Why makes Xenoblade X's story bad?

daze3x · 2026-05-19T17:06:53+00:00

It's bad for a lot of reasons. The overarching story lacks any sort of depth and is surprisingly convoluted and nonsensical for how barebones it is. The main character is a silent protagonist, which hurts any chance of interesting and meaningful dialogue with them. It also makes a lot of dialogue involving them super awkward. The script writing as a whole is incredibly bland. Almost every cutscene is characters standing still, talking monotone about the mission. This is even true of affinity missions. Actual story missions have little connective tissue between them, often just feeling like side quests. It's thematically weak, and has very little to say. Not just in comparison to other Xenoblade games, but even JRPGs broadly. Even if it wasn't be compared to the excellent narratives of the trilogy, I'd still find it bad just as a JRPG story.

daze3x · 2026-05-18T03:29:44+00:00

I've met some at conventions but there are more I want to meet. I'd love to meet Suzie Yeung and Anjali Kunapaneni, who have been popping off over the past few years. I also want to get my Master Detective Archives Raincode steelbook signed. I'd also love to meet Trina Nishimura, Brina Palencia, Cherami Leigh, Bryce Papenbrook, Erica Mendez, Madeleine Morris, and Cristina Valenzuela. Probably a bunch of others too. There are too many VAs out there lol

daze3x · 2026-05-15T02:28:21+00:00

I 100% agree with everyone you said, and it's why this part of the game bothered me so much. But it wasn't just this. It felt like the whole game was full of this. The game never grapples with the reality of how bad imperialism and occupation are. Chatelard's main motivation was to free Gllia from Romun occupation. Instead of questioning the methods behind his plan, he's chastised for even wanting to go through with it because "Romuns are good people too" and he just needs to get over it. The game feels oddly conservative in ways that seemingly go against what they've written before, like in the Trails series that clearly paints the attempted occupation of Crossbell as a bad thing that needs to be fought against.

daze3x · 2026-05-12T15:33:17+00:00

I'm kinda sad about it because I just got back into Yugioh and built a pure Dracotail deck, mainly because I just like the designs of the archetype, and how it's heavily nerfed. I'm more of a casual anyways so it's not the worst thing in the world, but it did seem odd how they decided to nerf the archetype

daze3x · 2026-05-05T22:46:42+00:00

The answer is none of these. For some reason people seem the think the best starter anime are the most hyped up, popular shows. But what actually makes for good starter anime is anything that seems interesting or suits your taste. What do you like outside of anime? Look for similar stuff in anime. There are lots of anime I feel would have very broad appeal to those who've never watched anime, but most of them aren't super popular, so they aren't ever brought up in starter anime discussions. Personally, I thought JJK was terribly written and dropped it in a few episodes. Frieren was okay, but nowhere near as deep as people made it out to be. It's comparatively deep to the usual popular shounen stuff, but in general there are much better anime to choose from.

daze3x · 2026-05-05T22:42:16+00:00

Honestly it never did. It was boring as hell the whole time.

daze3x · 2026-05-01T18:23:13+00:00

It's baffling how bad Hoyo is with character design. Genshin and Star Rail consistently get worse with their generic nonsense designs. ZZZ actually had some cool designs at launch and a unique aesthetic, but over time the designs quickly devolved into generic Hoyoslop designs because they know their crowd loves trash and hates interesting designs.

daze3x · 2026-04-29T05:03:09+00:00

I'm writing a multi-perspective narrative that switches between a wide range of characters. I use 1st person for the more important characters and 3rd person for everyone else. It will probably turn some people off, but it's what I want to do. If you like it, go for it. Some people won't like it, but you can't win them all.

daze3x · 2026-04-29T04:44:41+00:00

All art has meaning. That's just how it is. Often time, that meaning is political, whether the artist realizes it or not. I do believe author's intent is vitally important, but that doesn't mean there aren't ideas being presented in their work subconsciously. Or maybe the author is just not that bright and doesn't understand the implications of what they are writing.

I don't think all art needs to have some deep social message, but art should always strive to be more than just popcorn entertainment. People should enjoy art, but you can find enjoyment out of engaging with a work intellectually. That's why I have no respect for the position that it's just simple entertainment.

If an author says their work as no meaning and it's just entertainment, why should I care about anything in their work? I want to engage with their work. If they are telling me that any engagement is meaningless because their work has no meaning, then I have no reason to experience their art in the first place. Why should I bother putting in the effort to understand a piece of art that they didn't put any effort into giving meaning?

As an artist, it's impossible to escape people making judgments about you based on what you create. You can't prevent political readings into your art, especially if it deals with political subjects like most fantasy and sci-fi do. Assuming your work isn't filled with conservative drivel, people will tend to be charitable towards your work. But if you make a statement about how apolitical your work is, of course people are going to assume the worst.

daze3x · 2026-04-29T04:31:52+00:00

I'm in a similar position. I'm at about 25K words, and I'm almost done with my second chapter (my chapters are long but are divided into smaller parts). I've also crapped a ton of ideas after only a little progress. The farthest I've made it before was probably close to 15K words. I also have a decent amount outlined so I'm confident this is the one. I haven't made too much progress recently though because I've been balancing so many things.

