Note: As always with discussing RPGs, there will be spoilers. I'll try to avoid the most egregious ones, but what I talk about is what I talk about, so consider yourself warned if you care about such things.

JRPGs are a genre of games always looking for a hero to come along to lead them to the promised land. Once a dominant genre of games, it's always seemed to me like JRPG fans are fighting an uphill battle for mainstream acceptance, with mainstream critics often having only the slightest of experience with the genre ("I played FF7 and it was good! Is it like that? Are there espers?") and many others looking at it like the genre itself is some sort of stodgy relic of the past.

In a lot of ways the criticism the genre gets is sort of unfounded, anymore. Despite the popular conception that the genre plays to similar mechanical tropes that have somehow gone universally unchanged since the 90s, JRPGs these days are probably the most mechanically diverse genre outside of, like, puzzle games. Even aesthetically I have a hard time thinking of a more creatively varied major genre in games today. So when Xenoblade was making waves back in 2011, I was all-ears. I grew up with the genre, I love those games, and will always be open to playing new ones.

And make waves this game certainly did. It sits at a 92 on Metacritic, and reviews glowed about this game with such lines as "This is a landmark achievement in the genre. As of its release, you can no longer talk about great RPGs, or maybe even great games, without also talking about Xenoblade Chronicles." "Xenoblade Chronicles is like a collage of all the best elements taken from the JRPGs that came out in the 2000's." "Probably the best Japanese RPG in years, and hands down the best of this generation." "It's one of the best games on the Wii, it's one of the best RPGs in this generation, and more than that, it's one of the better JRPGs ever made."

Which makes me wonder, what the hell game was I playing?

Xenoblade has a good story, when it's not cock-blocking the player with bullshit filler.

Xenoblade opens with a short monologue setting up the history of the world very succinctly: In ages past, there were two great giants, the Bionis and Mechonis, fighting an eternal battle. Eventually, these two titans fatally wounded each other, falling into a deep slumber, and life flourished on top of them both. On Bionis, organic life, and on Mechonis, the detestable Mechon, which more or less kill innocent organic life on sight. In the prologue, you're told that the life of the Bionis (the Homs chiefly among them) are in a constant state of war with the Mechon, with only one sword capable of truly destroying them: The Monado. A great battle is won against the Mechon signalling a hopeful end to the conflict, and time leaps forward a year to our hero, Shulk, in his hometown of Colony 9.

I like stories with simple beginnings, where the characters have a very basic goal in mind, and the story balloons out of control and becomes several orders of magnitude more complicated as time goes on. Xenoblade's story uses this exact style of plot progression. Shulk is a weapons researcher (aka, a geek) studying the Monado, with his two best friends Fiora and Reyn. Eventually the Mechon not-so-surprisingly invade, kill Fiora, Shulk discovers he is capable of wielding the Monado, and he and Reyn set off on a quest to kill the faced Mechon that murdered Fiora. Xenoblade starts off as a revenge quest, and that's all well and good.

In the beginning I was pretty enraptured by what the game shows you. The UK voice acting gives the game a distinct flair that most Japanese RPGs lack. The soundtrack is easily one of the best soundtracks composed for an RPG in recent years, and even made me set aside my growing contempt for Japan's obsession with the violin. (Seriously, violins are great but you can give them a rest, guys.) The zones are gorgeous and every aspect of the map is used for some purpose, with secret areas tucked away, high level monsters to come back to down the road, and travel within a zone being instantaneous. The characters all have simple, but sympathetic motivations.

However, it quickly becomes apparent that there are simply way too many sidequests. Each area will have several of them right out of the gate, most of which are the worst parts of MMO quest design. "Collect five Dance Apples for me!" "Could you please go kill four of the M64 Mechon? They scare me!" If you raise your affinity with an area enough, accomplished by doing the menial bullshit tasks they're not interested in doing themselves, you could get more meaningful quests, but this requires the player to be comfortable doing hours of petty busywork before you get any of the good stuff. If you don't want to miss things, it's pretty much a Guide Dang It situation. (I completed the game not managing to unlock more than the base three skill trees for all my characters. Why? Because the game gives absolutely zero indication that there even are additional skill trees to unlock, let alone where to find them. Each character also requires separate questlines to unlock them. Hope you have that FAQ open.)

