my personal favorite game of all time. an extremely fun title that’s both so visually stunning and captivating. fast paced combat that still allows the player to feel a sense of freedom with an excellent soundtrack alongside it makes this game outstanding in my eyes. gorgeous landscapes with vibrant plants and creatures and a cast of characters that’ll have you engaged from the very beginning. this is in my opinion the best xenoblade game and always will be. underrated title that definitely deserves more love.

Open world:
I love the open world style of this game. The world has so much to explore maybe a little bit to much. I loved the different ways you can explore the planet and all its secrets. For my first playthrough i did not do a lot of exploring but i focused more on the story of the game. Now that i have finished the game i plan on revisiting the game to just explore. Overall i liked the world.

Combat:
Before i played Xenoblade X i played xenoblade1, 2 and 3. and from what i have experienced is that the combat felt very familliar compared to Xenoblade 1. I really liked the way you could choose classes and upgrade your abilities. Later in the game i have experienced that leveling up through combat could be a bit of a pain due to the amount of xp i was getting (this could be a me problem). overall i enjoyed fighting monsters and creating the strongest team possible.

Story:
The story is very good except that the pacing is kinda mid in my personal opinion. When doing story quest to progress further in the game i was forced to do affinity quests and other side missions before i could start the main story quests which annoyed me a little bit. Sometimes the forced side quests could be a little tedious because i did not want to do them or they where just not fun. If i really wanted to play the affinity quests and required side quests i would have started them on my own. Because of this i felt a bit dissapointed. To avoid spoilers in my review i want to say that i really liked the ending and i did see it coming it was a shocker. The ending left me wondering will there be a sequel or not because i have many questions that are not answered. Overall i liked the story but screw forced missions.

Music:
When it comes to xenoblade and music they always nail it. can't say much about it the music is just really good. Personally the music in the Barracks and New Los Angeles are good but they could have been different it did not match the music from for example Oblivia or Sylvalum.

Main Characters:
I liked creating my own character and chosing her voice type. Sadly she does not talk much. Overall i liked most of the characters like Lin and Elma. when comparing the characters to other Xenoblade games i will always hate nopons they really annoy me especially Tatsu. Besides that i have not much else to say about the characters they are just oke.

Final summary:
Great open world lots to explore. Great and familiar combat with lots of customization. great story mid pacing and annoying forced quests maybe in a future remake they change it. Great music except for a few places. Good character customization. Overall i gave the game a 4/5 due to a few annoying things and nitpicking on smaller details.

