Personally, I think I'm done with XCX. I find myself with opportunities to play it, but I keep making excuses to avoid it. Now I'm sitting here bored, and I still don't want to go play it. I legitimately would rather complain about it than play it.

I really WANT to like the game, but I can't. It has a ton of massive design flaws that just really kill the game for me.

First, it's too easy to miss stuff. The game is too damned open. I still have no clue if I've talked to everybody in New LA, nor is there any telling how many Affinity Chart updates or quests I've missed.

The inventory system is absolutely wretched. I seriously don't understand what moron thought this was a good idea. It's one of the worst inventory systems I've ever seen in a game. Every piece of gear is unique. I have no clue what any of it does. I have no clue what the stats do. I have no clue what the abilities do. The game doesn't explain anything. And every piece of gear is unique, so I never know what to keep and what to throw away. It's actually WORSE than the abominable system that the original Xenoblade Chronicles had.

The open world design sucks. It just sucks. Putting level 45 enemies in a starter zone is fine, but you then add in quests to go kill them that are available twenty minutes into the game (oh, and the quest difficulty rating is complete bollocks, as is the map difficulty suggestions). There is no flow to the quests, no proper difficulty scaling, no elegance to the design. It just dumps a crap load on you all at once, doesn't give you any way to sort them, nor any way to actually tell which ones you have a chance of taking on.

So, I'm stuck. I don't want to move on with the main story because I don't want to miss stuff, but I don't know what else I can do because the game doesn't explain anything. There's some NPC hiding under a rock that only shows his face when it's raining in Primordia while you're wearing a swimsuit and jump off the roof of the chapel or something that I'll miss if I progress the story. Or, at least, I'll miss their introduction, and their personal story and dialogue that changes as the game goes on.

And I'm still pissed that the game tracks how many times a mob has killed you. It's like it's sitting there going "this guy killed you ten times, HA HA". If I ever meet the designer who put that "feature" in, I'm going to punch him in the throat.

So, yeah. I think I'm done. I really enjoy the exploration, and I like the characters, but the game doesn't communicate anything to you, and I have no idea how much I CAN do in the game at this point. Honestly, if someone broke into my house and stole the game, I wouldn't try to replace it.