JRPG Battle: Xenoblade vs Ni No Kuni

Xenoblade sucked me in. Ni No Kuni was a fun playthrough, but overall, I prefer Xenoblade.

@turtlethetaffer:

So serious dude.

Luckily though, JRPGs don't even classify as games so I'll request a lock on this thread and we can forget this ever happened.

Or maybe if the mods are feeling kind enough they'll move it over to the "General Soap Opera and J-Pop Discussion Board for Weeaboo Man Children".

I'll see what I can do. Hope OP doesn't get banned for this.

It's weird how people are saying that Xenoblade doesn't have amazing art. It's fucking beautiful and a technical marvel considering what it's running on.

Played the game on PC with Dolphin and it looked great in native 1080p.

I've only played Ni No Kuni for a few hours but it hasn't actually swept me off my feet thus far. It's nice and all but seems to be really, really slow at the beginning at least. Maybe it gets better in due time..

Ni No Kuni is good but the pacing never gets fixed. At the beginning, it takes about 5 hours to a familiar or two; around the 15 hour mark you get a boat and start to travel the sea; around the 20 hour mark you finally get a travel spell that allows you to revisit previous towns without having to traverse the land for 20+ minutes. Then around the 25 hour mark you get a dragon.

Combat becomes meaningless after you get a dinoceros which plows over everything; Oliver becomes extremely overpowered in the end. Bosses use many attacks that could almost be classified as unavoidable and they often spam these attacks. The combat system is only partially fully controlled as well. Once you select a command your character will be taken over by AI and god forbid that another AI character is in his path (if one his your character will get stuck/hit a wall and not be able to complete the attack). AI members are absolutely useless too.

Pacing for sidequests is tedious, more so than Xenoblade, as well. Sidequests boil down to fetching hearts, but unlike Xenoblade where the majority of quests are over once you do the objective, in Ni No Kuni the sidequest is only completed once you travel back to the person who gave you the sidequest and talk to them.

Characters aren't especially great, partially due to lack of voice acting which is disappointing because the voice acting was entertaining when present and hand holding/instructive text that diminishes the writing.

Ni No Kuni was a game that I was almost certain would sweep me off my feet, it was the game I was most hyped for going into 2013. Unfortunately, it didn't. It was still a good game, but not something I can gush over. The charm wasn't in game play mechanics, pacing or story, but mostly setting and atmosphere for me.

Since we're talking about RPGs I want to go on a tangent and say that the second half of Bravely Default is this year's Ni No Kuni, possibly an even worse offender of frustrating game design in a game that I want to be amazing.

I thought you said Xenoblade wasn't overrated.

What scores would you give TLS and LO?

Character designs in Xenoblade leave a bit to be desired, but I agree that the environments are gorgeous.

Most of the music either sounds inappropriate for the environment it's used in, or just generic and forgettable. The main characters all have almost no personality besides Drippy, and the character designs in general are rather plain. The pacing is pretty bad since there's a lot of moments where the game forces you to backtrack back and forth across environments over and over, and Oliver's a moron so other characters constantly repeat information to him.

The story is full of massive, obvious plot holes, many of which make Oliver look like he's crazy. The gameplay is anything but intuitive, with it's clunky mix of turn based style menus and action style combat, and idiotic, broken party AI.

So I disagree with you.

That's true; it was awesome that all the equipment changed character appearance in game, but the models were pretty bad.

@ConanTheStoner: I thought so, I was just making sure.

Xenoblade is one of the very few games..I play from start to finish without getting distracted by other games...Im usually in the habit of playing multiple games..have Ni No Kuni..but haven't started. :P

Cool story bra

And that matters to me because...?

Because we're discussing a game.