Essentially, a game that you personally believe is so heavily flawed that you know on some level that you shouldn't be enjoying it, and yet, there's something, perhaps difficult to articulate, keeping you hooked.
Despite my pretty awful impressions of the game pre and post-launch, I decided to pick up Xenoblade Chronicles 2 a week ago. On paper, I should be finding this game absolutely awful: the sidequests are abysmal and torturesly drawn out, the RNG on the core crystals and the unskippable bonding sequence makes trying to get actually unique blades a pain in the ass, you have to sift through a fuckton of menus to keep your party optimized, I was still getting tutorial messages 20 hours into the game, and the game's performance in handheld mode, considering that it's a Switch exclusive, is so poor that I can't believe it flies Nintendo's flag, a company synonymous with polish in even it's B-tier efforts.
And most of all, in many ways the game isn't just a JRPG; it's THE JRPG. So much of the game's plot, characters, and setting seem to have been optimized for peak obnoxiousness. The female character designs range from merely offensively bad (Pyra) to the absolutely mind-boggling (the loli twins). There are a species in this world that refer to themselves in the third-person, go meh meh meh, and speak in comically exaggerated voices, as though they were put in to amuse three year olds. In the dub at least, there are points where the characters should be at the point of screaming rage, and yet the actors continue to speak in a non-plussed, casual tone (so far, Malos is the only one who seems to actually get worked up). You are constantly taking ridiculous detours and having your attention diverted away from your current objective, presumably to pad out a game that really doesn't need the padding (Chapter 4 never. Fucking. Ends.)
The player's presence and performance have zero bearing on the plot, leading to extreme player alienation; you can curb-stomp a boss in gameplay and get subsequently stomped in the following cutscene. On the flip side, the characters can perform amazing feats in cutscenes that the player can only dream of actually doing in gameplay. It makes me wonder wtf I'm even doing here.
All this and so much more. And yet, I already have thirty hours in the game and I don't see myself stopping. I really can't put my finger on why; the combat is surprisingly expansive and can be approached in so many different ways, and despite the 3DS level performance at times, the environment design is unlike anything I've ever seen. But I've dropped games for much lesser sins than this, and I'm surprised at how enamored I am with this game.
Despite my pretty awful impressions of the game pre and post-launch, I decided to pick up Xenoblade Chronicles 2 a week ago. On paper, I should be finding this game absolutely awful: the sidequests are abysmal and torturesly drawn out, the RNG on the core crystals and the unskippable bonding sequence makes trying to get actually unique blades a pain in the ass, you have to sift through a fuckton of menus to keep your party optimized, I was still getting tutorial messages 20 hours into the game, and the game's performance in handheld mode, considering that it's a Switch exclusive, is so poor that I can't believe it flies Nintendo's flag, a company synonymous with polish in even it's B-tier efforts.
And most of all, in many ways the game isn't just a JRPG; it's THE JRPG. So much of the game's plot, characters, and setting seem to have been optimized for peak obnoxiousness. The female character designs range from merely offensively bad (Pyra) to the absolutely mind-boggling (the loli twins). There are a species in this world that refer to themselves in the third-person, go meh meh meh, and speak in comically exaggerated voices, as though they were put in to amuse three year olds. In the dub at least, there are points where the characters should be at the point of screaming rage, and yet the actors continue to speak in a non-plussed, casual tone (so far, Malos is the only one who seems to actually get worked up). You are constantly taking ridiculous detours and having your attention diverted away from your current objective, presumably to pad out a game that really doesn't need the padding (Chapter 4 never. Fucking. Ends.)
The player's presence and performance have zero bearing on the plot, leading to extreme player alienation; you can curb-stomp a boss in gameplay and get subsequently stomped in the following cutscene. On the flip side, the characters can perform amazing feats in cutscenes that the player can only dream of actually doing in gameplay. It makes me wonder wtf I'm even doing here.
All this and so much more. And yet, I already have thirty hours in the game and I don't see myself stopping. I really can't put my finger on why; the combat is surprisingly expansive and can be approached in so many different ways, and despite the 3DS level performance at times, the environment design is unlike anything I've ever seen. But I've dropped games for much lesser sins than this, and I'm surprised at how enamored I am with this game.
