Xenoblade Chronicles X

Scroll down to read the review, or watch it in video form here: https://youtu.be/g4b1WUSjcsc

I'm not going to bother betting around the bush and be straight up with this one. Xenoblade Chronicles X is amazing. I love it so much. If all you want to know is whatever or not the game is worth by the answer is yes, yes, and YES! It does such a great job at blending the scale and imagination of the original game with lots of new ideas. Granted while some of these ideas may not work as well as others, and the overall experience may not quite be what fans of the original are expecting. But even with that said, this is one of the best experiences I have had with a game in a long time.

PRESENTATION

To quickly alleviate concerns for onlookers, you do not need to play the original Xenoblade Chronicles for the wii to enjoy this game. The story and characters have no connection to this and in fact from the looks for things they probably take place in a completely separate universe. Now if you have played the original wii game, there are plenty of call backs and references for you all, but if not you will have no problem getting into the story here. We good? Okay.

X takes place in the year 2054 as a massive war between two alien races is taking place. Unfortunately, these races decided to have their war right over Earth. Knowing that the end was upon them, humanity created a massive ship called the white whale on order to shepherd the survivors of Earth in order to find a new home, as Earth is annihilated behind them. Eventually, after crash landing on a distant planet and humanity is faced with its greatest challenge yet: to survive.

The games plot is...a bit mixed. On one hand, the story is very compelling setting itself up very well initially and continuing to hold your interest right up until the end. There are numerous twists throughout and the stakes presented make for an incredible sense of urgency and tension, especially when the final hours of the main story approach. On the other hand, the main problem with the story is that it is way to short. The entirety of the main story missions only consists of 12 chapters. More over each of these only contribute tot he advancement of the main narrative. While this does well to keep things moving forward, it comes at the cost of the development of the characters. In fact aside from the main player created character, the only two who are consistently involved in the main narrative are Elma, your commanding officer, and Lin, a 13 year old mechanic. While many additional characters are introduced, they mostly feel underdeveloped.

This is where the affinity missions come in. Affinity missions are character specific missions that you take on in between story missions. These come in different forms but all focused on either fleshing out the characters or the setting. And it's just so close...yet so far. Usually the problem comes when you end up being uninterested in the characters and yourself not caring. But in this case, it's wasn't a lack of interest that was the problem. The problem is that I liked the characters and wanted to know more about them. And the game just wouldn't tell me. There were bits and pieces just enough to make you invested and want to get to know these people, but rarely was it enough to be able to fall in love with them. I get the feeling that X was trying to go a Suikoden route by giving you a massive number of playable characters and making you feel like you knew them all. But you really don't. Now there are a few stand out characters for sure, and overall, with one exception, I didn't find anyone really annoying or unlikable which is a good thing. If so, this aspect would have fared far worse. And it's nice to see a JRPG where our heroes all angst teenagers.

GAMEPLAY

Like the original Xenoblade, the combat plays out as a sort of single player MMO, that being a sort of blend between real-time and turn-based combat. Your controlled character will attack the enemy automatically while you only need to focus on their positioning relative tot he enemy, and managing how you use various arts to gain tactical advantages. Instead of using an art immediately after it's cool down finishes, a second cool down meter will appear, allow you to use an enhanced version of that same art if you wait for it to fully charge before using it. While not for everyone, I personally love this style of combat. It eliminates all the tedium of button-mashing and allows you to focus on making strategic decisions, but still allows for a more dynamic approach to combat making well times usage of arts key to victory. And timing IS key. I cannot stress this enough, but when in combat, and also as a general rule of thumb in the game, remember this: YOU NEED TO PAY ATENTION! If you are too laid back or expecting you can breeze your way through, you aren't going to get very far. This is a challenging game, not hard exactly, but challenging. You need to concentrate in every battle on the status of yourself and especially your party, as they will be vital to your survival. Chain attacks have been replaced by Soul Voices. At various points during battle, your party will call out for you to use specific arts. Doing so will increase your affinity with them, as well as grant you all buffs and advantages making taking down you enemy easier. It's all part of making you feel like you've earned your victory in every fight, instead of just getting lucky, or mashing one button over and over again.

