Xenoblade Chronicles X

Damn this game has a good title sequence.

I just had to get that out of the way. Every time I booted up Xenoblade Chronicles X, I always let that first bit play out.And by the time I was finishing my over one hundred hours with the game, I needed something to keep me going. Xenoblade is one beautiful mess of a game. There are elements of it which were my favorite in an RPG of this generation, and elements that were so bad II had to resist the urge to put the game down and leave it unfinished.

It has been well over a decade since I last played a game in the Xeno series, so I have no means of telling you how or if it much relates to previous entries. In the game’s opening cinematic, Earth is destroyed after being caught in the crossfire of an interstellar battle between two space fleets. Numerous ships attempt to evacuate Earth in a mad dash to preserve humanity. The game is the story of one of these ships, The White Whale. After the ship crash lands on the alien world of Mira, the remnants of humanity establish the colony of New LA. Your quest throughout the game is to find a piece of the ship before “it’s too late.”

Xenoblade Chronicles X represents Japan’s attempt to build an open-world RPG that can rival the best efforts the West has been producing over the past two decades. The game feels like an attempt to merge those concepts with those of “hunting games” like the ever popular Monster Hunter series. There is a pretty basic gameplay loop here: you go out and explore the world of Mira, broken up into five large zones. You find landmarks, install probes, and work on filling in the map while at the same time fighting indigenous life-forms or “Indigens.” Combat is a cross between Monster Hunter and an MMO. Back in town, you collect your quests which almost always involve installing probes, looking for locations, or hunting a specific Indigen for their drops or to kill a requisite amount.

While you play the first chunk of the game “on foot,” eventually you’ll unlock Skells. The game really opens up around this point, and it is probably worth it to the player to rush through the game as quickly as possible to unlock Skell use. So much of the game’s feel and pacing changes at this point. Traversing these giant landmasses starts to take exponentially less time than it initially did. Further along, other changes come into play that continue to recontextualize the game and how it plays. Skell combat has its own nuances to it that make it different from fighting on foot.

Speaking of the combat, you’ll need to engage in quite a bit of it. I found the game’s combat system quite fun. To engage in combat, you simply run up to an Indigen and attack it. Your basic attacks are automatic. Your skills, up to eight of them, are all activated via a horizontal menu. If you’re familiar with MMO abilities on cooldown, you have a good idea of how this works. Abilities, or “arts,” are of several different types and certain combinations of them combo together. The game takes a cue from hunting games by letting you attack specific limbs to cripple enemies. You control only one party member, whether it be your custom character or a named party member. There is very limited item usage during combat. Instead, you heal by completing timing-based QTE events. It’s a fairly engaging, yet simple system that works well.

Exploring Mira is where the game is at its best. The game world is vast and gorgeous. What’s really fascinating is that Indigens are not necessarily gated to certain areas based on the player’s expected level. Instead, you see the enemy and its level and it’s up to the player to know not to engage with an enemy too high-leveled for them. While some high-level enemies might ignore your presence, others will attack and dispatch you quickly if they catch you. This results in a bit of light stealth as you attempt to avoid these Indigens, but it also makes the game world feel a bit more natural.

Here is where I have to start discussing the games problems. First off, the game does a terrible job of explaining its numerous systems to the player. The game packs a lot into its dual-screen interface thanks to the Wii U’s touchpad. There is little that could be called a tutorial within the game. There is a fairly decent game manual available from the in-game menu, but even that leaves out some key concepts regarding the game’s systems. I will say even after finishing the game I still don’t quite get some elements of the game.

It is quite useful to have a laptop, tablet, or other device handy while playing the game to Google for item and Indigen locations, While the game has its own enemy and item encyclopedia, it’s not quite as good as it needs to be. Players who shy away from looking things up online should make an effort not to accept certain quests that ask for yet to be found items or Indigens. Particular items may be only available as rare drops from specific enemies that you don’t often encounter, and with the size of the game world, you may never find what you’re looking for. This is perhaps where the game’s hunter game elements can frustrate players looking more for an RPG and less for a monster hunter game.

Xenoblade Chronicles X less solves for pacing issues and more relies on basic gating of story chapters in a way that is rather frustrating. This is a tough topic to condense within a review without getting into spoilers. For the most part, story chapters don’t have level requirements, but rather require you to complete certain missions (which do have level requirements) and explore a certain chunk of the map. The missions you’re asked to complete can be an issue at times. At times, you’re asked to complete affinity missions for certain characters. To unlock these missions, you must raise the affinity of certain party members by completing missions with them or gaining affinity through dialogue choices. If you haven’t been using certain characters, this might mean you need to drop everything you’re doing and grind with that character for a number of hours.

The game does a terrible job integrating story content with side-content. This is a bit of a minor spoiler, but you will always be stuck using two particular characters during story missions, leaving room for only one of the over a dozen other party members. In addition, most characters who tag along during story missions have no dialogue. After a while, it feels kind of comical watching a mute actor just hang around in the background while the rest of the cast engages in long conversations.

I have played a lot of video games in my life, so I say this hoping to attach the appropriate gravitas without engaging in hyperbole: Xenoblade Chronicles X has perhaps the worst story in an RPG I have personally played. While I can think of more pedantic storylines, this one has a particular combination of laziness and obviousness while somehow also lacking sufficient content that especially rubbed me the wrong way. Even the game at one point seems to admit to the audience that it realizes everyone knows where it’s going and has known for some time, but they’re still going to go through the motions anyway. To top things off, the offense the ending commits is so egregious that I could easily write an article the size of this review on it alone.

While I won’t spoil it, the game’s final chapter is a bit of a wreck. It is here where the game’s issues with story and pacing collide in a way that requires some pretty major spoilers to get into. To elaborate in a non-spoiler way, as clumsy as the game’s “gating” is up until this point, it never left me in an unwinnable situation. However, the final chapter can be started over ten hours before your party might actually be prepared for it due to certain gameplay elements. And depending how far behind you are where you need to be, you may need to engage in a lot of grinding to ready yourself for this chapter.

I really wish I could give Xenoblade Chronicles X more of a recommendation. In many ways, the game had a more addictive gameplay loop than most any open-world RPG. The world of Mira is a joy to explore, and that is what makes it so frustrating that Monolith Soft missed the mark on the surrounding game content. There is a core game template here which a sequel could utilize to make a truly exceptional game, but for now, you need to ask yourself whether a hundred hours of your time is worth a game with this many faults. While I don’t regret my time with it, this is not a good enough game for those placing a premium on the use of their free-time.