wipe if one guy falls. Healers suck and tanks dont really hold aggro and they just go all over the place, jumbling up in stupid ways so that either youre wiping the floor with the other guy or, like when fighting the Chapter 4 end boss, she will wipe you or be obnoxious until you can get a chain attack and actually manage your strategy more precisely and get your healers in on it so you can control that they actually heal your dudes instead of whatever else.
The combat+equipment+build shit is so flashy and 'deep looking' that it becomes shallow because its like when are you really gonna use the thing that's like "20% extra evasion in the water against a mechon monster" or some shit, I end up just kind of doing 1 or 2 broad general builds or maybe use the auto build and brute force it, and even then sometimes Im like "Wait why am I getting a bonus here for that reason?" Sure for the post game MMO monsters youll have a build for like "reflect damage against gorilla monsters 25 levels higher than you" but 90% of the game even in the castle area where there are a ton of mechs, youre fighting mostly humans. So why use the item that gives like +75% damage to mechs or some specific scenario item when you would be better served using the +10 percentage points to attack overall. Its not necessarily murky, but its trying so hard to look and be deep and complex in a way it doesnt need to 99% of the time, it comes across as dumb.
Other than that I love the environments, I love 'the city' -- it reminds me of those WoW major cities, I remember being blown away by how big they seemed because of how cozy and intertwined they were, I love shit like that in games.
I also really love the music. A lot of it has motifs from like Chrono Cross, especially around the floating sea.
So I just did the Troubadour's Ascension quest and I just want to say, the contest was fundamentally unfair and I have no idea what they were thinking putting that character into it.
It was like Putting that Tranny Archer in a Wet T-shirt contest against Monica.
Why aren't these fucks considered superbosses?
They're level 102 (higher than Grandeps) and it would be fun to have an ascending level boss that's two niggas at once and also one where ouroboros isn't allowed.
I swear to god they just ripped out assets from Daemon X machina for that first DLC hero, Ino. She looks like a full body augmented pilot from that game.
I swear to god they just ripped out assets from Daemon X machina for that first DLC hero, Ino. She looks like a full body augmented pilot from that game.
Harry Mcentire threw his whole ass into that performance. He's up there with Adam Howden in best performances imo. A huge step up from 2. And aside from some minor ooh me accents slipping, everyone is cast well.
Looking forward to the kimono woman hero and also the expansion. I can only hope the entire gang from 1 and 2 reappear.
Minor gripe I do wish there were more towns. I know why they don't have many but still
Also if you don't pick long haired Mio then what the fuck are you doing lol
Set before the events of the Xenoblade Chronicles 3 game, players join a cast of new and familiar characters in an original story scenario that connects all three installments in the Xenoblade Chronicles series. Future Redeemed also features new battle mechanics, such as Unity Combo, where two characters can attack in unison.
Additionally, the Pyra + Mythra 2-pack amiibo figures will be released on Friday, July 21.
Set before the events of the Xenoblade Chronicles 3 game, players join a cast of new and familiar characters in an original story scenario that connects all three installments in the Xenoblade Chronicles series. Future Redeemed also features new battle mechanics, such as Unity Combo, where two characters can attack in unison.
Additionally, the Pyra + Mythra 2-pack amiibo figures will be released on Friday, July 21.
Well let’s hope it’s good. While I liked it and thought the combat was fun, Xeno3 left me wanting a whole lot more than what I got. By chapter 5 I felt a little disappointed that I never got another system with which I could further interact with the world. The loop of town to town, consul to consul never felt quite right. Episodes in an anime I thought could have been a lot better. I never quite developed a bond with Noah and Mio the way I did with Rex and Pyra and Shulk and Dunban and Reyn. The voice acting in English turned me off immediately also. I wanted so much more of the bigger picture and a stronger vision of the future of the series. I’m hopeful there’s a bigger and better sense of exploration as well. While I got confused a fair bit navigating in Xeno2, I also appreciated the fact that by the time I beat the game I didn’t feel like I’d seen everything. The QoL improvements felt like they came at some costs in terms of narrative and systems.
Well let’s hope it’s good. While I liked it and thought the combat was fun, Xeno3 left me wanting a whole lot more than what I got. By chapter 5 I felt a little disappointed that I never got another system with which I could further interact with the world. The loop of town to town, consul to consul never felt quite right. Episodes in an anime I thought could have been a lot better. I never quite developed a bond with Noah and Mio the way I did with Rex and Pyra and Shulk and Dunban and Reyn. The voice acting in English turned me off immediately also. I wanted so much more of the bigger picture and a stronger vision of the future of the series. I’m hopeful there’s a bigger and better sense of exploration as well. While I got confused a fair bit navigating in Xeno2, I also appreciated the fact that by the time I beat the game I didn’t feel like I’d seen everything. The QoL improvements felt like they came at some costs in terms of narrative and systems.
The second game story DLC was fantastic, everything flowed a lot better because it was a complete story with a predetermined cast. Hopefully this one will be just as good.
Having important characters from the previous games is weird though, I thought the world merge was like couple of centuries after the two games.
