LogFAQs > #974516704

It is a great game that is weighed down by having so many systems that the quality of life suffers. You have to open menus a LOT and navigate through multiple pages within said menus every time you do. The battle system overwhelms a lot of people; NoA released videos before the game launched that explained everything concisely, and it made sense to me, but a lot of people really struggle with grasping it. The game does a poor job of emphasizing many important things while overly focusing on others, and there's some unintuitive concepts like these consumables that last for a limited time only, which the game briefly glosses over in a single quick stage of the tutorial quest, being like actually 100% essential to streamlining the combat, but only like 5% of the ones shops offer are actually useful.

The story is also inconsistent in terms of writing and tension: Chapter 1 is a decent opener, chapter 2 has some good parts and some weaker, chapter 3 is strong, chapter 4 is a weird and awkward sideplot, 5 is almost an intermission, 6 is strong, 7 has pacing issues, 8+ are edge-of-your-seat amazing and emotional, but you have to get there.

You also unlock weapon-slash-party-members (which partner up with your main party to make three pairs of characters during combat) through a random lottery; there are a handful of fixed ones you get throughout the game or from certain sidequests and events, but most are just random chance. This is meant to have players adapt to what they get or be pleasantly surprised when they get unique new Blades, but in practice, the generic ones you get for a failed roll are SO much less interesting and completely lack personality, while the unique ones have their own events, tons of voiced lines, and their own quests, making you want to get them all, so it just leads to frustration with the system for a lot of people.

If you can put up with its quirks, it's a beautiful world with a lot to do. Areas aren't as good as Xenoblade 1, but still solid. Combat is fun and pretty deep with the various ways to trigger huge damage bonuses (which are, again, extremely poorly explained by the game) and doesn't have much downtime once it ramps up after chapter 3 or so. Lots and lots of sidequests, tons of unique monsters to find and slay. It's a great game overall, but opinions are often love/hate based on tolerance for its baggage.