is xenoblade chronicles (first one) legit good?

[aweigh]

the game looks so fucking wierd, and that cooldown battle system... but well, might as well ask.

 

[Hobo Elf]

No

 

[Falksi]

Yo

 

[Taurist]

I played about ten hours of it and stopped. But I have limited patience for JRPG's these days, I enjoyed it up till that point. The combat is slow to develop but actually becomes something alright.

Like most JRPG's I think its a game driven more by its charm than anything. The English accents really work better than the traditional american anime dub style.

 

[Mortmal]

the game looks so fucking wierd, and that cooldown battle system... but well, might as well ask.

Yes it is, but it was one of the rare rpg of the wii, so i may remember it better than it was. Theres no reason to not launch it on dolphin, it looks very good still.

 

[The Decline]

It's worth a playthrough.

 

[Zerth]

Ive beaten it twice. Combat system seems odd at first, and even crappy, feels like a mix between TB and the combat system of an early MMORPG like lineage 2 or WOW. But once you get the hang of it; you will notice how much control and potencial It provides:

- You can arrange party and switch their abilities/arts any way you want. Shulk doesn't have to necessarily be the party lead, although you'll certainly be controlling him most of times.

-Positioning actually affects arts and/or abilities. It's not quite those shitty real time combat where everything is autotargeted and you only have to spam skills and wait up for CDs like most early MMOs.

- For the TB aspect mechanics. You have a chain meter, if you choose to do a chain attack when the chain meter fills, you get to choose each and every action of your party during chain, you could potentially take down higher level critters with it.

- As you may appreciate from the video. If done correctly you can stunlock most critters with the Break/Topple system. One character inflicts Break, which readies the enemy for Topple, which another character knocks 'em over. You can also add another effect called Daze on top of this to prolong the effect, and if you set It perfectly; you get a pretty much perma Break/Topple/Daze chain exploit.

Storywise, It gets apeshit convoluted at the end. But before that you'll not give a damn about the plot.

 

[jungl]

yes it is at least 10x better then elminage gothic. My computer got wiped when I played it and lost like 60 hours of playthrough probably never going play it again even still was more satisfying then most jrpgs I played all the way.

 

[Hyperion]

Soundtrack is wonderful, game is mediocre. Open up the full OST on Youtube and listen while you play something better. aweigh I know you weren't particularly fond of FF12. This game took what most consider the bad of 12 (only controlling one character, enormous zones, heavy on loot-based enemies, grindy) and exacerbated it. 12 at the very least let you customize your characters' AI and what they do. In this, once you setup their active abilities...that's it, everything else is a prewritten Ai script.

The most infuriating parts of them all: 1) fighting enemies more than 5 levels above you before the absolute endgame and you can build around fighting them is usually an exercise in futility because you will miss 90% of the time, and they will CRUSH you with extra damage. Just like in a fucking MMO. 2) You have a hotbar of active skills, and can not use all of them at any given time, and they can only be switched while out of combat.

 

[Grampy_Bone]

No. All the tactics in the battle system quickly become moot once you level past the enemies (which is guaranteed to happen). Nothing will challenge you and you'll spend 99% of the game auto-attacking and mindlessly spamming the same three attacks.

Story is nothing to get excited about, and the side quest structure is a nightmare. You have to do dozens of quests per party member to unlock their third passive skill tree, with no real rhyme or reason to it. You just sort of randomly open up new quests as you complete them in each area, and eventually if you're lucky you'll suddenly get the extra skill tree unlocked. The questgivers are all based on time of day and have nebulous requirements, which even the guides aren't clear about. They don't show up on the map until you're right next to them, and the towns are gigantic, so you have to make rounds through each town over and over again--multiple times per day!--every time you do a quest just to see if there's a new one opened up. I couldn't stand it.

Xenoblade Chronicles X was much better.

 

[jungl]

xenoblade chronicles is a straight up upgrade of ff12. Combat system, exploration, story, music. It has 4 years of technology advancement so its not exactly fair for ff12. I'd say its normal if you hated ff12 to possibly love XC. Combat is better here also then xenoblade chronicles x and 100x better then ff12 gear/level check mmorpg combat that makes korean shovelware mmorpgs look revolutionary. In X combat is worse there are op arts like a dagger art that heals your entire team you can spam every 5 seconds to trivialize encounters. Side content XC is not as bad as XCX.

 

[Perkel]

Yes. While ending sucks overall it delivered great journey to remember. And music is seriously amazing. There are some interesting plot twists to say "wow" to and generally trying to uncover what world is etc. doesn't get boring.

Mind you that game is uneven. For every great thing there comes some annoying part. Like shitload of fetch quest which you can skip but you can sometimes miss part of what makes this world going and small stories that add detail to world.

Overall i think it is one of those games that are worth to finish.

 

[ghostdog]

Yes and no. It has a very cool huge world with interesting lore. The combat system has some interesting aspects but in the end I found it repetitive and boring. The game has an MMRPG feel in general, with a huge load of generic fetch-quests, and the combat in particular has an MMORPG feel too, so maybe if you like certain MMOs you'll like it, but I found it pretty boring from a certain point on. The story was completely uninteresting to me. I dropped it after 25h, or so. It can be played perfectly with Dolphin.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

It's very good.

 

[newtmonkey]

Couldn't stand this one. I thought I could just ignore the characters/dialog/story/etc and enjoy the exploration and fighting, but the grunting in combat, the characters, the endless tutorials on how to open a menu and select a thing (in the 3ds version) killed me. I had a brief moment after the intro where you approach the first town and I felt a legit sense of awe at the size of the world unfolding before me, but then the game paused and a FUCKING TUTORIAL POPPED UP telling me, basically "try going to STORES in the TOWN to BUY and SELL THINGS."

I had put a lot more time into the Wii version, but the story/characters/dialog turned me off, and the exploration/combat wasn't interesting enough for me to put up with it.

Granted, the game could get awesome after 6 hours or whatever, but up until that point I simply could not bear playing this game.

 

[hackncrazy]

xenoblade chronicles is a straight up upgrade of ff12. Combat system, exploration, story, music. It has 4 years of technology advancement so its not exactly fair for ff12. I'd say its normal if you hated ff12 to possibly love XC. Combat is better here also then xenoblade chronicles x and 100x better then ff12 gear/level check mmorpg combat that makes korean shovelware mmorpgs look revolutionary. In X combat is worse there are op arts like a dagger art that heals your entire team you can spam every 5 seconds to trivialize encounters. Side content XC is not as bad as XCX.

FF12 is the only game I've like from the FF series, and reading your post made me want to play this right now.

On the other hand, Hyperion post about the lack of customization (which was one of the things I liked about the AI partners on FF12) made me cautious.

Who should I trust?

 

[aweigh]

actually I loved FF12. I even made a post about its Gambit system way back in the day.

 

[Werdna's Revenge]

I'm not sure I'd compare it to FF12 as far as how you can handle your party members. Both are long drawn out slogs though.