riki_sidekicks

I agree with everything you said here but how did you not mention the phenomenal soundtrack? The soundtrack is a masterpiece in itself and is one of the key things that pushes Xenoblade Chronicles from merely excellent into the realm of timeless masterpiece.

If I count correctly, there are 22 different area themes (not counting day/night variations and the different variations on Colony 6), a dozen or so different battle themes, and a bunch of other songs that play during cutscenes. Out of this huge volume of music, there are many brilliant tracks, some others that are merely good, and no duds.

Xenoblade 2 makes it and X does not? A travesty!

No Xenoblade merch? I demand a do-over!

What kind of news is that? Were you expecting them to announce that they are going to stop production right after Christmas and liquidate remaining inventory at fire sale prices?

Probably nothing because my husband has dibs on the TV to play Death Stranding.

The tedious grinding of the early Dragon Quest games has not aged well. 4/10 is very generous.

I played this back in the ‘80’s and there is no way it deserves a rating as high as 6/10. The old Dragon Quest games have not aged well and the first has aged worst. At least 90% of the game consists of wandering around in circles fighting the same three or four random encounters over and over until you have enough gold and levels that you can survive walking to the next town and walking around in circles near that town. There is no way this “classic” has stood the test of time.

As someone who played all four Dragon Quest NES games back in the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, I don’t see how any of them can justify ratings as high as you’re giving them. They consisted almost entirely of tedious grinding which we all endured because we didn’t know better and all the other RPG’s in the market, of which there were few, were the same way. I couldn’t in good conscience recommend any of them to someone today, even a friend my age who was considering playing for nostalgia value.

Keep your nostalgia intact and don’t subject yourself to trying to play these things again.

Do you really want to keep wandering in a circle grinding the same two or three monsters to level up? (Spoiler alert: no, you do not.)

I hope they fix the game's more obnoxious UI elements.

@Porky they said they animefied XC2 so they could show more detailed facial expressions, unlike the expressionless robot faces you saw in XCX. That's probably what inspired the change in direction here.

I really don't like the new character designs though. Shulk looks like a little kid now, and the cartoony characters don't fit with the rest of the game.

@personauser93 depends on why you didn't like XC2. 2 has some annoyances that are unique to it, like the infuriating RNG blade system, but in many respects they're similar.

If your only problem with 2 was poor graphical performance in handheld, that probably won't be present here.

@MonadoBoy yeah, I was really confused for a moment when they seemed to be in Outlook Park and then what appears to be Alcamoth was sitting there in the sky.

I’m not sure the “traditional” OOT-style dungeon based around a key item and a gimmicky puzzle boss will work in the new formula.

What I think would be better is to have more large shrines like they had in the DLC. There were a lot of shrines that had a single short puzzle with a mechanic that was never developed on, either in that shrine or elsewhere.

The thing I really want is playable Zelda. Nintendo has been recycling this retrograde “rescue Zelda” plot for over 30 years and it’s gotten extremely tiresome. Time for Zelda to be the star!

Really hoping we can get playable Zelda in this one.

“Winning the indie war.”

Nice way to say “losing the AAA war.”

I guess the one saving grace is that 99% of people who will play this game are people like me who played it in the 1990’s and would know to Google the code.

It really sucks for that 1% of players who didn’t play it before and don’t know that the puzzle is unsolvable in-game though.

I never knew NL was in the historical revisionism business. Where did you get your “information” about the Seal of Quality, official Nintendo marketing copy?

Video game ripoffs are nothing new or even undesirable. When there are enough ripoffs you even call it a "genre". Platformers started as Mario riipoffs, FPS started with Doom ripoffs, MOBA started with Dota ripoffs, and now Battle Royale consists of PUBG ripoffs.

The art style ripoff here is particularly brazen though.

I guess the review just can't mention the fact that these games were actually really bad. They suffer from a serious case of Nintendo Hard, made 10x longer by adding an unreasonable number of instant death spikes, nearly pixel-perfect jumps, and tedious grinding.

Yes, tedious grinding, because of terrible design choices like "you cannot finish this level without a full meter of X and the only way to refill it is by repetitively killing the same enemies over and over and over and over and over". The most egregious cases are MM2's Wily 4 boss and the flying section of MM3's Gemini Man Revisited, which render the games effectively unfinishable if you make any mistake the first time you try. Or spend twenty minutes repetitively grinding out random drops.

I think it says a lot that they had to massively dial down the (pointless) difficulty with a rewind feature. Maybe that makes the games playable.

Does this mean the games will be streamed (and unavailable for offline play)? "No offline play" is a huge limitation for a portable device.

The base game is already Easy Mode as it is. Why do they need a mode that's even easier?

This seems like a

@noobish_hat I hate the 3D effects and always play 3DS games in 2D. Link Between Worlds works just fine in 2D.

The thing this really needs is a port/remaster of Skyward Sword. I think Skyward Sword was great, but many players found the game frustrating because the Wii Motion Plus was not quite up to the task. Now that they have the joycons they should be able to do it right.

All I want for 2018 is Xenoblade Chronicles HD.

Xenoblade Chronicles HD please.

Plus Xenoblade Chronicles X-2 and Xenoblade Chronicles 3, but maybe that's asking a bit much.

I'm pretty skeptical of ports of old Final Fantasies--the turn-based combat, random encounters, and large numbers of useless spells (e.g., instant death effects "balanced" with high miss chances and 100% miss chance against bosses) just aren't up to modern standards. I couldn't recommend those games for anything other than nostalgia value.

