I recently got a used Wii U and this was one of the games I wanted to check out since it's never getting ported. I am only ~7 hours in, but I really like this game and plan to stick with it for a long time. I bounced off of XC1 and I don't know if I want to play XC2, but I am really enjoying the gameplay and story of XCX. However, if I had bought this game when it came out, I would have felt like an absolute clown because it compares so poorly to all of the games it's in conversation with at the time of its release.
• The structure and aesthetics of this game really make it seem like it is trying to compete with Phantasy Star Online 2, which came out in 2013. I think it's personal preference whether you like this game or PSO2 better, but that is a free to play game that was available on PC and the Vita and already fairly successful in Japan.
• I was having trouble articulating why I don't like the combat in XC1 and XCX until I realized that it's specifically just that the Arts Palette is a bad way to control games like this. I understand that it's an attempt to do MMO combat using a controller, but it's a much worse method than what's in Final Fantasy 14 (ARR in 2013), Dragon Age 2/Inquisition (2011/2014), or PSO2 which also have similar cooldown-based skill systems.
• This one is more general to the Wii U, but this game looks like a 360 game and came out 2 years after the PS4/Xbox One were out. The vistas are beautiful, but the character models are really not great and that's a pretty big part of a game with lots of cutscenes where all dialogue is voice acted.
Playing this game now, divorced of its context, there's a lot to like (especially the music) and I'm having a great time, but I also completely understand why it was not very popular at the time.
Edit: 20 hours in now, I take back all the nice things I said about the game. I hate all these damn nonsense fetch quests. I refuse to run in circles to collect 3 Beagflea Squashes in order to complete part 1 of quest 1 of the 8 quests needed to get my mech license.
• The structure and aesthetics of this game really make it seem like it is trying to compete with Phantasy Star Online 2, which came out in 2013. I think it's personal preference whether you like this game or PSO2 better, but that is a free to play game that was available on PC and the Vita and already fairly successful in Japan.
• I was having trouble articulating why I don't like the combat in XC1 and XCX until I realized that it's specifically just that the Arts Palette is a bad way to control games like this. I understand that it's an attempt to do MMO combat using a controller, but it's a much worse method than what's in Final Fantasy 14 (ARR in 2013), Dragon Age 2/Inquisition (2011/2014), or PSO2 which also have similar cooldown-based skill systems.
• This one is more general to the Wii U, but this game looks like a 360 game and came out 2 years after the PS4/Xbox One were out. The vistas are beautiful, but the character models are really not great and that's a pretty big part of a game with lots of cutscenes where all dialogue is voice acted.
Playing this game now, divorced of its context, there's a lot to like (especially the music) and I'm having a great time, but I also completely understand why it was not very popular at the time.
Edit: 20 hours in now, I take back all the nice things I said about the game. I hate all these damn nonsense fetch quests. I refuse to run in circles to collect 3 Beagflea Squashes in order to complete part 1 of quest 1 of the 8 quests needed to get my mech license.