Rei Yasumura · 2mo

Is there a notable game or series that you've tried to get into, but for one reason or another just didn't click with you?

Probably the two biggest ones are Xenoblade and Digimon. I'm offering 2 mainly because I just complained about Xenoblade 3 and the chain attack bgm recently so bringing it up again felt like low hanging fruit.

Xenoblade drove me a bit wild. I remember a lot of the commotion over 1 when it first came out and realizing there was a portion of people talking it up because they hadn't played a JRPG in like 10-15 years--I would liken it to some of the response that Expedition 33 got. Er, except maybe without some of the occasional implied racism people had when discussing E33 compared to "actual" JRPGs. The Operation Rainfall stuff might be partially to blame for this maybe...? I don't really remember since it was so long ago. Anyway, I thought it was a very nice looking game with some pretty environments, a plot I was totally fine with, a lot of subsystems to poke at, aaaaaaaaaaaand I didn't like engaging with the gameplay even one single bit. The pseudo-MMO style stuff just did not work for me and I tapped out like 70% into the game because I realized I was resenting having to play the game.

I didn't play XB2. I think the gacha stuff would have annoyed me. I like some of the character/blade designs, though.

I did play and finish XB3 when it came out and I kinda ended up feeling similarly burnt. Half the classes felt like they didn't matter, the broken damage classes were ridiculously good compared to some of the lesser ones, chain attacks got really tedious halfway through the game and there's the BGM overriding issue.. when I got to the final dungeon I decided I didn't want to actually, like, -play- the game anymore so I just set it to easy mode, finally dumped all of my bonus exp into the party, and would let the AI just slowly beat bosses to death.

XBC was... interesting. I think it's a fascinating game, I really enjoyed the feel of surveying the game world and all the sidequests and stuff. The nighttime song for NLA is awesome. I only played the Definitive Edition which unfortunately mechanically is completely broken so none of the gameplay matters, which is... rough. The skells feel really bad in DE due to the quick cooldown stuff you can do on foot, which is just a really big shame. They're big robots!! They should feel cool!!! (They do get to do the quick cooldowns or whatever they're called too, but that's literally only after beating the game, so...)

Digimon was something I never had any background with as a kid or basically never engaged with any of its games until literally Cyber Sleuth and I was just never able to mesh with a lot of its early-to-midgame monster designs... I did like Cyber Sleuth for what it was despite the occasionally jank translation but mechanically it felt really messy and hard to really mess around with all the digimon without some of the cheesier ways to get a billion EXP. Time Stranger I just bounced off of entirely after 10-15 hours which I feel bad about since it seems like people quite enjoy that one but the combination of my party being a revolving door of Digimon I had no real attachment to and getting hit with the 'oh, you picked the girl MC? she's now a silent protag and you have to listen to the male one instead since he becomes a plot NPC, enjoy' was a pretty big debuff. Alas. Maybe I should try other Digimon games.

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