I love Xenoblade, I hate Xenoblade

To be clear, before I go off on Xenoblade Chronicles, I'm referring to the N3DS edition of the game here. Maybe the other ones fix some of this stuff.

Xenoblade Chronicles, if you haven't played it, is a really cool game both in premise and execution. If you like megastructures, this game... might be up your alley? Actually no, it IS up your alley. The entire games map is just two absolutely massive robots (?) who are large enough to host entire civilizations. Multiple civilizations, actually. The sense of scale and the world building are great, it's really immersive even with the hot garbage graphics (it was ported to the N3DS from the Wii). The characters are endearing enough, despite their british VAs. (Xenoblade has since come to be somewhat defined by the british accents, but I just... can't take brits seriously) The story is cool and all, somewhat difficult to follow but that's probably just because I took so many month long breaks while playing it.

That actually leads me on to the actual problems I have with this fucking game. I kept on just walking away because every once in a while, theres a level wall that you hit, where, to advance the story, you have to put in a good five hours of grinding just to be able to barely kill common enemies again. So some bosses ended up taking me actual months of picking up and putting down the game to beat.

My next, and actually biggest complaint, is with the fucking combat. It pisses me the hell off, I can't even put it into words. Have you ever worked on something that people, or you, are going to be using for some kind of task? Well, you probably would realize if some design choice you were making was dumb and annoying, like "maybe let's not make these keycaps spikey on the top.", or "Wait, does there really need to be a built in combination lock on every one of these kitchen cabinets?". Things like that. Well apparently the developers here didn't possess the ability to reason that way. A major mechanic in the game is Shulk (MC) being able to see into the near future during a fight, and preventing his friends deaths with these visions. They usually trigger whenever an enemy uses a skill/battle art that deals enough damage, which can happen very frequently. The visions are delivered to the player by means of UNSKIPPABLE MINI CUTSCENE. WHY?????!!!?!??!?? IT'S SO AGGRAVATING! They last a (relatively) long time - you have to watch the enemy go through the entire attack animation... in slow motion. What the hell, man? Seriously, what the hell? I understood the danger in the first 3 picoseconds of this damn vision. I GET IT OK??? I DON'T NEED TO WATCH THIS. Why didn't they let you skip them? It truly boggles the mind.

Unfortunately, my gripes don't end there.

If I had to guess, I would say that maybe 30% of the time you're fighting either in a very enclosed space or a space where you can pushed into some kind of danger. So being pushed is just so irritating - you get backed into corners which then fucks up your view because the camera doesn't know how to deal with being backed into a wall. Either that or you and your party get shoved into ether pools and you die.

Enemies seem to have something like... 5 or 6 times your own health, and deal maybe half as much damage. Obviously, you can heal, so you survive, but everything is just so drawn out. Getting into a fight is more like getting into a queue, especially for beefier enemies. Don't get me started on bosses. They have health in the range of hundreds of thousands while you might not be at 10k. The player-enemy and health/attack differences here are strange. Or maybe they're perfectly typical, I wouldn't know.

For you, the player, there are two ways to miss an attack: you can either miss the digital dice roll/agility check, or you can just be out of range of the enemy. But the enemy is incapable of missing through that second mechanic, which makes sense on some level as it makes it harder to cheese fights, but it's still annoying. It doesn't matter where I'm standing during a fight, if an enemy attacks me either with an auto attack or an art, I'm taking that hit. I could be 20 metres away, or standing behind it, and I'll still get hit. Just feels kind of unfair.

They all suck. Reyn, Sharla, Melia, Dunban, and the other people. All of em. They all do the same thing where they get themeselves trapped somewhere or end up sitting a mile away from the fight, battling some tiny and insignificant fruitfly on the wall that looked at them wrong. I always end up spamming the button combo to get them to run back to you. Sharla especially likes to aggro things for no reason, get herself killed, and generally be a terrible healer.

I think that's the extent of what I don't like. The rest is pretty great fun - exploration, upgrading gear, filling out your collectopedia, even building relationships. It's good.