Eventually I wised up and stopped forcing myself to finish out sidequests. I would pick them all up, hope I completed them on the way, and if I didn't, well, fuck it. This had an unfortunate side effect, however, of making me realize how unbelievably thin the story is for the first 25 hours. Not that much actually develops until you reach the High Entia. Once there, you uncover a plot to assassinate Melia, the Empress-in-waiting, and get attacked by a secret order dedicated to killing the holder of the Monado. It all gets very compelling, leading to climactic scenes where the Mechon launch an assault on the High Entia, and Shulk and his party must rush to Prison Island, where they can unlock the hidden power of the Monado.

BUT WAIT. Because this is where the game starts integrating the shitty filler into the main plot progression. Immediately after all of this goes down and you're heading to Prison Island, you have to drop everything you're doing and fix the teleporter that can take you to there by running all over the Eryth Sea and flipping switches and grinding away at a bunch of enemies in the way. Scenes that build up to a great moment in the story have their tension completely ruined for no reason except to pad out the game by another hour or two. Why couldn't I just rush straight to Prison Island, as the game insists the characters do? How does it make more sense that it takes them hours to get there? You mean to tell the the assault just continues for hours while my characters are off fucking about playing tech support?

Pacing in storytelling is key, and the second half of Xenoblade forgets this completely.

What Xenoblade has in its story is the equivalent to a studly guy that has a huge cock, with no idea how to use it. Whenever Xenoblade gets going with telling me its story, I always end up wanting more than what it's willing to give me at the time.

The second half of the game is plagued with examples of anemic pacing and tension killing goose chases. Once Shulk and the party reach the Mechonis, everything about the level progression becomes a series of finding elevator switches, fixing power supplies, and generally running back and forth across drab-looking rustic brown environments because of course you can't just progress to the next part of the story, that would allow you to save a few hours of running around pulling levers, and we can't have that, can we.

What pissed me off about this is that there's clearly such a deep story here that the game is waiting to tell me, yet it acts as if it's terrified to sew up plot threads and move on to the next one. The Metal Face arc spans the first 35 hours of the game, and it's told through the same confrontations again and again. Metal Face shows up, insults you, you kick his ass, he insults you again and runs away. And this happens over, and over, and over. Another example is when the group discovers the Machina village (the Machine-like people who live in the shadows of the Mechonis, and also despise the Mechon) and talks with the Machina chief. He asks Shulk to kill Egil, the leader of the Mechon, who is his son. This comes as a shocking moment, but the tension is squandered yet again. Shulk says he'll need time to think about it, and in the mean-time goes off in search of an item that can heal Mecha-Fiora. When he returns, he is asked again if he will kill Egil, and Shulk says he'll sleep on it. The next morning, he's asked again, and says he still needs more time to consider it. WHY. WHY ARE YOU BELABORING THIS POINT.

Once you reach Agniratha, the Mechonis capitol where Egil lies in wait, you again have to find four separate towers to fix the teleporter to meet the supposed big-bad. There's no other word for what this is: padding. Straight up.

Thankfully, the plot goes nuts in the best possible way from this point forward. Dickson turns evil (and this is actually very subtly foreshadowed, in contrast to a lot of Xenoblade's other predictable plot turns) and you realize Shulk was dead all along and never truly existed. All sorts of crazy shit takes off here, and I really enjoyed it, because it was finally when the game stopped beating around the bushes and told me what was really going on. Surprisingly, everything more or less makes sense within the logic the game creates, too. (Except, Lorithia's motives don't really make much fucking sense, but whatever.)

But then Xenoblade does that thing. That old JRPG thing that no one ever likes. The last areas of the game suddenly shoot up like eight levels and unless you've been significantly overleveled the entire time, you're going to have to stop and grind before you can actually handle the last slew of bosses, of which there are shitloads. Xenoblade never seems to waste an opportunity to make you spend more hours doing busywork, and for a genre so focused on story, it's an unfortunate contradiction.

At least the climax of the story is pretty phenomenal.

Where Xenoblade draws mechanical inspiration it does so better than I expected.

