hannah

So, I'm well-known (as these things go) for being a fan of Xenoblade, although certainly not for being in its fandom; I wasn't able to acquire a Rainfall copy of the original US release of Xenoblade, which was in limited supply and exclusive to Gamestop, but one was procured for me by my then-creative partner as a birthday gift. The rest was extremely-niche and -personal history.

I think talking about that game at length is probably not worth it because its fanbase is often very loud, and while I have a lot to say about it and the games that preceded and followed it, I am torn between a fairly measured and critical view of a game that is better than most but fails significantly, something that is always true of the games in that particular "orbit," except when their failure is more dramatic and off-putting - which, to be fair, is mostly not the case here.

But I also acquired The Last Story because of its then-association, and it's funny how quickly it vanished from memory, which is sort of emblematic of Sakaguchi's latter-day work: frequently named as a synonym for the series that made him a titan of the industry, as if to recapture the magic; featuring genuine innovation in some particular area of mechanics, and clearly passionately-made; and ultimately, never as special as its fans want to argue.

Finding a marriage of traditional role-playing and essentially a cover-shooter is a fascinating concept, and the characters being so heavily-customizable gives the player a real sense of ownership over their play-style. But ultimately it's a pretty straightforward narrative that relies upon every character, including the one you're controlling, being just extraordinarily dumb.

The first third of the game is basically a riff on Disney's Aladdin in a forever-city like Dragon Age's Kirkwall, which is a concept that relies upon charismatic performances and flirty writing that just isn't there.

Sakaguchi is generally so disinterested in ports of his older games that it will likely be lost forever, and it's probably for the best, as I'm not sure how it would even play without the motion controls - just as the potential PC port of Fantasian he's currently arguing for might crumble into dust the moment it was played, without the innovative use of the touch-controls it was built to use on iOS.

You know what, I'm swinging back around to say something else, sorry.

The Operation: Rainfall games were weird. At least, by the standards of their genre, they were weird. They didn't equally work, and they weren't equally weird, but that's why Operation: Rainfall happened - because Nintendo of America decided that there was no longer a market for this stuff. That sentiment reverberated even past the time of discussion - when Treehouse were trying to show off Xenoblade X during E3, they kept stumbling trying to tell you what the point of the game was or even what it was about - it wasn't clear they knew (and it wasn't clear that their localization team were comfortable with it, either). Xenoblade 2 limped over the finish line. It was only when Xenoblade 2 did numbers (regrettably), that the perspective at Nintendo of America was different on it, I think. A miserable state of affairs to be in, but it's not the perspective of the guy making them, so it is what it is.

I say that to say this: All of them are experiments, on one level or another. I know the least about Pandora's Tower, personally, but it was a strange little dungeon crawler, almost like trying to make Ico an action RPG - general consensus is that it didn't work. The Last Story won't commit to its innovation and so it ends up eating up interest after the first two hours. Xenoblade was the most conventional of the bunch, but at the time of its release, it was considered unlike the other games being made because it was a mish-mash of ideas that seemed antithetical, but (largely) worked in context. The MMO-style play, the fact that you were meant to keep track of 200 named NPCs on their own day-night cycle, that significant sidequests were gated behind generic ones, that the game was essentially not balanced at all, that the final two party members had entirely separate mechanics not introduced until you were anywhere from 40 to 100 hours in, depending on your commitment to completionism, at the time it was a curio. It just so happened that people were hungry for that style of narrative after receiving watered-down copies of its style after nearly five years.