By story, you mean Game of Thrones Season 8 schlock (the ending is pretty much Jaime Lannister's character arc).
By characters, you mean a cast with predominately underdeveloped anime tropes that aren't played with in any sort of interesting manner to warrant their existence.
A good example of why Xenoblade 2's character writing falls flat is to compare Sylvain from Three Houses to Tora from Xenoblade 2, as they both use a similar anime trope. Sylvain is a multi-faceted character whose most negative trait (his philandering) has an explanation that ties into and enhances Three Houses' overall worldbuilding, and whom his negative traits are balanced out very well by some of his more positive traits (i.e. his charisma, his intelligence, his strained relationship with his family, etc.) Tora, on the other hand, is an insufferable, one-note anime pervert stereotype that doesn't get any more depth beyond a flimsy-at-best explanation - and I believe a Tora in Xenoblade 1 (with its writers) would resemble Sylvain a lot more than what he ended up being in Xenoblade 2.