Xenoblade 2 was ROBBED.

Breath of the Wild totally deserved it though. BOTW >> SMO.

The underlying problem is that Nintendo decided this is a "niche" title and gave Monolithsoft a much smaller budget than for Nintendo's other franchises. If Nintendo decided they were going to make a serious push to compete with Final Fantasy and gave Monolithsoft the sort of money Square Enix wasted on Final Fantasy XV they would have been able to put a lot more engineering talent on hardware optimization.

It doesn't bother me in the slightest. Especially after coming off Mario Odyssey which was practically unplayable in portable mode thanks to the motion controls.

I love the battle shouting except the human guards with two lines that they repeat constantly. Who thought that was a good idea?

@JaxonH I'm pretty sure no video game main plot will ever impress me. I like having a decent story (Nintendo is pretty egregious here since Zelda and Mario are still recycling "rescue the princess") but novels and movies are just fundamentally better-suited to telling a narrative.

Video games can tell other kinds of stories better than novels and movies though. I think the real heart of all three Xenoblade games is the parallel second story of the world and the relationships of the people in it. A movie can't capture that in the same way and it's hard for a novel to do it too. (This is why I'm disappointed that they got rid of the NPC affinity chart.)

@Agramonte the story isn't terribly original so far but video game stories almost never are. There seems to be an enormous double standard for JRPG stories. I have never seen an English-language reviewer who complained that an American AAA developer has produced yet another game about space marines blowing up ugly aliens or yet another D&D/Tolkien ripoff, but almost every English-language JRPG review complains about the use of JRPG tropes.

XC2 is fantastic so far. Easily deserves GOTY. There are some annoyances--bad map UI, human enemies repeat their two lines WAY too frequently, too many shops (couldn't they have had a third as many shops with three times as many items each?)--but these are really minor in the scheme of things.

Probably not as good as XC1 but IMO XC1 is the best video game ever made for any platform, so it's asking a lot to top that.

If only this had the production budget Squeenix blew on FFXV ...

@babel116 I thought helping random NPC's find stuff was great, and I loved XCX. But not as much as the original XC, which is why I'm not named tatsu_sidekicks.

@Switch_will_fail yeah, I'm pretty sure if you didn't like the first game you won't like this one either. This is not like Breath of the Wild where they're making a dramatic turn to throw every convention they've been following for the last 20 years. It's more like Super Mario Odyssey, where people who didn't like any of the previous 3D Mario games probably won't like this one either.

And just to keep going with the FFXV rant, yes, it's cool that they can render shadows based on the branch pattern of every individual tree, but how much is that really adding to the game? What about the views from those impossible arches? You know what I mean: the ones you can't go to because there's an invisible wall in the way, even when you get the flying car. And there are invisible walls everywhere in this "open world".

If they had spent less money on shadows and redirected the budget to tearing down invisible walls the game would have been a lot better.

@dimi This will blow the pants off FFXV in virtually every respect--plot, art design, world, characters, exploration, combat. Except loading screens and driving around in a convertible while nothing happens, where FFXV is way, way ahead.

The one big area where FFXV has the advantage is "graphics"--there's no getting around the fact that PS4 can render more polygons than Switch, and Square Enix had the budget to do things like motion capture actors while Monolithsoft (sadly) didn't. But the superior art design and world are going to more than make up for it.

What's with using the Japanese voice actors? This can't be a big draw for American audiences who are notoriously averse to foreign subtitled films. Is the English voice acting so bad that they have to remove it from the marketing materials?

I'm #reallyFeelingIt anyway.

Sounds like mediocre ports of old games. Yuck.

@roboshort and yet XCX was enormously better than FFXV. I liked FFXV but there's really no comparison unless you have an idiosyncratic attachment to bros riding around in a convertible.

@NEStalgia I don't agree about variation in XCX--one of my big complaints about the game was that the continents were very different from each other but there wasn't much variation within each continent. There are some areas that are conspicuously different from the rest of the continent they're in, like the Delusian Mountains and the White Phosphor Lake, but they're pretty small and there aren't many of them.

Compare XC, which was divided into had a much larger number of smaller areas, no two alike.

@MegaVel91 I think the big issue with the XCX music was NLA Night, which a lot of people hated. People who don't like rapped lyrics were also turned off to the basic battle theme.

XCX also had a more generally uneven soundtrack than XC, which is not surprising since XC had the best soundtrack in video game history.

@NEStalgia I think Riki is great, he seemed obnoxious when he first joined the party but he rapidly grew on me.

Tatsu, on the other hand, is awful. He's little more than a vehicle for endlessly repeating the same joke that wasn't even funny the first time.

Please none of the B.S. you pulled with the Farming Simulator review, where every aspect of the review was positive but you docked it down to 7/10 for being a niche title.

This whole institution of trying to have a retailer enforce a "release date" is silly. Just let the stores sell them as soon as they get them. If Nintendo cares about it not being available until a specific day, have the shipping company ship it to arrive that morning.

The key difference: they figured out that you cannot look at your TV and your tablet at the same time.

You can't make a judgment like this a week after release. Few people have had a chance to play the game for more than a few hours, if at all. That's not enough time for people to decide if the game becomes tedious or repetitive.

Remember that Skyward Sword was released to universal critical acclaim and it took months for the backlash to develop. I think Skyward Sword is phenomenal, but a lot of people disagree with me.