• The glowing reviews from critics and fans who praised Xenoblade Chronicles?
• The grassroots organization known as Operation Rainfall who began pushing the release of Japan-only Wii games last year?
• The lack of anything worthwhile on the Wii in 2012?
• The hope of a JRPG that maybe I might like?
• Hailinel?

The part of the blog where I explain why Xenoblade Chronicles is awesome.

But Dalai, did Xenoblade Chronicles change your opinion on Japanese role-playing games?

Speaking of Operation Rainfall, Dalai, did it change your opinion on petitions?

The end of this game is a big bag of cocks. Boss Rush sequences followed by poorly constructed levels followed by Boss Rush sequences.

Considering how much hype this game had around it, I was expecting it to be a lot smarter than it was. But it ends up having the same problems as every other Monolith game. A fairly interesting story and combat good enough to keep you enthralled enough until the end, where the game becomes a clunky mess in the developers attempts to make the combat difficult, when all they're doing is breaking every system they spent 40 hours trying to hammer into you.

@Mesoian: I can't imagine what the end-game must've been like for people who didn't overlevel themselves with side-quests. All I recall was an absurdly spacious castle dungeon, some portentous BGM and cutting down absolutely everything in the way. And then that insane ending. Was there any boss fight in particular (keeping in mind spoilers) that seemed unbalanced?

@Dalai Hey Dalai. I'm responding to your blog with an @ so you get two notifications instead of one. I think I oughta concur with your bullet point list of reasons for why I wanted to play Xenoblade as well. That darn Hailinel gets everywhere. (I also liked how it was one of the very few JRPGs to make it to Europe, especially with the whole US release still up in the air. Don't get me wrong: I'm glad you guys got it eventually, it's just that turnabout is fair play is all.)

Wait. You're telling me you didn't want to throttle Riki every time he opened his stupid fucking mouth?

Seriously, though, I had a reasonably good time with this game, though admittedly I lost interest near the end, sometime after the Japanese curveball, and have yet to finish it. Xenoblade seemed pretty genre standard to me as far as story and character goes, so I'm not sure where the delineation is between Xenoblade and the JRPGs you apparently don't care for, but you're certainly entitled to like what you like.

Probably the best part of the game is the battle system, specifically the precognition twist on it. That first boss fight when you start having to dynamically react to Shulk's visions was just fantastic.

Xenoblade Chronicles is pretty rad!

@Mesoian: @Mento: I remember the Gadolt fight being littered with cheap shots. It took me several attempts and some additional leveling up to actually beat him. And I was overleveled throughout most of the game. It was at that point where my level felt somewhat balanced.

@Encephalon: Riki didn't annoy me one bit, surprisingly. And I had a ton of success with him on the battlefield. Anyway, I do realize the story isn't that different from the usual JRPG fare, but I just wasn't bothered by it for some reason. It could be because of my lack of JRPG experience or they just presented it in a good way. Something just clicked this time.

I'm closing in on the end of the game (maybe). I'm at a point where I'm going to do every sidequest I can before I get sick of them, because the point of no return on a lot of the timed quests is right around the corner. That said, I'm enjoying the hell out of this game and am less than half an hour from a hundred total hours clocked. A friend of mine is only a zone or two ahead of me and has logged a fuckton more hours than I have, has completed more sidequests, has more achievements than I'll probably ever have the patience to gun for, and is...well, she's enjoying the hell out of it, too. She also happens to be a diehard Xenogears fan and is constantly having fun with the thematic similarities between the two games (as well as Xenosaga). It's really interesting to get her perspective on Xenoblade, as she also happens to have studied up on gnosticism and other elements that influence the games and their respective worlds/universes.

I do believe, however, that Japanese RPGs are as good as they ever were. You mention wanting to see another Final Fantasy VII landmark, but I don't think that's ever going to happen. Final Fantasy VII's popularity was a case of perfect timing. The game's overall quality played a large role, of course, but so did the fact that it was the first Final Fantasy for the post-cartridge generation of hardware and a game that Sony pushed hard in advertising the Playstation brand. It received more marketing in North America than all of the rest of the series combined up to that point. It was that moment when the series really broke into the mainstream among western audiences.

