Why does Xenoblade X get a bad rap again? I love the game. It's one I can lose hours and feel like I've accomplished nothing. That there's so much more left to do. That's what I enjoy about the game the most. It feels never ending. Of course in doing so it loses its story a bit but with what's given to you to explore it's acceptable.
I have a questions about this part here. What do you consider a populated game? Considering it had something to do, fight, or find in every single little hexagon at the least. Most of the time more. If you want a barren game play Twilight Princess, Even Final Fantasy XV, hell the original Xenoblade was barren to an extent in some areas. It being bland also confuses me. What about it is bland? Sylvalum is gorgeous, Oblivia is epic in every sense if the word, Primordia is your typical starting area sure, and Cauldrons isn't anything super special but I fail to see how any are bland. Very few RPGs capture that sense that you're in completely different worlds in each of the areas you visit, like the original Xenoblade for instance.
I still feel that the original Xenoblade Chronicles is far better than X. Though certain complaints confuse me. One of them being that people don't like it feeling like an MMO but that's what it was always compared to so I dunno why they played it if they didn't want a soft-MMO.
I found that a lot of the squares just had a single thing you pushed a button for a moment to unlock to them, or had other things that didn't have much to them.
That isn't to say that the other games aren't barren, although I haven't played most of them, just that no game released to date could actually meet my standards for holding my attention at that scale. The original Xenoblade actually was pretty barren as well thinking on it, it's just that being a bit more cramped, having a larger number of towns to break up exploration, and having a larger number of areas meant it wasn't as easily noticed. I'm not sure if it's even possible to populate an open world enough to actually hold my attention perfectly, although BotW seems to be trying to supply enough physics shenanigans to make up the difference.
Bland is more in the sense of each area outside of Noctilum having a single Hat for the entire map. Sylvalum is pretty and probably my next favorite area but it's "white place," and Oblivia is "desert" with my having a particular bias against deserts, possibly ever since the Great White Knight Chronicles Why The Heck Do You Keep Making Me Trek All The Way Across This Stupid Place of Who Knows What Year. I may or may not have been traumatized to deserts in MMO-likes.
Noctilum is nice because you never know what you're going to find. You can find an area with completely different colored grass, or a treetop, or a completely dead area. It's not a wide stretch of just one thing.
