Hey everyone, got a stack of articles for you all to peruse this weekend and then a heckuva lot more to say about Xenoblade Chronicles X, which you'll be delighted to hear I'm not even halfway through yet. There were a lot of distractions this week, some good and some potentially catastrophic. No need to elaborate on what is which, however.

While there's an absurd number of desirable games out during this first quarter of 2017, I think everyone's attention is firmly on the Nintendo Switch for the time being. Even if you're not a big ol' Nintendo fanboy like I am and thus lack much excitement for another gimmicky Nintendo console, you can still appreciate how new Nintendo hardware can be an unforeseeable roll of the dice, which engenders a lot of curiosity from the industry as a whole as various third-party developers consider their interest level for publishing on the platform. Like VR, the Switch has got quite the battle ahead to convince a wider and more shrewd audience of its merits as a system, especially after the relative failure of the Wii U. I don't think I'm alone in giving it a wide berth at launch due to its lousy range of early releases (I'll almost certainly sweep up Breath of the Wild for the Wii U instead) and revisit the notion of purchasing one when Super Mario Odyssey and Xenoblade 2 are available later this year, barring any deferrals. For all my apprehensive bluster I've yet to skip a Nintendo platform, so it's more that I'm hoping there's a strong enough case to resist the urge this time. I'm not likely to get over my resentment for the disappointingly short lifespan of the Wii U for a while.

(As for the PlayStation 4 Pro and Microsoft Scorpio, I'm currently on the "if I win one in a contest, maybe I'll keep it instead of immediately hocking it on eBay" tier of purchasing consideration. No shade meant to either Sony or Microsoft, but graphical upgrades were never a big draw for me. A stable framerate is slightly more important, but still not enough to justify a new console purchase.)

Anyway, your links for this week:

• The Top Shelf enters its third week of deliberations, with five new ("new" in a loose sense considering they're all around sixteen years old) games to be judged. I was a lot more lenient this week, promoting four of the five to the next round of eliminations. Even the one that didn't make it is a recommended favorite that just doesn't shape up compared to its sequel. You can witness this shocking magnanimity for yourself by following this link to Case Files 11-15: "It's Oni Fair".
• I'm also debuting the second round of The Top Shelf this week, rather than waiting for the first round to conclude. With the second round, I intend to spend more time on each individual game, going so far as to play several hours (or even a complete playthrough) to have a clearer sense of their value to me. For now I'm focusing on games that only survived the first round because I never took the time to get around to play them back in the day. A lot of those are therefore wildcards that I lack the background to properly assess, and this also provides an excuse to clear out some backlog that I've been sitting on for over a decade. The first game to see the second round treatment is Capcom's Onimusha Warlords from 2001, since it was short enough to bash out over an afternoon. If you need a refresher on Capcom's historical Japanese take on their smash hit Resident Evil series, be sure to swing by.
• Our Indie Game of the Week is Ori and the Blind Forest, a game I'm currently very close to concluding. I've been catching up on a lot of semi-recent high quality Indie SpaceWhippers over the past few months, and Ori might be my favorite of the bunch. Its various showy visual effects makes it a little rough to play on this old clunker of a PC, but I don't hold that against it. It focuses on platforming primarily, which is always my preference for this genre as a platformer fan, and some of the imaginative new abilities I've been acquiring have really helped the game's flow: launch jumps, slingshots, triple-jumps, wall-climbing and gliding are all letting me move around as quickly as the wind. Very highly recommended.
• I also got started on my "GOTY 2014 (Adjusted)" list over here. Presently, I've added appraisals for the top ten games on that list, but my end goal is to eventually flesh out the top thirty. 2014 is presently the busiest single year's worth of games that I've played: currently sitting at 46 total. Something tells me that the 2015 and 2016 lists will catch up very quickly however. As Vinny always says, there's never been a better time to play games, and I always interpret that to mean that there's enough of them out now to last a lifetime even if you don't care for a majority of genres. 2017 could blow chunks (it won't. New Zelda, Nier, Xenoblade, Persona, Yakuza and Mass Effect? Are you kidding me?) and I'd still be set for the next decade, at least. Anyway, check that list out and maybe provide a few ideas for 2014 games I'm still missing, if you'd like.

Xenoblade Chronicles X

As before, let's just launch into another list of Xenoblade Chronicles X's features. There's so damn many and I love that this game just tosses out as many systems and mechanics as it can to keep its admittedly light open-world monster-smashing gameplay interesting.

