Labrynian Rebel
Member
I only use it to describe 95% of the sidequests, which are the worse part of the game and are monotonous.
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Xenoblade 3D |OT| Is that a Monado in your pocket or are you just really feeling it?
- Thread starter TheMoon
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I only use it to describe 95% of the sidequests, which are the worse part of the game and are monotonous.
CertifiedFP
Member
But there's no de-leveling.
Which reminds me... When it comes to the death penalty being nothing more than being warped back to your last landmark visited... I can't decide if that's dreadful dumbing down which is too forgiving, or a goddamn stroke of genius that separates Xenoblade from the crowd. Personally I lean towards the latter but my inner Souls fan always barks at it haha.
Shame the game doesn't make much use of the 3D, I'd imagine it would do so much for the perception of the landscape to make up for the reduced resolution with extensive 3D support. Do UI elements at least display in 3D above the environments ala SMT4?
Chrono trigger. Maybe some phantasy star (Honestly, chrono trigger already had some phantasy star 4 in it, I suspect a number of its creators were fans)
Its like what would have happened if jrpg's would have continued progressing on the foundation of their snes design roots, instead of squeenix taking a detour down all fmv's no substance after the success of ffvii.
CertifiedFP
Member
Why is it only Xenoblade fans (And Takahashi as well apparently) that agree with me that Final Fantasy VII's success was the worst thing to happen to JRPGs?
Whenever I bring it up around Final Fantasy fans they immediately go "Nuh! Nuh! Spirits Within / X-2!" when it's clear that VII is what started leading JRPGs onto the path they've gone now.
Probably because the people who cared about the actual game design side of rpg's have long since left forums dedicated to games that no longer target or produce the kind of experiences they enjoy.
CertifiedFP
Member
TBH, it's probably a miracle they even got the game running stable in 2D to begin with. Add in AA and it'd probably have framerate drops.
Isn't the 3D fairly taxing as well though?
Quite a few games do. Yes, it would have been nice.
Especially for those of us in NA, who have no choice but to get that horrible 92ppi new 3ds xl screen.
Oh well, Ill get over it. Ive been playing, hell I still play pc games that cant be rendered any higher than 320x200....
Huh. I have a sudden desire to see about dosbox on 3ds.
Maybe. The 3ds, even og 3ds gpu (its the same one), seems to be considerably more capable in a lot of ways than hollywood. More efficient pixel/vertex pipelines, more efficient and modern shaders, more vram, more system (Like, a lot more) ram, its even clocked a little higher. I think the 3ds is much more equipped to deal with AA of a 240x400 image than the wii was of dealing with a 480x800 image.
The cpu seemed to be the main problem here, and the 3ds in general. Namely in draw calls. Pretty sure going to 3d doubles the draw calls that need to be made, and the system was already pretty badly cpu bottlenecked. Even with a doubling in cpu cores and vfp co processors, that mobile arm 11 isnt going to effortlessly be double outdoing that wall plugged ppc 750. Despite all the jeers and jokes the wii got, that was always one hell of a good little non simd single core processor design.
Looking at it, Im pretty sure Xenoblade only does the 'true' double draw call 3d for maybe 10-20 meters out from the camera, and then past a cutoff point it only calls and rasterizes once (As opposed to rendering and rasterizing a different viewpoint for each eye), and simply uses data from the z buffer to space duplicated left and right eye objects (Like a tower), a certain distance apart, which gives the appearence of depth, but makes things look like cardboard cutouts instead of objects with 3d form like stuff close to the camera has. Bet there was some crazy hair ripping tweaking going on to get that to work right.
And then past another cutoff every thing else is flattended onto a single layer thats shoved all the way back,
Garou
Member
That was only for the first batch of 3DS-games where the software couldn't know if you have the slider turned up or not. Newer software knows the slider-position and does it automatically.
Is that a Mature rating for Xenoblade 3D? Or am I missing something?
Yes. It doesn't mean anything. Ratings don't mean a thing unless they're legal restrictions (R18).
I'm just surprised, given that the Wii one is rated PG. That's some whacked up ratings if the jump was that high given that they are almost exactly the same game lol.
Are you American? PG to M is barely a jump.
Also that Wii version is probably a New Zealand copy. Xenoblade was M on it's original Australian release. It doesn't matter, anything under M is freely distributed and doesn't require ratings between NZ and Australia as far as I know. e: seems Xenoblade was M in NZ too so I have no idea why it has PG on it. Again it doesn't matter to retailers or parents.
