Difference between Xenoblade and White Knight Chronicles?

I bought White Knight Chronicles 2 which includes the first game for free for €15. The game has mediocre reviews. Xenosaga Chronicles cost a fortune and have great reviews. What is the huge differece? I have not played Xenosaga since I don't have a Wii, but looking on youtube at combat gameplay it seems to play very similar. Both games are kind of single player MMO's with quests and killing monsters on an open field. They both have a single player story that is voiced and with cut scenes but seem mostly to be about fetch quests. Even the way they have translated the quickbar in PC MMO's to work with a controller seems the same.

So why was Xenoblade Chronicles regarded as the best thing that happend to RPG's in years with a metacritic of 92 and White Knight Chronicles was all but ignored with a metacritic of 60?

Anyone have played both?

WKC is extremely grindy and the story and dialogue are atrocious.

WKC2 is even worse, as you just backtrack through every area you went through in the first game.

Xenoblade is an amazingly fun game with a fantastic story. WKC, from what I've heard, is not.

It's easy to compare the two based on those similarities, but on the whole, those comparisons are largely superficial. There are a lot of factors as to why Xenoblade Chronicles is a more well-regarded game than White Knight Chronicles (or White Knight Chronicles II, for that matter).

That's it. We're done here. Close the thread, guys.

Let me lay it down, in case it wasn't already clear from what Meat said.

Xenoblade is a good video game.

White Knight Chronicles is a bad video game.

I actually really liked WKC (1 & 2). However, I will freely admit that the plot and characters are pretty dumb/bad, and more importantly, those games kind of hinged on an online multiplayer component which was shut down sometime last summer I think, so the game is borderline useless.

I actually quite liked what I played of WKC so far. The combat is different and the world seems to be massive. I also have the collection of the two games in one and will be start it up again when I can, but I've played about 10 hours of MKC1 and about 150 of Xenoblade.

Xenoblade is a really outstanding game. Honestly I could sit here and just praise the game to no end but I think you should just play it for yourself. There are segments that are weaker, sure, (like the mechon city) but after that everything's good again. I can't believe they were able to create a game with such scope on the Wii.

WKC in comparison is a lot slower, the characters are blander, world is generic. But I still don't find it necessarily bad to play.

@epidehl: Was the online really that integral? I tried it when it was still up and it seemed to me like a bunch of separate co op missions and a customized town for guilds. Didn't seem like any major story stuff was in there.

@xyzygy: A lot of the early reveal trailers that got everybody hyped about it were focused on the online multiplayer, but in the final game yeah its a pretty small thing

On topic: Xenoblade is a much much better game in pretty much every way, the only thing WKC has over it is technically better graphics, but the art design in Xenoblade is so great that even that doesn't matter. Also Xenoblade does not "cost a fortune", it's on amazon for $80 + Shipping which really isn't that bad if you are at all into rare games.

@xyzygy: It's not major story stuff, but higher-level quests that required multiple people were the only way (if I remember correctly) to get a bunch of items in order to get/make a ton of later equipment, a lot of which I think is nigh-impossible to get now. That said, I don't think you need it to "beat the game".

Here is another difference!

Xenoblade was good enough to make me import it from the EU (when there was no word of an american version) and mod my Wii to play it.
White Knight Chronicles was so good..... I didn't bother buying the sequel because the first one sucked. I also didn't bother beating the first one either.

Spend the extra scratch and buy one of the best JRPG's of the last 5 years.

So people have said that WKC sucks and Xenoblade is great but I still don't understand what it is that makes Xenoblade so great. Does Xenoblade have a great story? I got the impression it was mostly about grinding too.

I am interested in Xenoblade but I would have to buy a Wii just for that and now you can no longer find those new except for Wii Mini that doesn't even have a way to connect to the internet and I don't trust buying used consoles.

From the videos I've seen Xenoblade looks like a single player MMO, is that a fair assumption?

I still can't believe that Level 5 went from making Dark Cloud 2, Rogue Galaxy, and Dragon Quest 8 to making something as mediocre as White Knight Chronicles. It's all Professor Layton's fault isn't it?

@dagas: In a few days the regular Wii won't be able to access the internet either, except to use the Wii Shop. So depending on what you were planning to do online, Wii Mini might be acceptable.

@xyzygy: Well, Final Fantasy XII (and Dragon Quest VIII) has more scope than basically every PS3 JRPG. Scope has never really been a hardware limitation issue.

@fredchuckdave: That's true. I guess I was just thinking about RPGs on the Wii. I can't think of one that has the same scope of Xenoblade.

@dagas: Well if you're buying a Wii for one game you should know there are other good RPGs out there for it. The Last Story is one of my personal favorites (though it is short it's still good) and Pandora's Tower is a very interesting game.

As for its merits... It takes place on this world that was created when two giant beings clashed. They froze in time and over time their bodies developed into an ecosystem. When you travel across certain areas of the world, you are actually located on a certain part of the giant's body. You travel across the two different worlds; one is a lush, biological world, the other is mechanical.

The story is good and long and culminates to something beautiful. The game is challenging. The main story is long and there are plenty of monster hunting style sidequests. Music is absolutely wonderful. Voices are excellent and unique, it's one of the only games I've played where characters have a this really awesome UK dialect, and the performances are excellent. Graphics are some of the best on the Wii. Game is equally good played on either Classic or Remote controllers, I've even heard reports that it's better on the remote because of the combat UI.

Battles are fought in real time and there is no separate battle area, you just fight right there on the field. So no random encounters obviously. You are presented with a line of 9 icons: the middle icon is the default and that is your characters special move. To each side of the unique skill are four skills slots to insert skills you want to use. I forget exactly what Shulk's main skill is (Main character) but I think it has something to do with a lot of debuffs. Speaking of debuffs, the game relies on buffing and debuffing. You'll notice that it's pretty integral to the combat. Battles consist of three people, and you need to work together to make sure that you can set up certain situations to utilize your skills to the best effect. For example, Shulk has a skill called Back Slash that does more damage when you are behind your enemy. If one other character has the aggro, then it makes perfect sense to get easily get behind the aggro'd enemy and deal that extra damage. The game IS auttoattack but it's also spacially aware, so you will have to time where you are to when you'll strike to get the most out of your skills. You'll find it's an extremely engaging combat system.

It's a really unique game and it's more than just a "console MMO". I've had more fun with it than any other MMO I've played, I can tell you that much. One of my all time favorite games.

@xyzygy: I love the Xenosaga series and I'm sure I would love Xenoblade I'm just not going to buy a Wii to play it; but I very much appreciate you supporting it as consistently as you do; JRPGs are probably still the genre with the most potential and it's good to praise the good ones, however rare they might be.

Actually as games get more expensive the opposite might start/has started to be true; game developers really prefer eyecandy over substance for whatever reason. I don't think that graphics actually sell more though so it doesn't actually make any sense. Crysis should be more than enough to prove that point. Call of Duty has looked more or less the same for 5 or 6 straight games for example.