LogFAQs > #968387603

agesboy posted...

the ENTIRE FUCKING GAME was building up to the themes you despise. like this is the 7th xeno game and you explicitly hated the previous one, maybe this series just isn't for you

I didn't say the theme had no build up, it was just applied inconsistently. The actual stuff the party does had no build up. The game was building up to liberating aionios from Z, not destroying aionios, something that would have happened eventually anyway.

I also quite liked xenoblade 2, just not the ending or really the last 3rd of the game. Xenoblade 1 was similar but it's jump the shark moment was closer to 50% of the way through (stuff with mumkar or whatever the claw guys name was). After seeing the memes of rex's voice acting I expected to hate him but he was really enjoyable until he gave up for no reason in a situation where giving up means death anyway even though he is acting like he can walk away from it. It was a real "shinji, get in the robot" moment except if that happened 2/3rds of the way through eva after shinji had a ton of time to process everything. Then the very end with one of them trying to stay behind and rex being stopped by a 20 foot chasm despite some of the much larger gaps he has closed in other parts of the game. Then the even undo that pointless sacrifice making it extra stupid to have set it up that way in the first place.

The only xenoblade with a solid ending is X, which is ironic because the majority of it's story is garbage. It's like the reverse xenoblade game where only the ending is any good. Although I did find most of xenoblade X's story inoffensive despite it's poor quality. Felt very campy and silly outside of the opening and ending of the game.

Xenoblade 2 especially felt like the classic anime storyline 3 act structure where the first act is the hero's rise, the 2nd act is the low point where the hero falters, then the 3rd act is where they resolve their failure and grow from it. However, anime/jrpg shoehorns this into a lot of stories where it doesn't work or feels stupid like infinite undiscovery or guilty crown. Xenoblade 2 is one such story. And it's not like they couldn't have rex falter, it's just the way they did it made him seem incredibly uncharacteristically stupid.

To use edgerunners as a positive example, it does the same thing. David rise's to power, david goes too hard on the chrome trying to make enough money to send lucy to the moon and keep his crew alive and rich, david redeems himself and has a heroic sacrifice at the end. It's the same structure, but they did all those aspects in ways that actually make sense and don't require the character to pick up the idiot ball or act completely out of character.

Going into xenoblade 3 and maybe even still, it was my favorite jrpg series and thats one of my favorite genres. I love the xenoblade series. The gameplay, exploration, and world building is second to none. It creates places I want to explore and enemies I want to fight and people I want to get to know better than any other series. And when it sticks to small personal stories like in the side quests, the writing usually hits well. The sidequests in xenoblade 3 are the best side quests in video games. I know the names and personality of like 100 NPCs in xenoblade 3. I understand the dynamics of so many people striving their best to survive in this world and make it liveable and peaceful in a place that had only known war. That's why it feels so shit to just crush all that work and say "actually, you don't need to pick up the pieces and strive to find a way to make things work, we'll just delete it all".

I didn't want to dislike this game, I wanted to love it and I'm crushed by how it turned out, but the damage is done, I'm done talking about it. This is my last post on xenoblade for a while.