One of the most recent things in video games I'm always pleasantly surprised by is when people say "It's like a single-player MMO, sort of" and this doesn't turn out to be a bad thing. Some of the first combat tutorials in the game openly talk about "aggro," "buffs," and "debuffs" in a way that only make sense if you have MMO experience. In fact, the combat system itself works best if you play it like you would the "Holy Trinity;" with a healer, tank, and DPS/support. Reyn is explicitly meant to be a tank, with several abilities that raise aggro, while Shulk is meant to avoid damage with abilities that imply he does best with positional attacks and abilities that cause aggro reduction. Sharla is a healer. Riki casts several DoTs. Dunban is like an evasion-tank.

They call it the Holy Trinity for a reason, because it works, and Xenoblade makes moving from combat encounter to combat encounter as little of a hassle as possible, which is nice. You heal up super fast in between battles, the UI is unique, but still very simple, and all party members level up at the same rate, solving the age-old JRPG problem of characters becoming useless over time because they're not in the active party. Status effects and damage over time spells also come in super useful, which stands in contrast to so many other RPGs. The game also does some smart things in subverting gameplay and story segregation. Because Shulk can see visions in the plot, this is integrated in the battles, giving you the ability to quickly react to attacks that will likely kill your party members otherwise, also solving an old, often JRPG-specific thing, of sudden or unfair deaths, and even if you do die, you're quickly resurrected at a nearby monument with minimal time loss. Outside of battle Shulk will often see visions of future quests, tipping you off as to what collectibles you're picking up are important or not. This at least makes the egregious amount of sidequests a little easier to swallow.

There are also several small ways the game tries to take the edge off the grinding, by giving you generous EXP rewards for discovering new locations, landmarks, and secret areas all over the map, and an achievement system that similarly heaps on EXP and skill points for engaging in certain amounts of crafting or questing. As far as JRPGs go, this is considerate stuff. (It's only a shame that the main level progression isn't nearly as respectful of your time.)

That being said, though, there are many more instances here where Xenoblade again buckles under the weight of its own side-systems. There is a crafting system that allows you to create various gems that allow you to attach several fairly potent effects onto your weapons and equipment with crystals that you collect from monsters or mine from the environment, but this system is way more complex than it ever needed to be. From the Collectopaedia (a menu that gives you rewards based on how many of the collectibles you gather from a certain zone) you're given plenty of high power gems, and the gem crafting menu itself is a terribly organized nightmare, making actually finding the gems you want to use a hassle, particularly when you need to swap between them based on your encounters. In general there is very little rhyme or reason to the way items are organized, and the sheer number of items is another negative side effect of how many filler sidequests there are in the game.

But I don't mean to be so negative in this case. The act of playing Xenoblade is actually pretty fun. Combat flows really well, picking characters that synergize better with one or the other encourages you to experiment with your group lineup, and in general the positional nature of many of the attacks means you're always engaged with movement or helping your allies. There is very little downtime in Xenoblade's combat and that's a fantastic thing.

Xenoblade is an alright JRPG, but not at all one of the best games in generations.

When I think back to some of my favorite JRPGs, I just think of games that were paced way better than this game. That abided by a more consistent schedule in telling its story, more respectful of my time, with mechanics that were not so bloated. Final Fantasy X's plot structure perfectly matches its journey, the nature of the pilgrimage allowing for significant story events and character development to happen at a regular pace. Persona 4's murder mystery, and the nature of its school calendar and unique dungeons attached to every character, has a story that doesn't feel unevenly told (there's some tonal weirdness in the last month, but it doesn't really get in the way). Suikoden 2 never wasted my time with its stories of rebellion and political intrigue. Lost Odyssey does a better time letting you savor the environments you are in just enough before moving on, instead of lingering for hours upon hours.

Xenoblade is a beautiful 25 hours surrounded by monotonous dozens of others that simply could've been better. It is not a bad game. I don't even believe in the ever pervasive idea from some mainstream critics that all JRPGs would be better if they were shorter just on principle. That's bullshit. But sometimes that is the case, not because long games are bad, but because there are times when your storytelling comes at a trickle like Xenoblade's so often does. Xenoblade feels like a game that had an additional game just randomly attached to it, completely incongruous to its desire to tell you a world-crushing, twisty story. Sidequests are wonderful, but those sidequests should have meat to them, and not be given prominence over your main story. (Seriously, when unlocking the Colony 6 reconstruction sidestory, the game outright tells you "Hey, come back here and do this stuff during breaks in the story!" Why would you sideline the main plot of your own game in such a way?)

