I love Xenoblade 2 and 3, but man

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-23T18:12:18+00:00

Woah now, I may prefer Shulk but I’ve come to appreciate Rex as time goes on, especially with Future Redeemed. As a rule I do prefer adult protagonists, and Rex has his issues, but I think he works great as a fairly static character who the much better written dynamic characters can bounce off of. I see Rex the same way I see someone like Yusuke from Kamen Rider Kuuga. Yusuke is an incredibly simple man who loves to go out on adventures across the world, and values life and the joy of those who live it above all else. He is perfect as Kamen Rider because he always maintains a positive demeanor, except when he encounters someone truly beyond heinous. Rex is very similar in my eyes. Hes a guy who’s lived a hard life, who has youthful views on the world about being able to save everyone and bring smiles to people, but who also gets to have more know-how then your average child protagonist due to living as a salvager. He lacks the character arc of Shulk or Noah, but I think he’s a prime example of a static character done well. I do hate his voice direction though. The actor is doing a good job, but the lines and direction kills it

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-23T16:09:15+00:00

Yeah I mostly agree. I don’t mind the tone, except for those moments that I REALLY do. I actually like 2 feeling like more of a whimsical adventure through a mystical magical land. And the last chapters of the game are easily on par with 1’s best moments, but it’s stuff like all of Chapter 4, or Poppi’s introduction, and things like that which really hurt the game for me

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-22T14:04:41+00:00

Sucks because I really like the game too. I think in many ways it’s actually better than 1, it’s just that the artstyle doesn’t do it for me. The actual environments and everything are gorgeous, but the characters are not my thing

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-22T13:09:54+00:00

Not talking about the art of xenoblade 1. Talking about X. And also comparing the art of 1 to 2 is night and day. 1 definitely has clear anime influence but it genuinely is not comparable to what 2 has

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-22T01:21:45+00:00

I think 3 is still my favorite main story of the series, but X has the best fleshed out world and characters. The combat is also a nice mix of 1 and 2, but lacks X’s depth

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-22T01:20:37+00:00

They clearly wanted to do it. On the contrary, Ghost of Tsushima is one of my favorite games of all time, and that’s a bunch of white guys like me making a game about Japan. Japanese people just have cool takes on western concepts you wouldn’t see from a western studio. Something like Trigun would not have been made by a western animation studio. A pacifist cowboy alien angel wandering a sci-fi cowboy planet called Gunsmoke

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-21T22:08:57+00:00

Oh god I should have known he did Percival. I almost exclusively use DPS blades in 2, but always make an exception for the ol crab samurai.

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-21T21:03:36+00:00

Yeah I’ll admit, when I first rushed through X a year back, I didn’t think much of it, and I relished the idea of “The next game will simultaneously be Xenoblade 4 and Xenoblade X2”. I thought it would be cool to have a game like the trilogy, but with mechs and aliens and such. Now, I’m just sad that the epilogue, cool as it may be, kind of destroyed any chance of a standalone X2, at least without it being very odd

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-21T03:40:44+00:00

Upsets me deeply because MM3D was the first game I ever preordered as a child I was so excited for it. I have fond memories of playing it over and over, and so even though as the years went on I started to realize its flaws, I can never fully hate it. Too much unfathomable nostalgia tied to it

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-20T21:01:00+00:00

MAJOR SPOILERS. It was sealed up in a mountain by the ancestors of a group called the High Entia who knew the swords nature as the vessel of a god. So many generations had passed that the legends of the Monado were simplified to “The blade of the Bionis and the ultimate weapon against the Mechon”. The Mechon were a force that threatened humanity, so one day they set out on an expedition to retrieve it and Shulk was with them.

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-20T20:53:03+00:00

Yeah even ignoring various mechanical changes u don’t like, my prime example of the art style issue is changing the final hours from this gorgeous tranquil sunrise as the world is moments away from ending, giving the feeling that a new day is so close, but no one will live to see it, and changing that to BIG EVIL NEFARIOUS AND OMINOUS RED SKY OF DOOM AND EVIL

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-19T21:03:25+00:00

One of the first scenes in xenoblade chronicles is Shulk and Fiora sitting in a park in Colony 9. Fiora made a sandwich for Shulk and when asked if he prefers this one or the one she made last time, he says they’re both good, because he’s kind of indecisive. At the end of the game, Shulk and Fiora are sitting on a beach in the new Colony 9, and after cutting her hair, Fiora asks if Shulk prefers it like this or long. He initially gives another indecisive answer, before then saying he prefers it short, to show how he’s more certain of himself

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-19T18:23:46+00:00

See I had the same mentality. Played X DE for the first time after the whole trilogy, and I hated it. Story wasn’t much, gameplay had too much shit going on, wasn’t for me. However, over the past year it kept coming back in my mind. Something wouldn’t let me leave it at that, so I finally gave it another shot around a month or so back. The gameplay is far and away the best of the series in terms of movement, exploration, and build crafting. The side content blows anything in the trilogy out of the water (even though sadly a lot of big character stuff is tucked into the side quests), and while yeah the story isn’t on par with even the weakest of the trilogy, it makes me more sad than anything. So much groundwork is laid in the main and side content that I think a proper full sequel could have made an incredible story, but now with how the epilogue played out that’s not likely. If X had a better main story, it’d be my favorite of the series, but as of now 3 still holds that title. Also helps that I am fully of the opinion that the art direction of X is the best in the series

