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Author Topic: Xenoblade Chronicles  (Read 9776 times)

« on: February 06, 2012, 06:47:02 PM »
Holy cow, do we seriously not have a thread for Xenoblade Chronicles?  If you're not familiar, here's a quick refresher on the game and its long road to a US release: http://shigeruslist.com/2011/12/03/dont-be-a-penoblade-preorder-xenoblade/

Nintendo's holding a vote to pick the boxart for Xenoblade Chronicles: http://shigeruslist.com/2012/02/06/americas-next-top-xenoblade-boxart/

Ah, I see the original thread now.  Lock this if need be, though I think a separate thread for Xenoblade Chronicles (outside of the main Operation Rainfall thread) makes sense at this point.
« Last Edit: February 06, 2012, 06:50:46 PM by billy chilly »
Haters gonna hate

WarpRattler

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« Reply #1 on: February 06, 2012, 10:58:52 PM »
I already have the game preordered and am looking forward to playing it. When the European release happened, #tmk's resident Finnish gamer n-fani was talking about how it's one of the best JRPGs he's ever played, which has my hopes up for something amazing (even if it doesn't have me as stoked as The Last Story would).

Of course, knowing me, it'll probably meet the same fate as Rune Factory: Tides of Destiny, which I still haven't opened months after its release.

WarpRattler

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« Reply #2 on: April 06, 2012, 01:11:44 PM »
Picked up my copy today before work. Can't wait to get home and play it!

« Reply #3 on: April 08, 2012, 12:05:56 AM »
I bought this game because I supported Operation Rainfall and only really wanted The Last Story, but I'd feel like a massive hypocrite if I didn't support such a niche release for this one. Plus my local game store promised to get me the red controller that came with the japanese version.

Too bad its been sitting in front of me for a whole day and I'm just wondering if I'll play it or get my money back.
As a game that requires six friends, an HDTV, and skill, I can see why the majority of TMK is going to hate on it hard.

WarpRattler

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« Reply #4 on: April 08, 2012, 01:27:54 AM »
The most I've done with it so far is register it on Club Nintendo. I figure I'll have plenty of time to start playing it starting next Saturday.

CrossEyed7

  • i can make this whatever i want; you're not my dad
« Reply #5 on: April 14, 2012, 10:12:50 PM »
First impressions after playing the first ten hours: I've played Xenoblade for about the same amount of time I've played FFXIII, and I've had FFXIII almost six months now. I don't remember any moments from FFXIII; I will always remember today when, while wandering around a field shortly after reaching the second town in Xenoblade, I attacked some rhino-zebra-ponies to get some XP and suddenly a level 70 Territorial Rothbart (I think that was its name) came over and killed everyone instantly, and then a couple hours later when, in that same field, when I should have been going to the third town, I was wandering around again and came across some ruins, with some giant spider egg sacs in them, found an item, and then got chased by a giant queen spider that would also have killed everyone instantly if we hadn't just barely gotten away.

There's a character in this second town who tells her little brother that it's dangerous out in this field, especially if you go off the path. Staying on the path, you'll just run into monsters around your level, who you can eventually defeat as long as there aren't too many of them, but just off the path (depending on the time of day), there are some packs of wolves that I know would be much more deadly than the normal monsters (especially since every time I see them, I turn around and find there's another bunch of them over there where I didn't see them), and there's also some level 77 monsters wandering around. Definitely conveys her "it's dangerous out there" message very well, more coherently and internally consistently than most.

There's no silly vestigial flashy battle transition like in FFXIII. If a monster sees you or hears you (or, for some of them, if they detect you using magic), they'll attack you (but not everything is a "monster" -- most things you run into in the field so far are just animals who may have good defensive capabilities or high HP, but won't attack you first; they're just giant armadillos that'll just keep minding their own business), and you can either stay there and fight back, or run away and try to lose them or hope they just give up. But it's all on the field. There's also no healing items (at least so far); between battles, your HP gradually recovers (it seems like it recovers a little faster standing still than while running, but I'm not sure). During battles, you'll have to use healing spells, and also not just run around blindly.