As the advertising points out, eventually you have the opportunity to acquire a giant mech called a skell. As soon as this becomes available, I highly recommend you do so without delay, as it will make getting from place to place a lot easier. One thing that is very well done with the skells, though, is how, while they give you a distant advantage allowing you to take on enemies high above your current level, they are not game breaking. You still need to pay thorough attention in combat, especially since skells rune on fuel that depletes as you fight and use arts. Just don't neglect training yourself with ground combat as well, especially since you'll be needing it sorely near the end of the story. Speaking of which, there is an absurd amount of customization here. Aside from completely personalizing your gender, look, and voice, there a ton of different classes and weapons to master. This does a great job making you feel like a unique developing member of blade rather than some generic hero with a sword and a ratty haircut. But this leads a to another major complaint: the game, only has one save file. This is stupid. I don't know why they did it, but in a game with this much player input, it's unacceptable to only allow for a single savefile per system (not character, system). It may not bother everyone, but it still needs to be noted for those who enjoy things like new game plus or diverging storylines.

While not planting date probes or slaying monsters, you'll be taking on jobs from the mission board and various people around the city of New Los Angeles. While some of these involve...planting data probes and slaying monsters, others require things like delivering minerals or collecting items from round the planet. Although, word from the wise: avoid taking on any gathering missions until you've either already collected all the necessary materials, or know exactly where to find them. As they are not identified on you frontier navigation like everything else, so you have almost no way of locating them. Actually, that leads us nicely to Xenoblade's other biggest flaw. It is terrible at explaining things to you. You know how everyone complains nowadays, and rightly so, about how too often video games hold your hand and force every little piece of information down your thought? Well, X has the opposite problem. The first 2 chapters are essentially dedicated completely to tutorials, and even then hardly even give you the bare minimum. Things like how to mine, investing in research companies, or using the collectopedia are barely even mentioned at all. This is a real pain, especially when mining in particular becomes such a vital part of progressing through certain quests. Now thankfully, there is a very useful manual that's easy to access from the pause menu, so be sure to make use of that when you need.

I suppose I should also talk about the online components, but honestly, there's not a lot to mention. When starting up your save game, you can choose from one of three different squads, each of which will allow for a slightly different experience based on how you prefer to play. You can then temporarily recruit other player characters from that squad into your party, say if you're having trouble with a certain boss fight. Although I rarely used this myself. Lastly you can take on squad missions from the BLADE barracks, but these essentially boil down to you and up to 3 other either party members or other players slaying specific enemies. It's fun at time, but it's not much to talk about. Honestly, if you skip the online entirely, you'll hardly miss a thing.

AUDIO & VISUALS

If you've been paying attention, you'll have noticed that Xenoblade X looks amazing. The art direction of the world and creatures deserves praise alone. I'm still shocked that this entire thing was able to be run on the Wii U with virtually no loading screens or frame rate drops. Granted you will have to deal with some model and texture pop-in and that can get really annoying sometimes, but it's never enough to harm to overall experience. Like it's predecessor, Xenoblade X used the limitations of it's system as a way to focus on making a game with an impressive visual aesthetic, rather than graphical fidelity.

And speaking of aesthetics: BEST. SOUNDTRACK. EVER! I know plenty of people have complained about it, but they don't know what they are talking about, this is the stuff of truly epic proportions. I have a feeling that some of the backlash is in part due to the music being so different than the original Xenoblade. Maybe's that's because the original has arguably the greatest game soundtrack of all time. They are both great, but it's a different kind of great. Xenoblade Wii is a more personal and emotional story, focusing much more on the characters and their place in this unfolding plot. Thus it required more inmate music with preferential use of instruments like the piano and violin and softer tracks. Xenoblade X's music is far more, and I'm using this word correctly, epic. Anyone familiar with Hiroyuki Sawano's work should know what to expect. It's bombastic, it's filled with vocal tracks, and it elicits a feeling of being surrounded by a world and universe much grander than yourself while still making the themes of survival in a foreign planet hit home. I could listen to it for hours on end. In fact I have. Many many times. The soundtrack, and I say this with no hyperbole, is half the reason this game is such a blast to play.

FINAL THOUGHTS

And I've barely scratched the surface of everything this game has to offer. If I did go on, I'd be here all day. But it basically boils down to this. Xenoblade Chronicles X is an extremely ambitious game that deserves every penny of its asking price. The world is massive, there's tons to to, and the story, while not the finest I've seen in JRPG ever, is still compelling enough to see through to the end. And honestly, when the credits did finally rolled I found myself wanting to know where the story goes next.

One last thing I need to tell you, though. For goodness sake, DO NOT RUSH. Take your time to do as many affinity missions as you can, and you will enjoy your experience so much more. The horrible lack of explanation will frustrate you, and there may be a few times where you start to feel as if you're just running in circles for hours and not accomplishing much. But if you can will yourself through that, you will be treating yourself to one of the best games the Wii U library has to offer. And honestly I'd rather take a game with to much passionate ambition for its own good, that one where the creators feel that the bare minimum effort is somehow “good enough”.