People were already declaring this game one of the greatest JRPGs ever made before it even got here. The myth surrounding Xenoblade, that it was an incredible game being kept away from us for too long, that it would be one of the JRPGs that revived the glory days, seems odd having played it alongside other JRPGs of the last decade and beyond. I don't think the game is bad, overall, but this shit's just a JRPG, you guys. It is by no means a revolution. It's strange to me that it ever got such a huge following.

Thanks for reading.

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I hope the one on the Wii U is much better, although I wouldn't bet on it. I'd still like to play this game, even if it is just to fire it up and run through pretty environments to do cheesy MMO quests. I've done a bit of that in Dragon Age Inquisition recently and, I dunno, I just find an RPG that's easy to slip into like that pretty relaxing.

Atlus seems to be the one to look to these days for great JRPG's. SMT IV and Persona both have some pretty great mechanics and Etrian Odyssey does a pretty great job of reviving Wizardry-esque dungeon crawlers.

I feel like what the genre needs, more than anything, is just a really big, popular, extremely well-made game on consoles and maybe PC. Persona 5 might be that game. I don't think FFXV will be, that series just needs a complete refresh - drop everything from the older games and make something from scratch that looks new and different. I think an SMT game - that is, a game like Nocturne or SMT IV - could be pretty successful, given the popularity of the grim aesthetics, difficulty, and mechanical focus of the Souls games.

My JRPG cliches are not that it'll look like the 90s, it's that everyone will have really clear skin except for the guy with the masculine voice, and there will be like three menus you have to use simultaneously during combat. Four different kinds of experience points. My real contention with JRPGs is that I can't seem to get one that hits the right challenge; they're either faceroll or pounding nails through my dick.

I think the core strength of the small adventure that spirals into a world-rending epic is that it gets things moving forward faster. If you're planning on revealing the secret Doom Upon The World within the first two hours, you basically can't do anything but vomit exposition at the player for the entire beginning. You get characters with motives established and gameplay, now you got a video game. And then angels from beyond man's sanity show up at the end of the game for the customary batshit finish.

I correspond the second half of these kind of games as being the Disc 3, where you get to really see the depth in the game, but more and more it seems to be the part where the padding happens.

The reverse box art is even better.

Anyway, yeah, totally on point that this was an imperfect game and a lot of the praise was overblown. The main thread of the story was pretty good I thought (esp. the later twists), but as you pointed out it didn't escape a lot of the problems common in JRPGs, particularly bad pacing. The battle system was pretty engaging and that was enough to keep me playing through the flat parts (I'm one of those unfortunate completionists though, who doesn't need much to compel me to finish something once I'm about 20% in). I am hopeful that the WiiU game will improve on the bad aspects.

A lot of systems in this game felt like experiments, and some of them were successful (e.g. remote-completing quests) while others not so much. I imagine a lot of the praise was derived from it feeling like a fresh entry in a somewhat stagnating genre, despite it not being revolutionary. It *does* stand out to me among games I've played in the last couple of years (I did skip the last few Tales games so no idea if I'd prefer those over this).

I have this game in my possession (I'm holding onto it for a friend) along with The Last Story. If I were to pick up a copy of Pandora's Tower I'd have all of Project Rainfall! Hmmm... I smell a terrible blog idea that I might capitalize on later...

I've heard great things about Xenoblade, but I've also heard most of those things from people who still really like JRPGs. I have my favorites, but I've never been that guy, and hearing yet another person complain about the bloat and questionable pacing of Xenoblade reminds me those things that are only secondary to obnoxious characters and predictable story (which Xenoblade seems to have neither, also they're hella british which I'm a big fan of) as reasons why I don't play a ton of these sorts of games.

Still, I'll give it a shot somewhere down the road. I'm not taking any classes Spring Semester, so maybe once I pick Lightning Returns up again and get that magical journey over with I'll give it a look. It's not like that Wii is doing much other than collecting dust otherwise.

@arbitrarywater: The characters in this game are completely one-note and generic. I don't even think anyone has an arc, to speak of. Good characters would've made some of the meandering parts of the game more tolerable, but you won't find much, if any, of that here.

As someone who is generally disgusted with the majority of JRPGs of the past five or six years, I thought Xenoblade Chronicles was easily the best one out of those that I've managed to play yet. The only one I can see potentially de-throning it is Ni No Kuni which I hope to get around to someday.