In big important boss fights, there'll be a green ring of fire around the battlefield keeping you from running away. This was where I've run into the only real (though minor) camera issues -- I think sometimes when the boss was cornering me against the wall, the camera was behind me and it didn't want to go through the wall so things got a little cramped. Still, just took an extra half-second or so to figure things out and move the camera to a better position.

I do wish I had a Classic Controller Pro, as it has better access to the ZL and ZR buttons (extra camera controls and simple battle commands for AI partners, respectively). Haven't tried the nunchuk setup yet. Sometimes I'll be moving with the left stick while also reaching my hand over to make selections with the D-pad and the A button, and while this seems like it should be awkward and cumbersome, it works just fine for me.

I like the feel of the towns so far. Lots of people in the towns, and all the ones with names you keep track of on one of your menus. A little like a streamlined version of the Bombers Notebook from Majora's Mask, though the game never wastes any time explaining why your character has this notebook and how that fits into the story. It also never wastes any time coming up with in-universe justifications for quick-travel, saving anywhere, respawning at the last landmark when you die, how you finish most sidequests instantly upon collecting the items (rather than having to go back and find the person that gave you the quest and talk to them again), how you know which sidequests will expire at some point in the future (though this one could possibly be chalked up to the Monado), or your ability to change the time of day. And I'm glad it doesn't, because those kinds of things usually just end up raising further questions and imposing annoying restrictions on the powers in the interest of making them slightly more believable.

Basically, if you've ever liked JRPGs, and especially if some of the pretentious extraneous BS in later Final Fantasies turns you off, you'll probably like this (or at least the first ten hours of it; I can't vouch for it beyond that yet). Both this and Last Story seem like a great chance to see what can happen when you have the talent and the effort that goes into a Final Fantasy without all the expectations and the baggage and the vestigial organs and the hype and the fandom that that name and that corporation comes with today. It's a shame that NOA still doesn't realize what they've got here.
"Oh man, I wish being a part of a Mario fan community was the most embarrassing thing about my life." - Super-Jesse

« Reply #6 on: April 14, 2012, 11:34:58 PM »
This game is indeed pimp but I'm not sure about your Final Fantasy smack-talking. FFXII and FFXIII both have the extremely powerful wandering monsters that you can run into while walking around thing. In fact, FFXII's MMO-esque world and transitionless combat is extremely similar to XC in most respects. (FFXIII it takes forty hours to get to the open part.) I also think XC has far, far more "extraneous BS" than any FF ever has. Individual relationship affinity levels for every named NPC in the game? Like fifty quests per town and a dozen plus unique collectibles to fill in for every area? Note that "extraneous BS" is usually seen as a good thing for JRPGs. The reason FFXIII enraged so many people was because its early level design and combat system is so streamlined (no towns, walk in a straight line, everyone fights automatically). I don't know what you meant by "pretentious" either. Good graphics?

It is convenient to be able to instantly warp to any place you've ever been and instantly change the time of day with no consequences, but I feel including both of those seriously damages the immersion. It doesn't feel like you're in a world; it feels like you're the guy operating the Truman Show. They should have at least called it "sleep" instead of "change the time".

But don't get me wrong: this game can easily stand toe-to-toe with the best of JRPGs. It's class. And British.

CrossEyed7

  • i can make this whatever i want; you're not my dad
« Reply #7 on: April 15, 2012, 12:50:15 AM »
Yeah, I haven't played XII, but from what I've heard, it's a lot like this. And then the fans complained so they turned it back. And I'm probably not going to be getting to the open part of XIII any time soon, so I can't really compare it fully I guess.

I also heard, though, that in XII you program your allies's behavior and some program things have to be unlocked, like you open a jar and now suddenly you're able to tell your healer to heal you when you're under 40% of your max HP.

One thing is that, from what I can remember of what I've seen so far, XIII's enemy designs seemed more abstract than XC's, which I think helps make XC more memorable. Simple rhino-ponies and giant armadillos and spiders -- things that have some tie to the real world -- tend to have more of an impact than just another weird thing made out of crystals or whatever, like how people like Gen I and II Pokemon better than the later ones when they started running out of animals. But part of my lack of remembering things from XIII is my fault because I haven't played in a while and have an unreliable memory anyway, not just because the game is unmemorable in itself (of course, part of the reason I haven't played it in a while is because it hasn't captivated me like XC yet).

