Some 30 hours into Xenoblade 2. I believe roughly half way through the available chapters. I still have no idea if I like this game or not. I like its combat more than 3, the gacha system is weird but I actually quite like the excitement of getting the named Blades, while it is in someways a more generic JRPG, I think this story works much better in the context of what Nintendo will allow you to show, I also think it is significantly better paced than 3 was and far more coherent, as well.
However, I sorta don’t like… anything else? Quest navigation might be some of the worst I have ever experienced in any game. The quest compass thing is utterly useless, and the maps are not designed for you to be able to organically find where you need to go with so little guidance. I have like four pages of side content that all do not have quest markers, they just give you a vague area of a map and tell you to figure it out. This generally means googling it, but I got really tired of doing that.
I think exploration is meant to be a puzzle solving mechanic in itself, which would be fine, but the game loves putting high level enemies near where you need to go at a much lower level. I guess this is to help funnel the player in the right direction, but when one of these things agros, it removes your ability to access menus or see the compass, and they won’t break agro for literally miles, so trying to escape one of these always sends me massively off course and the fast travel points are so spread out and often poorly placed, getting back to where I was before to resume looking for where I need to go ends up being more frustration than its worth.
It’s systems, and menus, are unnecessarily overwhelming and I’m already pretty exhausted with trying to remember to constantly manage my WP, my bonds, my skill and affinity trees, my accessories and food items and whatever other levelling up menus I’ve probably already forgotten about. I usually don’t love aggressive streamlining of RPG
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