7 reasons to skip Xenoblade Chronicles

I know I'm late, but these reasons are bullshit. Some of them are flat out wrong!

#1: Everyone screams this. But video games aren't the same as movies. They're more than spectacles. By your logic, every game that doesn't have at least 360/PS3 graphics shouldn't be played. What kind of fucked up bullshit reason is that?

#2: A classic controller costs $20 friggin dollars. Chances are if you can afford this game, you can afford the classic controller.

#3: I agree, Nintendo making this a limited release is bullshit, but it's not as if the game is outrageously expensive. People act as if Xenoblade for the Wii is Earthbound expensive. It's like $10 more than a new game. Whether that's worth it depends on what you think you'll get out of this game.

#4: The game's offering variety. If you don't want a helmet that protects you from bleed damage, then don't wear a helmet that protects you from bleed damage! It's not that hard. These specific gems are supposed to be use against enemies that specialize in certain areas.

#5: This is just flat out wrong. Are you so stupid that you forgot to notice the red and blue highlighted areas indicating which stats are boosted and/or reduced from your current armor with the new?

#6: This isn't a reason to not buy the game. This is the case with all open-world rpgs. It's part of the genre.

#7: Again, this is a terrible reason to skip out on the game. It's a part of the genre!

@kyle

1) what do you expect, it's a wii game. I prefer the less detailed faces compared to gritty looks. Broad brushstrokes and distinct looks are part of jrpgs.

4) the interface is brilliant, everything is clearly shown and you can reorganise items in multiple ways. What are you talking about? Unless you mean swapping gems to better equipment, butthat's to be expected.

5) you want the game to just tell you what you need for every quest? It's a better system than in many other games, in that there's the vision feature, but if it happened for every quest items, then you would complete a lot of quests before actually receiving them.

I'm in the UK, and over here it retailed for £30 on release, so around $38. Admittedly theprice
has gone up massively due to very low quantities still on the market as people that have the game tend to keep it.

I guess I'm just a crazy person for wanting a more functional inventory. Or everyone is playing dumb about it. Or maybe I just notice when game design is lacking because I'm a game developer. At any rate, I better try to explain.
1. Certain item information is missing in certain contexts. You can't see how much an item is worth unless you're in a shop or trading. And for some reason, an item's description can only be seen in the inventory or collectopedia. If you want to see the text attached to a piece of equipment when you're equipping it in the party menu, you're out of luck. I know it wants to focus on the item's actual stats on that screen, but surely it could show the description when you press + for more information.
2. It's damn difficult to tell when an item is better than another, or which item is the best. When you select a piece of equipment, it just shows what your new stats would be, not how much better or worse the item is than your current item or no item. Sometimes you're in luck and the new stats are better across the board, but usually there's a trade-off, and all you can see is than it has better physical defense and worse ether defense or vice versa. I need to move the cursor around so that no item is selected and I can see my current stats, then move the cursor back to the item and do the math in my head to tell if the new item is better or worse. There is no reason that the game shouldn't have the option to do this automatically. Heck, the game should have a button that equips all the best stuff on your whole party. If you could tell the game what your gem preferences were then it could do the same with gems.
3. Speaking of which, it should definitely be easier to equip gems. While there are a lot of options for how to sort gems, somehow it's not enough. Suppose I'm looking for strength up gems. There's no option to bring me right to the strength up gems. I know they're red, but there's no option to show all the red gems either. The categories are things like "field" and "special," and it's not immediately obvious what those categories contain. And when I'm trying to fill all a weapon's slots I want to just see all the gems and choose the 2 or 3 I want all at once. But instead I have to navigate to one slot, press a button, navigate to the gem, press a button to equip it, press a button to exit out of that slot, then navigate to the next slot and do the whole thing over again.
4. It's also a pain to find the right crystals when crafting gems. They've got a nice thing going where a crystal will glow if it has at least one stat in common with what you already have, but there's no way to sort for a specific stat. You could end up looking through hundreds of gray monster crystals only to find that they were all glowing because they had a stat that you didn't want rather than one you did.
5. Trading for secret items is awful. It's fine to have a mystery item to trade for, but you could at least tell us what its value is so we know how much extra value the item we're giving away needs to have. There should never be gameplay mechanics like this that encourage you to do a lengthy reload once you've discovered the secret and can do the trade again without wasting any value. And there should be a way to see what items a character has from the affinity screen once you've already discovered that they have them. At the very least it should indicate whether or not you have discovered a character's mystery item. You might not think this is important but apparently there are special items in the collectopedia that can only be obtained from trading. Things like this make me say that Nintendo still thinks it's in the era when games were made to sell strategy guides.

These are a few of my complaints with items. I didn't even get into wanting skill linking to be easier. The common theme seems to be that the game makes you look at every single thing in situations when you shouldn't have to.

