I have been trying to get through Xenoblade Chronicles 1 since it came out for the Nintendo 3DS in 2015. I never got it for the Wii but I was definitely aware of it.
Not for lack of trying, but The tiny screen of the 3DS put paid to that ambition as playing it for three hours made me not want to put possibly another 60 in it. Also it’s a terribly tedious game…
I’m serious, in a normal playthrough you are supposed to spend the first 10-15 hours in for first town (Colony 9) just leveling up and doing near endless side missions to have enough character strength to progress the story. No thank you, as I can complete whole other games in that time (more on that later).
Here is where the Definitive Edition for Switch comes in; and it is, shockingly, better and more playable. Granted, it came out after a game and a half after later, but it was still much more improved because it added in simple option:
Casual mode.
Gone are the hours of grinding monsters and exploring the world doing side quests that reward you with gear that gets outclassed 30 minutes later and a textbox spam explaining why it was a good thing you delivered 18 bear-asses to someone’s grandmother at 6pm on a Tuesday. Yes, the game uses missions based in time of day and yes, it’s obnoxious because half of the time the missions will not always explicitly tell you that’s a thing.
Complaining aside…I loved it. I thought if I actually played the Wii version as a 14 or 15 year old, it may have ended up being my favorite game, ever. It has huge vistas and incredible music. You are wandering across two giant mecha with their own biomes, and their massive scale always impresses. The game is a little…too long? It only took me 30 hours to beat but I legitimately felt like 10 of those were just walking back and forth in the later chapters fighting the same 10 robots. I can now definitely see why people loved it as a series. I will spoil this now, it's my favorite in the Xenoblade Chronicles series.
Xenoblade 2, tho…
Both it and it’s DLC…I’ve never experienced a game where the developers were clearly so embarrassed and terrified of the game they created.
Getting the obvious out of the way, the female character designs are just goofy. Very anime and overtop to the point of embarrassment. The mechanic of it being a gacha game to acquire more characters, particularly powerful ones is…well it’s just a pathetic usage of a popular smartphone game mechanics to strangle money from the impatient and desperate. Gacha mechanics in a single player game sort of screams desperation into making the game replayable via luck of the draw. Fortunately, you don't have to interact with the mechanics a lot to progress through the game, but you do have to interact with it sometimes to make the game easier.
Also the length and forced side quests in the game show that the developers wanted to tell a large story, but were hamstrung. Without getting into deeper details, all of chapters 4 and 7 could have been cut from the game and it would have been both 10-20 hours shorter and a better experience. I actually wanted to love XBC2, because there is a solid game there. By the time you finally figure out the mechanics of the game (which is...poorly explained), you've basically finished the game and you're asked to replay it to enjoy it as it was mean to be. No. No thank you. I just put 60 hours into it and I do not want to do it again. I shouldn't have to. Great game and great concepts held back by sexist art and a very bloated main story length.
Briefly, I just wanted to note about the Torna: The Golden Country DLC. It's good. Really good. Better combat, relatively short (17 hours?) and tells a complete story. Biggest and most glaring negative: 4-5 of those hours are mandatory side-quest the games forces you to do right before the final boss fight of the game. As noted above, I really do feel like the devs felt embarrassed at short length games with tight-knit stories. I won't say I didn't enjoy the game, I certainly did. I just wish it would let me, enjoy it the way I wanted to.
That's it. That's my unhinged and unprofessional rant on a couple of games I ultimately enjoyed but I wish were a lot shorted. Except XBC1, it's perfect.
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