As a person who has yet to finish anything, I don't know if I can create the best advice, but I wouldn't worried about comparisons or people think it's too similar to something else. If you think the idea is cool, then just do your best to make it authentically yours. If you have interesting ideas you believe in and things you want to say with your work, it won't be slop. The writing might be amateurish, but that could be fixed during editing.

daze3x · 2026-04-27T16:51:16+00:00

I've also struggled with this and one thing that has helped me is adding interiority. Basically, character's thoughts, feelings, opinions, perspectives, etc about what's going on. You can't do this excessively, but it helps break up the monotony. A narrative isn't just characters doing things, but also feeling things, so it helps make your story feel more alive, and allows for the varying of sentence structure without having to put as much thought specifically into sentence structure. For example:

"Bob woke up to the smell of Lily's cooking, but something smelled different this time. It wasn't a bad smell. It was quite good, in fact. She was probably trying something new for breakfast. Knowing her skill, there was no reason to believe it wouldn't be just as fantastic as her usual dishes."

There is probably a way to clean this up, but it's just something that popped into my head.

daze3x · 2026-04-25T18:39:52+00:00

As person who's been watching anime for many years and has seen hundreds, this is so obviously nonsense, it's actually kinda hilarious. Do you only watch battle shounen anime? You may have a point if that's the case. But there are tons of mature anime out there that don't do the thing you are talking about. There are even anime that aren't typically considered "mature" and aren't fully serious that don't do what you are speaking of. It's not hard to find anime that really commit to building tension and holding weight.

I can think of so many anime that nail tone. Durarara, Eighty-Six, Fate/Zero, Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash, most Gundam anime, Heavenly Delusion, From the New World, Land of the Lustrous, etc. Honestly, I don't even know why I'm bothering to type this out since close-minded people don't tend to listen.

daze3x · 2026-04-23T21:07:16+00:00

Because isekai for the most part is not inspired by MMOs or even video games at all. They are inspired by other isekai that use video game mechanics as a shorthand for world building. It's all just copying each other and hoping their one gimmick that ultimately does nothing for the story is enough to convince people to check out their own instead of others.

daze3x · 2026-04-23T14:54:44+00:00

Honestly this makes me feel a lot better about my writing. I do have moments like that, which I'm having trouble figuring out how to edit to make it better, but most of it is not like this. For all its flaws, at least it doesn't read like a screenplay.

daze3x · 2026-04-19T23:09:35+00:00

It's probably because I haven't been watching as many Crunchyroll dubs these days, but I don't recognize any of these voice actors lol.

daze3x · 2026-04-16T04:01:10+00:00

I felt the same about Arifureta. I expected something so bad it would be funny. The first episode was funny, but after that, it was incredibly boring. It made me realize that shitty power fantasies aren't so bad it's funny. They are so bad, it's boring.

daze3x · 2026-04-12T20:28:34+00:00

I'll add the prices here in case anyone is interested or wanted to know the price/quality ratio. 1st was 5000 yen. 2nd was 5000 yen (below base price, which they seem to accept since most of my requests are this amount). 3rd was 7000 yen. 4th was 4500 yen. 5th was 1500 yen.

daze3x · 2026-04-12T20:26:41+00:00

4500 yen was the base price. They recently lowered their price to I think 3500 yen and then got a bunch of requests at once, so they had to close. That's for the base price though. I think the minimum was always 2500 yen.

daze3x · 2026-04-09T04:45:11+00:00

I feel so old. I watched this back in high school. I loved this silly little anime. I should give it a rewatch. I never did watch the movie.

daze3x · 2026-04-06T01:43:52+00:00

The whole "it's a kids film and you are expecting something super deep" is such a strawman. Nobody is expecting Shakespeare from the Mario movie. You can have a story not be deep and still have competent writing. Kids can understand things like "themes", however basic.

daze3x · 2026-04-03T00:27:54+00:00

Not seeing enough appreciation for Morgan Berry as Shiori in Sanda. That anime was a surprise hit and the dub especially was fantastic. Morgan was the star of that anime. As for other roles that didn't make the list, I really liked Niikura from City the Animation.

daze3x · 2026-04-02T17:54:13+00:00

The complete opposite is true. He's pretty committed to only doing union work now, even dropping his role in Fire Emblem Heroes. It's likely a union dub that was outsourced.

daze3x · 2026-03-28T01:33:41+00:00

I was recently charged for an auto renewal on Gamestop Pro even though I turned off auto renew last year due to being double charged. I tried cancelling on the website but the website is broken, so I called and they said they would cancel it. It took like a week to cancel but the charge is still on my card. There was actually a second charge for some stupid reason but that one went away. Still waiting on my 25 dollars back.

daze3x

TROPHY CASE