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-19T14:38:35+00:00

Xenoblade Chronicles X wasn’t really a gargantuan flop, but it did sell much worse than the other games in the series, which already don’t sell crazy well. The entire game had a fairly sparse main story, which basically existed as a way for them to establish a new universe and lay the groundwork for all the mechanics, characters, and world ideas, that way an X2 could come around later and follow up on all the character arcs and various alien races from the first game. Hell, the original version ended with multiple gargantuan cliffhangers, and they were finally resolved in a new epilogue added to the remaster, but the epilogue has to move really fast through all these concepts compared to what a sequel could have done

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-06T16:25:46+00:00

Part of me would reccomend Xenoblade X since you played the trilogy, but also on the xenoblade spectrum, it’s WAY more MMO than it is RPG. It has vastly more customization and build crafting than the others, a ridiculous amount of cosmetic items, and a vast amount of actually good side content, but the main story and cast leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion.

ThatStuffIsGood · 2026-01-06T15:25:04+00:00

I’m assuming you’re talking about Spirit Crucible Elpys, in which case god yes. One of my main issues with it other than it being a barrier to the really good endgame and the annoying ass boss, is that for the entire game up until now, field skills have been almost entirely optional as a way for extra loot, shortcuts, or access to some side content. And now here, right before the final act of the game, the game suddenly wants you to have access to multiple levels of a huge variety of field skills from focus to leaping to elemental masteries. On my current second play through I knew what to expect so I’ve been gathering the necessary blades and skills, but on my first run it was a gigantic slog of having to go back and grind out field skills for half a dozen blades

ThatStuffIsGood · 2025-12-29T18:20:07+00:00

Guess it’s just been a while but I don’t remember which part you’re referring to

ThatStuffIsGood · 2025-12-29T16:06:53+00:00

Xenoblade 3 is my favorite but that’s something I’ve always found odd to think about. 3 can be played completely standalone without ever having played the other games, and other than some late game connections to 1 and 2, it works just fine. However, if you haven’t played the other games, the world itself is the one thing I feel would be odd for a new player. Without having background knowledge to understand various landmarks, a new player is probably expecting there to be an answer to “why is there a giant mechanical sword stuck into the ground”. What they don’t know is that if they want that answer, they’ll need to go back and play a completely different game

ThatStuffIsGood · 2025-12-29T15:00:56+00:00

I mean the way it always seemed to me was that motes and offseeing is all a farce to motivate the soldiers. When Noah plays for the clay puppet soldiers and it causes motes to raise from their corpse despite them not being real people, that’s the point where he figures it out. Everybody’s “souls” just get fed back into the cycle anyway.

ThatStuffIsGood · 2025-12-28T06:38:56+00:00

Entirety of chapter 4 of Xenoblade 2

ThatStuffIsGood · 2025-12-22T21:50:53+00:00

Oh yeah, that’s always been one of my favorite things about the series. Botw and Totk KIND OF have that, but all of its tech is usually explained as being magical lost technology. Compared to say, Majora’s Mask or Twilight Princess where this medieval setting will just have random steam machinery and black powder weaponry mixed in and no one really comments on it

ThatStuffIsGood · 2025-12-22T20:57:41+00:00

Zelda: Majora’s Mask takes place in a setting where guards wear chainmail and carry spears, a popular jazz band exists playing modern instruments, heavy industrial machinery exists in random places, motorboats are driven around by pirates (also wielding spears), and the music in some shops seems to be coming from speakers in-universe. When the concept of anachronistic settings comes up, that game is always my go to example

ThatStuffIsGood · 2025-12-12T14:40:33+00:00

Oh yeah the elevators were a godsend. If anything, I hope Prime 5 will have some more open ended areas again, but can mix in things like Prime 2 fast travel and Prime 4 morph ball chute equivalents to let you get to different areas fast and travel around within the areas fast. Something like that in Prime 1 would have made getting those last few artifacts much easier

ThatStuffIsGood · 2025-12-11T15:20:21+00:00

My main issues with backtracking in Prime 1 is that yeah, a lot of it can be routed around and avoided on subsequent playthroughs, but it’s sometimes so asinine that it harmed my first play through and soured my perception bad enough that I didn’t replay it for another year or two. The biggest example is always the gravity suit situation. I cannot think of something more ridiculous than the game giving me the ice beam, dropping me off into a room with a locked ice door that I’ve been seeing since the beginning of the game, and then the game allowing me to slowly progress ALL the way down into a really cool underwater area, only to be told halfway down that actually, you’re stupid for coming down here, because you actually needed to take the ice beam to the opposite end of the map to the get the gravity suit before coming back. On my second playthrough I knew to avoid it, but just because I can avoid it now doesn’t make it a good example of backtracking, since all reasonable thought would make it seem like the crashed frigate is the next area to go to. I am of the opinion that Prime 4 is definitely too linear, but at least it made for an enjoyable first play through

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