By "streamlined", though, I'm more referring to the way that, for example, most fetchquest-sidequests end instantly upon obtaining the items, rather than needing you to remember who gave you the quest and remember where they are and go find them and talk to them and then pick the items out of your inventory to give to them. Which doesn't make sense, but because it makes no attempt to make sense (most games, if they had a feature like that, would say there's like a network of birds that provide instant communication and parcel delivery, or maybe they put something into your wallet that detects if you've completed the quest and then generates the money and XP that you earn for it, or some other kind of technology that, if it really can do what it's described as doing, would have come in very handy at many other points in the game). That's the kind of extraneous stuff that isn't really necessary in RPGs and is usually kept in out of habit.

Not that it should all be gotten rid of -- not every game needs to be like XC, just like not every movie needs to have super-fast-paced editing -- just that it should be done more deliberately. Like how FFXIII still has battles working where you touch an enemy, there's a flashy transition, and now you're in a battle arena (which usually is almost exactly the location you were in anyway). As XC and FFXII showed, transitioning to a separate screen for battles is no longer a necessity like it was in earlier RPGs. You can do it as an intentional throwback, you can do something unique with it like TWEWY, but FFXIII does it just for the sake of doing it, when keeping a transitionless system like FFXII would probably have been better (the nice thing about making a new franchise instead of a Final Fantasy is you don't have to listen to the fans at all (the not nice thing is that no one will buy it, which is why this new IP got a "Xeno-" added onto it, and probably why Last Story has a name that sounds like a Chinese bootleg of Final Fantasy and also has Sakaguchi and Uematsu's names on the cover)).

I don't really have a problem with lack of immersion on the convenience features. Like I said, when a game does try to make those things fit in, it usually ends up raising more immersion issues than if they hadn't tried at all. It's sort of related to the uncanny valley -- if they're trying to make it make perfect sense, you're drawn to all the ways it doesn't make sense. I'm okay with a reading of the game where gameplay elements don't have to be literally true as they're represented on screen -- I'll just pretend that the characters have better time management skills than me and got all these sidequests done in the right order (assuming they even found time to do sidequests at all).

And then if it's done right, you can have the not-sense-making parts segregated away from the sense-making ones. It's like when the tutorial section at the beginning of a game wants to avoid just having a text box rehashing the instruction manual, so instead they try to teach it all situationally. This works for a game like Braid, but for games with more complicated controls, you quickly get to a point where the voice-acted characters are trying to make "Press the X button!" sound like something their character would naturally say. If you have to break the fourth wall anyway, sometimes it's less immersion-breaking to just have text tutorials for some things.

If Mario & Luigi had been a serious game, the suitcase would have been a serious attempt to explain why you can carry things. But if it were serious, we would start questioning why we can hold 99 of everything (and if you accept that, why can you hold 99 Mushrooms and 1 Super Mushroom, but not 100 Mushrooms?), and why time apparently stops when we open the suitcase, and so on. And maybe they'd anticipate that and say that E.Gadd created the suitcase with a time-distortion field that makes everything around us freeze while we're opening the suitcase. And then we'd say well then why can't we just have Luigi open up the suitcase in battle and then have Mario attack the enemies while they're defenseless? And then if they were really serious, they might add a time limit to the suitcase, so you can only pause for thirty seconds at a time or something, to explain why that doesn't work, or maybe the enemies are all imbued with an anti-time-distortion-field-field, which would then raise quite a few questions just on Woohoo Hooniversity (not to mention all the glaring questions about the storyline in general that would come up if it were all meant to be serious). But instead, the suitcase is just a stylistic choice and only serves as an explanation for why you couldn't look at your items while you were still in Toad Town (though that still raises the question of where you were keeping the items the Toads gave you out there if you did their sidequests), and the pause menu gets no attempt at justification, and we all just accept that there's a pause menu and it doesn't try to make sense, because it's a game.
"Oh man, I wish being a part of a Mario fan community was the most embarrassing thing about my life." - Super-Jesse

« Reply #8 on: April 15, 2012, 06:35:44 PM »
Here's a question: why does everyone in the world disappear when you talk to someone? I can think of neither a good technological or artistic reason.

