Xenoblade

Why is Alcamoth so large? Every other town is either in a confined area or has distinct landmarks, and then all Alcamoth gets is two fountains and the palace as landmarks. Finding npcs in that town is a pain.

Xeno 2 is a stand alone game, but you get to see how it is connected to 1 by the end of the game. It's only a brief segment, so you can still fully enjoy the game anyway, but given how DE releases next month you may as well wait a bit and play that one first.

Even with the shoulder being huge it can't be more than a few hours tops.

There's portals involved, so it may have some additional areas. Look at Torna, nobody expected it to be such a big game on its own.

>Finding npcs in that town is a pain.
It could be worse, it could be the fucking Nopon tree city. I sure hope they made it easier for you to find NPCs in this remake.

>game timegates sidequests
>but also puts them in massive areas with no clues to find the person again
>there are four times of day, and some npcs are only present during 1/4th of the day
Xenoblade 1's sidequest system was so fucking trash. It's one of the reasons I prefer 2.

Correct me if I'm wrong but the affinity chart would tell you what times npcs would be active and their nearest landmark, and quests would always show who their giver was in its details.
Of course it wasn't perfect due to them sometimes having long routes or changing location completely if certain quests were active but you could always at least narrow down their area.

Same, I will probably have to stay away from Yas Forums for a while or else I risk running into drive-by spoilers and asshole OPs that subtly put a spoiler in the form of a seemingly unrelated question

If the player doesn't have an inkling then it's not spoilery. That's like saying knowing who KOS-MOS is spoils her plot line.

Definitely play 1 before 2. No matter what the other subhumans tell you.