Some thoughts on Future Connected after a few hours of play.
More Xenoblade is always good and it adds in some QOL changes compared to the base game but there's a few changes that I'm not thrilled about.
- Removal of chain attacks and skill trees
Chain attacks are removed and that makes it harder to stop the momentum of enemy attacks when you're near death. Without skill trees, you lose the ability to revive party members with more health or change armor classes and such.
Certain vanilla Shulk/Melia stats aren't great and as far as I can tell there's no way to improve those stats.
- Not a lot of gear and armor
This makes fighting higher level monsters much harder because in Xenoblade there's some very powerful gear that could make fighting monsters 10 levels higher viable.
In the original games drop rates for great gear are fairly high. Every 3 enemies drop a useful item. Here the drop rate is very low.
- Longer 'cool down' time between actions
As I mained Melia for the latter half of Xenoblade, the difference is striking. Before I could Summon Bolt, wait for the Ether Energy to fill up then cast the bolt and then instantly do Mind Blast before the Ether Energy ran out even though my bolt was not yet cast.
This meant that you could sorta 'cheese' stacking attacks. It worked for chain attacks too. Just do Mind Blast, and just before the animation ends, hit the team attack button. You could get 2 fully charged attacks out of 1 charge.
No longer possible in FC because you can't cast something new until the animation of your original attack has ended.
- Replacing Rein and Sharla with Nene and Niko
Instead of Rein and Sharla your other 2 party members aside from Shulk and Melia are two Nopon with the skills and abilities of Rein(berserker) and Sharla(healer). If you add in two new characters with the exact same stats as the original characters, why not just include the original characters?
+/- Adding in more Nopon
I'm not a Nopon hater so I don't mind more of those furballs. With that said, the prospector mechanic is a bit under developed. As you move through the world you collect Prospectors which join your party. It's basically a group of allies that joins in battle.
There's no way to control their actions though and they team-up with Shulk by default. Shulk AI is dumb but you want to play as Melia because her AI is dumber and her spells are more helpful in battle. Both Shulk and these Nopon are kinda useless.
+ Removal of gem crafting
In FC you can just pick up gems instead of having to pick up Crystals and crafting gems out of those Crystals. The only downside is that you no longer get Crystals from enemies so you can only collect gems from the ether mining points.
At like halfway through Xenoblade crafting already becomes so easy that the crafting minigame (which is totally random anyway) just breaks the pace of the game.
+ Layered environments
FC is a 'newer' game and you can tell from the way the landscape is created. They clearly no longer have Wii limitations to work around so you get more interesting environments and layouts from a gameplay perspective overall
+ Condensed quest locations
Because the world is smaller, quest locations are more condensed. In a town you might find 5 people with quests in the same area. In Xenoblade you have a lot of quests that spawn different areas of the game.
Some of these are interesting but there are also a bunch that is just 'slay 3 monsters, but do it in this remote area that has no fast travel point for no reason'
+ Voiced heart-to-hearts
They have a slightly different name that I forgot but the heart-to-heart moments are now fully voiced cutscenes as opposed to speech bubbles in the original game.
Considering some of those heart-to-hearts in the original game contained optional important plot developments for the overall story it was a shame those weren't cutscenes
+ Better enemy AI
The enemy AI has been much improved. In the original game most enemies don't move 2 steps from their spawn location and they seldom sync their attacks (even though some enemies have the ability to perform chain attacks).
In FC the enemies are much more agressive and time their attacks pretty well. They're also moving around the map in 'packs' making it harder to pick them off one at a time. Definitely an improvement.
+ Better cosmetics and overall graphics
Even though it mostly looks the same as the base game there's definitely some visual improvements such as the more dynamic lighting at night, props for destroyed buildings, better textures, materials, caves, dungeon areas and improved costumes and cosmetics.
The new outfits are mixed in with the existing sets but are in general more interesting and detailed than most base game gear.
Overall it's a weird thing considering it's an expansion that is part of the game but has more QOL improvements than the base game but also some fundamental gameplay changes.