Итак, я прошел второй (по счету) Ксеноблейд.
Ну как сказать прошел… Дошел я до 2й фазы последнего босса. Из пяти. И дальше он меня раскатал в блинчик. Я полез гуглить что же надо чтобы его убить. Рекомендации превзошли самые смелые ожидания. Пати у меня была 45-47 уровня, хорошо одетая на свой лвл. Босс 50, но в итоге его лвл тоже был снижен до 45. Но толку ноль. Так вот, рекомендации были «нагриндить до 60 лвл 4х персов, нагриндить денег на Скеллов (мехов) 50 уровня тяжелого класса, нагриндить определенный шмот для пати, определенные апгрейды этого шмота, определенный шмот и апгрейды на скеллы». По самым скромным подсчетам это пара недель, ибо играю я по 2 часа в день. В итоге я просто посмотрел концовку на Ютубе.
Теперь об игре. Если в целом – то это самая невероятно замороченная JRPG из всех, что я играл. В ней заморочено буквально все. Геймплей, управление, боевка, ролевая система, шмот, апгрейды, получение ресурсов, менеджмент разработок нового шмота, личные связи, прям вот вообще все. Подробнее расскажу в минусах, ибо замороченность и сложность для меня – минус. Но сначала давайте о плюсах.
Все что касается визуала, музыки – все на высшем уровне (для Вии Ю). Очень красиво, огромный живой город, с жителями, машинами на дорогах, в который можно просто залететь на Скелле, а не только фаст-тревел через экран загрузки. Привет Старфилд! Саундтрек, традицоинно для серии – великолепный.
Очень понравились Скеллы, и полеты на них. По сути игра становится огромным опенворлдом, и ты реально можешь долететь откуда хочешь, куда хочешь – без экранов загрузки. На Вии Ю. Да, это снова привет Старфилду.
Основной сюжет тоже топ. Практически такой же крутой, как в первой части.
На этом плюсы – все. Теперь о минусах. Повторюсь, это минусы именно ДЛЯ МЕНЯ, возможно кто-то подобное любит, и минусами не сочтет.
Главный минус игры – кроме основного сюжета, все побочки и прочие активности – крайне унылы и однообразны. Напоминают квесты из ММО. Но, это потому, что в нее можно было играть как в ММО, набирая народ в интернете на прохождение этих квестов. Разумеется, я где-то на трети игры на эти квесты забил напрочь, и проходил чисто сюжет, и обязательные для него «Affinity» квесты. Что и привело к тому, что на ласта я пришел сильно недогриндив. И судя по количеству подобных вопросов на Реддите – не я один.
Аффинити квесты – квесты, которые можно пройти только развив отношения с определенным персонажем до определенного уровня. В них я вижу аж 3 проблемы.
- Начать их можно только развив отношение с персом до опред. Уровня. Иногда приходилось брать сего перса в пати, и ходить с ним на гринд активности пару часов.
- Они скучные, как и гринд активности.
- Они обязательны для продвижения по сюжету.
Боевка. Боевка тут реал-тайм. Больше и говорить нечего, я пока не видел ни одной нормальной реал-тайм боевки в JRPG. Нет ее и тут. Более того, тут она усугублена тем, что в игре нет лечебных абилок. Вообще. Как лечиться? Ооо, вот тут мы и начинаем погружаться в пучины замороченности ролевой системы этой игры. Итак – в игре есть куча классов. Сначала их 4, у этих 4 еще 1 повышающий класс а далее у каждого еще 2 финальных класса, из которого можно выбрать только один. Все это качается в боях, и очень очень долго. У каждого класса есть разный набор умений, и они тоже доступны не сразу, а качаются постепенно. Все умения в итоге ты взять не можешь, надо выбирать. Плюс – у умения есть уровни. Качаются они не боями, а за определенные очки. Очков мало, за что дают, я так и не понял, качать все подряд нельзя, надо выбирать что нужно. Так вот, у тебя и у твоих сопартийцев определенный набор умений. И применение каждого умения тобой или ими, а так же некоторые ситуации в бою вызывают так называемые «ситуации». Причем какие события какие ситуации будут вызывать (но не все) можно менять в огромной табличке настройки этих ситуаций. И если возникает «ситуация», например один сопартиец врубает ауру и орет «врубил ауру, атакуй вблизи». Ты должен успеть за 2-3 секунды применить умение боя в близи (оно должно быть не на КД). Если успел – всем отлечивается 1-2% хп. И вот так лечишься. Тебе надо или генерить события, или отвечать на них, а точнее и то и другое. И умения пати, и состав пати, и табличка этих самых событий должна быть настроена ПРОДУМАННО. Иначе – тоби пизда.
Шмот. Казалось бы, что сложного может быть в шмоте? Но мы же играем в самую японскую игру в мире. Шмот в магазинах – полное говно. Но есть 5 военных корпораций, которые делают шмот. Чтобы они разработали тебе шмот – надо платить им спец ресурсом, который генерится только когда ты играешь в игру, на спец точках, которые ты должен на карте открывать, и ставить туда «добывалки». Скилл для этого надо прокачать, получая уровни, и добывалки надо добывать за квесты. Итак поиграв пару-тройку часов ты можешь поднять уровень одного производителя на 1, после уровня 3 – играть до поднятия надо часов 15. Подняв уровень мы получаем… думаете новый шмот в магазинах? Хуй там было! Мы получаем ЧЕРТЕЖИ нового шмота. Чтобы произвести этот шмот – надо бегать по всей карте и собирать ресурсы спавнящиеся рандомно, и никак на карте не отмеченные. Будет просто голубой ромбик, висящий над землей. А что там в ромбике – не узнаешь пока не соберешь. Итак набрал, нагриндил, сделал чертеж – можешь делать вещь. Только надо того же ресурса, на что ты прокачиваешь уровни заводов заплатить. И бабла еще. Надеюсь, у тебя все это есть. После этого в магазе будет хороший шмот.
Но шмот это пол дела. Шмот еще надо улучшать специальными улучшениями. «Камнями». Все по той же схеме, что и со шмотом, только чертежи не нужны. Гриндим, набираем ресурсы, крафтим. Вставляем в шмот.
А еще все то же самое надо проделать не только с одеждой и оружием для пати, но еще и со Скеллами, броней и оружием для них. И стоит это все – миллиарды миллионов. То есть гриндить будешь много и долго. Базовый скелл то тебе дадут, но один. И дохнет он от любого чиха, а чинить его или за дохуя денег, или за токен который дают за много гринд-квестов. Веселуха.
При этом – мобы сильные, бьют больно, их много, респавн бодрый. Вот в целом такая игра.
Рекомендую ли я ее? Вопрос сложный. Несмотря ни на что – игра мне скорее понравилась. Сюжет тащит, музон качает, а получив нормальных Скеллов чувствуешь себя прям летящей смертью. Главное к финальному боссу не залетать. Ну и да, для игры нужна ВииЮ. Ну или ее эмулятор.
Рекомендовать могу только тем, кто хочет раельно сложную и хардкорную ЖРПГ, где надо прям разбираться. Заморачиваться. Настраивать. Дрочить на циферки. Сильно дрочить на циферки. Если такое любите – лучше игры не найдете.

