Thanks for the feedback. I actually grabbed the cart and haven’t played it yet. But I had a feeling this would be the case. Still, I’m going to jump into it sometime soon.
I’ll certainly be interested in what you have to say about it.
One other thing I forgot to mention was how the game felt like it was by a ‘B’ team at Monolith Soft. The menus and map were a huge regression from not only Xenoblade X’s amazing FrontierNav system, but a functional step back from Xenoblade 1’s map system.
It seems the bulk of the budget went into making really well animated cutscenes. It’s rather mind boggling how even the most throwaway of dialogue in that game managed to get motion-cap cutscenes and voice acting. Xenoblade X felt like the opposite - it was budget constrained in its cutscenes.
I think XC2 is divisive in different ways from X, but I’m glad they both exist and are not just like the first game. I dig both of them quite a lot.
This is true. While I found Xenoblade 2 to be a regression in ambition in many ways, I was glad they did something different with it. A direct followup to either 1 or X in gameplay style would have been more boring, and might have been disappointing in a different way.