Gaming Diary – From Xenoblades to Pokemons

After I finished Pokemon Alpha Sapphire, I thought it might be best to put down the Pokeymans for some of my other unfinished 3DS games. Since Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is out, maybe it’s the best time to finally play Xenoblade Chronicles 3D. After playing it for about 8 hours, I have the following thoughts:

• WOOF the graphics are bad. Like they’re so pixelated, it’s really hard to distinguish faces and enemies from backgrounds. I never played this game when it released on the Wii, but I have a very hard time believing it looked this bad on the big screen. Final Fantasy VII has outdated graphics, but at least the faces and enemies are discernible on the small screen. During an early boss fight with a spider, I gave up figuring out what to hit and just swung madly at the purple blob on my screen.
• Why are there zero interesting side quests? Thus far, it’s only fetch quests as far as the eye can see. And when I do complete a fetch quest, would it have killed the devs to include map markers for the quest givers? It’s not a joy running around the town over and over again trying to find this one boy.
• This is an action-RPG, but I want to use that term loosely. It’s an action-RPG/turn-based RPG hybrid. You can move around on the screen and aim for specific places to hit like an action-RPG. However, the characters and enemies on the screen attack in some sort of an ATB system. Either make it an ATB system or don’t.
• Are you telling me this is yet another post-apocalyptic setting in a neverending war between man and machine? Wow. That’s totally NEVER been done before.

Part of me wants to push through a little further, but another part of me is all, NOPE, nobody got time for that. I’m going to research the sequel a bit more before moving on. If the combat is exactly like this one, then it will get a hard pass. I’ll just go back to Xenoblade Chronicles X, because that game was fun.

After feeling defeated with Xenoblade Chronicles 3D, I decided to pick up a game that has a completely original idea and game format: Pokemon Pearl. (If your sarcasm senses aren’t tingling, please slap yourself.) Even though the Pokemon games are literally all the same, I still have fun playing them. They’re easy to pick up and play, and it’s a bit of an RPG-lite, which is nice for a handheld.

Is anyone watching Awesome Games Done Quick? It’s a blast as always, although it was a little disheartening to see a runner blaze through Splatoon 2 in the same amount of time it took me to beat one level.

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