New patch out makes pulls much quicker. Can skip all the animations, but of course it's iffy implemented so you have to choose to skip before you even pull, so if you do get a unique you miss their introduction movie. And there's still a bunch of button presses every time you pull. Why does it have to ask you if you want to equip after every pull? If they're going to force you to make a choice after each pull, why not add a "equip yes/no/trash" option. The whole limited selection, gotta keep trashing pulls system is so stupid.
I'm still missing like 10+ uniques, pulled 8 epics, 20 rares, 30 commons tonight after this patch and got...1 unique :\
I'm at the
spoiler (click to show/hide)
tree
Every time I sit down to play it after a long amount of time it goes like this:
-Oh hey, this is pretty and sounds good
-Oh hey, this combat is fun
-Oh hey, my AI teammates never do anything intelligent so I can't pull off driver combos because stupid ass eye patch man with his lightning pal won't UPPER the goddamn grounded enemy.
-Oh hey, enemy mobs pulling from everywhere, so much HP on little mobs even with lvl.3 blade combos, this is tedious as shit
-Oh hey, just died because pulled too many mobs on accident and couldn't run in time, time to go through a section again and fight everything that gets pulled again
-Oh hey, got a new blade, let's look at its tree, oh that's ton of grinding for a little content
-Oh hey, ran into another field check, time to switch in a bunch of useless blades for the check after slowly searching through list for the correct field skills, then do the check for something super minor, then remember to set everyone's blades back in
-Oh hey, merc missions came back, time to send them back out again for the 10,000 time
Like, there is a lot I really like about XB2, big environments, awesome towns, great music, solid battle system, solid story/characters.
but
This is like one of the most tedious games ever to actually play because of all the sub-system bullshit. I'm a huge Takahashi fan and enjoyed everything he's directed immensely until Xenoblade X. That was the first game of his I thought was kinda bad and a mess, mostly because of lack of an actual plot/characters and the mechs breaking the traversal and mech combat being kinda shitty. Xenoblade 2 is kinda continuing the trend of great game somewhere in there but a mess. The plot/characters are back in, but now there's a ton of annoyances that weren't in XBX /sigh
Will finish the story up at some point (might just use the new easy mode, tested it and all it seems to do is cut enemy HP by a ton) but even though there was a ton of content with all these blade quests, I can't see myself sticking with the game because of the grind you have to do for them.
It's weird because I felt like XB1 got it right the first time outside the 9,000 filler sidequests if you wanted to build the cities up, but that was all optional. I thought the combat worked in XB1 and I liked how you could assign a teammates move to your command bar so you had some control over what they execute. I much preferred the story/characters/world of that one too. I feel like the sense of mysterious exploration in XB1 isn't quite matched in XB2 and there's no moments like the marsh at night, or the city in the ocean, etc... XB1 felt like a single player MMO with a good story along the lines of FFXII. XBX/XB2 haven't really felt like that to me.