Tetsuya Takahashi's Xeno franchises

[Mirage]

Well, Vyk, did you play Xenoblade, and did you like it? If so, what did you like about it?

Oh I'm not gonna lie. The combat was surprisingly good. And I loved fighting. But I don't need it to be that good. I really got into the game because I loved the story and characters and drama and humor. All done well. And I get no sense XCX does that stuff much

The story in XCX is laughable compared to XC. The characters are less developed and instead you get two dozen pretty shallow party members to choose between, but no good interface to switch between them. You have to track each and every on of them them down in the field to add them to your party, including when you just want to swap them in to move gear from them to someone else. The combat is comparable to XC on foot, but the ground combat becomes less and less balanced as the game gives you stronger and stronger mechs, and eventually all encounters are either balanced for mech combat and really annoying (or downright impossible) to do on foot, or designed for foot combat and therefore possible to obliterate from orbit with a single strike with a mech. Boring.

Here's another fun thing about mech combat:
Some enemies must be fought in the air at high altitude. If you perform a topple on them, they start falling. As they fall, the enemies move out of combat range, and the enemies despawn, only to respawn at their original position with full health, while the fuel you used in that battle still is lost.

Even more fun is it if the enemy topples you, make you fall out of combat range, only for the battle to once again restart with the enemy at full health. This also often happens if your mech gets destroyed (even if the three party members' mechs are still working) and you start falling down faster than the enemy pursues you (if it chooses to do so at all).

Eventually, you run out of miranium (because the storage limit for this resource can be pretty low) which makes it impossible for you to refuel your mechs in the barracks, forcing you to sit around and wait for the next batch of miranium to come in from your mining probes, instead of actually doing what you wanted to do in the game.

I actually liked (loved, even) the first half of the game, and even managed to ignore many of the problems with mechs allthe way towards the last chapter, where all the shortcomings just started stacking up and annoy me enormously as i tried to do side combat in mechs. Well, that, and also the fact that i started to slowly realize that the game would end up not touching upon even *some* of the actually interesting things about the world we were on.