Nope, but games here follow Japanese CERO (for Japanese import) and ESRB for NA games. I'll be honest I'm not familiar with the ratings there, though those are the same ratings we use for movies, so I thought it was a big of a jump.
R10Neymarfan
Member
Basically play the Wii version on Dolphin I
in 1080p30 3D and the effect is way better
Mature here is basically the ESRB equivalent of Teen. No T rating.
That makes sense.
SolicitorPirate
Member
I don't know about that. A lot of very solid RPG series like Suikoden, Valkyrie Profile, Wild Arms and even Square's own SaGa existed pretty happily in a post FF7 world. Honestly, it seems that it was the sheer development costs associated with HD that largely killed JRPGs.
Makna Forest spoilers.
The Leone Telethia is probably the first really large scale boss fight in this game imo. I remember really struggling with it when I played the first time around on the Wii, it took a long time to get past it. This time around I mained Melia and had Dunban and Shulk with me to deal damage while I spammed Summon Bolt/Copy/Flare and whittled away at it's HP that way. Much easier this time around, although towards the end I had to constantly warn Shulk to use Monado Shield every few seconds to keep Dunban alive lol.
CertifiedFP
Member
HD was a scapegoat that was used to deflect blame from plain shoddy game design. Tales of Vesperia, the Souls games, and Last Remnant were bloody amazing, as will likely Xenoblade X. The only thing about HD that "killed" JRPGs were irresponsible spectacle fests that a ton of HD developers felt compelled to engage in for some reason, which could be said to be a long term result of the post-FF7 FMV craze, in addition to a large amount of mismanagement at the head of many Japanese publishers that happened to coincide with 7th gen. HD isn't a problem when developers don't let the capabilities go to their head and are willing to put something out that is modest and happens to not use 200% of the GPU - Considering the continued success of the Tales and Souls series in the current HD development setting. But hey, you know what they say, "HD towns are hard" -Motomu Toriyama
But I digress.
And to be fair on the point of Valkyrie Profile and Suikoden not being Style over Substance FMVfests... It's not like the developers could suddenly change how their games were designed with the snap of a finger. It took until around 2010 for FPSes to begin truly copying CoD4 - The vast majority of FPSes that came out in 2008/9 were in development *before* CoD's popularity explosion, alike how Valkyrie Profile was in development since at least 1996, which put it at least a solid year into development before FF7 was the Hot New Thing on the block.
Anyway, I'd rather kill this topic before the mods come and Rek us for potentially derailing. But yeah, like I said before - Great game design is great game design no matter what potential the hardware it is on has for spectacle. If hardware capability and game design quality were inversely proportional, Xenosaga 2 would be the 6th gen Game of the Generation.
Err... Anyone know a better way to pass the time for this next 3 day stretch OTHER than writing long and nonsequitous posts while I'm half asleep?
theprodigy
Member
I believe it's a stroke of genius.
I recently did a playthrough of Final Fantasy 6(Love the game), and I realized that there are some serious issues that have always plagued the series. Final Fantasy fans and most JRPG fans in general wouldn't call them issues because "Almost every JRPG has them".
Why do they need to have them though? Why can't there be checkpoints you spawn back to? It was really annoying in Final Fantasy 12 when you hadn't saved for 3 hours then whoops, random superboss. Since there are some insanely tough enemies in Xenoblade(Plus fall damage), this is an excellent design choice.
Thats really the key to xenoblades success.
There was no penalty for failure, you were encouraged, to explore and fail.
However, because of this, the battles were able to be made a lot more challenging, without frusteration shooting throught he roof, and the player was encouraged to take risks on harder battles. There was no penalty for failure, but the barrier to success was raised.
This also got rid of tedious things like item management. DId anyone seriously get any enjoyment out of managing tonics, mid tonics, ethers, shelters etc?
Not really. In most jrpgs by the time you killed your 10th monster you had enough cash to stock up on as many items as you wanted, and you only used healing items until you got characters who knew healing spells, and then you used those instead of items, when battle was over you cured everybody then used one of your hundreds of ethers to get the magic points back up. Then when they got back to shop, they went and stocked back up to whatever number they choose (I have 10 or more of everything, if its less than 10, I buy until I get 10). Its not hard, its not challenging, its just going through menus.
It wasnt fun, it wasnt engaging, there was no strategy, beyond what could be considered mind numbingly obvious, it was tedious.
Xenoblade did a fantastic job of cutting out a lot of that tedium that had just been 'the way it was' for too long.
Lol no. Lower resolution and some textures. that's it.
