whelp i finished,i don't think i have much to add to what i first say
as i said i really don't like big open field,here's the reason why i love jrpg,i love their scenario's,i like the futuristic dystopian city of midgar,i love that bit in chrono trigger when the hero go into the future and there is the wind that blow,those futuristic bed that tell you "you are still hungry" but when you have open field what do you get?
boooooooooooooooooooooring,open field turns an adventure into an hiking simulator,you can't have an open field ghost pirate ship
the second thing that i don't like when it comes to these kind of rpg is the combat system,rpg are all about making the right decisions at the right moment,so when an AI makes most of those decision for you,it just stop being fun,i don't think i was in trouble in battle even once and that was because the AI did all the tanking and all the healing,for all the flack FF13 gets i think it strikes the perfect balance between being real timey while giving me enough control to get satisfaction out of it,if in xenoblade someone gets hurt,the AI will heal it but in FF13 i am the one who has to hurry to switch to a paradigm with an healer in it,this game battle system might be fast paced but is no different than FF12 if not for the fact that it allows even less control about your party
well those are the two biggie i have to say which are applicable to xenoblade but heck,they are the main reasons why i also don't like FF12 that much either,but still there a lot of thing feel half-assed,the cities are big but they are also mostly empty,this is especialy annoying in alcamoth which is simply a big open space filled with nothing,finding a NPC sometimes result in the biggest and hardest challenge of the game,you have a map that gives you info about NPC but it doesn't tell you where that NPC is and instead insist on giving you info about his age and sex,the map in question is a pain in the ass to navigate as there is no way for searching for a specific NPC so you have to scroll all over checking names until you find the one you need,why not a named list with the NPC in alphabetical order,that would make thing easier! heck why not put all the quest in a single point? resonance of fate does it and it works!
monsters are recycled like crazy,having recolors in a rpg is nothing new but i think this game set a record,by the time you finished with the 2nd zone,you have seen 80% of every enemy in the game,there are rare named mob,but most of them just look and act like their normal monster counterpart,it had a sense in FF12 because they would give them a unique look,bossy special moves and heck even some bit of extra story but when you have to do it like this way what's the point to begin with?
and sure it's nice that the monster drop a lot of loots,it beat the shit out of opening a chest with 2 gils like in FF12 but there isn't just enough item to make it worth,you find 1 piece of armor with better stat and then proceed to find the same piece 5-6 more times (and by the way each piece of equipment take a space in the inventory when they could have at least grouped normal item together) diablo this ain't not
the plot start out decent,it takes a while to get it on mainly because the heroes find a lot of reason to lose time (at a certain point the heroes needs to take an elevator,but they can't take the elevator if first they don't find the 4 magical keys,but then after finding the 4 magical keys they can't take the elevator anyway so they resort to climb when they could have done so in the first place
) by the time it finaly gets going it goes full straight on JRPG generic dumbness...
seriously just to put it out in a pretty easy way,
at least 4 of these happensand... well i don't think i have anything else to say,personaly i started liking the game more after sword valley,the maps get smaller,the enemies get stronger (sword valley in particular has a lot of named mob that consist more of "I HIT SLIGHTY HARDER THAN MY NON-NAMED BRETHENS") there is less walking to do,more reward that you actualy use instead of just sitting in your inventory waiting to be sold,plot actualy starts to happen....
and once again,i'm not saying it's bad and that i don't like it because i don't finish game that i don't like but i'm saying it's not that great either,arc rise fantasia (metacritic average 64%) is a better game than this,you get your ass kicked in battle way much often (it's grindy!),it's a lot more colorfull and pretty (it's linear!) and
From an utterly predictable, cliched story involving typical things like magic, dragons, and teenage love
it has pretty much the same plot of this game yet for some weird reasons this one get called cliched instead of MATOOR
i blame the animu visuals