This game ends on a fade to black screen with text that sasy "This story never truly ends". This is a reference to the fact that this game as so much post game stuff that it seems insane to actually 100%, and also that it ends on like 3 cliffhangers that might never get resolved.

Xenoblade X is very strange. Anyone familiar with the rest of the Xenoblade franchise knows that the games take a lot of inspiration from the MMO; obvious things like aggro being a game mechanic to just how the game map is designed, ect ect. But while XB games often feel like JRPGs that kind of feel like single player MMOs; XBX is basically just a single player mode. The single player part isn't even accurate; this game Kinda has multiplayer. Sorta.

The game's main story is... lacking. While the main setup is interesting and has some good moments it is blatantly an unfinished story and was made with a sequel that has never arrived in mind. The ending of this game's main story is loaded with what feels an endless pile of unfinished story threads or just straight up cliffhangers. This wasn't a huge deal in 2015 when there wasn't a precedent for this franchise yet and assumed that Monolith's next game would be XBX2. And then that game was acutally XB2. And then we said okay well now it's time for XBX2. Then it was the XB1 remake. And before we even got to say XBX2 XB3 got revealed. Maybe XBX2 or just a XBX remake is on the way now that the Klaus trilogy is over, but maybe the next trailer with a monolith logo will just be XB4 with some brand new shit. who knows.

While the main story is lacking I cannot say the same about this game's side quests, which are fantastic and some of the highlights of this game. While there's plenty of really generic one there's also a lot of hitters, and oddly a lot of quests branching paths that actually end pretty differently. A few examples: A quest where you're tasked with rescuing 3 people but if you rescue them in the right order you wont learn + acquire the item that lets you scare off the Giant Fucking Monkey that kills one of them. You help repair a crashed helicopter but end up in charge of picking the right wire to plug in. If you pick the wrong one (which you can figure out from main city dialogue.) the helicopter crashes again because you fucked it up idiot and they die, changing your rewards. In another someone's life is deicided by whenever or not you let them take a Anti-Stress shower. A lot of people can bite it in this game.

This does lead into an annoyance I have with this game however; this is one of the most You Gotta Wiki This Shit games ever. Many quests require you to acquire The random items that drop in the overworld, and there is no clear indicator as to where you get these items, even if you've gotten them before. Thankfully the fellas are the Xenoblade wiki are gods strongest soldiers, but the I Need To Wiki this extends well into a lot of this game; for exmaple, I didnt know that Skells overdrive bonus' change depending on what kind of Skell you use until literally writing out this review. Speaking of lets wiki this, Lets talk combat and class design.

Combat and classes are tied together. Your skills tied to what weapons you use (AKA if your class uses Knife and raygun, you can only use knife and raygun skills), but when you max out a class you are free to equip its weapons to any other class. The passives your job unlocks can also be moved onto any other job; infact the best job in there game is technically the starting blank because it has the most passive slots, but it's not good until you actually make a lot of progress and have a lot of skills unlocked.
Because of the above, this game has a really extensive build options. Probably deeper than Diablo 4. You get to pick from 8 skills from your two weapon choices (there are 12 weapons total), which have around 12-15 skills each, an additional 3-5 passives (each job also unlocks like 6~ passive options). And this isn't even considering your actual stat builds though armor and skells.

