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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”.

I went into Xenoblade X after having played all the “numeric” entries in the series – and I feared I would feel the absence of the most recent quality-of-life improvements that the new games have. However, that was not the case!

Everything started an afternoon that I was feeling the emptiness of having to wait for Xenoblade 4… and I said, why not playing Xenoblade X then? Yes, that one game in Wii U jail that everyone asks for a remaster or a continuation. I can see why now!

Regarding the story I Xenoblade X… Yes, it is interesting, but it not really presented in the best way – It is there, and it has a deep meaning (as usual), but it is overshadowed by an increasingly amount of quests of several nature that will just take the other 98% of your time. And that is really the point of the game, exploring everything, going from here to there completing quests. Or that was for me, at least.

The obscure gameplay mechanics can be clunky sometimes. And by gameplay mechanics I mean pretty much EVERYTHING happening on screen. Weapons, armors, skills, classes, levels, weapon upgrades, overlimit mechanic, robots, robot parts, robots parts that can get boosedt, weapon creation, boss weaknesses, and the list goes on and on. And don’t forget the 20 status icons and its own specific meaning! It can be so overwhelming! – but the truth is the game takes its time for everything. I did have an advantage coming from Xenoblade 1, 2 and 3 (and I see now they took a lot from XCX for the last entry, actually!).

Characters are presented horribly but I guess I assumed what I was going for, being this a Wii U 2016 game… They have deep background stories and very philosophical reasons to do what they do, but the dialogue sometimes ruins it. The voice-acting doesn’t match the mouth movement at any point and it does feel a little bit cheap. I usually played these games in Japanese but since this time it was not an option I had my time to re-adapt to playing a Japanese game with English voice-over.

The music is amazing! Truly – you can see they put a lot of effort on this area. I liked it had a wide range of instruments, from rock guitars to more electronic-oriented music. That Skell song is SICK! I do think some songs overstay . For example, gaving a single song for a whole continent sometimes can turn into a nightmare. However, I think the same of Xenoblade 1, 2 and 3 anyways, so don’t mind me.

To sum it up – I completely fell in love with this game. The world is huge, and you can spend hours and hours immersed in it. Worth it every minute!

Have you ever played a game for a long time, not because you loved it but because you really wanted to love it? For me, the highly anticipated Xenoblade Chronicles X is one of those games. While I did not hate the game per sé, as a fan of the original XC I had very high expectations and cannot help but feel disappointed. Starting with the good, the game has an excellent premise: the Earth has been destroyed in the cross-fire between two alien races, a large colony ship carrying what may or may not be the remains of humanity crash lands on the distant planet Mira, and you find yourself in the role of a colonist tasked to pick up the scattered pieces of the mothership - most importantly the lifehold core.

With such a promising introduction, giving me vibes of both Mass Effect and Battlestar Galactica, I was sad to find out that the writers could not make an engaging story out of it. My biggest gripe with the story is that it is uneven – on the one hand the story is often strikingly childish and simplistic – most characters are basically nice and there is a general sense of everyone being unrealistically buddy-buddy with each other. I don’t mind these stories when they keep with it, but they also try to tell mature stories about loss, revenge, depression, and racism that just does not fit with the overall narrative. The main story also suffered from the fact that the motives of the main antagonists made absolutely no sense up until the very last mission, and just little sense after that. Finally, the so called lifehold core – the thing everyone has been looking for since the beginning – eventually turned out to have been poorly hidden. Stupidly poorly, it made no sense whatsoever. If Xenoblade X had managed to provide a compelling story I would have forgiven them for other annoyances in the game, including atrocious lip-sync, poor and boring character design, level-grinding requirements, meaningless side-quests, and the perpetual lack of cash to buy the massive number of gear available.