Sweet job :)
in regards to 1; what you're asking for is something that benefits no-one. You can organise items by sell value so you can get a good idea of values. Is the sell value of an item worth knowing if you're not at a place you can sell it? The items that come with descriptions are the collectables which cannot be equipped, and their descriptions are readily available in the two places you can use them. As for the descriptions of armour and stuff, there comes a point when you don't really care, and considering all the relevant info it does reveal on the equip screen such as the equipment's stats, it seems a little irrelevant and peripheral. I'd liken it to Kid Icarus Uprising where if you take time to read through information on all equipment youll appreciate the extra thought gone into making the game; but similarly you can just as easily enjoy the game knowing that x armour is better than y armour in every conceivable way regardless of descriptions. I prefer the descriptions kept 'hidden' - though they aren't really - as it is like a mini easter egg. In comparison to other games where there is no description ever, I find it nice.
in regards to 2. By pressing start it comes up with each piece of equipment's individual ratings and through this it is easy to make comparisons between direct stats. The same is the case when buying an item, its stats are readily apparent. The higher the weight, the more a drop in agility is also self-evident from this. 'Best armours' don't exist. There's an argument where no armour Dunban is the best, but with your magical 'maximise everything' button this playstyle is lost. Plus, for certain characters, higher phys def is preferred to higher ether def (e.g. Reyn or Sharla) and so they tend to wear heavier armour; whereas characters like Shulk and Melia might want more balance between the two defences. Also if you do not have enough of the 'best armour' for the whole party, how would the game allocate who to give it to. In the case of 7 a Speed Armour set with Haste is tended to be preferred, but it doesn't individually give the best stats to their defences etc. As for maximise gems, what if multiple characters run strength gems and they are not all of the same level. You might in preference give Reyn for instance the 3 strength up V gems, and give shulk the 3 strength up IV gems; but in a magical world where optimisation is achieved with a clickof the button, shulk might end up with the strength V gems. In reality, this type of 'magical button' would not work and cater to all playable characters at once. I do agree that gem preferences for characters should be allowed; but the gem navigation is fairly straightforward.
3. I concede to the latter point to make gems equippable quicker. As compared to how gems are sorted, colour would be nice (as in the gem crafting menus) but the default one (attribute) gives a clear picture and easily sorts the gems. Field is obvious for things that benefit out of battle i.e. Quick Step and so on. I think its pretty easy to navigate gems.
4. I love the gem crafting system. I find it fluid and oh so easy to craft the best gems. Perhaps the ability to specialise in a particular attribute would be good; but when there are crystals that can have 2-4 attributes, how would they be sorted into this system. If you craft all your gems every few hours (which is the optimal way to play) there should never be 100s of grey crystals to go through. Considering only about 20 of the attributes are useful, it doesn't hurt to read what each crystal has if you keep them to a manageable size. Plus when you get the crystals from enemies; it tells you what the gem has and it is easy to say no to picking up a cystal you will not need. Rather than play mindlessly and accept everything, because money is generally no object I do this with items, weapons and crystals so I never have crappy trash to filter through.
5. I can't object to everything said here. Trading would be a lot easier if it showed up what NPCs could trade and at what affinity of an area on the chart.
Also I'm going away for a bit; so don't worry if I don't reply to your reply.

I could care less about the graphics and stuff. The story is more important to me than that. And, number three is essentially just completely ignorable now that it's out for 3ds for a lot cheaper.

What's so bad about GameStop?

You may have to buy a New 3ds XL to play it, but it's worth every penny of that $200.

I had a few bad experiences with them years ago so I rarely go to the stores. I've broken that rule recently, but I did manage to not shop there for like 5 years

All of these are total nitpicks.

I believe monolith is made up of some of th best who left square soft when it turned enix. Designers of Xenogears?!

You can hold the "c" button on the back of the nunchuck to achieve the simultaneous character and camera movement. With the gems for debuffs- resisting that one bleed or negating one (60% return damage/instant death) spike could mean the difference between winning a fight and loosing it. I made it to level cap and figured this out the hard way when I slammed a lvl 96 monster with a critical backslash on shulk and instantly died. This was from a post story character you will never run into unless you are determined to get 100% completion but my point is these gems you say aren't worth it turn out to be the most valuable things in the game besides your character interaction and party set up. Having beaten the game several times and having several hundred hours into it i can personally say that this game's story line FAR outweighs the graphic flaws of the game. Sure, it takes commitment to beat it (just beating the game and squeaking by the final boss (three fights in a row on the same character btw) took me a little over 80 hours) but the story draws you in and makes you want to see how it ends.

The comparing of stats in the game is easy. I've never had a problem with it and I've sorted through A LOT of gear. I have a full legendary set on Reyn as well (minus the helmet, which is the hardest drop to get from the Ancient Daedela).

Thank you for that. Revived my hope in this community of gamers

Perhaps you and other players don't mind taking the time to go through all your equipment manually. But the game would still be better if it had a feature that allowed players to equip things more quickly. The presence of that feature would not have made your experience any less enjoyable.