The big problem with it is that the eternity of your ground skill build should be based around a single thing; a good overdrive set up. And there is nothing more I Need A Wiki than Overdrive.
This whole franchise is full of I Need A Wiki Or Youtube video things but each game's Chain Attack equivalent I think you can figure out how to get a good result by bumbling you way through some CAs and eventually the neurons start connecting. You will probably need a video to really optimize but thats whatever.
Not the same with Overdrive. OD, the game's CA equivalent (though they are very different), is impossible to figure out on your own. You have got to pick up a video for that shit to really figure it out, and the video that's the clearest explanation of the system came out only like 3 years ago. And unfortunately, like I mentioned previously, your entire ground build should be based around being able to get an infinite overdrive. The entire game opens up once you actually understand how to overdrive, but I've spoken to a lot of people and many of them just never interacted with OD because they had no idea wtf is happening when you hit the button, and the game offers no clearance at all about what it is does. it's crazy.
In truth ground combat is pretty slow even with a good build, and you're relatively weak until you get 3000 tp and then, as long as you aren't getting 1 shot by the enemy, you can kinda just turn into an unstoppable and the game becomes really fun because you're pressing tons of buttons and there's that joy of seeing a build really click together; but if you cant figure out OD it's going to feel really wack.

On the flip side, lets talk skells. Skells, the mechas, get acquired at a later point in the story and are also a pretty important goal in endgame progression. The level 30/50 skells are acquired just through a pretty significant investment in money, while the level 60 and higher skells require going out to getting endgame materials and the alternative resources investment. The customizable skells (some 60 skells just have unchangeable skills are based on) are based entirely on the gear you ahve equipped.
However skell builds and combat feels oddly shallower than ground combat. Looking online a lot of skell builds boil down to:
1) try to oneshot with a super weapon
2) One very high power 60sec~ cooldown skill paired with 7 short cooldown skills, and fishing for cockpit mode to keep it going
3) a pure debuff build, which you probably wont play yourself but shove onto a NPC party member skell.

It often feels like there isn't much to it other than just pressing the buttons when they're on.
Skells are also just loaded with a bunch of weird mechanics that feel like baggage like Insurance, Fuel and jsut getting your skell back wehn it dies. just weird and frustrating ways to stop you from using skells 100% of the time once you get them, which is an annoyance to work with and isnt even that relevant because once you get overdrive the pilot becomes better than skells (assuming we're talking about something that wont get oneshot by a super weapon)

Other things that I can't segway into cleanly:
-I didnt super get to explore the end game/online because there's backlog stuff i wanna play, but this game is filling to the brim with content if you're a compleitionist. Tons of quest, affinity missions, late game gearing, build options yo ucan pretty freely swap between, ect. This game' online is on the way out because the wii u is shutting down all their stuff, so I wanna try going back in and really getting into it before it goes.
-A very large part of this game is having to explore through regions full of enemies that are higher level than you and it is On Sight if they spot you. Many missions really are just Go To This Place And Talk To This Guy which sounds bad... but the guy is in an area of enemies that are 20 levels over you when you unlock the quest. This is kino and it rules. Some of the funniest moments in this game is getting jumped by an enemy while fighting something else.
-just an insane soundtrack. They really just let Sawano do whatever the fuck he wants. It's not my favorite XB soundtrack but it's the most unique one, also the Overdrive song does go crazy.
-The bad fights in this game are BAD. This game is maybe the most frustrated ive gotten in a XB game; any fight with an enemy in the air is very frustrating, and the final section of the game fight where you have to fight 10 enemies that all cleave and aoe stagger had me FUMING.
-skells are cool

XBX is a weird game. It's flies way too close to the sun in its goal of being a singleplayer MMO, something following XB games dialed back on, and almost everything in this game is poorly explained to the user and the game is just not as fun if you don't take the time to figure out its inner working, and has a pretty poor main story. However, if you can dig below the surface it is a game with a ton of a depth and a brickload of content, and just a unique game.

I hope monolith does plan to do something with XBX, seeing how a large chunk of the game is about to just disappear with the Wii U online. However if the next Monolith game is not XBX remake or XBX2, I think thats just them giving up on this franchise.

