Xenoblade Chronicles

In terms of writing and so on? On its own, pretty much every scene involving Fan la Norne was really strong, especially the showdown with Jin. Vandham's exit was pitch perfect, and I really enjoyed the scenes at the Praetorium and in Tantal. Everything from the end of Elpys to the end of the Cliffs was fantabulous. Morytha itself was pretty good.

When you take the original into account, Malos's weapon had me actually shouting. The Experiment, of course. Meeting the Architect.

Sidequest-wise, Captain Nopopon might be my favorite quest in Xenoblade. The questlines about the group trying to take down Mor Ardain, particularly the bit with the blade who I think was named Akatsuki? Talk about dedication to a cause. Herald was solid, and Dahlia's actual Blade quest and Heart to Heart were both poignant, sad and funny and like a broken record I repeat that it KILLS me that they went with ugly bunny instead of fancy dress Dahlia.

Xenoblade 2 could have blown Xenoblade 1 out of the water on multiple fronts. As it is, I think it undercuts its own themes in too many places to succeed, while Xenoblade 1 continually builds upon its own.

I don't see Fan la Norne to bee anything more than a plot device like Meyneth.

The end of Elpys has Rex act like a colossal jackass that I just skipped every cutscene from then on.

And Malos' weapon and the experiment are said riding on 1's coattails. I cannot put them as something 2 has over 1.

Edited by RAlexa21th on Jun 15th 2020 at 11:00:16 AM

Ok.

2 also has this Pokemon problem where it tries its best to say Driver-Blade relationship is a good thing but if you scrutinize it a little bit then no, it's not. I'm not even talking about the aesop-breaking gameplay.

This is more characters than story perse, but 2's characters are all over the place in terms of quality. Poppi, Nia, Zeke, and Mythra (especially with Torna) feel more developed and make me think more of them in general in a good way. Too bad the likes of Rex, Pyra, and Tora drag the whole gang down. In 1 Shulk, Fiora, Dunban, and Melia are great, but they don't reach the heights of 2's best. But like, Riki and maybe Juju are the worst characters, and they don't really drag down anything. So it's a give and take.

2's primary villains are easily much better than 1's. Jin, Malos, and Amalthus are all complex and interesting figures with multiple ways to read them and an inherent tragedy in them, even if Amalthus's backstory comes too late. Egil is alright and similar to Jin, but he's too backloaded while Jin is a constant presence. Meanwhile Dickson and Zanza are fun with their dickishness, but don't have much going on for them beyond that. Admittedly Mumkhar alone is a better minion than the rest of the Torna goons combined, but this is a case where the important guys win out over the ones just there to be punched.

I never got to the Jin "teleport behind you nothing personal kid" hype, and I'd take Riki over base game Mythra anyday.

I didn't watch many endgame cutscene so can't say much about Amalthus or Malos.

Poppi and Nia are dragged down by their relationship with Tora and Rex respectively. How is Poppi developed, actually, besides the obvious one?

Edited by RAlexa21th on Jun 15th 2020 at 11:21:38 AM

One thing I will say is that I feel that nothing whatsoever should ever be locked to NG+ on principle. Lock it to postgame instead, like how T-ELOS is.

After going through and doing all the sidequests the first time around, the last thing I want to see is content that requires you to do everything all over again.

That goes double for content added via DLC.

Edited by justinkal on Jun 15th 2020 at 1:28:15 PM

I agree! I'd vastly prefer if the NG+ Blades were available in the same save file. Same for the various experience traders.

Although, iirc all of the things added to NG+ by the DLC were free and came out alongside the paid content, which could be accessed in the same playthrough.

EDIT: I don't think that Amalthus was very well done at all. Their actions were far too arbitrary for the purported final goal or start of darkness, both of which I really liked. It was the middle part, including "most of the game that we play" where the it fell apart.

Edited by Watashiwa on Jun 15th 2020 at 11:33:45 AM

I don't think base Xenoblade 2 is near as good as Xenoblade DE, but I love Xenoblade 2 + Torna much better because I love the Torna story and characters, and the Xenoblade 2 Challenge Mode is the most fun I've had gameplay-wise in the franchise.

Amalthus is definitely the weak link among 2's major villains overall, but he still manages to have some really good moments over Dickson and Zanza at least.

Poppi goes from a kid naive about the world into someone who, while still not quite fully matured, has a much greater understanding about her power and what she can and should do. She recognizes that one day she may very well be on the level of an Aegis, and that terrifies her. She has the most emotional parts of the endgame, even more than the leads, as she too learns to let go of those she cares for. It certainly helps that it really doesn't take long for her to be the dominant part of her relationship with Tora. Whatever else you can say about him, he doesn't hold her back from expressing her full potential. Obviously not the deepest stuff ever, and most of it is pretty predictable, but she's done really well once she stops just acting as Tora's maid.