While I regret putting around 80 hours of my life into this game, I must admit that I mostly enjoyed the battle system (despite poor targeting) which mostly improved upon that in the original Xenoblade. They also managed to create a massive open world with beautiful sights and an exciting plethora of animal life. I thought it was quite exciting that from the moment you stepped out of the gates of your stronghold, you were surrounded by a mix of weak low-level monsters and massive, high-level monsters you could not even scratch for another twenty hours or so. Getting ambushed by aggressive, high-level monsters was annoying at times, but it kept you on your toes and made the world feel alive. Props should also be given for the introduction of mechanized armor suits - so called 'Skells' – which added a whole new level of fighting and exploring. I do feel, however, that it made the most complex ground battle system feel obsolete.

In the end I would not recommend buying this game at full price unless you are the adventurer type of gamer – loving open world games just to explore every nook and cranny. Compulsive grinders will also find a lot to do in this game. But if you are like me, drawn to RPGs mainly because you want a compelling story, then I’m afraid Xenoblade X is going to disappoint.

9/10 (but I'm not actually done it so there's still a chance for it to go higher). Maybe a 9.5.

I think mechanically this is one of the most satisfying RPGs ever, just like the previous XC was. The combat is great and fast, the depth to the level progression is wonderful, and there are all kinds of different aspects working together to make it an engaging experience, like upping your Class Rank, using your Battle Points on skills or your arts, etc. It's one of the most beautiful games of the year, not based on technical ability because it IS the Wii U after all, but because of the artistic vision. This world is ALIVE and varied, with incredible monster design.There is so much to do and see that it is astonishing.

Where the game falters is in a place that XC did not: the story. Mind you, like I said, I haven't beaten it so maybe the story kicks it up a notch but so far it's been good but not amazing. After the initial anime action sequence I expected good things but it has just kind of plodded along. I care a little bit about these characters now -- thanks partially because of the more personal missions -- but it hasn't reached the level I expected yet.

I also think that the game is needlessly obtuse sometimes. It's very frustrating the hoops they make you jump through on occasion, but then it's very satisfying once you do it. It's like the hot girl (or guy) that you want to bang and so you work at it over and over and you finally do it. I'm not even annoyed at the Gathering quests because that was put in there for certain gamers (plus it makes sense to not know where everything is because you're on a foreign planet), but that doesn't mean some of the quests aren't complete piss-offs.

It also has one of the best soundtracks of the year, while being poorly implemented at times. Running around the world is epic as fuck, and they play these amazing songs when people are talking but the mixing is so bad. Why would you include a loud track when dialogue is happening? Also, why would these songs include VOCALS AND LYRICS? You're trying to listen to two different things at once and it muddles everything.

When you get your Skells it does get a lot better though. Things are easier to get to and the customization is a bit addictive. It might warrant giving it a 9.5. I'm not sure. I'm conflicted on where I stand.

For any other game a 9 is amazing. XC is one of the best games ever and while this makes strides in the right direction in some ways, I feel like an RPG needs to have a compelling story first and foremost. This hasn't reached that yet, but I'm hoping it gets crazy soon.

(Note: I played the Definitive Edition on Nintendo Switch.)

Much of what I enjoyed about the first, second and third Xenoblade Chronicles (plus an expansion or two) is fully intact in Xenoblade Chronicles X. In particular, the fast-paced and fluid battle system, and the vast, diverse and dangerous world to explore. (The latter growing ever more impressive with each release on the newly obsolete Switch 1.)

But X is definitely a departure, one I didn’t find entirely successful.

While every entry I’ve played has dabbled in a few well-worn narrative tropes, X’s story struck me as a particularly typical sci-fi yarn. I was genuinely surprised and intrigued by one early twist, but I found my eyes rolling more frequently with each new story beat.

I enjoyed creating my own character, but their anonymity put a lot of emotional burden on the game’s cast. That’s especially tough for X to pull off: There are a lot of potential party members, which you're incentivized to swap frequently for various challenges and affinity missions. I just couldn’t feel attached to any particular character.

To be fair, the expanded cast makes sense given X’s disinterest in its own main story. You’re meant to spend most of your time on hundreds of optional missions varying wildly in size, emphasis and complexity. That’s an interesting shift from other Xenoblade titles that works pretty well: I felt a sense of ownership of my team’s expedition, the terrain we covered and the relationships forged with various NPCs.