I think the thing that makes or breaks a JRPG for me is how well it establishes its universe. FFXIII has ridiculous architecture, asinine physics and the most mind-numbing plot ever digitized. Resonance of Fate is mostly just a combat system with bits of disconnected plot here and there and an over-world that could be interesting but is unfortunately broken up into an abstract hex map with your party designated by a bloody pointer. Eternal Sonata oozes potential with its setup, but ends up being the most boring-yet-colorful thing I've ever experienced with easily the worst character design ever and a battle system that actively gets worse the further into the game you get.

I thought Xenoblade Chronicles did world building better than any of those. It helps that the characters were generally (*coughcutesypieceofshitNoponcough*) likable and not anime douchebags and that the plot was anime-ridiculous, yet at the same time at least internally consistent, unlike something like FFXIII with it's annoying to bland-as-fuck cast of characters and fucking ridiculously inane, all-over-the-place-contradicting-itself plot. Fuck, the entire game takes place on the backs and appendages of two giant mechs frozen in eternal battle. That earns it some cool points right there.

It's incredible to me that you state the issues this game has with pacing as being a big impediment to your enjoyment of it, yet also imply that Lost Odyssey is one of your favorite JRPGs of all time. I found that game to have disastrously bad pacing, can't imagine how much worse Xenoblade Chronicles must be.

So even if you haven't played Xenoblade you've basically played Xenoblade.

It's been awhile since I last played Lost Odyssey so I don't really have a great map of the moment to moment stuff in my head, but I don't recall anything in that game that really constantly stops you from progressing the plot with menial tasks. It's a slow burn, and there's one really annoying mandatory sidequest you have to do for that funeral, but otherwise Lost Odyssey understands what you're there for. When I complain about Xenoblade's pacing it's more that Xenoblade is constantly interrupting itself in a way not many JRPGs I've played do. I can't stress enough the amount of areas in the second half of Xenoblade that are literally just all about flipping switches or climbing up and down broken elevators. The game always feels like it's telling you "stop doing this petty main story nonsense and do some sidequests instead!"

One example from near the end of the game: On the return to Prison Island to have a confrontation with one of the big bads, just before the final climb to the top platform (after unlocking several doors and fighting a trillion minibosses, mind) there's a boss that does obscene amounts of "spike" damage, something almost no boss in the game does, ever, and is incredibly annoying. The only way you can beat this boss is by having a ton of gems attached to your equipment that reduce spike damage and increase healing percentages, but nothing in the game up to this point has required you do this, necessitating a trip all the way back to the hometown to do a bunch of gem crafting during a period of the game that's supposed to be all about charging toward the villains to save Bionis. When you reach Agniratha, the aforementioned Mechon capitol to kill their leader, I mentioned you have to fix a teleporter (again!) before you can fight him, but the game also sees fit to give you at least thirteen sidequests you can do along the way. The game just constantly seems to be telling you that the "right" way to play the game is by ignoring the main plot every once in awhile, which annoyed the fuck out of me.

I played it when it came out in the US a couple of years ago, so I may be looking at through rose tinted eyes, but I don't recall many of these issues with the game. All I know is that it was the first RPG in a long time that I actually really enjoyed. I do remember there being way too many side quest, but I believe I just started skipping most of them. I did really like the characters and story though. I guess I'd have to go back and play it again to see if I notice the pacing issues.

I can't speak for everyone, but I personally see why people praise it so much. The combat was fun, it had likeable characters, and a neat story. I think the last RPG I played before that was FFX. I guess this game kind of proved to myself that I could still like JRPGs, a genre that I really enjoyed growing up but has personally fallen off for me in recent years.

Like, I don't even know how this is arguable. Very few of the characters in Xenoblade have any real arcs, and almost no time is spent with them on anything but the immediate story events taking place. Even once you throw in the other games mentioned, Lost Odyssey is all about immortals who have lost their memories and rediscover their pasts, and Suikoden 2 is about a best friendship gone bad as much as it is the war and rebellion. The characters in Xenoblade are fine, but they're not standout figures by any means, and I don't think the game really even tries to make them memorable, to be honest. There are too many sacrifices that game makes to accommodate the wide quantity of content in the game, but I don't think most of it is very good as a result.

@marokai: Yeah, that sounds inexcusably awful. Like if Antonioni made a video game. Let's just forget the plot and meander on this trivial thing for the next few hours.

