Both the best, and the worst, aspects of Xenoblade Chronicles X can be summed up in the game’s most triumphant moment. After roughly 40 hours, your character finally unlocks the ability to fly. Zooming through the sky in a giant robot, blazing across territory that was once a perilous (if beautiful) slog to traverse, there’s a giddy sensation of freedom that has its roots in all the hoops the game has made you jump through to finally get to this point. It’s the apotheosis of the “airship moment” from the old Final Fantasy games, the moment when the world truly opens up, taken to extremes by the beauty of the setting in question and the intense frustrations that were surpassed to see it in its fullness.

But all the pleasures of that moment can’t erase that whole “40 hours into the game” thing that preceded it, or the underlying flaws that persist even after you take to the skies. Xenoblade Chronicles X is a game that presents the player with real pleasures, sights, and experiences they’re unlikely to have encountered before, and that’s something to be celebrated. But it doesn’t change the fact that the game is also a poorly paced, frustrating, sometimes embarrassingly written mess.

Xenoblade Chronicles X never met a moment of interest or fun that it couldn’t “improve” by locking it behind a fetch quest or a mandatory quota of explored territory, often tying it to a randomly dropped item or two, just to make things interesting. No reward—useful upgrades, new characters, progression through the plot—is free. Every fun quest, of which there are a few, is hidden behind two or three boring ones, as though the designers were mimicking the screaming teacher from “Another Brick In The Wall,” the one who’s terrified that players will try to eat their pudding before they’ve finished their meat.

The worst instance of this, in a disappointing but not wholly surprising turn, is tied to the Skells, one of the most alluring carrots in Xenoblade’s arsenal of ways to coax the player into taking up yet another asinine quest to kill a dozen rampaging monsters or scour the world for more randomly generated collectibles. The Skells have been a big selling point in the game’s promotional campaign, and for good reason: They’re legitimately cool, combining increased combat options with new ways to navigate the environment (via increased speed and jumping ability at first, and later on with flight). So it feels almost intentionally antagonistic to be told that, after finally unlocking the damn things—after 20 hours of watching various NPCs dart around in their own beautiful transforming mecha—you’re now expected to complete eight more subquests to acquire your license to pilot one. It puts a monstrous hydra of tedium between you and the empowering moment when you finally step into the cockpit, and it’s the ugliest symptom of an underlying disease, an apparent belief that fun must somehow be “earned” to be really appreciated. It’s a philosophy that drags the game down at every turn.