Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition (2020)

Absolutely massive and beautiful. This game would have blown my mind if i played it as a teenager. There is lot to like about it. The game has a sense of scale and wonder that i really enjoy and respect. The soundtrack is stunning.

Glad to have played it but i will probably never play it again. The game suffers from pretty severe padding issues when it comes to sidequests and content in general.

The characters are are likeable enough but kind of bland. Wished i could get into the story more but it's just not very good.

Xenoblade Chronicles is a super comforting place for me. I can come back to this game at any point and it always holds up, no matter what. Even now, 10 years after its original release in North America, it sunk its claws into me as I replayed it in preparation for the release of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 in a few days. It will never get old.

The world of the Bionis and the Mechonis has a visual scale and splendor that has not been matched by any developer other than Monolith Soft themselves. From the moment you walk out to Gaur Plains and you see the sword of the Mechonis towering over you, that visual context of where you are in the world never fails to make you feel so small. The story, despite being filled with a few clichés, is captivating and full of emotional moments. The music is stellar, of course.

I also tend to prefer the gameplay of Xenoblade Chronicles over its sequel. Xenoblade Chronicles 2 often felt like it could buckle under the weight of its complex systems, but the relative simplicity and familiarity of the combat and equipment systems of the first Xenoblade Chronicles makes it so easy to pick up and play. The gameplay never gets in the way of letting you get immersed in the world, which is a charge I'll loudly levy against its sequel.

It's not quite perfect enough to get five stars out of me though--while the later areas in the game do kick up the visual grandeur tenfold, the dreaded late game difficulty spike grinds the game's pace to halt. In addition to this, the vast majority of the game's side quests consist of bland fetch and kill quests that felt dated even in 2012--this is something the sequel improved on significantly, actually. But these are pretty minor complaints when put next to the things this game does right in terms of art direction, exploration and story. Those things alone are enough to make it one of the best JRPGs I've ever played.

I got this game with barely any knowledge about it beforehand.

TL:DR Confusing but easy battles, cool world building, standard JRPG-tropes that will make any JRPG fan feel at home, even though it is nothing special.

Full text: I knew Shulk in Smash Bros was from this game, and he looks like a JRPG-hero, and this was defiitely a JRPG.

The world is fairly interesting: The world consists of two giant humanoid creatures, one made of biological material called Bionis, and one made of metalic material called Mechonis.

On both gients bodies lives smaller creatures, among other the humanlike people called Homs, which Shulk and most of his partymembers are a part of. The giants fought a battle long ago, but they killed eachother, and since then they have been standing, frozen, with their weapons plunged into eachothers bodies.

The biological people of Bionis are under attack from the mechanical people of Mechonis for some reason the biological people dont understand. Shulk, i young human, has found a magic sword who seems to be the only weapon that is capable of seriously hurting the machine-people, even though he has some reservations about using it since he dousnt understand how the sword works. Until an evil machine raiding party attacks his home village and kills his girlfriend. THe he brings the sword and his his bestie to go on a long quest of revenge against the entire machine-people.

I am a bit ashamed to say that I played this game for more than 120 hours, and i STILL dont understand how the battle system works. I played through so many battles, just buttonmashing and hoping for the best, and usually that worked just fine. But i'll try to explain what i understood and what i did not understand.

I do understand you control one of your 7 partymempers, and whis partymember is backed up by two other partymembers of your choosing, who controls themselves in battle, and 4 partymembers are just not helping out at all during battle, which is pretty standard JRPG stuff. You walk the character you control up to an enemy and s/he starts bashing the enemy with the weapon s/he is holding by themself, but you need to give orders about which special attacks to use, and when to use them. If an ally falls, you have an opportunity to revive them if you have some arbitrary guage filled up. You sometimes get "visions" of what strong enemies are planning to do in a battle, and if they are planning an attack on one of your allies youu can run up to the ally and warn them of the attack, which gives you the opportunity to use an allys special attack, and this might stop the enemies attack. I never figured out how to stop those strong enemy-attacks though, so i just let my allies do any special move at random, and usually i got lucky.

I think the point of the combat is to combine different statur ailments on enemies, like first make an enemy dazed, then prone, then poisoned, then confused, then homesick and finally scared and THEN wail on them with swords and guns and whatnot, but i never really got the hang of it. As i wrote earlier, i just buttonmashed my way through 95% of the game. It worked fine (but could probably have worked even better if i learnt the battle system) until i got to the endgame, where you fight one particular boss that just wiped the floor with me. It was not an optional boss either. So i finally gave in and set the game to casual mode, just so i could get through the game.

And lastly, this is a game that seems like it is about to end one million times, even though it just goes on, and on and on... Mild spoilers ahead now, in case you are sensitive to those.

The world consists of two giants as i already told you. You start the game at the bottom of the first giant, and climb your way up to this giants shoulders, where i great epic "final-boss"-style battle takes place. After this battle i felt like this would be a good place for the story to end, but no, the party walks over to the other giant, and a whole new journy takes place on this giant. Until another great, epic "final-boss" style battle takes place, and after that i felt, great!, This is where the story ends!. But no, the anothr villian shows up at the last minute, and now we have to chase this guy around the world for a while, and on and on and on... Like the ending for the movie "return of the king", except this is videogame, which takes hours and hours and hours of grinding to get through.