It's also, unfortunately, that moment that became cemented in a lot of peoples' minds in what defines a JRPG. No matter how much the genre has evolved since 1997, there are still people, seemingly some of the GB staff included, that constantly ignore most every step of evolution that both the Final Fantasy series and the genre as a whole have gone through in the past fifteen years. And even then their focus on the genre is laser-focused onto the Final Fantasy series for the most part, from which they'll zoom even further in on the flaws. Final Fantasy XIII is a great example of this. The game has easily one of the best incarnations of the Active Time Battle system to date as well as an interesting story and characters. But despite what the game does well, critics of the genre zoomed in on:

• The overly linear map design. This is a valid complaint, but even so, it's not the first Final Fantasy to feature a linear path. (See: Final Fantasy X.)
• The slow pace of gameplay's unveiling. The game takes its sweet time in doling out gameplay concepts for the first twenty hours or so, but over that same time, the story is constantly moving. There is always something going on to keep the player engaged. And if you're so focused on the fact that you can't access the Crystarium from the start, then you're missing the forest for the trees.

And so on. But in terms of what Final Fantasy is, specifically, it is a series that has always changed things up from game to game. People that fell in love with Final Fantasy VII were upset that Final Fantasy VIII didn't conform to the same concepts. Others hated Final Fantasy XII because it was so MMO-like and put more focus on the events of the story than the characters themselves. If people want an RPG experience that doesn't change that drastically in terms of its mechanics or presentation from game to game, they should try Dragon Quest.

And then there's just the general problem of critical apathy, where certain portions of the professional critics and reviewers out there simply refuse to keep their knowledge of the genre and the games in it up to date. Not everyone is like this, of course, and I don't expect every reviewer to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre as a whole. But I do count the Giant Bomb staff as part of this problem. They cover JRPGs in quick looks, and for the most part, are generally dismissive and uninterested (see the Kingdom Hearts 3D Quick Look for an example of this) or they make statements that make them seem foolish or clueless. (See Patrick's comments about Xenoblade being a JRPG that "finally gets it" in its quick look, or his factually inaccurate comments regarding Final Fantasy and Tetsuya Nomura on the Bombcast.) I should preface this by saying that I am a fan of Kingdom Hearts, and that I have, for the most part, kept up on the story of the games. That being said, when Brad states that he apparently hadn't played through a KH game since the first one, and then had no interest in the story and no understanding of the evolution of the series as a whole from beyond his main point of reference, it seems absurd that he'd even bother covering the game enough to provide a quick look of it because he genuinely lacks any interest in in it whatsoever and has no desire to educate himself.

I can't be the only one that finds that absurd.

Yet, it's this sort of blase, ignorant, disinterested approach that Giant Bomb takes to the genre as a whole that seems to breed some of the contempt for it that I've seen on these forums. Because just like the crew, there are users that share that same level of disinterest, but trust the staff enough that they'll eat up and parrot anything that they spout as absolute, regardless of how foolish the staff looks to anyone that knows better. I'm honestly curious on just what the staff's actual, sum total frame of reference for the genre is, because beyond Persona 4 and Final Fantasy XIII (which Brad reviewed), I can't think of a single game in the genre from the last five years that anyone on the staff has played even halfway to completion, as far as they have been willing to talk about.

@Encephalon said:

Wait. You're telling me you didn't want to throttle Riki every time he opened his stupid fucking mouth?

Riki is hilarious. He's actually a nice twist on his character archetype. Who'd guess he's:

@Hailinel: You wrote a blog within a blog because I referenced you, right? I mean, you were the staunchest supporter of OP out of all the people here I know. You did the dirty work for me and the other lazy bastards.

As for the JRPG stereotypes, you're probably not wrong about the preconceived notions of JRPGs among many gamers and the Giant Bomb staff... and probably most game journalists in the U.S. right now. In fact, I'll admit to having the mindset as well. Maybe I've been out of the loop so long, I ignore the changes, but maybe the doubters and skeptics like me do have some valid points about the direction of the genre and the similarities. I still think a major shift in JRPGs is needed, but I don't think anybody knows what that is.

I still really liked Xenoblade so maybe there's hope for me and JRPGs yet.

@Hailinel said:

@Encephalon said:

Wait. You're telling me you didn't want to throttle Riki every time he opened his stupid fucking mouth?

