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SubstantialFrivolity  I'm not even supposed to be here today  1yr ago (text post)   2179 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 14, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What are people up to that's fun? Myself, I've been playing the recent release of Trails From Zero. It's a game where I already played a fan translation, but the fan translation was pretty rough so it's fun to see what a professional localization effort looks like. The Trails games in general are very long "I hope you like text" games, so this one will take me a bit, but I'm really enjoying it.

I've been slowly plugging away at Xenoblade Chronicles 3. I think the end is in sight. I'm on the last chapter. Just having fun doing side quests at the moment. Wrapping up a bunch of side stories with respect to the various colonies.

I'm finding XC3 rather weak in a lot of areas. But one thing it's doing well is having the side quests related to a specific colony tell a cohesive long term story about how that location is coping with the changes you are causing in the world. That said, while I enjoy the narrative arcs of the side quest, their actual construction seems the worst of any XC to date.

That said, I'm finding the combat much more poorly balanced that previous entries in the series. And with far less of a feeling of agency controlling 1 party member out of 6 versus 1 out of 3 in previous games. Enemies, especially enemies you enormously out level, are way to damage spongy. The level caps on the job system severely impact my enjoyment exploring it.

I was watching one review of the game, and they said something I really agreed with. Probably the best part of XC3 is it's restraint. XC2 had some serious weeb cringe, and XC3 corrects for that extremely well.

I'm excited to see the ending, but I'm just not feeling myself and pulled through the game as I did in XC1 or XC2. Instead of being excited to do things in XC3, I find myself settling for the lowest hanging fruit. Ah well.

Yeah, to be honest I found XBC3 to be a real letdown. It wasn't bad, I would say it was a solid 7/10 or 8/10 game. But XBC2 is in my top 5 JRPGs of all time. And XBC1 (while I didn't dig it as much) was still way up there as a top tier game. This game I didn't think lived up to either of its predecessors.

In hindsight I think maybe I just got too hyped up? I was more hyped for XBC3 than for anything else in recent memory. When it came out I did little else in my free time except play. So maybe that just put my expectations too high. I do think that the game has problems even if I hadn't been hyped up, but I may not have felt as let down by the game if I wasn't hyped.

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