I'm too emotional right now. Maybe I'll write extended thoughts some other time but man. I've never really gotten into Time Loop stories before, but this one absolutely hooked me. Gameplay does get a little bit stale around the halfway point but everything comes together in the end. I get the feeling that this score might increase over time.

Overall: I fucking love the funny "Quirky Indie RPG" genre. Give me like 20 more of them or something I don't care

EDIT: I changed my mind already. It's getting 5 stars.

Before I start I'm just gonna preface this by saying that this is not a normal review and what I'm saying might not even make any sense. My thoughts on this game are strange. These are just the drawn out incoherent ramblings of someone who, minutes before writing, just finished the game at 2 AM. And despite the rating, I ended up feeling kind of conflicted.

So, Xenoblade Chronicles, right. I was saving this game specifically for my 400th game milestone, as 90% of the people I've ever known who enjoy video games have built it up as a perfect masterpiece. And while I have learned to keep my expectations in check, I was pretty confident that it would live up to those statements.

And I was kind of right, because Xenoblade does so much that it's sort of overwhelming. It had really engaging gameplay, a great story, amazing characters and breathtaking visuals. Looking at the comparisons between the original game on Wii and the Switch remaster is like night and day. The soundtrack is one of the best this medium has to offer. There is so much stuff in the game I can't even mention it all. I'm even wondering if it's possible for me to play through it all... which is kind of where my problem comes in.

When does a game have too much content?

I'm probably not gonna be able to answer that properly here (Refer back to the 2 AM rambling thing I said) but I was thinking about it during my playthrough a lot, because although I had fun through the whole game, I found myself getting weirdly annoyed in the last few chapters.

Long game length usually isn't too big of an issue for me. In fact, it took me around 50 hours to beat this, which is less than half the amount of time it took for me to beat one of my favourite games, Persona 5 Royal. It's not as if the game is paced badly either, the story progresses naturally and so does the gameplay.

(Not saying Persona 5 and Xenoblade should really be compared mechanically, they're very different, I just needed a comparison to another long game lol)

But whatever the reason was, I started getting mad a bit. I felt like a lot of it was unnecessary. Maybe I was just getting burned out, maybe it was the rising difficulty. But that final stretch felt like it could've been condensed to a shorter runtime and I would've enjoyed it just as much.

Don't get me wrong! The content that was there was all really amazing! It was an incredibly well made game! Everything that was there made perfect sense! But I can't stop myself from feeling like it could've been shorter and I could've avoided that feeling of being burned out. If you're reading this and you don't get what I'm saying, that's fine, because I don't even get it myself!

So what we've got is an incredible game that feels too long and pissed me off for some incomprehensible reason. Maybe I'll write an actual review later so I can pinpoint exactly why I feel this way. I guess overall though, the people that hyped this game up to me were right. It's absolutely worth playing.

Despite that though, this is probably the first time I'm giving something 5 stars due to it's technical quality rather than my own opinion. I'm doing this because I feel like my current feelings are being a bit too unfair and I need to think about it more. I know that it's odd to be so negative in a 5 star review. I love this game. But maybe the rating will stay at 5 stars or dip to 4. I don't know. I'm going the hell to sleep.