But that promising change in structure is undermined by a number of user experience hurdles:

• The “recommended level” for missions does not seem to take into account the enemies blocking one’s path to said mission, or any unique attributes of enemies that may require heavily specialized abilities or equipment to counteract. (Sometimes the opposite was true, and my party would annihilate a seemingly high-level threat like it was 10 levels lower.)
• Some missions allow you to cancel, some do not. If you find yourself under-prepared (despite exceeding the recommended level) and don’t have an alternate save file to load, your only options are to look up solutions online or grind, grind, grind.
• Certain enemy encounters will offer a reduced difficulty option if you die fighting thrice in a row. This only reduces the enemy’s level, which doesn’t always help. There are no other difficulty settings.
• X’s menus do a poor job of assisting in gear selection, creation and assignment. There’s so much choice, but it feels like homework to determine what's right for my party, and the automatic assignment features seem to only account for level as opposed to other attributes.
• Even “Fashion Gear” is a slog to assign, with long scrolling menus of locked “???” items to traverse.
• The game’s skells offer interesting traversal options, but they're even slower to customize, sluggish to control, and frequently at odds with X’s camera.
• You can’t skip individual lines of spoken dialog, and there’s a lot of spoken dialog, much of it long-winded and repetitive. I found myself skipping entire scenes for certain uninteresting affinity missions because I just couldn't take another pregnant pause, corny joke or restatement of what a previous character just said.

I enjoyed Xenoblade Chronicles X. The Definitive Edition performs great on Switch. It offers a change of pace from other entries that works surprisingly well at a basic level. If you have the patience to deeply learn and invest in all its mechanics, this might end up being your favorite Xenoblade game.

But for me, the narrative and UX issues caused X to overstay its welcome. I saw credits, but decided to move on partway through the Definite Edition’s new epilogue chapter.

Alright, if there was a word to describe a game like this, that world should be breathtaking, since I started my run on DE until I completed it, I couldn´t hide my amazement to this game, more if we take into account this is actually a game from 2015 or something like that. Loved everything from it, its world -Mira- is amazing and exploring it is probably the funniest thing to do in the game, the races and lore, unlocking the map, I loved the whole thing, it´s crazy when you realize that games like Zelda BOTW or Elden Ring take direct inspiration from the open world game´s design of Xenoblade Chronicles X. The game looks gorgeous even by today´s standards and it puts other Nintendo Ip to shame, though I do understand it´s not perfect by anymeans due to the lack of animations from npc sometimes, it´s more than a great job done here.

Before playing the game, I honestly thought I´d be disappointed by the story because that´s like the worst part of the game when someone else talks about its down but I actually think is pretty cool, there is just another execution, if you want to get the whole pictures, you must do tons of side quests and I understand if someone skips all of that but if you do that, you are like skipping more than 50% of the game, it´s true that the story is not perfect, more if you compare it to Xenoblade 1 or 3, but either way is really enjoyable, filld with interesting themes like religion, xenophobia, colonization and so on.

Anyways, loved the game and I´d recommend it to anyone

I have had this game on my backlog shelf for almost a decade. I remember being so intrigued by the scenery, the enemies, and the biggest world I've seen in a video game. Despite the bad things I've heard, I finally picked it up again, started from the very beginning and ran with it. The highs would be incredibly high, but the lows are so low that it hurts the good.

Some pros:

• The music is fantastic. Very fitting for the epic world you are exploring and well orchestrated.
• Combat I would consider good, not incredible. It's basically just a carbon copy of XC1, but that's not a bad thing.
• The broad world is very creative and leaves so much to explore; almost too much, which I will touch on later. The cutscenes left a lot to be desired early, but suddenly got way better once you get to like the halfway point. Not sure why they waited so long to turn it up a gear.
• The characters for the most part are pretty cool to get to know. Their development was well done until endgame (I have a LOT to say about endgame, I will leave it for last). Each person you meet is quite different and they do a good job blending together to make a new world on this foreign planet. They all need help in various ways and that's where the development occurs. With that being said, I really enjoyed those side quests. I'm the kind of player that kind of has to finish the side quests before moving on with the main story, so I'm glad it was enjoyable.