Riki is hilarious. He's actually a nice twist on his character archetype. Who'd guess he's:

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

40 goddamn years old.

Married with like ten kids.

Only Heropon because his kids have driven him into serious debt.

I still didn't like Riki at all, though. I'm more than glad that Nopon had no greater influence on the plot.

As for Dalai's opinion on Xenoblade, I....pretty much agree, only with trillions more words.

@Dalai said:

@Hailinel: You wrote a blog within a blog because I referenced you, right? I mean, you were the staunchest supporter of OP out of all the people here I know. You did the dirty work for me and the other lazy bastards.

Possibly, yes. Also, you're welcome. :P As an Operation Rainfall supporter, I am doubtful that the campaign itself was entirely responsible for the North American release of Xenoblade. But it did get noticed by a lot of people and, on some level, informed them that hey, there's an audience for those games over here.

But my thoughts in that blog post within a blog post (Xzibit post?) had actually already been on my mind quite a bit lately, and were only stoked all the more when I watched the KH3D QL this morning. Your comments just made me pull the trigger on my ranting.

I'm sure that the critics and skeptics do have some valid points, but all the same, I think that it would be better if the doubters and skeptics spent more time educating themselves on the genre before offering suggestions about the direction that the genre should go. It is, as I believe I noted in the KH3D QL thread, that a lot of the opinions I hear are kind of like if a guy read The Hobbit, and then read Return of the King, and then started complaining about how the story makes no sense, why was Bilbo replaced with this Frodo guy, why is the whole thing so much more serious and dour, and where the fuck is Bombur? Basically, it's people asking for the genre to change to be what they want, rather than what the creators of the games and the fans that already enjoy them want, without the full context of what it is people enjoy about them.

Xenosaga series from PS2 was my second favorite RPG series from that generation and Xenoblade is my favorite RPG from this generation of consoles, hands down. What Monolith studio excels at is having interesting storybeats. New characters make their appearance at just the right time and new twists are revealed on just the right occasions. Plus, they are a delight to play as well.

What Monolith needs to work on for their next game is making actual characters more interesting. Shion from Xenosaga was such a bland protagonist and several of main characters from Xenoblade failed to deviate from this unfortunate trend. The whole Nopon race was awful and that awfulness carried over to their badly designed vertical Nopon village.

But despite these flaws I greatly enjoyed the game. It captured quite nicely the open world feel of being able to go anywhere and encountering enemies that are way above your ability to beat them. But you know that such enemies exist and will one day fall under your hands. Even when I reached maximum level and felt that nothing could beat me a 120 level monster showed up and gave me business.

Excellent RPG game. Way better than Skyrim in my opinion.

@Video_Game_King: So slightly shorter than your Persona 4 review?

@Hailinel: Now I kinda want some Xenoblade spinoff starring Xzibit aptly named Xziblade Chronicles.

I don't think I would want the established franchises like Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, Tales, etc. to cater to the haters (rhyme intended) and alienate the fans, but I'm sure there is room for an original IP to experiment a bit more with different settings, mechanics, and themes. That's why I respect the Persona series. They're still classic turn-based JRPGs, but they distance themselves from the usual formula and create something unique and brilliant.

Surprisingly, it's longer. I had to use five images for it, and the caption on the last one is "WHY WON'T THIS BLOG END ALREADY!?".

@Dalai said:

@Video_Game_King: So slightly shorter than your Persona 4 review?

@Hailinel: Now I kinda want some Xenoblade spinoff starring Xzibit aptly named Xziblade Chronicles.

I don't think I would want the established franchises like Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy, Tales, etc. to cater to the haters (rhyme intended) and alienate the fans, but I'm sure there is room for an original IP to experiment a bit more with different settings, mechanics, and themes. That's why I respect the Persona series. They're still classic turn-based JRPGs, but they distance themselves from the usual formula and create something unique and brilliant.

I think that, perhaps, you should take a look at The Last Story when it ships. The game has a combat system with mechanics that are very much out of the ordinary for the genre.

@Dalai said:

That's why I respect the Persona series. They're still classic turn-based JRPGs, but they distance themselves from the usual formula and create something unique and brilliant.