• I want to talk about the online first. This is the only place besides Dragon's Dogma itself where I've seen a variant of Dragon's Dogma's asynchronous multiplayer. As with Capcom's monster-climbing simulator, you never play with other players directly: instead, there are various ways that a group of players can help each other without ever crossing the streams, as it were. The first is through "scouts": a facsimile of your character created by your last save file pops up in the worlds of other players, allowing them to recruit you as an additional member of their party. They'll have some rudimentary AI that I think will fight like any other NPC of whatever class you currently have, but they'll also have your level and equipment, which'll probably make them a lot more powerful than most of the NPCs this other player could recruit from their own world. Upon defeating enemies and earning materials and equipment, you can gift the ringer you recruited a share of those spoils, and the owner of that character can then collect them from a console next to the quest dispenser once they come back to the game. I've not partaken in this feature myself - there's various "heart-to-heart" affinity events I want to see, so I'll use a full party of story NPCs whenever possible - but I've received enough spoils that I'm happy I've been able to help others, even only indirectly.
• The online features don't stop there though. Occasionally, you'll get "Squad Missions": a set of five randomized monster bounty or fetch quests that appear at the bottom of the screen. The "squad" is an undisclosed number of Xenoblade X players playing simultaneously, who can collectively work on eliminating the enemies or collecting the items shown. If you don't want to go out of your way to track these targets down, you don't have to, but the game will helpfully label nearby monsters in the field that qualify with an "S" if you just want to help out on the way to your current objective. Completing these squad missions will give you reward tokens, which can be spent on procuring absolutely any monster-derived material drop in the game: these are invaluable for completionists and those wanting to build or upgrade their equipment without the necessary farming, so it pays to help yourself and everyone else in your squad by completing these missions. There's a wonderful sense of community about earning all these reward tickets, and helping others earn theirs. (Other online features include the occasional raid, but I haven't involved myself with those yet.)
• One more online feature, however, is tied with the game's "divisions": when you join the multifaceted human task force B.L.A.D.E. early on in the story, the player can select one of eight divisions. These divisions ostensibly represent the eight different jobs that are integral for the smooth operation of B.L.A.D.E.: Interceptors defend the New LA outpost from outside threats, Harriers proactively go out and eliminate possible problems before they become threats, Outfitters work on equipment and skell research and development, Pathfinders scout unexplored land, Reclaimers collect debris from the White Whale seedship that crash-landed on the planet as well as abandoned equipment on the field, Prospectors locate and collect precious minerals and other valuable natural resources, Curators survey and determine the value of new locations discovered by the Pathfinders, and Mediators stay in New LA to assist and police the community. Of course, each of these divisions also provide a passive stat boost to the player as well as a means to ascend the ranks of B.L.A.D.E. by performing the tasks of their chosen division adroitly; gaining ranks in B.L.A.D.E. open up more cosmetic changes in the player's home base as well as allowing the player to open higher-level treasure chests in the field. I personally went with Reclaimers: they get a boost to item discovery after defeating enemies, and they level up by exploring new locations and opening chests - two things I intended to do a lot anyway. Where the online comes in is how you can talk to scouts in the field - those are the other player characters that are controlled by AI in your world - and instead of asking them to join you, you ask for "division support" instead. This temporarily gives you their division's passive boost for a while. It's just another way of making the game feel like there's more of a community behind it, even if it's not strictly a massively-multiplayer online game. (I'm sure there are MMOs, or MMO-likes, that also have features like this and the above though, so take my amazement with a grain of salt. I don't play a whole lot of these types of RPG.)
• One last bulletpoint to see us out. This time, I want to discuss how much easier they made the upgrading and equipment augmentation in this game compared to the first Xenoblade. First, you can create augments like you can any other equipment by crafting them out of monster drops. Second, you can attach an augment to any piece of equipment that has an empty slot. Third, you can then take out any augment if you've found a better piece of equipment, and then put it into that instead, and the game doesn't charge you for this or force you to destroy the old equipment. Fourth, you can add new augment slots to any equipment once you're far enough into the game, though it can get pricey. Fifth, you can upgrade the fixed augments that came with the piece of equipment: they have anywhere from one to three built in (depending on the item's rarity level) though there's a limited number of times you can upgrade these native augments. Sixth, you earn blueprints for new augments by completing quests, giving you another layer of reward incentives. When compared to Xenoblade Chronicles 1's weird gem creation system, this one makes a lot more sense and is a whole lot more versatile.

Next time, I might start delving into the plot, the other alien races you meet (there are some fun ones), the character customization, "soul voices", and the skells: the exoskeleton mech suits that saw a lot of attention when the game was being promoted, but are kind of underwhelming in practice. Well, maybe that's not the right word - they can be terribly powerful if decked out appropriately - but I just don't feel like they add a whole lot to the game's combat, besides maybe a change of pace. It is cool to run around in a big robot suit, I'll give them that much. Especially if you give them two beam sabers.