This is a without a doubt the most impressive console to handheld port I have ever played. Literally identical to the Wii version apart from those two things above. The game is as it ever was, and the frame rate is rock solid throughout. I'm constantly in awe it is running on a 3DS, especially in locations where you can see for miles and miles and miles. And with no fog or slowdown.
It is still one of the greatest RPGs ever made and is just as good as the Wii version. Buy it.
Xenoblade made a great call with the landmark revival system. Choose a save and checkpoint system that suits the title. Punishing people for dying has it's place and that's in a Souls game.
10 hours in and I'm still on Bionis' Leg. It's about kicking back and taking it slow.
10 hours in and I'm still on Bionis' Leg. It's about kicking back and taking it slow.
The game is pretty much asset identical to the wii version. Same low poly models, same low res textures, same incredible scene composition.
The IQ takes a hit, going from 480x800 to 240x800, or even worse if you play in 2d, going down to 240x400.
Fastest speedrun is 3 hours iirc. You need to step up your game.
That's NG+ though right?
Is there any way to rewatch cutscenes? I accidentally skipped the introduction one and now I don't see an option to watch it again.
And yeah, the 3D effect is very weird in that it makes it look like it only extends an inch into the screen at max. Even early 3DS titled like Ridge Racer had a very "deep" effect. I suppose they didn't want to leave it out completely (since "super stable 3D" is one of the N3DS features), but as it is now it doesn't do the massive draw distance any justice and they could have used to extra power for other things in the game.
But regardless, having such huge environments in a portable game is stunning and has always been a bit of a dream of mine. The game structure really suits the portable style as well - easily going from play to standby to play again, with the easy warping and the streamlined design.
And yeah, the 3D effect is very weird in that it makes it look like it only extends an inch into the screen at max. Even early 3DS titled like Ridge Racer had a very "deep" effect. I suppose they didn't want to leave it out completely (since "super stable 3D" is one of the N3DS features), but as it is now it doesn't do the massive draw distance any justice and they could have used to extra power for other things in the game.
But regardless, having such huge environments in a portable game is stunning and has always been a bit of a dream of mine. The game structure really suits the portable style as well - easily going from play to standby to play again, with the easy warping and the streamlined design.
thetrin
Hail, peons, for I have come as ambassador from the great and bountiful Blueberry Butt Explosion
I find the sidequests totally fine, and 90% of them auto complete without requiring a turn-in!
names2hard4you
Member
This is out on Friday guys. Friday. That's so soon, I cannot wait.
Windom Earle
Member
People saying they only downgraded textures and resolution, isn't there a lot less grass? This was always one of the things I liked about the Wii version,but it is kinda gone here. Only patches.
edit: Just took a look, the difference in foliage is huge.
Disappointing that they had to downgrade it so much from the weak Wii hardware.
edit: Just took a look, the difference in foliage is huge.
Disappointing that they had to downgrade it so much from the weak Wii hardware.
Sodding_Gamer
Member
Huh is it?! Where are you located? I had mine delivered from Nintendo last Wednesday.
names2hard4you
Member
Canada
The Elite
BOSS
It comes out on the 10th in North America.
Sodding_Gamer
Member
Ahh my bad.
I've been enjoying it so far. First time playing it. It looks much, much better than I was anticipating. Getting to Gaur plains at sunset looked really good. Mainly just doing the timed side quests and when I get bored I'll probably move back onto the story.
JODOROWSKY51
Member
Played this on the train to work today...
I can't comprehend how this is even possible!!
Such a good game!
I can't comprehend how this is even possible!!
Such a good game!
I knew Gaur Plains was supposed to be big, but boy, it really IS big.
Really really really big. I'm amazed this is still the (slightly souped up) 3DS I'm playing this on - the "see that in the background? You can actually walk there" syndrome is really catching me off guard!
And now I'm really curious if the next Zelda is going to be on such a scale...
Really really really big. I'm amazed this is still the (slightly souped up) 3DS I'm playing this on - the "see that in the background? You can actually walk there" syndrome is really catching me off guard!
And now I'm really curious if the next Zelda is going to be on such a scale...
theprodigy
Member
correct, NG world record is 9.5 hours (NG+ is 3.5 hours)
Youtube Xenoblade Prologue. Don't look at anything but the prologue, and avoid the sidebar.
TheSlySoul
Member
From quests? Not that I recall.
Quests and Land Locations gives you way more EXP than battles which is odd.
Xaero Gravity
NEXT LEVEL lame™
I wasn't a big fan of the game on the Wii, but I tend to enjoy JRPGs a hell of a lot more on a handheld, so surprisingly I'm looking forward to picking this up on Friday. Here's hoping it finally clicks with me.