Topic: Xenoblade Chronicles 2

@Dezzy Well, even though the story is conclusive if you remove that epilogue, there's still a lot of unanswered questions and things that don't make sense, like communicating between Nopon, Ma-non, Orpheon (they bring it up literally only once and never explain why it's the case ingame), what's the deal with the second alien race fighting the Ganglion back at Earth, and other stuff I'm probably forgetting here.

So I still want a XCX2 to help tie up stuff beyond the cliffhanger, but I highly doubt it'll be a thing sadly.

Oh well, headcanons it is...

Some random battle footage we haven't seen before:

At this point, I wouldn't even mind if BoTw DLC was delayed until Q1 2018. With Odyssey and XC2, have so much to play @Dezzy

The desertey industrial place reminds me a bit of the sandsea in FF12. One of the best areas in that game.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 director shares excitement for the game's launch, mentions "enormous amount of quests"

https://gonintendo.com/stories/290506-xenoblade-chronicles-2-...

As long as the main story is as good as XC1 and sidequests as good as XCX, I'm game.

So weird to think we didn't know this existed before January.

Exactly! Although I thought the main story in XCX was quite good too. It was just too short.
The sidequests were excellent though. Whereas in XC1 they were just 90% fetch quests.
The only game I can think of that has a really good main story and really good sidequests is The Witcher 3.
Having good characters also massively important though. Lin was the only really well fleshed out character in XCX. Whereas most of them in the original were.

@Dezzy I haven't done all of the affinity missions, but I thought the characters were pretty good when they were given the spotlight.

That said, I firmly believe Monolith can deliver amazing stories when given the time and effort. XCX suffered because it was Monolith's first HD project and they wanted to focus on gameplay and the world first, along with online development forcing the need for an avatar instead of a set protagonist like Shulk and Rex.

@Dezzy

Gosh... the world looks amazing. Even better than XCX, which had one of the best worlds in any video game I've played.

I haven't seen anything yet that looks even half as good as XCX's Primordia in the footage. That game seriously has the most gorgeous environments I've ever seen in a video game.

So you can rotate between party members in the middle of the battle? That's great! It allows for a far more dynamic battle system. Something annoying in XCX was that you were locked to a single character in the middle of battle, and you companions AI wasn't really good.

@Snaplocket I'd argue that both were interesting in spite of all the clichés. Sometimes you can make something good by taking a cliché and just make it good and interesting. It's hard to be 100% original nowadays - no matter what you do, there will always be a cliché of a sort in any story. It's why TVTropes is a thing and has oodles and oodles of tropes listed for both XC1 and XCX.

Yeah so far I'd say it doesn't match the first 2 games in terms of its environments. But we haven't seen that much of them yet. But it still looks way above average. The first 2 games just had some of the best environmental design in the history of gaming.

They were standard, but much better than most, and much more explorable than most and much more worth exploring than that group that would outdo it for explorable.

I mean, at times it does show the hardware's age pretty hardcore (OMG MAKNA FOREST), but in terms of sheer artistry, going against expected hardware limitations (which is more impressive) + actually being able to properly explore it and successfully encouraging you to do so, Xenoblade is top-tier. Both of them. I have zero doubts 2 can do the same.

@Tsurii

"Pretty standard" is what I'd call medieval castles, knights and dragons. Floating islands on a sea on a giant robot's head is definitely not standard by my reasoning.

I rarely got a cliched experience out of the environments tbh. The fact that forests and icy mountains and grassy fields are used a lot in JRPGs and games is not the best example of standard being a bad thing. Otherwise most game environments in games people like are standard and boring too.

There was this popular image of a bunch of 2011 first person shooters that looked remarkably similar. And while it was a bit out of context and unfair, it still kinda had a point. But, I'm not sure you could show me environments in Xenoblade that are comparably indistinguishable from the ones in other RPGs.

The one thing Xenoblade has definitely done that's very tropey is following the standard climate zones that so many JRPGs have. You have the grassy area, the industrial area, the snowy area, etc etc.
It is nice when games depart from that formula a bit.
I rember being surprised in FF12 about how much of the main map is based around a desert because I was so used to that formula

@Tarvaax Decided I'd respond in the Xenoblade 2 thread. The voice acting was one of my favorite things "Now it's Reyn time!", the characters felt quite unqiue with my limited JRPG knowledge, and I didn't bother too much with the quests. I grabbed as many as I could when I went to a hub area, but that was it. Plus, remember, you don't have to turn in your quests which was great! And on top of it all, the gameplay was engrossing. So even if it played out like a book, I was hooked because of the gameplay. It was certainly not a perfect game. I had a myriad of problems, but I also experienced many video game "firsts", which puts the game high on my score ladder.

By the two main character designs of Xenoblade 2, I can already tell I won't enjoy it as much as 1. But if I get the game I will enjoy it, for sure! I'm open to surprises, but I'm not confident about them.

Unfortunately I can't say much about Xenoblade X, as I never played it. Someone here convinced me to get it eventually, but the avatar character is a big turnoff for me.

Yeah I was fine with the voice acting in both of the first 2 games. I'm generally don't put a huge amount of importance into voice acting. It just needs to not be awful and I'm happy.
The difference between Xenoblade Chronicles voice acting (which I'd call average/ok) and The Last Of Us voice acting (which I'd call superb) has a fairly limited effect on how much I enjoy a game.
Things like dialogue and scene direction I think easily as much as the quality of the voice acting.

@Snaplocket

Some of them are standard fare. Colony 9, Valak Mountain and Makna Forest look like areas you might find in any JRPG.

Bionis Leg, Eryth Sea and the Fallen Arm, seem far more interesting and unusual.

Bionis Leg and the fallen arm especially are those areas where the fact that you're on a giant robot is much clearer in the design.