Unfortunately, it was hard to focus on the pros sometimes because there are far too many objectively bad things going on with this game. Yes, it's on the Wii U, but I'll try not to blame the game for that misfortune. This game is from 2015, but the rendering and load times would have you thinking it's more like 2009. Characters directly in front of me wouldn't even render for like 5 full seconds, then show up out of nowhere. This includes NPCs but also overpowered enemies that would literally appear from thin air ready to kill you, simply because the game didn't load fast enough. Led to a lot of dying and unnecessary frustration.

I said I loved the music, but I noticed immediately that character voices in cutscenes were pretty quiet. I go to the setting to adjust the volume and... I can't? What?? I have never seen that in a game before. For the rest of the 115 hours I put into the game I had to suffer listening through really loud music over the dialogue. A shame, really. Side missions often require gathering materials. Okay, fine. Every RPG has this. Why is it a bad thing? You are not told where to get these items, what enemy drops them, or even what area you should look in. I found myself googling 10 items every session I played the game which is just not fun. It would be totally different if they just pointed you in a direction like every other mission does.

Something almost everyone seems to complain about is that literally nothing is explained to you. So many nuances of this game were completely hidden from me, which led to even more googling. There is an in-game manual, but I personally didn't feel like the tutorial was that bad. They could have added a few more paragraphs in there to explain the things they needed to, but they didn't, and adds to the overwhelming confusion this game already brings.

I said there was a lot to explore and a lot to do, and there are many reasons why this is a good thing. However, I have never been so overwhelmed with options before. Some people may like this, and I usually do, but not here. I'll focus on ways to improve your character, since that's my biggest gripe. Most big JRPGs like this give chances to change weapons, armor, maybe abilities or something like that. XCX, however, lets you change: Weapons, Armor, Skell Armor, Skell Weapons, Augments, Character Abilities, Character Skills (yes, that's different than abilities), Arts, Classes and I'm probably forgetting others. Not to mention there are weapon BRANDS, which changes Lord knows what. Every weapon and art had attributes you need to worry about, too. Every enemy responds different to an attribute. FrontierNav would take an essay to explain by itself, so I'll just leave it at this: I felt like an accountant. So many numbers and other things to keep track of and strategically place. Jeez. I could barely keep track of all of this and it was too much to focus on. It hurt my head and eventually I just stopped caring about it. This was to my disadvantage competitively because it probably made the game harder than it needed to be.

Targeting is SO BAD. You just press R to target one enemy, and you are supposed to press it again if you want to switch enemies. This almost never works. It seems dependent on where they are on the screen? Also, targeting certain appendages was just running around until it auto locked on it. Ridiculous.

A couple things I feel unsure about:

• The leveling system. It's strange. Right at the beginning of the game you encounter enemies in the lvl 90s. I find out much later that a character's max level is 60? Why is it different? Someone on Reddit made a point that this could be a conscious decision. It would be realistic that a new planet had wildlife that was just too much for a human race to try to compete with, so you need to avoid it no matter how strong you are. I kind of like that. What I don't like is when I'm in the middle of a story mission fighting at level 20, and a random indigen at level 87 shows up and wipes you. Nothing you can do about it and you have to try again, only hoping RNG is on your side this time.
• Skells brought a weird dynamic to this game. Don't get me wrong, they're awesome. The combat with them is really cool and the reward of getting one late into the game was unique. You get to explore this world you thought you knew in a whole new way and brings a different perspective. My issue is that ground fighting almost becomes completely obsolete once you have access to your giant alien crushing mech. It was a very polarizing change. I wish there was a more fluent way of working them into the story.

*** SPOILERS. THE FOLLOWING IS ALL ABOUT THE ENDGAME ***

The first 90% of this game I would give an 8/10. Despite some tough mechanic issues and overwhelming complexity, the story and characters kept me playing, and it was a wonderful world to explore. Then they hit you with THAT ending, and now part of me regrets playing in the first place. Other reviews seem to disagree with me, but that's why it's an opinion.