The recent Xenoblade Chronicles X direct is all in Japanese. It shows off the ginormous world and what you'll be doing in it. I used Cheesemeister's (from NeoGAF) translation of the dialogue along with my own understanding of what's going on to write down some bullet points about the game.

You've got:

• Your main missions (finding Life Pods and Life Points, I think) and your side quests which you can take on from citizens or BLADE (the organization you work for).
• Frontier Spots, which are indicated by the big glowy red beams. Probe them to discover more info about the surrounding area (treasures, objectives and such). You can also fast travel to areas that you've probed. The citizens of NLA (New Los Angeles) will have more to say the more you probe areas.
• The relationship system is back (hopefully there's a better in-game tutorial for it this time around).
• Heavy emphasis on exploration of the planet, obviously. The five continents include: Grassland (location of NLA), Night Light Forest (This will look quite familiar to Xenoblade fans), the Forgotten Canyon, the White Forest, and the Black Steel continent.
• Navigation Ball races towards your destination to show you the way if you're lost.
• Hopper Camera allows you to get a birds eye view of your current location.
• For some reason you can jump great distances. I ain't complaining.
• Mech! It can run, drive, fly, and maybe swim? Piloting that thing around the world looks amazing.
• There are other humanoids to interact with. Some are friendly, some are not.

Honestly, I'm not sure how this game doesn't set the Wii U on fire. Apparently, that little box can handle this monstrously sized game.

Can't wait!

Edit: Forgot to mention that all of Sawano's vocal music tracks are here in full force. Now you're able to play your JRPG while listening to catchy Engrish songs in one convenient spot.

Man, so you're right about how this should set the Wii U on fire as one of the more interesting console JRPGs to come out in a while, compared to some of the hangups that plagued the entire FF13 trilogy. But that also assumes that the JRPG, as a genre/loose set of descriptors, holds that much clout among the general gaming masses.

If anything, I'm finding it increasingly quaint that there was once a time where Western game developers hadn't got in on the console market yet, and there were these massively successful JRPGs from the SNES and PS1 eras that had almost nothing to do with most of the other media that North Americans and Europeans consumed.

And then finally Halo happened, then RE4 happened (Capcom ironically paving the way for dozens of Western-developed third person shooters), then the Xbox 360 happened, and suddenly North Americans and European devs could transfer some of the games they had been making on PC into a console environment, and since they were games designed by Westerners, for Westerners, their popularity took off and completely eclipsed the once massive popularity of the JRPG in the PS1 era. It also helps that this coincided with the Xbox 360/PS3 generation where suddenly it was becoming prohibitively expensive to make big 60+ hour JRPGs, and a lot of Japanese game development started to shift towards mobile games.

I'm not saying anything about this turn of events is necessarily good or bad, but that it's interesting to think that this series of events might've played out entirely differently if Western devs had gotten more heavily involved in console development earlier. Also weird to think that the JRPG might never have existed if Wizardry hadn't somehow become super popular in Japan. It just feels like a very specific set of factors led to JRPGs being this huge part of our childhoods/teen years, almost against all odds given how culturally different they are from most other Western media.

I find it endless fascinating seeing how the popularity of certain genres rises and falls due to factors ranging from budgetary/business reasons to general public perception of that genre. I could read a whole book on it. And then you have cases where 2D indie games got big because ultimately there is still so much possible game design space to explore in games that can exist in a 2D world so even though the PS1/N64/PC hardware of the time were all capable of moving past 2D to 3D, it doesn't mean game designers had fully explored all of the interesting games to could be realized in a 2D world.

@bisonhero: Haha, by "set the Wii U on fire" I meant literally set it on fire because of the technical feat this game is.

Looks impressive. I'm finally getting to Xenoblade on Wii after a year of backlog.

So far I'm excited but time will tell.

@aegon said:

Ahhh, gotcha. I thought you meant the sheer impressiveness of everything on display should get people's attentions and maybe sell some Wii Us. Still, my misinterpretation of what you meant led to that thought chain which I'm glad I got out there!

