Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition (2020)

Enjoying my first steps into the jrpg genre! Spent an hour in xenoblade which is no time at all really, but learnt some of the combat, controls, characters, and map navigation!

Entered the city area and took on some quests. I figured there would be some kind of party system but didn't expect to be switching characters completely! I've been roped into repairing some dudes watch, finding ingredients, clearing out a monster from a pool... I'm collecting all the quests!!

Some things I instantly liked was the music, it has it's own distinctive style and I like how it changes to be more subtle and slower at night time. The camera is also really nice to control and customise, even going first person if I want to. I was worried the combat would be turn based but it's real time whilst still being strategic. Took some getting used to as it kind of just throws you in.

The story seemed to take off relatively quickly, was worried I wouldn't care for how dramatic it was considering I had no context for who the characters were, but actually I found myself liking them pretty quickly and caring about what was going on! Overall really enjoying the feel of the game!

Due to some last minute housing issues on his end, one of my friends moved into my spare room last fall. It's kind of a weird dynamic, but we've just been watching/playing through some shows/games in the evenings that either one or both of us never got through. I'd been wanting to play through XC again, and he'd only ever played a small chunk of it, so that was our latest game project over the past month or so.

Just finished up the Future Connected DLC this evening. It's been almost four years since my first playthrough, so revisiting this game after so long and getting to see someone else experience it in full for the first time was great. I just love this game so much, and Melia is still one of my all-time favorite characters.

Edit to add: I've only played through the series with Japanese VAs before, so I decided to suck it up and try the English dub this time. (Friend is usually multi-tasking with a mobile game or something, so it helped there.) I still prefer to play with Japanese VAs when available, but I can't complain too much about this one.

I can't do back-to-back JRPGs, so even though I'm honestly looking forward to playing through XC2 again, we're taking a break for now. For our last project, he played through the first Phoenix Wright game since I'd never played any of them before and he's run through them a million times. We're gonna go through the second one next.

The ending was interesting and a fitting twist to everything else that happened in the game. I might need to sit with this one for a bit to decide how I ultimately feel. I do know the following:

• I enjoyed the story and the characters quite a bit. Even though the story is a bit nonsense it’s also really compelling. It’s just so weird that you can’t help wonder what will happen next. I think the story gets a shot of adrenaline from great characters. They are just so darn likeable that I almost forgot I wasn’t playing Final Fantasy XIII ;-)

• The one exception to the fact that I enjoyed the story and characters is that I don’t have a lot of patience for the very cliche love triangle and bare bones romances involving Shulk. I just don’t care about his live life. I know this is a frequent component of JRPGs, but it’s probably why I like FFXIII as much as I do, every relationship among the playable characters was platonic. Don’t get me wrong, games can tackle romantic relationships, but they felt shallow in this game and I feel the game would be better served if it focused on the bonds of the entire group without muddling that up with romantic subplots. It especially bothers me that every time Fiora is predicted to die from an attack in battle, her death cry is “Shulk!” It felt like the game was undermining her a bit every time because it contributes to an overall reduction of her character to her romantic pairing.

• The game could stand to be about 10-15% shorter. The ending really feels like it drags and despite wanting to know how the story will play out when I start revisiting locations during the last few chapters I knew they really should have edited the game. It doesn’t help that they throw mini-boss after mini-boss at you in the final two chapters. Perhaps if it was a bit more challenging, but by the end it feels like my team of choice are simply flattening everything, and I’m not even over levelled for the content.

• Despite that last point I did enjoy the combat, especially once Melia joined. I know it replicates a lot of MMORPG elements with cooldowns and so on, and maybe that’s why I dug it, but I had fun with it. I do find it annoying that for a portion of the game you are forced to have Shulk in your party to deal with Mechon enemies, however. I wish the Monado was not the only way to deal with them. Furthermore, I wish more teammates had the ability to counter enemy sets the way Shulk can. I know you can use things like topple to interrupt predicted attacks, but Shulk alone has such a great toolset that I feel like the devs wanted to force him into everyone’s parties.

• I thought I might want to play another JRPG or even Xenoblade Chronicles 2 after this but I recognize that’s a big mistake. I think I wore out my patience for big JRPGs with this that it will take some time before I want to play another, least of all another in this series. But my curiosity is peaked in regards to where the story goes next.

• Boy did someone on this game design team have a fetish for robots. Like big time.

Realized I posted my earlier status on the original game and not the definitive editions. Oh well.

Discovering that there’s a number of missable elements in this game that I, uh, definitely missed. Just learned, after being locked out of an area crucial to obtaining extra skills, that there are in fact extra skills. And simply because I didn’t talk to the right sequence of people, within the right timeframe, and with the right party member, I missed out on getting one of Dunban’s skill trees.

Also affinity is a bit annoying. I did every quest I could in every area I could yet somehow I’m still only at two and a half stars with Colony 9 while I’m at five stars with The Hidden Village. Yet I definitely don’t think I did more side quests for the Hidden Village. Which leads me to believe somehow I’ve missed key things for growing affinity, which is keeping me from other skill trees.

It’s all a bit tedious, systems that feel like they are there to create busy work yet none of them are transparent or obvious enough to pick up on. I’m kind of hoping there’s a new game plus where I can keep my existing skills, gear and arts and that I can build on them with a second play-through wherein I meticulously follow a guide. Sounds fun, no?