Some mechanics in Xenoblade Chronicles X can range from arbitrary at best, to an exercise in frustration at worse.
- Better get used to being stuck with Elma and Lin, because the game forces you to include them in your party for every story chapter and for the majority of the affinity missions. And don't even think of filling that fourth slot with someone else, because more often than not, that's predetermined too. Meaning, the only times you're allowed to choose your own party is either during regular missions, or if you're just exploring the world map.
- The game forces you to do a certain amount of quests and leveling up (by outright saying "you must be this level at least to proceed") before you can continue the plot at several points. It also forces you to take partner characters out with you to gain relationship values whether you like the character or not, because sometimes the game makes you do characters quests too before proceeding, and that requires certain levels of relationship values.
- Speaking of the main quests, the level requirements for most of them underestimate what level you should be at to beat them, which would not be so bad on its own if they did not keep you from quitting them, or removing party members, or locking you out of other affinity missions, limiting your level grinding choices.
- A common criticism in reviews is the fetch quest. More specifically, there being nothing to differentiate most quest items from the other random items on the continent, even when in the above mentioned character quests. This lead to some of the more unlucky reviewers to lose hours locked into a sidequest looking for that one last drop. There's no way to trade for collectibles either.
- Even worse are the fetch quests involving items mined from Data Probes. There's not much you can do to influence the process of gathering them, you just have to plant mining probes in the right places and wait. This can roadblock certain affinity quests very easily. On the other hand, this eventually becomes one of the most laughable mechanics in the entire game. Resources tick far more often than FrontierNav revenue and Miranium, so with a wide enough probe spear you'll quickly find yourself just watching stacks of credits roll in when your inventory fills up with all the different ores.
- While it's more realistic, some find it a pain to have to actively look for party members they want to party up with (as opposed to the previous game, where you can easily switch between different party members in the menu at any time after unlocking them). Also, in comparison, there's also the lack of Leaked Experience (with Leaked Experience being something that can be justified by the members doing their own thing off screen), although all the BP gained from finding locations and completing Field Actions still seems to be distributed to every possible party member. Still, considering there's 18 possible party members with only Lin and Elma being located inside BLADE barracks, that's 16 locations you have to memorize and even though they're listed on the map, the symbol used to signify their location is identical to the one used in every other hex when you complete a quest associated with it.
- Your characters' arts with an area of effect can reach enemies behind close doors or walls, including enemies above them and beneath them, resulting in your characters aggroing every single enemy in the vicinity of Ganglion's towers when you fight inside.
- The nature of enemies hiding in plain sight and waiting to ambush you. Even when you're overleveled, they'll still attack you, wasting valuable time and triggering the Jump Scare music constantly. And when you do want to fight them, there's no way to target them and have the initiative and skip said music.
- Fleeing is tedious; your characters need to run away from the monsters they were fighting for a couple of seconds before the enemy decides to give up. If you happen to run into aggressive enemies during your escape, you will need to escape them too, meaning you will run for a very long time before finally be able to escape them, making it quicker to just let your characters die and respawn in some cases. Fleeing is made much easier once you unlock your Skell, but you will run into another problem: simply running over small enemies will aggro them too (your Skell will damage them). As a result, the only safe and quick way to run away from a battle is to fly away in a Skell once you unlock the flight module.
- The inability to sort your rather bloated inventory or sell items en-masse.
- Skell Insurance, which is ironic considering it was meant to make things easier. Whenever your Skell runs out of HP, you have to go back to the barracks and use the Hangar console to get a new one. While this is really easy to do, it's just tedious, because if your characters need a Skell (for example, if there are weather effects that hinder your ability to proceed without one) you have to fast travel back to the barracks, activate the console, and then go back. "That's realistic", you say? Well how realistic is it to have a menu option to magically teleport you back to your Skell? It's hard to imagine many complaints for Acceptable Breaks from Reality like that. It's especially nasty for the final battle, since you can't leave the area and go get your Skell back should the grueling final boss destroy your or a teammate's Skell.
- Any quest that requires you to find a specific NPC with a speech bubble on their head to gather info from them can be this, as the game only tells you the general areas where they can be found which is usually most of the district, they don't show up on the map unlike NPCs you can directly talk to and it's more than likely that any NPC you might find that has a "new info" speech bubble on top of their head tells you treasure or tyrant locations instead, further prolonging your search. To make things worse, if you're unlucky they can take their time loading into the map, meaning you can potentially run straight past them without ever realizing it.
- Soul Challenges, a QTE which grants the player various rewards depending on whether or not they fail, succeed or get a Perfect. Early game, this is the only way (along with Soul Voices) to consistently heal or gain TP. It's also the only way to get squad members to do what you want them to (as long as they only have one move of a certain type and didn't already use it). Late game, Soul Challenges are moot—you'll likely have gear, augments, skills and arts that do its job better, so you'll likely find yourself either ignoring it or hitting it just to make it go away. The interface is also very unwieldy—while it isn't "random", the triggers for it are so easy to miss in real time that they might as well be, and it takes up the center of the screen until completed. Also, certain functions (such as exiting a battle or other things that use the B button) are disabled because the Challenge is waiting for you to hit "B" to complete it. That means that if you're trying to run away or use a non-offensive Art, the Challenge will screw up your attempts to escape the battle, and if you are trying to cancel a targetable attack, you might hit B and accidentally fail the Challenge just as it pops up.
- Sometimes whenever you get Free Reports, you have the option to block the poster. There are a couple of problems with that. When you block a user, you can't give them friend requests or favorite them and you can't unblock them later. The posters you can block from the free reports don't post anything inappropriate or offensive. They just post very short spammy posts which might Makes Sense In Context. This makes you wonder why you the posts you can block even show up in your view at all, unless the poster is in the same squad mission as you. Additionally, there's no names from free reports, meaning you'll need to sign your name in order to get people to identify who's talking, which cuts into the letter limit of each post.
- More and more players are getting access to Game-Breaker equipment and abilities, which in turn, has made the Global Nemesis bosses an endangered species. Since the RP count was never increased to accommodate this it's rare to see the likes of Telethia Plume last for more than five hours. This has created a huge divide between players who think the Global Nemesis should be milked for reward tickets and those who want to suck the RP out of it as soon as possible.