I first started this game MONTHS ago, and hoped I would be able to finish it by the new year, and my god I fucking DID IT. Now I can talk about how wonderful and underrated this spin-off of Xenoblade Chronicles is.
The Xeno games are well known for their epic and amazing stories and writing, and I personally think this game's story is good! It's very clear the main campaign was not the main focus, but I think with that they did, it's pretty nice! I like a lot of the ideas, I feel for things that happen to humanity in this game, and the finale is pretty great. I like the main characters like Elma, Lin, Lao, L, Vandham, and Nagi, and I liked the recruitable party members you could get too! Among my favorites were Hope, Yelv, Phog, Frye, Alexa, Mia, among more. Most of the questline's stories were also really engaging! Which is wonderful, as I usually find myself bored doing quests in RPGs, but the ones in this game give you choices that actually matter and changes what happens in the quests, leading to different endings. The side quests were wonderful, I could tell they put a lot of effort in them. As for the post-credit scenes, I wasn't much of a fan of the second one, but both of them both make me wonder and hope for a sequel to this game, I would love it Monolith Soft!
This is easily the Xenoblade game I've enjoyed the most gameplay-wise. A lot of it has to do with one of the game's defining features: FrontierNav. On the gamepad, not only does it show the Map, but the map has hexagons on it, with each hexagon having a task you can do on it, such as collecting a treasure, or doing a quest, or fighting a Tyrant (a super tough enemy akin to Unique Monsters in the other Xenoblades). The game doesn't tell you what type of treasure you need to collect in that area, or what Tyrant you need to kill, or what quest you need to do, but you can collect info from people around NLA to figure it out, or explore to find it! That brings me to one of another of the game's main focus: the exploration. This is absolutely the most fun I've ever had exploring a world in a video game. With FrontierNav, and planting data probes, exploring the planet of Mira was so fun and whimsical, it's the most fun I've ever had in an open world game. As for the combat, it's mostly the same as Xenoblade Chronicles 1's, but this game boasts Skells, which are Mechs that you can unlock to traverse the world and fight even BIGGER monsters. These Skells brought an even bigger joy going around the world, and you can also unlock the ability to fly! THIS GAME'S EXPLORATION IS SO FUN! I LOVE GOING IN MY SKELL, GETTING TREASURE, KILLING TYRANTS, COMPLETING MISSION, DOING AFFINITY MISSIONS, I LOVE IT I LOVE IT!!!!!
This game's music is fucking fantastic. They got a composer well known for composing many popular anime Hiroyuki Sawano to compose the soundtrack of the game, and he delivered so hard. There are too many fantastic tracks to name in this review, so please just look up the soundtrack on Youtube and listen to the music. Be warned though, a lot of the songs have really dumb and indistinguishable names, such as "no1=CODENAMEZ" or "no5=KAKU-WEST*→▲★★KAI", so if you don't want to look through all of that you can just listen to the tracks that have actual names, like Wir fliegen, Uncontrollable, or The key we've lost.
This is easily the Xenoblade Chronicles game I've enjoyed the most to PLAY. The other may have better stories, but I love this game in every other aspect besides story, characters, and art-style. The gameplay, exploration, mechanics, side content, and music made this experience absolutely divine and I believe this is the longest I've ever taken to finish a game. (A whopping 137 hours!) I'm very thankful this was the big swan song to my year, as it's one of, if not my favorite game I've played this year, heck, it could even be top 20 favorite games of all time, maybe lower! I suppose I've joined the crowd in wanting a remaster, or even a sequel.

Had a lot more fun with this than I thought I would. I think I even prefer this open world to BOTW/TOTK's open world.

Combat is essentially an improved version of XC1's combat, with a lot more build variety and options. And while a lot of that complexity is somewhat reduced once you fully abuse Overdrive to its limit, the endgame and postgame challenges really test your whole game knowledge. Exploration is also probably the best in the franchise, every hex on the map had a meaningful interaction, such as enemies that drop important materials, or a Tyrant to challenge yourself with.

As for the plot, it's certainly a downgrade when you compare it to the rest of the franchise. But I wouldn't say it was ever really bad, but just a 7/10 sci fi action plot. Although Tatsu can go fuck himself. But the side content certainly makes up for it, these are probably some of the best sidequests i've done.

Finally dusted off my Wii U to play this. Wanted to finish the last Xenoblade game I've yet to play. And overall, I had a pretty great time. It has its issues, the side quests are as bad as always with not much meaningful or interesting story content to be gleamed with annoying dialogue I always skip. And the game does a poor job encouraging trying other characters due to lack of XP share and small gains with class XP for your main character. But the base combat system is awesome, overdrive is amazing once you master it. Just play as Elma the entire game and you are in for a fun time. The open world is great, the probes encourage wide exploration and the 5 unique zones feel pretty dense and varied. Story was a tad forgettable but not bad, it had characters I liked like Elma and the ending was certainly intriguing. I hope it gets a followup and a rerelease on Switch.

playing this game the only thought that went through my mind is...
"give me the goddamn mech you advertised on the box"
than it went into...
"when can I fly with my mech?"
for me what made this game special is how good the side missions were and everyone's story was, the game had some issues but it did not stop it from being my favorite game of all time