Never ever have I felt so conflicted on a piece of media as I felt on Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
Let's start with the positives:
- The world of Alrest is beautiful and a great place to explore.
- The soundtrack is a banger with tons of amazing pieces of music.
- The story, as cheesy as it is, is still very enjoyable and fun!
- The cast, especially the main cast is lovable and great.
There's more, but since we're on the topic of characters, this is where I need to bridge over to my negatives.
Because as much as I'm in love with the characters, they alone are responsible for everything I hate about the game.
To put it bluntly, it's the objectification of female characters that grinds my gears.
I'll tackle the elephant in the room right away, among the worst offenders are the designs for our heroes, namely Pyra (red) and Mythra (white) :
I'm gonna be fair and say when compared side by side, Mythras design is actually somewhat decent. However, both make it really tough to enjoy playing the game in public (well, that and the horrible resolution in handheld mode, but that's an entirely different issue).
I especially have an axe to grind with Pyras design. I'm sorry but what happend here? It's all over the place and then there's that one stripe of clothing covering the crotch area. It just looks bad and confusing. It's not even sexy to be honest, because let's be real: That's what the developers were going for here.
But not only our female heroes have been struck by the God of horrible design choices, our protagonist, Rex, has to suffer as well!:
I really don't think I have to explain this one. This is the second weirdest design for a JRPG character I've seen since Mr. Pizza cutter
Anyway, back to Rex. The game tried to explain his design by showing off its functionality as diving gear:
Now, this looks a lot better and kind of makes sense now?
But does it make the standard version of the design look good? The answer is no.
And this, ladies and gentlemen leads to my biggest gripe with this game.
As I said before, I am not a fan of how our girls (and our boy) look like. But in case of the girls, it's a bit worse and that bit is what made parts of the game really annoying. So much that I would have dropped other games for what it did.
The unnecessary tits and assshots that happen all over the game. There are a ton of scenes where you'd get camera shots unnecessarily focusing on the chest and our butts of the female characters, especially of those who wear revealing clothes.
It's something that quite a lot of games do, hell the Senran Kagura franchise is basically built on this concept, but why was it that it annoyed me so much in this particular game?
Because, and that's the ironic part, I love this game.
As I said before, I love basically everything about the game. From the world to the general asthetic to the story. But it's really jarring and annoying when the game tries do be less lighthearted and more serious for a bit, only for the camera to decide "now is the perfect moment for a panning ass-shot!".
Its the kind of stuff that makes me go "was that really necessary now?"
And the game is sadly filled with moments like these, where the game tries to make you focus on the "sexy" parts of the already questionable female character designs.
But, with all that said, I still love the game. Overall I can say that I really enjoyed playing it. It's just that the game itself sometimes can't decide whether it wants to be a great fantasy story or an or an playable ecchi-anime and this is my biggest disappointment with the game.
Would I still recommend this game to other people? Yes I would, and in fact I did recently recommend the game to a co-worker. But the fact that I had to inform him about the less desirable stuff saddens me and ultimately lead to the creation of this thread, because the game was so close to being a timeless classic and easy recommendation for me, just to fail about something so stupid.
And it's the fact that the game is stained like this that makes it the best game I simultaneously also hate.
TL:DR: Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is an amazing game that sabotages itself by occasionally forgetting that it's supposed to be a Fantasy JRPG and pretends to be a ecchi visual novel instead.
Let's start with the positives:
- The world of Alrest is beautiful and a great place to explore.
- The soundtrack is a banger with tons of amazing pieces of music.
- The story, as cheesy as it is, is still very enjoyable and fun!
- The cast, especially the main cast is lovable and great.
There's more, but since we're on the topic of characters, this is where I need to bridge over to my negatives.
Because as much as I'm in love with the characters, they alone are responsible for everything I hate about the game.
To put it bluntly, it's the objectification of female characters that grinds my gears.
I'll tackle the elephant in the room right away, among the worst offenders are the designs for our heroes, namely Pyra (red) and Mythra (white) :
I'm gonna be fair and say when compared side by side, Mythras design is actually somewhat decent. However, both make it really tough to enjoy playing the game in public (well, that and the horrible resolution in handheld mode, but that's an entirely different issue).
I especially have an axe to grind with Pyras design. I'm sorry but what happend here? It's all over the place and then there's that one stripe of clothing covering the crotch area. It just looks bad and confusing. It's not even sexy to be honest, because let's be real: That's what the developers were going for here.
But not only our female heroes have been struck by the God of horrible design choices, our protagonist, Rex, has to suffer as well!:
I really don't think I have to explain this one. This is the second weirdest design for a JRPG character I've seen since Mr. Pizza cutter
Anyway, back to Rex. The game tried to explain his design by showing off its functionality as diving gear:
Now, this looks a lot better and kind of makes sense now?
But does it make the standard version of the design look good? The answer is no.
And this, ladies and gentlemen leads to my biggest gripe with this game.
As I said before, I am not a fan of how our girls (and our boy) look like. But in case of the girls, it's a bit worse and that bit is what made parts of the game really annoying. So much that I would have dropped other games for what it did.
The unnecessary tits and assshots that happen all over the game. There are a ton of scenes where you'd get camera shots unnecessarily focusing on the chest and our butts of the female characters, especially of those who wear revealing clothes.
It's something that quite a lot of games do, hell the Senran Kagura franchise is basically built on this concept, but why was it that it annoyed me so much in this particular game?
Because, and that's the ironic part, I love this game.
As I said before, I love basically everything about the game. From the world to the general asthetic to the story. But it's really jarring and annoying when the game tries do be less lighthearted and more serious for a bit, only for the camera to decide "now is the perfect moment for a panning ass-shot!".
Its the kind of stuff that makes me go "was that really necessary now?"
And the game is sadly filled with moments like these, where the game tries to make you focus on the "sexy" parts of the already questionable female character designs.
But, with all that said, I still love the game. Overall I can say that I really enjoyed playing it. It's just that the game itself sometimes can't decide whether it wants to be a great fantasy story or an or an playable ecchi-anime and this is my biggest disappointment with the game.
Would I still recommend this game to other people? Yes I would, and in fact I did recently recommend the game to a co-worker. But the fact that I had to inform him about the less desirable stuff saddens me and ultimately lead to the creation of this thread, because the game was so close to being a timeless classic and easy recommendation for me, just to fail about something so stupid.
And it's the fact that the game is stained like this that makes it the best game I simultaneously also hate.
TL:DR: Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is an amazing game that sabotages itself by occasionally forgetting that it's supposed to be a Fantasy JRPG and pretends to be a ecchi visual novel instead.
