wes

3w

Cygames killed it with the Relink DLC

These fights are good as f*** man. Need unlimited content in this game Hit 85k concurrent players on Steam the other day so I'm hopeful this will be supported in the future.

Trash Star

3w

just wrapped up xenoblade chronicles definitive edition on switch 2 gonna copy and paste my review from backloggd

I really, really, enjoyed this, until the final chapter. The pacing falls off a cliff in its final moments and becomes a total slog to get through. Fake fight after fake fight into cutscene after cutscene. It's very unfortunate because everything in the story was finally coming together and it gets totally interrupted by all the stop and go sequences. I ended up switching to casual mode just to get through the fights because I had become invested enough in the story that the conclusion mattered to me more than trying to grind out a few more levels just to be the proper level for the final fights.

I finally decided to jump into this when the Switch 2 upgrades were announced and the story was surprisingly engaging. I knew nothing about it before starting, just had a vague interest and it surpassed all my expectations. Once the puzzle pieces start getting put together it's awesome moment after awesome moment. Learning about the history of the world becomes increasingly satisfying and despite the poor pacing at the end I think all in all it comes together extremely well.

I sorta ended up with a love/hate relationship with the characters. I loved their collective presence (except Riki) and their camaraderie, but I didn't enjoy the actual writing of the characters all that much. The writing always felt either way too stiff and robotic or overly cheesy and juvenile and because of that only a few of the emotional moments connected with me, the rest all fell flat.

The scale and visuals of the environments are incredibly impressive. I took so many screenshots overlooking unbelievable backgrounds and vistas. Unfortunately I found exploring the environments to be pretty boring a repetitive by the mid game. Side quest design is very poor, they're almost all some version of a fetch or delivery quest or kill x numbers of monsters. At least the music is phenomenal. There is always something either beautiful, exciting, hype, atmospheric or touching playing.

I don't play MMO's but I know everyone compares this series' combat to MMO's, so I was unsure how I was going to feel about it but I ended up falling in love with it. It basically ended up feeling like a strategy game where I was managing cooldowns, status effects and positioning. I enjoyed it so much that I ended up clearing out pretty much every dungeon because the combat felt so satisfying once I found my groove. I did find the party system to be a bit limiting though. I felt like I had to have a bruiser/tank and healer at all times or else the party would get demolished quick. That meant I ran with Shulk, Dunban and Sharla for the majority of the game. Maybe I was building the other characters wrong but whenever I tried to experiment and switch someone in, combat felt significantly more punishing and not very fun.

The other games are definitely on my list to play at some point but I think once I finish the dlc I'll just wait for Genesis next year.

4/5