immensely tedious melodramatic JRPGs are my christmas music

Anyway this is a Xenoblade Chronicles 2 thread now

Warm up that "mute conversation" button

I turned off subtitled before starting the game bc I hate reading text and then waiting for the actors to finish saying it

They don't appear to have localized the lip flaps and it's... surprisingly distracting

We got a catgirl NPC in the starting town so this is definitely a good game

Spent 15 minutes ignoring the very first quest objective in order to find chests

Turns out apparently opening checks is a skill check that I currently fail 100% of the time lol

ohh okay apparently you can play it with Japanese audio but you have to download it like DLC

English voice acting isn't bad so far but it's got that super-awkward timing thing that always happens with translated games

prob more comfortable just playing with Japanese voices

Can't get a decent capture of it but there appears to be motion blur on the main char's jump animation and nowhere else

like it's a VFX thing attached to the animation and not a dynamic thing that's applied everywhere

𝑴𝒀 𝑳𝑰𝑭𝑬 𝑭𝑶𝑹 𝑨𝑰𝑼𝑹

These are... definitely not the same artist lol

Whoso pulleth out this sword of these boobs and hotpants is rightwise king born of all Anime

Real talk this game is basically everything bad about JRPGs so far

I'm three hours in and have played about twenty minutes of actual videogame

It's still possible that once this JRPG-intro-length intro section is finished it will introduce some of the things that are good about JRPGs though

Rest assured, this game contains The Official Videogame Footstep on Metal Grate Sound Effect in all its resplendence

This game doesn't support video capture so I can't provide you an example, but have no fear; it's just as distinctive as ever

One major frustration: Subtitles only exist for cutscenes; all the fun incidental dialogue in combat and exploration is audio-only

Means you miss all of it if you use the JP voices :(

Also sucks for anyone with a hearing impairment who actually relies on subtitles :/

oh cool a boss fight

*wins boss fight*

*cutscene plays in which the protagonist is forced to run away because the boss is too strong*

WHY DO YOU DO THIS JRPGS

WHY

IT'S SO DUMB

If you want to set up a villain as Unbeatably Powerful then maybe don't force me to beat them in a fight first?? Why does this happen multiple times in nearly every game in this genre? Game writing is hard but it isn't THAT HARD

The design of these NPC children suggests that the cat people are born as furries and then grow into anime catgirls/boys upon reaching puberty

isn't nature amazing

Welp apparently Cait Sith has joined my party

I sincerely love how JRPG interiors are always these warped, impossibly cavernous nightmare spaces to allow room for the floating third-person camera

This is supposed to be a hallway on a military airship

Eyebrows sort on top of hair
A+ anime rendering

Also I must update my previous statements re: motion blur

It *is* actually dynamic; it's just incredibly rare for it to appear in any situation other than jumping

Current theory: Motion vectors do not take camera rotation into account (spinning view never blurs), and it appears that not every surface generates them at all

The Post-Critical-Plot-Moment Save Screen is one of the best JRPG conventions

You *know* some cool stuff just happened if the save screen comes up completely unbidden

well it took like eleven hours but I finally figured out how Blade Combos work

always amazes me how these games manage to spend literal hours on endless tutorial text boxes without ever actually explaining how their systems work

there's this thing that's super common in anime and Japanese games where characters spent *absurd* amounts of time on meaningless dialogue that consists of repeating what the other characters already said

That and/or vague pointless affirmations

"So that's how you perform a Blade Combo"
"Wow, I've never seen a Blade Combo before!"
"Ah, of course..."
"Blade Combos are so cool"
"Oh, I see..."

It always ends up combined with tutorials and then you have these insane dialogue slogs that take forever to sit through but explain nothing about how the game actually works

I dunno if it's like... a quirk of Japanese sentence structure that just translates poorly, or what

Does bad writing manifest differently in different cultures? Like does crappy Western-AAA game writing express weird distinctive quirks when translated for foreign audiences?

Also lest it sound like I'm just endlessly bashing this game, I've actually gotten far enough that's it's become pretty fun

Definitely a "for fans of the genre" kind of experience though lol

Okay here's some cool design: Combat has gauge-based super attacks, akin to Limit Breaks etc, but the gauge resets if you kill an enemy or switch targets

This means there's ZERO incentive to ever save powerful attacks; if you don't use them on the current enemy they'll reset anyway, so go nuts

This is both Fun and Good

There isn't a whole lot of flashy graphics tech in this game but the way the clouds interact with the landscape is really, really good

Also here's a shot of clouds kinda breaking in interesting ways

Screen-aligned aliasing suggests low-res depth buffer; the "layered" aliasing on the rocks/tree trunks I'm less sure about.
Guessing maybe some combo of low sample count for raymarching and possibly limited depth precision?