Most of his good moments don't gel at all. Like, is he the distant, conflicted individual who philosophizes on the nature of the world's decline, or the smirking cause of it? Is he someone who'd help a dying stranger at the side of a road with forbidden science, or the person who introduced it and uses it to torture people with?. Is he someone who'd save a baby to live in a complicated and painful world for the hope of something better or kill the baby and call it mercy? Both are good, but he can't be both at the same time. Pick one and stick with it.

Man, Tora. Especially at the start he's so close to being Best Nopon. He's funny, actually helpful, and the maid thing is a great gag when it's a one-off.

And then QT happens and there it all goes. Argh. Poppi is a much better character, but especially as the game goes forward there's times when the party starts dealing with hyper-advanced technology which should be Tora's specialty, but it goes unremarked on. They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character.

Edited by Watashiwa on Jun 16th 2020 at 12:15:16 PM

Amalthus's motivations and actions feel contradictory and haphazard at times, but damn does he have some really great, quotable lines. I also love that of all the seven deadly sins, it's Sloth that's the most dangerous and corruptive. Misanthropic apathy becomes incredibly deadly when backed by political power.

Malos meanwhile is the best, most nuanced take on a Generic Doomsday Villain I've ever seen. Taking "wants to destroy the world for no reason" and making it an actual thing. He's even better after the DLC, where we can compare "cocky, sophistic, doesn't know why he wants to destroy the world but is delighting in it anyway" young Malos with "sober, jaded, companion-oriented, identity crisis" old Malos.

I didn't care at all for Discout Sephiroth during the base game, and even after the DLC I feel his performance as a villain is pretty weak, but I like him as an anti-hero during the DLC.

I think all three villains have potential, but only Malos really gels and it takes Torna for it to happen.

Jin's the easiest fix imo: Villain Has a Point. Villain has a VERY GOOD POINT that the ending never addresses: that no matter how beautiful the sentiment about Driver/Blade relationships that Rex offers, they're still a Slave Race who EXIST for the sake of humanity, to become the literal ground that the rest of the world walks on. Additionally, their very existence+core personality is tied to someone else's, and a bad enough day can warp one of them for their entire life. That's horrifying on every level, and the game does nothing to address it. So have Jin's role be calling it out at every step, with his entire plan being to replace god and create a world where Blades can be themselves. It's already there, just amp it up as his motivation (and maybe make his feelings for Lora be a bit more complicated in the main game, since he does care but wishes he knew if it's because she's his driver or because he's himself). Let him fail, but demand that Pneuma change the Blade system.

As for the last one, he'd need a lot of work. I'll write that up in a day or so, but he needs a complete overhaul.

Welp, since we're all doing this, coutn me in the camp who thinks 1 is a way better game than 2. Someone has already commented on it but the driving differences is that 2's alleged highs do manage to work even for someome who disliked the game like me, but they work in spite of the rest of the game while 1 is just a very cohesive ensemble and that's a quality that can never be overstated.

Replaying the game has got me to reappreciate a couple things I missed the first times. Most notably, Riki really is the best nopon of all threes because he actually has some nice depths and the game does let him showcases those throughout most of his screentime and he's never annoying either. Tora has a solid concept and arc but all of it is frontloaded at the start of the game with a terrible comedy quirk to undercut it, and he's just there for most of the story.

Speaking of nopons, I never realized it until replaying it but nopons were just a lot less Planet of Hats -y in this game. You regularly meet noopons who just talk perfectly normally and not every nopon has the same mannerisms overall. That's something that completely woosh'ed both X and 2 and probably is part of why I always saw them as harmless at worst in the original instead of mildly annoying in the sequels.

1's antagonists might be weaker in a straight comparaison, but that's a case of 2 being less than the sum of it's parts. An important part of what makes the antagonists work is that they're used to highlight shulk's growth as a person over the course of the story. You can tell how much he's changed between two scenes with the same antagonist just by looking at how he sees them. it's something you can clearly see on metal face and Eghil, and to a lasser extent on Dickson and Zanza.

Metal face is a better character than all of the antagonists of 2 combined as far as I'm concerned simply because the way his death his handled makes is so important to what makes 1's story so good. It's the scene where the guy who used to openly admits to be driven by revenge talks down another guy driven by the exact same desire of revenge to kill the most hateful character of the whole story.

Rex doesn't really have that in 2 at all because he essentially starts the game having already figured out the entire answer to the game without having lived it, and the game simply gives him words to put on things he seems to have always understood. And as such he's never really all that changed by his oppositions to the antagonists. Amalthus might have a lot of resonance to the player because of modern world applicability, but his opposition to Rex is an afterthought. Malos might be an interesting concept in theory and has a pretty neat arc for himself thanks to Torna, but his role in the story is still to be the Generic Doomsday Villain and is treated as such by the plot itself. Tellingly, the only scene of 2 I occasionally go back to rewatch is Jin's final confrontation and the scene is pretty much Rex just stating the aesop of the game he has understood for a while now and how it breaks Jin to hear it worded like that.