Ironically, take one step outside of the JRPG milieu, and the "high school drama with supernatural elements" setting is perhaps the most well-worn of the last decade of anime. It's really a credit to the Persona guys that they can straddle that line.

Dalai market forces play a big role in inhibiting creativity so that studios churn out whatever sells the most. This is true not just of JRPG but games from every genre. How many shooter games can you name that truly stand out from the rest of the crowd in its characters, setting, story, and gameplay? Only MGS4 and Spec ops come to my mind and even they are not truly unique in all aspects.

There have been several JRPG games that have experimented with something new but since something new doesn't equate to financial success, they just kind of faded way from the psyche of the masses. Xenosaga series was originally meant to be 6 games that spanned across multiple generation of consoles but lack of financial success did not allow it to reach its true potential. It was innovative in how it wrestled with some heavy concepts. There is Shadow hearts Covenant and Shadow hearts Brave New world; JRPG games set in 20th century U.S. that had excellent comedic characters and a fun story. But despite their originality they did not caught on with the masses either.

More often than not what gets caught on are tried and true ideas. Like Encephalon said, a game set in Japanese middle/high school with kids gaining special powers has 0 originality. About half of anime series released every year in Japan has this plot line. I am not saying persona games are bad but they should not be praised for their originality, because they aren't. Games from original Shin Megami Series take a lot more risk in their often dark storyline but unfortunately they aren't as popular as the spin off persona series.

I don't ever blog about video games in terms of describing my experiences...ever. But I came really close in regards to writing a blog about my time Xenoblade and also in regards to Bastion. Both for the same reason in that they were games that were from genres I don't play often and were highly recommended by friends and ultimately I didn't enjoy. Yes, that's right I didn't like Xenoblade Chronicles, but that's okay, I'm happy I gave it a try and am equally happy that the game was released to a wider audience. In fact I'm at that point where I'm more willing to play games outside of my comfort zone than I ever have, even if that means I fall on my face a couple of times, as a result of the experience. I'd say playing games and not liking them is just as normal as playing them and thinking whatever you played is the greatest thing since Optimus Prime died for your sins. 
 
In regards to putting why I didn't enjoy the game, or what part of it didn't connect to me in the form of a massive blog for everyone to read over, someone beat me to it. MajorMitch, wrote out his reasons and as I saw his reasons were exactly the same as mine. 

@K9: Well I can't really dispute the fact that familiarity sells. You mentioned shooters having similar problems with originality and that's pretty much true. The same can be said about WRPGs, MMORPGs, and almost every major genre at this point. I think the reason JRPGs get the most criticism is because of cultural divisions between the East and West and because this stigma has been around for years now as opposed to shooters, MMORPGS, etc. where the fatigue for those types of games are now just starting to happen en masse.

As for the Persona comments, a game based in high school alone is foreign to most of the American audience even if that whole storyline has been played out in other media. To someone like me who isn't surrounded by Japanese culture and anime, it's not at all played out. However, I wouldn't want to see Persona clones coming out of the woodwork every week either.

The worst boss fight in the game, and the worst environment, is when you go back to the "inside bionis". Almost every normal enemy is enormous and every platform is only 3 times the width of your character. That means if you're trying to position yourself to do back and side attacks like you have been ALL GAME, you're constantly falling off and dying. The boss of that area, the woman commanding the Telethia is just as bad due to her stupid sheild bits and the fact that her boss room is coated in acid, and your stupid AI characters will constantly ignore it and swim through it in order to get to good position points. It's terrible.

And like you said, if you aren't dramatically overleveled, the end boss sucks. I was level 80, which is the same level as everything past the point of no return. I demolished everything on the way to the final boss (which is ANOTHER boss rush...), and then the final boss was suddenly 5 levels higher than me. Can't go back to grind it out, there's nothing you can do, Just like Xenogears, Just like Xenosaga 1 and 2. That kind of pacing is garbage.

@Mento said:

@Mesoian: I can't imagine what the end-game must've been like for people who didn't overlevel themselves with side-quests. All I recall was an absurdly spacious castle dungeon, some portentous BGM and cutting down absolutely everything in the way. And then that insane ending. Was there any boss fight in particular (keeping in mind spoilers) that seemed unbalanced?