CrossEyed7

  • i can make this whatever i want; you're not my dad
« Reply #9 on: April 16, 2012, 06:24:57 AM »
At first I thought the camera was just going through the other people, but then I talked to that little bouncy guy between the two giant armadillos on the bridge and the two giant armadillos disappeared. That's weird. Especially considering how good the draw distance is.
"Oh man, I wish being a part of a Mario fan community was the most embarrassing thing about my life." - Super-Jesse

CrossEyed7

  • i can make this whatever i want; you're not my dad
« Reply #10 on: April 20, 2012, 02:27:28 PM »
The teleporting and turning back time make a lot more sense when you realize that Shulk is actually ElectricalBeast.
"Oh man, I wish being a part of a Mario fan community was the most embarrassing thing about my life." - Super-Jesse

CrossEyed7

  • i can make this whatever i want; you're not my dad
« Reply #11 on: April 26, 2012, 03:21:22 PM »
"Oh man, I wish being a part of a Mario fan community was the most embarrassing thing about my life." - Super-Jesse

« Reply #12 on: July 27, 2012, 09:43:39 PM »
Did anyone actually beat this? I petered out in the 50-60 hour zone, after getting to a jungle area where a new girl had just joined the party. I had done almost every single quest available to me which took a lot of time and is probably what burned me out. They were too hard to resist though, especially when the game puts those ominous clocks next to quests and says THIS QUEST WILL SOMEDAY BE IMPOSSIBLE IF YOU DON'T DO IT SOON ENOUGH.

Someday I'll go back and restart and beat this great game.

CrossEyed7

  • i can make this whatever i want; you're not my dad
« Reply #13 on: July 27, 2012, 10:39:01 PM »
I'm getting kind of burned out on a part quite a ways further than that, though I'm also about 50 hours in because I've barely scratched the surface of the sidequests. This part has a lot of stuff that feels fillery and tedious, and the enemies are less interesting to look at, and the hub world is less vibrant, and the story's getting a little hard to follow (though that's partly just because I'm playing less frequently instead of four hours a day every day, and also because I can be pretty lousy at following stories anyway). I'm pretty close to the end, though.
"Oh man, I wish being a part of a Mario fan community was the most embarrassing thing about my life." - Super-Jesse

WarpRattler

  • Paid by the word
« Reply #14 on: July 28, 2012, 04:12:27 AM »
I haven't put nearly as much time into Xenoblade as I'd like, because the Wii is in a room I don't spend a lot of time in and because I have too many other games to play at the same time.

My copy of The Last Story is never going to leave its shrinkwrap, at my current rate of playing stuff.

« Reply #15 on: November 18, 2012, 07:23:17 PM »
I never saw it until today when I was moving data between my Wiis to prepare for Wii U transfer:

This game's save data icon is WEIRD. An endless zoom into the mouth of a doll character I don't recognize and then the uvula is another copy of itself.

« Reply #16 on: May 29, 2013, 03:18:29 AM »
Someday I'll go back and restart and beat this great game.
Today was the day. Here we go again. May the Bionis have mercy on my soul.

Here's a question: why does everyone in the world disappear when you talk to someone? I can think of neither a good technological or artistic reason.
The reason struck me right after restarting. When you talk to someone it freezes time. So instead of having everyone else walking around turn into statues while you talk (Zelda-style), they just disappear them.

« Reply #17 on: June 21, 2013, 05:57:18 PM »
I never saw it until today when I was moving data between my Wiis to prepare for Wii U transfer:

This game's save data icon is WEIRD. An endless zoom into the mouth of a doll character I don't recognize and then the uvula is another copy of itself.

It's Riki...

You don't recognize Riki? :(

« Reply #18 on: June 21, 2013, 07:25:04 PM »
No. I guess I've never gotten to Riki.

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