Another guess: Clouds might not be raymarched at all; could just be a stack of a few dozen planes sampling a volume texture, akin to SotC fur

If they did that and rendered it at quarter res to save on the (massive) overdraw cost, then blended the result back onto the scene with a soft z-test, you'd get a very similar set of artifacts

I HAVE MADE A CRITICAL DISCOVERY

YOU CAN PLAY AS A CATGIRL ON A TIGER

Turns out you can swap the player-controlled character for anyone in your party, Tales-style

Wonder if this will turn out like Vesperia where the character you *should* be controlling is not the protagonist lol

Just spent ~15m fighting an optional boss and it took so long that all the generic mobs respawned and killed my whole party while the boss was at 5% HP

For those keeping score on RPG Gamedev Dos and Don'ts:
Non-instanced battles: good
Basically everything that can happen in an MMO: bad

there's... a merchant?
who sells explanations of the game mechanics??

and they're EXPENSIVE???

Not gonna post many of these out of respect for Spoilers but, this game has extremely pretty environments

I've spent this entire weekend playing this game; save file says ~24hrs

It's STILL introducing major new combat systems every few boss fights

Alright we're now up to THREE boss battles where you win the fight and then watch a cutscene of the boss beating up your whole party and escaping

I hate this trope so much

Normal Brain:
Nia's voice actress sounds older than her design looks

Galaxy Brain:
W E L S H

A C C E N T

C A T G I R L

Major plot-critical cutscene that should have been emotional, utterly and irrevocably ruined by incongruous chintzy english-translated 00s-anime-ED accompaniment

it is unfortunately possible to anime *too* hard

...I was gonna leave the tweet at that but let's be honest I am 100% here for garbage anime JRPG melodrama

merry christmas to all

Do you think the whole Avert the Magical Apocalypse War trope in JRPGs is still a nuclear metaphor, or is it basically just a requirement for the genre at this point and we're not supposed to think hard about it

Like older stuff like Akira obv has this really strong undercurrent of Cold War anxiety in the only country that's actually BEEN nuked before, and it's prevalent in 90s stuff like Chrono Trigger etc, but maybe a bit less pronounced

But like it's 2017 now and Xenoblade 2 just did a flashback of a bunch of people on a hillside watching their *continent* get bombed into the sea...

Maybe it can be both?
Like American fantasy media is usually super colonialist unless it tries *not* to be bc those memes (in the original sense of the word) are just baked into our whole culture

maybe, similarly, "avert the nuclear-ish apocalypse" just sort of works its way into a ton of Japanese fantasy media by default, just by nature of the cultural context in which it's made?

I dunno; it's hard to speculate on this stuff without sounding like a gross weeb waxing essentialist over ""japanese culture"" in a forum thread

Tsundere just called the protagonist a pervert due to a fairly innocuous situation she 100% caused herself, if you were worried this game wasn't Anime enough yet

Yo is this character a reference to like Xenogears or something? Incredibly 90s-anime design; seems pretty obviously deliberate

Biggest actual complaint about this game now that I'm past all the intro stuff:
It just took me 47 seconds to kill an enemy 14 levels below my party

ppl have remarked on the combat system's complexity but that's actually pretty fun once you figure it out

All of your attacks just do a morale-crushingly tiny amount of damage in all circumstances though :/

This is some fantastically Videogame music

man what if literally any western AAA studio besides Bungie cared about having even slightly memorable music

oh lmao apparently Xenoblade 2's character designer also did Expelled From Paradise which explains why Mythra and the Expelled From Paradise girl are EXACTLY THE SAME DESIGN

so, hilariously, this game's combat is structured around MMO-style tank-and-spank, except the tank is an incompetent AI that constantly pulls bosses into huge groups of adds and wipes your whole party

Also there are environmental hazards, and the enemies avoid them but the friendly AIs don't, so he'll routinely pull bosses towards cliffs and then fall off of them and die, or stand in pools of acid next to a boss until he dies

basically my point is this is probably the most realistic tank AI ever created

Another Very MMO Thing this game likes to do: put a named mob in an area that's roughly the player's level, then also put a level-eighty-billion flying boss on a minutes-long patrol path that goes right past the aforementioned named mob

in an actual MMO this is a fun opportunity to sit nearby and watch newer players get destroyed

it's considerably less fun in a single-player game with an AI-controlled tank lol

J R P G

you have to be able to parse that explanation to advance the main plot

lol TAA has no idea what to do with this conveyor-belt texture

probably just a UV-shift animation that isn't contributing to motion vectors?

