- I want to play something else now but I know I'll struggle to pick it up again if I drop it now. Looked online at how long I have left and...I'm just over half way through. I don't recall the other two being so long and if they were, it probably helps that I loved them from the start. It's not often I complain about a game being far too long but with what's looking to be about 60-70 hours of main story content, it's tiring to sit through at this point. I don't mind so much content, but it would be a lot less daunting if it were optional side quests and blades.
- About 20 hours in until I stopped getting regular tutorials and unlocking new primary gameplay features. It shouldn't take so long to be given your entire BASIC toolset and the game to become fun and honestly, to me it's a design failure. I'm only trying so hard to finish this one because I want to love it like the previous two, I don't know how a newcomer with no expectations could sit and bide their time this long...Reminds me of Final Fantasy XIII when everybody insisted the game gets good about 30 hours in, then 30 hours in you get 3 big open empty fields before entering the final stretch of hallways.
- The characters never shut up. There really needs to be some sort of 'mute combat dialogue' option or something. Sometimes they cut themselves off mid sentence they talk so damn much. Especially with Tora and Nia doing those irritating "ma ma maaaah" and "yayayayayayaya" noises every 6 seconds.
- Too many cutscenes. I would love the game far more if it just let me spend more time enjoying the systems rather than a bombardment of cutscenes, more often than not about 5 in a row within 20 meters distance of each other. Seeing as I've """""played""""" a lot of this game on my work breaks, most of my game time has essentially been watching a movie at this point.
- I hate the augment system. So tedious and dull compared to everything else there. In fact, as much as I love some of the game systems, there's too many of them. Regular RPG levels, affinity trees, weapon skills, accessories, pouch, blades, affinity trees for the blades, separate weapon systems for the blades, augments for the blades, another separate system specifically for one character (Poppi and her variations), field skills...Like, damn, most of this could be consolidated into each other. It's poorly designed IMO.
- One that irked me in particular because it had me wandering around for about half an hour stuck on where to go, there's been at least a couple of times where you have to do something you've never done before, never will do again and thus didn't even know it was an option you should consider. This particular case was standing on some icicles to make them drop and create a bridge to progress. Absolutely nowhere else in the game did I have to do anything remotely like that, where I have to stand in a particular unmarked spot to make something happen, so when I got to it and there was no objective marker, I didn't even consider that a possibility. I just looked for some field skill icons and moved on like the game had trained me to do for the previous 30 hours. I thought it was all static scenery like literally everything else up to this point.
I hate when games do that, expect you to do something the game hasn't taught you is possible. I don't get the feeling of "oh, it's so obvious! I'm so silly!", I just think "wtf?" and call it crap.
(for XBOX)
