Xenoblade Chronicles X

Xenoblade Chronicles X was an alienating experience. As a fan of the 2011 predecessor on the Wii, and as a grown up, it was really quite painful to witness the discarding of so much of what made the previous game worthwhile. That sense of journey, the growth and development of its characters, the romance and the beautiful score, all now thrown upon the scrap heap and replaced with open world tedium and sub-George Lucas infantilism.

Will JRPGs ever grow up? Will we ever see a great flowing of diversity in plot, in theme, or in characters? Surely, given that fans of the last game are now a few years older; could Monolith Soft not have made this new game a little more mature to reflect that change? Why must every JRPG be seemingly made for the same curiously moronic sector of the teen audience and cater to their boundless levels of banality, angst, and tediously superficial moralising?

The original game’s story and writing was far from perfect, but it wasn’t so bad as to cause me genuine emotional and intellectual pain, to make the entire experience of playing a torture, but that is what it is sometimes. The game reiterates the most basic of plot points over and over in dialogue that is about 20 lines longer than it needs to be. Characters will say nothing very slowly whilst my soul drains away, desperately longing to be elsewhere fighting giant beasts, or at least admiring some of the wonderful scenery.

Whoever wrote this garbage should be beaten with their own script quite frankly. It’s just appalling, and embarrassing to have to even engage with. Plot holes abound and information is withheld and deployed in the most exasperating of ways, the tone is all over the place, characters are clichéd even by JRPG standards and often so annoying as to make Jar-Jar Binks a titan of likability and charisma by comparison. There’s no way of getting around it; it’s shit. It’s not risible ‘so bad it’s good’ shit, just depressing, incompetent, ‘can’t believe someone got paid to write this’ shit. I’d mention its attempts at comedy but I’m still trying to get over the trauma.

Then there’s the music; with a few notable exceptions the gorgeous score from before has now been cast aside in favour of tragically awful rap-rock and ear grating electronic bleeps, bloops and other abominable noises. To make matters worse, you can’t adjust the music audio, which not only means you can’t escape the unrelenting horror of it, but you also have to put up with a terrible audio mix where characters sometimes can’t be heard for the sound of some instrument being violently abused.

But what’s perhaps most disheartening is that there’s no excuse for any of it. To have actually decided that all this was somehow an improvement can only be the work of someone who should never be allowed to speak, let alone be part of a development team. The thought that this perhaps came from some god-awful focus testing puts chills down my spine and has me wonder if burning all my games might be the best way to escape all this terminal stupidity. But then I get into combat, or see some wonderful vistas, or find some cool new loot, and for a moment the pain subsides and I am once again in the land of the competent and creatively living.

Graphically the game is impressive. The art direction is striking and varied with its use of the biological and the technological, often times mixing the two to great effect, especially with some of the beautiful Giger inspired outfits you can unlock. The frame rate is also solid and the draw distance remarkable, but the lack of anti-aliasing creates a lot of distracting graphical elements, spoiling the otherwise sumptuous visuals.

Xenoblade X is a very dense game mechanically, where the sheer number of systems can be quite overwhelming, even after you’ve looked over the terribly clunky e-manual. Whereas the previous game was mostly linear, Chronicles X is much more of a traditional open world game, whilst taking a couple of cues from the Monster Hunter series. You have a main base of operations from which you adventure out to various locales to complete the game’s myriad of missions. Story missions are separated out by having to meet various requirements, such as having surveyed so much of the planet, or having completed certain other missions to unlock the next chapter. NPCs will also offer missions and sometimes will even become potential party members. There is also a mission board with various monster bounties and ‘collect x number of things’ tasks to boost your level, skills, and get unique equipment.

It would be a lie to say it’s not enjoyable; the basic cycle of going out, fighting, levelling up and getting new gear is addicting and rewarding, and the visuals are such that exploration is exciting and feels worthwhile. As an added bonus, as you explore you can place probes that yield resources and money on a regular basis, and as you explore more and place more probes, the potential payoff grows quite dramatically, and you’ll appreciate it for when it’s needed in order to access and afford the most expensive Skells (mechs) and other equipment. The geography of the planet is also well thought out with many secret areas and caves that require some actual exploring to uncover. There’s also an agreeably head spinning level of customisation on offer, with many different classes, weapons, skills, abilities, and equipment to play around with. It’s also worth noting that once you and your party gain the licence to pilot skells, your ability to explore and fight becomes exponentially more potent, and it’s a real high point of the game to cruise around with your little gang of mechanised terror.

The biggest problem with the overall structure however, much as it ever is with open world games, is how it kills the pacing. If you’re not interested in story or characters or being given any real reason to care about the world you’re exploring then it likely won’t matter, but I found long stretches of the game to be quite dull as a result, waiting for that next level up or random item drop. Many of the missions rely on you gathering items, and these will not be marked on the map at all, leading you to wonder aimlessly or kill certain monsters over and over until you get what you need. The mechanics are such that you can also easily grind your way to an extent which makes most of the game quite trivial in terms of challenge, and without any story beats or characters to care about it all feels rich, yet arid, dense, yet strangely hollow and uninvolving upon reflection. There’s a lot of technical craft on display, but very little soul or heart. Not every game can or needs to be something like Journey, but beyond the arresting visuals, Xenoblade Chronicles X lacks magic and fails to pull you in.

Combat is very much akin to a classic mmo but where the added team dynamics make for a much more tactically engaging affair. You have a hotbar from which you select your actions, all of which come with a cooldown timer, wherein you will auto attack with your currently equipped weapon until you use another ability or ‘art’ as they call them in-game. By timing your attacks with those of your AI companion’s prompts (you can also adjust their AI behaviour), and by the use of various stagger and topple mechanics you can create powerful combos and a variety of tactics to deal with the various monsters you must slay. Positioning also plays a part as attacks will have varying effects depending upon the direction from which you strike, then add in environmental effects and you start to get a sense of the many systems at work. It is such to the game’s credit that combat is relatively easy to get into and very satisfying, with the more complex elements really only applying when fighting the game’s much tougher monsters.

There are also co-operative and social elements, allowing you to team up in squads of 4 to go on special online missions, and you can post various messages and such that will flash up in-game, although most of these messages have been banal or downright annoying. Mercifully you can turn all this off and not clutter the user interface. The game also allows you to recruit other player's characters into your party for a limited time.

Xenoblade Chronicles X could have been a masterpiece; in fact it really ought to have been as many of its constituent parts are at or at least near that level. But its fundamental structure and pacing hold it back, and the wretchedness of its story, characters, dialogue and music is so total as to make the whole experience at once moderately enjoyable yet hugely disappointing.