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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”.