Another thing replaying the original has made me realized is that 1's writing is simply more direct, more grounded when 2's tend to rely a bit too much on playing tired tropes straight to create drama.

The politics in Alcamoth are a great exemple because 2 has a similar arc with Tantal to draw parralels at how both games do things. I've always thought of the politics in Alcamoth to be an almost unbelievable amount of great guys because the defining theme of those people is "reasonable", because the game seems hellbent on defying Be as Unhelpful as Possible at every turn.

When the party gets detained, the game uses Alvis that it introduced earlier to immediately defuse the situation while at the same time providing an explanation for why the party was detained. Then immediately after that, the people they just arrested ask for permission to interfere with a traditionnal ritual because one guy in the group said he foresaw someone was gonna interfere in the ritual anyway, AND IT WORKS because a) they also have a guy who see the future so they don't play the skeptic card, and b) because unlike many times in fiction with people who put Honor Before Reason, they actually remember that if they can help melia and also do it by the book by exploiting a loophole, there's no reason to oppose them.

After that, when the gang asks for permission to go to prison island, they don't get a "no" and cryptic comments for a reason why they can't. The emperor asks for time to think about it and gives the reasons why he needs to think about it, which in turns makes you want to say "okay, I can understand that, hit me up when you've made your mind".

There's another nice case of this right after prison island where Melia is trying to convince herself she can't go with the rest of the group because of plitical duties and Kallian just shows up having already thoguht of a way to solve it while letting melia go with the rest of the cast while being very supportive of the bionis alliance against the mechons.

Tantal has a very similar situation of the party getitng arrested by an otherwise wise ruler concerned by good reasons about the power of the Aegis, but instead we have to break out of jail and fight our way through the entire royal guard to get out, and the most help we get from tantal is that they stop interfering with the party for the remainder of the plot. Which makes the supposedly wise king look like a moron.

That's the point where the differences are the most obvious but that's running thing for both games. Xenoblade 1 feels like the most well adjusted party of individuals of all of JRP Gs simply because every single time an issue arises between the group, they simply talk it over almost as soon as it comes up and get resolved without needing an overly dramatic situation to force a resolution. It takes exactly three sentences to Reyn to call out shulk for his tendencies to keep his visions to himself instead of warning them so they can work out to defuse it, and Shulk immediately takes the point puts it into practice. Similarly, after the events of Prison Island, Dunban just calmly explains why things are actually looking pretty good for them and Shulk, who was more confused than depressed, accepts the answer and decides to keep going forward without being a bitch about it.

Poppi slapping rex out of his Heroic BSoD might make for a more shocking moment than Dunban and Shulk's reasonable discussion, but it requires Rex to make a stupid decision in the first place, to persist in it's way when other people spells it out to him how dumb he is being, and just generally makes you want to punch him for deciding to give up after Tantal. Everything about Niall before torna made him a much better character made me howl at how stupid this entire plot was and how it could have been avoided.

That's one of the things that make 1's sotry much better than 2 in my eyes. it doesn't need to use pointless drama to create tension or great character arcs.

Edited by Yumil on Jun 16th 2020 at 1:22:03 PM

One of the things that I especially loved about the first Xenoblade was that the cast were very good at averting the Poor Communication Kills problems that utterly plague most JRPGs and a great deal of Japanese media in general. Characters consistently acted to the best of their ability and any mishaps or conflicts were the logical consequences of their character flaws or a reasonable lack of information that the players themselves would not have been privy to either. It's quite refreshing.

that sums it up better than I did.

The main theme of Xenoblade 1 is very well-supported by the gameplay too.

Story: "Goddammit Shulk if you have a vision then warn us so we know what to do."

Gameplay: You can literally warn anyone whenever a vision appears (okay, AI Shulks refusing to break visions by himself is a little weird).

The Aegis' foresight ability was hyped up to be the next equivalent...but not so.

Foresight would be useful if Rex was actually fast enough to actually benefit from it.

Also the 1's story is superior to 2. 2's chapter 4 was that much of absolute mess.

Edited by NoName999 on Jun 16th 2020 at 4:26:49 AM

Xenoblade X's main theme was also well-represented in gameplay.

It's just that theme was the much less philosophical 'Giant Robots'

X is officially connected to 1 and 2

If that's to be interpretted literally, I suppose the earth in X could have been the same one from before Klaus's universe-ending experiment, with Mira being some sort of refuge.

Impossible. The Earth is clearly destroyed in two different ways.

Oh, right. It's been too long since I played X.

That could be easily be retconned because in 2 it also looked like the Earth blew up as well. What's to stop the humans who escaped from thinking that the Earth is actually gone but it's in fact, still there?