Xenoblade Chronicles
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The story is great even if I disagree with some of the messages of it and Shulk was a unique and interesting main character personality wise.
The gameplay on the other hand is not so great, I have 3 complaints
1.) The map areas are too big and empty, there were many a time where I was just staring at my switch with the autorun on for a couple minutes without actually touching the controller. It was wasting my time
2.) every single side quest in the game except for 1 is a generic fetch quest, I am not being hyperbolic or exaggerating about that either, after like the first area I stopped bothering to read any of the dialogue for those and did them all in bulk when i needed to level up. and while that's not really the fault of xenoblade chronicles, I had just played chrono cross a few months prior which had the most unique and involved side quest I've ever played in a game ever, which made it even more jarring to me.
3.) The combat, why wasn't there some basic combo I could do with like the a button to fill up the arts gage instead of the characters allegedly autoattacking and everything being cooldown based. The characters would often just stand there and just not do anything even though i was facing the enemy, it was very annoying. the arts being on a cooldown is also again a waste of time because even when I upgraded most of them to at least level 8 there were still times where i was again just sitting there waiting for any of them to fill back up. This game isnt an action rpg, Its a turned based game cosplaying as an action rpg. Its that slow. I have been told it gets improved by later games so hopefully they fix it in some way, hopefully by adding at least a basic manual attack or some other way to give the player more control over when to use arts
Overall I still at least liked the game, but it is by no means the greatest rpg ever or even on its original console, it is a 6/10 game