Gvaz said:
It felt like a half baked game to me. I enjoyed the exploration a lot but most of the time it was very unrewarding to explore as there isn't much to find. Sure the areas are beautiful but you rarely find something useful. At most you find those horrible collectables or items required for the annoying fetch quests the game is filled with. Instead of doing 20 well done side quests using nicely desgined side areas and npcs they preferred to do 500 shitty fetch quests. Good luck finding the like 10 quests with useful rewards.
It also didn't help that finding npcs for these quests was a chore since they only appear in a specific time window so you have to mess with the clock all the time. Why bother with a night/day system if the game admits that you need to manipulate it manually all the time to be able to do something. Getting the loots required for the quests were also annoying since some are rare drops from monsters who appear only in certain areas under a specific wheater or other randomly spawn on the ground at a certain time or weather. It doesn't help that you have no bestiary or some encyclopedia containing all the info about where you fought X or found Y, at which time and under which weather.
I was fed up with the battle system about 20 hours in. It basically boils down to circling monster and using the move that exploits the specific sides of the monster over and over again. It didn't help that you gain useful moves quite slowly. I also didn't like how you couldn't configure the behaviors of your AI partners. The only way to order them to do something is by warning them when you have a vision. I did enjoy the vision system but once again they went too far with the gimmicks. They give you all those monado moves for specific situations but the game requires you to use them quite seldomly (except for the one allowing party members to hit mechs).
Gems were annoying to collect since my inventory was always filled with them and I was more or less trying to fill the furnace with them all the time. This system seemed like a diluted Star Ocean item creation knockoff. Affinity points took forever to gain between AI members so you pretty much either have to swtich the character you play all the time or say good bye to those cheezy hearts to hearts where you need to answer completely random questions.
Story eventually became quite interesting to me but the characters were so horrible. I felt like punching Shulk in the face all the time. Especially, when he did his "Oh no, I'm not sure I'll able to do it" speech in every story events past the halfway mark.
So yeah. It seems they tried to shove as many quests and mechanics in the game without bothering about the quality of the stuff they've added.