I honestly love how the invention of TAA has introduced an entire new class of never-before-seen weird graphics jank

don't want to post screenshots bc spoilers but... for some reason they got Tetsuya Nomura to design the main villains

the result is generic moeblob cartoons vs straight-up Kingdom Hearts

it is *hilarious*

Turns out this is actually the explanation for this tweet from 45 minutes into the game

The character modelers actually did a really good job of interpreting Nomura's faces too, so if anything the contrast is even more incongruous in 3D

After like 40 hours we've made it to the protagonist's home town. It's surrounded by level 35 monsters. He was level 1 at the beginning of this game. Apparently venturing two feet outside the gate is a death sentence for everyone living here

JRPG plot requirements:
☑️ Flying Catholics

this is somebody's sonic OC

For those curious: Basically this game has a form of your typical JRPG monster-collecting system, except instead of monsters they're all weird semi-humanoids that are all designed by different guest artists

These guest artists make no attempts whatsoever to maintain a coherent art direction, which is kind of awesome but also super weird

The in-game clock is somehow super broken and claims I have logged 96 hours

I've played a lot but I def haven't played 10 hours a day since it came out lol

like... I do have a job

Hypothesis: JRPGs always get bad review scores bc can you imagine if playing 60+ hours of this tedium was your JOB?

I would want to die

exposition cutscene featuring the villains casually explaining to each other what their villainous plans are

There's some legitimately really good dialogue in this game

It's got a ton of awkward timing bc the English translation doesn't match the sentence lengths very well, but it gets close enough for a lot of the cleverer bits to land

Really wish I could just play it in Japanese so the timing worked but nothing outside of the cutscenes is subtitled :/

[Minor Xenoblade 2 spoiler]

I just discovered that if a battle is going poorly Mythra can get mad at you and forcibly swap herself into combat

A+ character development via gameplay systems lol

Serious Plot Stuff happened so it's time to break out the Serious Color Grading

If this game had discs this would absolutely be the start of disc 3

Me: It's taking forever but this game's plot is actually getting pretty interesting. Some cool unique ideas

This Game: Okay time for a weird deus ex machina also you're literally on a quest for a legendary sword now

I swear I'm not playing Kingdom Hearts II

once, just ONCE in the history of All Videogames Ever, could we PLEASE have a character interrupt another character without a second's worth of silence between the two voice clips

or at the barest possible minimum, could we at least have the VA delivering the interrupted line actually stop like they were interrupted, instead of inflecting it like a completed sentence that just happens to be missing a word

Update: The legendary sword is really large

Also: everything that happened between those two tweets was some of the most insufferably frustrating JRPG garbage I've ever experienced

Like we're talking There's No Way You're Taking Kairi's Heart tier

I should probably reiterate that Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is really good and I'm enjoying it a lot

Most of the cool stuff is plot/character related though so I can't really discuss it without spoilers

It's essentially a really good PS2 game so like... expect all the frustrations of JRPGs of that era haha

anyway I want to marry Nia

No exaggeration this is by far the longest game I've ever played

It came out on the first of the month and It's been the majority of my free time since then

I'm in chapter 8 of a reported 10

o___o

In other news one of the characters is named Tora and his swordgirl is upgraded by playing an arcade game named Tiger! Tiger! and I just now after like 80 hours realized this is a pun

Hello I am still playing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 and it continues to achieve ever higher levels of Anime

A robot just punched a continent in the face

Okay good thing I watched Gunbuster a couple months ago because that cutscene def featured a Gunbuster reference

Late-game loredump appears to be hinting at some kind of franchise-spanning continuity revelation

This would probably be awesome if I had played any of the other xeno games before this one :/

So unlike typical JRPGs this game is super forgiving with checkpoints and doesn't have any save-point tedium or anything

Except now I'm at the end I guess because it just popped up this info box like HEY GUESS WHAT NO MORE CHECKPOINTS LOSER

o no the really bad english-translated maudlin pop song is back

Okay I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2

It was v good

Also literally the longest game I have ever played, by far. Like, took pretty much the entirety of my free time for the entire month of December lol

Wanna tweet about how the ending was handled but spoilers lol. As someone who often actually enjoys ridiculous anime melodrama, it was very... anime

Basically if you like PS2-era JRPGs not made by Square it's v much in that style and I def recommend it

If you hate those games I understand and you should probably not play it

Fantastic environment design, inconsistent but occasionally inspired art direction, plot has cool ideas conveyed kinda awkwardly, really fun character writing, combat system's unique and creative and remains fun to play over 80+ hours

Thus concludes this month-long tweetstorm

My sincerest condolences to the like six people still following me