I've played my fair share of JRPGs and I gotta say that Xenoblade Chronicles is one of the better ones, objectively. At the same time, it's not one of my favorites.

I never played the original version but the Definitive Edition is pretty polished. You have your standard party of heroes who come together and rise up against a world-ending threat. But the setting itself is pretty unique. The world being the dormant bodies of the local deities was a fantastic concept that gave me serious Bionicle vibes. The maps are huge, beautiful, and filled with items, monsters, and side quests. Lots and lots of side quests.

Now, the side quests were a bit of a mixed bag for me. You basically have to do all of them (or close to it) to keep your level up enough for the main story. Either that or just farm a bunch of monsters and I'm not a fan of incessant leveling grinding. Too many Runescape flashbacks. It does, however, give you a reason to explore every square inch of the maps. On the flipside, it also makes the story feel a bit slow.

The actual plot was probably only about 1/3 of the gameplay. It took me about a month to beat this game, playing it a few hours every day, and I probably only advanced the plot 2 or 3 times a week. The story itself was pretty creative and despite feeling like a fantasy game I would argue Xenoblade Chronicles leans just as much towards sci-fi as fantasy, if not more. A bit more so than Final Fantasy (at least FF6 onwards), given that only one of your party members is straight-up a mage.

The thing that didn't particularly mesh well for me was the combat system. It reminded me more of Final Fantasy 12 than anything else, with a bit of the Tales series mixed in. I personally like a classic turn-based system more than anything else. When combat is in real-time, the Tales series is my preference. Here, I wasn't a fan of a couple of different things. For one, the AI for your party members is not great. I tend to stick with the main character on my first playthrough when you have the option to control any party member. Shulk was decent enough but I wish he had more skills to pick from and I outpaced the AI well enough that I was consistently pulling aggro, and Shulk is far from the tankiest party member.

But as much as the characters were somewhat lackluster in combat, they really shined as characters. Everyone here was interesting and got a good amount of character development. Especially if you go find the Heart-to-Hearts, assuming you can raise everyone's affinity levels enough. Which takes a long time and was really more of a pain than anything else.

The last thing I want to note is the epilogue. Once you beat the main story, this pops up on the main menu. It's a lot like the main game, but worse. You have fewer party members, no skill links, a replacement for chain attacks locked behind side quests, armor does not drop from monsters, the side quest reward armor is mainly cosmetic, and the whole thing starts at level 60 when the end of the main story will have you around level 80. Plus, a generic plot with a generic villain and only a handful of returning side characters. The best thing about the epilogue was that it only took about 6 hours of my time to complete.

All of that being said, I will say that a big part of my bias comes from the fact that the previous JRPG I played was Dragon Quest XI, which is probably the best JRPG I've ever played. I kept thinking to myself, "Man, Dragon Quest had a much better crafting system, skill trees, etc." the whole time I was playing this game. By no means is Xenoblade Chronicles bad, it just didn't mesh 100% with my preferences and I've played better. Objectively it is a very good game, just not the best. But well worth playing, nonetheless, especially if the playstyle is more to your tastes than mine.

4/5

The game took me so many attempts to beat. My initial try was on the Wii way back when, I made it about halfway and lost steam on the story. Then I tried again with the definitive edition - got just short of halfway and lost steam. Then about a year later I picked it up again with the intent to finish it - made it close to the end, maybe three-quarters, and put it down. Finally, I picked up where I left off about half a year after that and steamed through the rest of the game.

I think there's a few reasons why I burnt out on this one so many times. There is very little variety in gameplay, pretty much all just combat and combat preparation. There's a lot of variety and systems involved in the preparation phase - affinity, gems, equipment, arts. But the moment to moment stuff is all just combat. Add to that looooooong stretches of just walking and fighting to get to the next cutscene, and a padded out midgame and it's easy to see why this game killed my desire to continue. The combat itself though is great, it's plenty deep and every character plays in a really cool and different way. There's just so much of it.

The giant areas add so much to the world-building but they do make the mid-game incredible plodding, I think they could've cut down on the size of some of them.

The first three quarters of the story I'd say is pretty good. Characters are great, really likeable and the voice acting sells them to me. A lot of them are way to monologuey, both villains and the main cast - they will tell you their feelings and plans in excruciating and painful detail and at length. There is a boatload of cutscenes too - probably too many. The last quarter of the story is super interesting. I love the turn that it makes, and that alone bumped this game to a 4/5 for me.

One of my favourite soundtracks ever. Probably my all time favourite. Gaur plains, satorl marsh night, frontier village and Zanza the divine. Such great tracks that capture the spirit of their areas and have a strong nostalgic hit, and there's heaps more. Could listen to this one forever.

Overall, I'm glad I persisted with this one.