You make some valid criticisms but it's clear that you do not understand the battle system if you think this is what's going on.
And that's understandable because neither did I for quite awhile, the game doesn't explain it very well and it takes awhile for the game to really open it up.
I took the time to read a lot of tutorials about the combat in the game and FAQs in internet. And while it promises a lot of deep mechanics, simply, all of these deep systems are not applied in the combat in the first 10 hours of the game, and they can be surpassed with simple attacks.
As I said, I have no doubts that if I advance far into the game, all these promised good combat systems will appear between the anime troops and all the big boobs.
But honestly, I prefer to invest this time in a game like '
Elminage Original', in which every combat is interesting and challenging, starting from the first minute into the game.
Good for the people with the patience to discover the supposedly good parts of the game, after all the tutorials, and after having invested 60 euros in a game.
JRPGs are a vey complicated genre to judge based in the opinion of other people.
Even more, traditionally, the JRPGs that I have enjoyed the more, they were destroyed by the reviews in the press because of their "
repetitive nature".
Fortunately, things have changed for the better in the last 5 years. Now, you can't see scores of 6 for the new releases of 'Etrian Odyssey', even when NintendoLife has give a score of 5 to '
The Lost Child', simply because is trying to be a dungeon crawler game, and it doesn't have a name as well stablished as the Atlus series.
And in the 90s, every roguelike of Chunsoft translated to English received scores of 5. Now, finally the press have been able to understand the roguelike mechanics, and they don't have the guts of destroying their games with low scores, using that you lose your progress when you die as the main argument for the low score, in texts written by people who come from playing a match in 'Fortnite'.
And this is my main problem trying to find good JRPGs to play. The press still keeps writing about the quality of the stories in the JRPGs. If I want to see a good story in a screen, I prefer to watch a film of Ingmar Bergman.
The combat system and the mechanics are still the most important things in a JRPG for me.
And 'Xenoblade Chronicles 2' doesn't do a good work in presenting an interesting or challenging combat system in its first hours.
So if a friend asks me if I can recommend him 'Xenoblade Chronicles 2, I will say, better invest this money in a masterpiece and hidden gem in the eShop like '
Ambition of the Slimes', which is the opposite: a game in which every combat is interesting and challenging.
But I will coincide with a lot of people in past messages in which we have a serious problem in these threads if we are talking about 'Xenoblade Chronicles 2', but for example, I can't find a single opinion of a release as interesting as '
Whip! Whip!', a single-scrreen arcade game inspired in '
Bubble Bobble' and '
Snow Bros' using a
Game Boy Advance aesthetic.
So the problems in video games forums is not related with hyperbole: it's related with a toxic culture of hype, in which only the heavily marketed games such as 'Xenoblade Chronicles 2' are able to create some type of reaction in the public, it doesn't matter if it's the form of praise or criticism.