I don't mind games like Xenoblade or DA: Inquisition because I throw on podcasts like 99% Invisible or Hardcore History and ensure that my brain is active and learning something, taking the focus off the more menial bits of the games I'm playing. This isn't a defence of these games, and I agree with your criticisms, but they don't bother me as much. I could have never sat through the brain deadening process of doing nothing but running around and bashing stuff if I didn't have a lesson about the Roman empire playing in my ears.

Yeah I can't help but chime in on this bit. I'm sure it has more to do with my age than the game itself but Lost Odyssey was that game that made me finally say "Enough is enough. I don't care how much I'm enjoying the combat system, I just can't take this pace of game anymore." ...and I played like 60 hours of Blue Dragon ffs.

I love classic JRPG gameplay but I feel at some point these games became less about gameplay and characters, and more about who can write the most lines of dialogue and render the most impressive and/or longest cutscenes.

@nasar7: I'm sort of curious, as a person who deeply loves a lot of what Lost Odyssey did, for more detail on what you dislike about it, if you remember the game well enough at this point to give it.

God dammit first I hear praise, then I hear groans, IS THIS GAME GOOD OR NOT, PEOPLE?

I got a New 3DS (not specifically for this game, just wanted to upgrade from original little 3DS) and I was looking forward to this. I don't know if I want it now. TELL ME WHAT TO FEEL

@marokai: I made a thread about it back in the day, followed by this blog post. Essentially, I remember enjoying the game through Numara. Those caves at the end of Disc 1 started highlighting my frustrations with the combat system (highly irregular random battles, too many party members, too many enemies, takes forever). The entirety of disc 2 really tried my patience. The plot went absolutely nowhere for an entire disc (10-15 hours?), the characters which I initially found to be cooly mysterious turn out to be sort of lame. The concept of being immortals was an interesting idea but ultimately robbed any tension from the story because the main characters were never really in danger. If you read my blog post about the Experimental Staff section, I think there are a lot of similarities to your frustrations with Xenoblade Chronicles, namely having to fuck around getting a keycard or whatever in order to advance, in what is supposed to be an exciting section of the game where you are hurrying to stop the bad guy, which can only be stolen off certain enemies (see above feelings on combat). I think I got to disc 3 and turned it off, never finished it. Based on what I heard from people who beat the game, I don't regret it in the slightest. Anyway, I know I'm in the minority on this one but those were my issues with LO.

Excellent read @marokai! Can always count on you to lay it out like it is.

I don't know what it is with the Monolith Software guys, but their games always seem to meander oddly in the back half. Least the ones I've played.

It's a good game that's got some flaws (sidequest bloat and narrative pacing problems).

In other words it's a Xeno game.

It's up to you to determine whether those characteristics make it good or bad for you.

Complete agreement on the abysmal pacing preventing this game from being an all-time great JRPG. When I think back on the game I remember the high points - taking down XORD in Colony 6, Dunban arriving to the rescue, the encounter(s) with faced mechon, the climactic battles against the ending bosses, the huge battles taking place between the mechon and the creatures of bionis. The game has some pretty amazing scenes that would make for a compelling story if they were played straight through.

But then I remember the fact that I almost quit playing when going down the mines in Colony 6 through the ultra-repetitive mining facility. Or climbing Mechonis with constant multi-hour button quests separating me from the next great few minute scene. Or grinding to be able to fight the end bosses. Or doing endless sidequests to build up affinity and get skill trees. It was a slog just to get to the next scene I really wanted to see.

I didn't realize how bad it was until I started watching a Let's Play of the game and realized that I was mainly waiting to see the plot episodes again... and there was about one plot episode for every five sidequest/grind/exploration episodes. That's not to say the game doesn't do a lot of things right mechanically in terms of sidequests, exploration, hidden stuff, affinity, etc, and I'm sure some people really appreciate having a hundred+ hours of content. But there has to be a better way to balance that with telling a 25-35 hour story.

Even when I was a kid with a ton of time, the JRPGs I liked were not ones with 50+ hours of bland MMO-filler quests. There's very little filler in Chrono Trigger or Final Fantasy VI for example. I don't know how 100+ hours of content went from being a moderate joke to a required feature of JRPGs, but it could really die off. If a game is worth my time, I'm willing to spend it, but almost no game is worth 100+ hours.