OMG get those voices to shut up... I want to listen to some of the game effects but those voices are unbearable. I like the animation but the textures on the NPC's doesn't seem very good :(. Ultimately when something is as expansive and exploration focused as this, I think the combat dictates its quality.

It's really a shame the character design is so bad. Everything else seems really interesting and I'll definitely buy it when it comes out.

Am I hearing a Mika Kobayashi song there in the end? Cool!
But I also can't get over how bad these faces look ... everything else, though: A+!
I'm still very much hyped for this.

Thank goodness you can customize the main character. That design they have for him is pretty awful. I don't mind the faces as much as some others seem to but holy smokes that MC looks so bland.

Yeah the MC is really derpy. Unfortunately their other examples are just as bad, if not worse. Shorts girl looks like the lower half of her face is sloughing off. Shorts girl reminds me of Odo from DS9.

@tuxfool said:

@pyrodactyl said:

It's really a shame the character design is so bad. Everything else seems really interesting and I'll definitely buy it when it comes out.

@rayeth said:

Thank goodness you can customize the main character. That design they have for him is pretty awful. I don't mind the faces as much as some others seem to but holy smokes that MC looks so bland.

Yeah the MC is really derpy. Unfortunately their other examples are just as bad, if not worse. Shorts girl looks like the lower half of her face is sloughing off.

Why would anyone hire a character designer that's so terrible at his job? Every human character in the game looks horrible

The game looks awesome but... those faces... yeesh.

I've never really seen or touched a Xenoblade game but I'm really interested in checking this one out and giving it a shot.

Dammit. More Wii U games that I want to play and Nintendo continues to not release their console in Korea. Which if they did, I probably wouldn't buy anyway because they insist on region locking it. CURSE YOU NIINNTEEENNNDDOOOOO!!!!

I CAN'T STOP MAN THESE WII US ARE ON FIRE AAAH

It was a very interesting little piece of writing! Yeah, the history of the JRPG is pretty interesting. We might be getting three big traditional JRPG's on consoles this year - Xenoblade Chronicles X, Persona 5, and FFXV - and maybe, just maybe, one of them will knock it out of the fucking ballpark sales-wise and we can get some more console JRPG's. And we're getting Bloodborne for certain, so maybe Japanese games can really come back this generation? Maybe? Probably shouldn't bet on it.

I. want. to. punch. all. the .faces

its been said 100 times already but man..

please hire a better character modeler or tell him to look at real faces, eyes are either too far apart, too wide or at a strange angle, too much definition around the whole eye (bottom of eye should be lighter unless all the males are really into eye liner) on top of terrible eye shape (the black they use on the eye is also much darker than any other part on the face), some mouths are too big and everyone has a weird pout, too much cheek fat made worse by the standard pointy anime chin, chipmunk faces aren't cute they are disturbing.

The best looking faces are the gruff looking characters because they aren't afraid to break away from the 2d animu art and use real anatomy.

This stuff cant be that hard to fix, god knows it aint hard to notice.

I really hope Xenoblade,Persona 5, Bloodborne and FFXV all do really well critically and commercially so it could revitalize the genre that i loved the most and grew up with as a kid. I miss fantastic console JRPGS :(

Looks dope.

Makes me want to play Freedom Wars again, but it also looks a hell of a lot better than Freedom Wars.

This is the game that would get me to pick up a Wii U.

@masterpaperlink:

Something is getting lost between the designer and the modeler. Even so, I'm fine with how most of the characters look in-game and I even like some of them. The little girl, Lyn, is the one where the design is the most extreme and the modeler had the most trouble it seems. She understandably gets the most hate.

Regardless of those problems, most of the characters look fine to me so it doesn't bother me too much.

This is excessively minor, but I wish they didn't run around with those massive ass guns on their backs.

So this is for a new Wii U console that is coming out, right? Because there is no way in hell the Wii U can run a game like in that video.

@sterling: welcome to the actual power of the WiiU and not the puny amount of power developers have been using from it.