shoz999
Back when Tigers used to smoke.
Discuss your favorite or one of your favorite Nintendo series. I'll start off with one of my favorites and an important series for JRPG history, Xenoblade Chronicles.
So I freaking love Monolith's world-building. They are without a doubt the most beautiful crafted worlds you will ever see in a video game that even with the limited hardware, people have claim it to look better than games like the Witcher 3 for its art-style alone. To this day I still see the majority of JRPG fans who play both Xenoblade Chronicles X and FInal Fantasy XV often say Xenoblade Chronicles X has the more impressive and livelier open world. However it's not just an artistically stunning series, it's a pretty important series too, specifically the very first Xenoblade Chronicles.
So for those who don't remember or aren't aware of how JRPGs were during the Wii-PS3 era, the main focus of it was pretty much all about graphics, graphics and graphics. This was a time that many major JRPG developers didn't seem quite sure what direction to take their series into, with many prioritizing in state-of-the-art graphics as the focus. The most famous example of this is Final Fantasy 13 on the PS3 which was praised for its graphics but criticized for its gameplay and linear world design to the point that Square Enix saw FF13's reception damaging the FF brand and wanted to fix that with sequels. Interestingly enough, this trend on more stunning graphics over gameplay bored Tetsuya Takahashi, the founder of Monolith Soft and creator of the Xeno series. For Xenoblade Chronicles, he envisioned a game with an action-packed shonen story where exploration and a sense of being overwhelmed would be huge themes to the game and thus Xenoblade Chronicles stood apart from the majority of other JRPGs at the time through its innovating open world design and an interesting combat system that has been compared to FF12. Hence, that is why Xenoblade Chronicles is so remembered to this day.
This was a pretty big deal at the time and perhaps still is. This is because Xenoblade Chronicles also released during a time when most JRPG developers were still experimenting with the open world formula with the majority of these series coming out with half-baked results, often where the open world transition either hinders the gameplay or that it adds the open world but not the open world exploration similar to the vast but empty Hyrule Field of Twilight Princess. A lot of JRPGs at this time couldn't get the open world formula right and to this day there are still JRPG developers struggling with this concept. This is where Xenoblade Chronicles comes in for essentially doing open world design right and thus was seen as a breath of fresh air by many JRPG fans. It's not perfect of course, fetch quests are the subject of hate when it comes to discussing Xenoblade's open world design but it was without a doubt a huge leap into the right direction of open world JRPGs that it caught the interest of Tetsuya Nomura of the Final Fantasy series and that the Monolith Soft team were asked to assist with the open world design of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
So I freaking love Monolith's world-building. They are without a doubt the most beautiful crafted worlds you will ever see in a video game that even with the limited hardware, people have claim it to look better than games like the Witcher 3 for its art-style alone. To this day I still see the majority of JRPG fans who play both Xenoblade Chronicles X and FInal Fantasy XV often say Xenoblade Chronicles X has the more impressive and livelier open world. However it's not just an artistically stunning series, it's a pretty important series too, specifically the very first Xenoblade Chronicles.
So for those who don't remember or aren't aware of how JRPGs were during the Wii-PS3 era, the main focus of it was pretty much all about graphics, graphics and graphics. This was a time that many major JRPG developers didn't seem quite sure what direction to take their series into, with many prioritizing in state-of-the-art graphics as the focus. The most famous example of this is Final Fantasy 13 on the PS3 which was praised for its graphics but criticized for its gameplay and linear world design to the point that Square Enix saw FF13's reception damaging the FF brand and wanted to fix that with sequels. Interestingly enough, this trend on more stunning graphics over gameplay bored Tetsuya Takahashi, the founder of Monolith Soft and creator of the Xeno series. For Xenoblade Chronicles, he envisioned a game with an action-packed shonen story where exploration and a sense of being overwhelmed would be huge themes to the game and thus Xenoblade Chronicles stood apart from the majority of other JRPGs at the time through its innovating open world design and an interesting combat system that has been compared to FF12. Hence, that is why Xenoblade Chronicles is so remembered to this day.
This was a pretty big deal at the time and perhaps still is. This is because Xenoblade Chronicles also released during a time when most JRPG developers were still experimenting with the open world formula with the majority of these series coming out with half-baked results, often where the open world transition either hinders the gameplay or that it adds the open world but not the open world exploration similar to the vast but empty Hyrule Field of Twilight Princess. A lot of JRPGs at this time couldn't get the open world formula right and to this day there are still JRPG developers struggling with this concept. This is where Xenoblade Chronicles comes in for essentially doing open world design right and thus was seen as a breath of fresh air by many JRPG fans. It's not perfect of course, fetch quests are the subject of hate when it comes to discussing Xenoblade's open world design but it was without a doubt a huge leap into the right direction of open world JRPGs that it caught the interest of Tetsuya Nomura of the Final Fantasy series and that the Monolith Soft team were asked to assist with the open world design of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.