Is that an older version of Bandit Keith from Yugioh?

I concur the back half pacing is bad, and the pacing could be better over all throughout. That said it was still a great game and easily the best JRPG in a very very long time. Of all the project Rain (or was it Rainfall, I forget) RPG's this is the one that legitimately did live up to the hype and really should have gotten a release without people having to fight for it. Did it redefine the genre? No, but it was certainly the best JRPG since Persona 4 and I could argue a case that it was in fact better than Persona 4 to begin with.

Sure the pace was bad at points. Sure the colony 6 stuff was strange (you could ignore it you know), and yes the second half was weaker than the first (it is a Xeno game by this point those of us who knows these games would be shocked if it wasn't), but I would still play it over any Final Fantasy release in well.... .... .... like ps2 days. Personally I did not care for FFX over Chronicles though it is the last game in the series that I thought was legitimately good. Too much Wakka I guess.

I've thought about this a lot and I feel like the bolded here is a huge point for me. The popular perception of JRPGs is that you have less tolerance for them as you get older, but for me this hasn't been the case whatsoever. Some of them just have hideous pacing issues, and even my favorite JRPGs from when I had much fewer cares in the world as a child weren't so disrespectful of my time. I played a lot of the first Suikoden and loved it before my age hit the double digits, and you can blow through that game in well under 30 hours. EXP scales to your level to minimize grinding and there's no sacrifice in spectacle or scope of the story. I don't see any reason why a game of that length couldn't be perfectly acceptable to me as a person in my 20s with more responsibilities.

Like, I remember playing Persona 3 and 4 back to back. I started with 4, after discovering it through the Endurance Run, and absolutely adored it. My total time has been lost, as I've since-sold the backwards compatible Ps3 I first played it on, but I'm fairly positive I spent well over 70 hours with it on my first go. (Later on I played it again on the higher difficulty and spent nearly that amount of time with it again.) Afterwards, I played Persona 3, and the pacing was rouuuuugh. I felt so much more restless with that game, because it was just making me grind constantly and the story wasn't nearly as engaging or well paced. Two games of roughly similar length and mechanics and two very different attitudes from me with how well I enjoyed them. It's all about how well that length is used. (Har har.)

Yeah, I may have been more willing to tolerate pacing issues when I was younger, or less willing to give up on a likely $50+ game just because it requires grinding or was terribly paced. But that didn't make a JRPG that was an obtuse, terribly-paced grindfest good, even if I played through it to the end. I think once I beat Seventh Saga, and that game was fucking awful. The elements that I still love about a good JRPG were the same ones I loved when I was a kid - interesting systems for character and party building, strategy in and out of combat, exploration, characters, story, and music. Length has little to do with it, except to the extent necessary to build out those elements. And even the games that had crazy goals requiring dozens of hours of grinding and work made that content optional, like the latter Final Fantasies. It was fine getting Knights of the Round or killing the FF7 Weapons when I had nothing else to do or no new games to play, but I would never do that crap today.

And I definitely agree with your citation of Persona 4, as that's one of the few games I've played that is 50+ hours and doesn't suffer from it, mainly because it's generally well-paced with a balance of monthly "cases" pushing the main story, fun down-time events on the main story that weren't related to the central mystery, and compelling side stories that you could pursue at your choice. Along with great characters, music, and a great story outside of the end trope of "now it's time to kill a god". I rarely felt bored or grinding to the next story beat, if only because I could spend time with the day-to-day side stories.

I'm not sure when JRPGs got stereotyped as overly time-consuming and grindy, but I really wish people would look back at the golden age of JRPGs and realize that those were never present in the greats.

I totally agree. I find myself much less likely to play through a badly paced game than I did when I was younger, but I also find myself enjoying stereotypical JRPGs much less. In the last decade, only the Persona games, Ni No Kuni, and Bravely Default have felt like satisfying games in the genre. They respected my time, by encouraging grinding only when my skill or knowledge wasn't quite up to the task at hand, they presented interesting stories without frequently resorting to fetch quests.

I missed the whole Wii generation of RPGs, having picked up a Wii only a few years ago to check out the Mario Galaxy games, and was thinking about trying out Xenoblade, but this review kinda turns me off of that idea. Thanks, @marokai, for the great rundown!