i know the good parts part of your list was meant to be a small defense of the game, but only two of those stand on their own.
"The connections to the previous game were done well."
i would certainly hope a direct sequel connects to the previous game. this isn't final fantasy.
"Pyra is cute."
100% agree.
"The main plot was mostly well thought out if you ignore the playable characters."
from what you wrote, pyra is the only good character and that would mean that the story is only good when she is on screen. if you have to ignore the party members to enjoy the story, you might as well not even bother playing the game. just look up pyra fanart. that's what i do.
"Poppy is very well developed if you ignore her terrible origin story."
kind of defeats the point of even bring it up in game if its that bad that it has nothing to do with her actual arc.
"Gameplay can be good if you can figure it out yourself (despite the endless tutorials that barely explain it)."
if the tutorial sucks and i either have to figure it out blindly or look up a guide, i don't think i would stick around very long. it's a different story if the translation is bad or something.
and with the rest of your bad parts list; kind of glad that i put off playing this. i can't imaging what the other installments in this set are like. i stopped playing xenosaga right near the end of the first game, and i've read that blade, saga and gears are all connected. now i kind of don't want to play gears either. i might just draw some art of pyra and KOS-MOS. and telos? i think that's her name.
they will apparently be the only parts of the entire series that i like.
The direct connections to XC1 don't come up until pretty late in the game. Even then, none of it is made clear until the last chapter.
What I mean about the main plot is that it all reads good on paper. If you read any summary online, you don't see all the dialogue or character interactions included, so it all sounds really good. It's only when you hear and see the characters being a bunch of b*****ds that the writing falls apart. (And note that you could easily miss Newt and Floren's parts, as both characters are locked away in the gatcha system.)
Poppy is the one character other than Pyra who doesn't act horrible towards others; likewise, she actually develops instead of staying the same anime trope from beginning to end. That, unfortunately, doesn't change the fact that her story starts off pedo baiting and Tora is always there to undermine it all.
The translations of the tutorials isn't the problem. The tutorials are just really bad because the
Xenoblade writers suck at technical writing. (This was also an issue in
Xenoblade X, especially for the mining system.) You basically have to experiment until you get how the battle system is supposed to work. (Note that almost every review of the game hated on it to the extent that they completely redid it in the prequel.)
Xenoblade 1 is actually a fantastic game and definitely worth playing. It has none of the issues that XC2 has. (Okay, Melia being traumatized at the end of the original release is kind of sad, but that was changed in the Switch version.)
Xenoblade X is a mixed bag. The gameplay is great, the world building is really good, and it does well at incorporating MMO elements into a mostly offline game. However, the writing is really bad, with an incomplete main story (though the Switch version expands it), a lot of repetitive dialogue in story cut scenes, and the playable characters having an idiotically repetitive and underdeveloped sense of humor. Oh, and the worst song in the game is the one that plays the most often. At least the characters aren't hateable when they aren't trying to be funny.
Can't comment on
Xenoblade 3 too much since I've played it on and off without finishing. Nobody's confirmed for me if it gets as cringe as XC2 does, so I'm reluctant to put the effort into powering through it. (Also, the submenu's equipment section UI is such trash that it makes equipment changes aggravating, so that makes playing a bit of a slog.)
