I was always aware of how good this game was, whether it was Chuggaaconroy, my friend groups or just general reviews. I bought the Definitive Edition, sat on it for 3 years and then I played it. After saving Juju from Xord, I was permanently hooked all the way until the end.

The Cast: There is no bad one. I'm serious, not one single character is bad in this game. If I had to rank my top 3, it would be Riki > Melia > Egil. I love them all. I do think Dickson becoming comically evil is very ham, but that's not really a bad thing persay.

The Gameplay: Gorgeous environments, great world. I do think a lot of sidequests are busywork, mainly Colony 6. The combat took some getting used to, but after a while, I started growing to really like it and then I became addicted. My team comp mostly was either Shulk/Fiora/Riki or Melia/Dunban/Riki

The Story: Very very strong. I can't think of any strong downsides of this story. Strong protagonist with Shulk, a great plethora of bad guys like Metal Face, Egil, Zanza, great supporting cast. This is just kind of the banger game.

ok i havent finished this game yet but theres no way in hell im gonna give it anything less than 5 stars by the end of it.

AND THE OST IS SO PHENOMENAL? I INSTANTLY LOVED THE MUSIC IN COLONY 9 AND THOUGHT THERES NO WAY THEY CAN TOP THIS AS MY FAVOURITE OVERWORLD TRACK. I WAS SO WRONG.

edit: i finished it this game is peak

I wasted 140 hours playing this game and I don't regret every hour of this. This is the most interesting JRPG I've played so far and it's plot, while does go with the traditional "kill god" routine it had very refreshing and unexpected plot points compared to other JRPGs i've played (so 8 Final Fantasy games in a nutshell).
Gameplay isn't something to speak off proudly but isn't completely brain-dead either, it's basically a single-player focused MMORPG gameplay.
This was the 2nd game that make me focused so much on plot, next to Yakuza 0, alongside having very memorable and enjoyable cast with good, albeit rough around the edges, British voice acting. Reyn's "alleyoop", however, is the most funniest shit i've ever heard. Thank you, Monolith Soft.

One thing I can say quite definitively about this title is that that the world designers were cookin'. Very few things coming off a Nintendo console can be considered "high fidelity" — even with the fresh coat of a remastering — but fidelity is only ever one part of a game's visual toolset. Creativity and an eye for detail are what truly make a work special, and the world designers at Monolith Soft clearly had it.

I've been into sci-fi tales from the cradle, so I'd like to think that I've seen a lot in the long list of works — both new and old — I've read, watched, and played. I have vague memories that I've seen a general setup like Xenoblade's "universe for two" before, but... there's a magic to the execution here that got even my desensitized, open-world-burned-out self to spend 30 minutes in areas just "looking around." Something I haven't done much of since I was first awed by Mass Effect back in 2008.

Original or not, it sure feels unique. Even when I knew that I had probably found all of the interesting gameplay elements in an area, I still would feel compelled to look.

So for all of the more mixed opinions I'll give after this, I will say right off the bat that I now see why this game has been held in such high regard by its fans since its original 2010 release.

I also understand why people compare it to a single-player MMO, because beyond just the combat, every technical aspect of this game feels like it was derived from that space of the industry. In more good ways than bad — I say as an occasional MMO enjoyer.

[Combat]

Combat on the surface is almost one-for-one with the likes of World of Warcraft or (more relevant to me) Star Wars the Old Republic. You can move freely and it's in "real-time," but it uses the same style of targeting and action queueing any MMO player would immediately recognize. With that said, as an offline game it's far more responsive and willing to push for tighter timings on actions. They took the liberty to add features that its online contemporaries could not, like a system that plays out a possible future action from the enemy as a warning for the player to shift their tactics.

Frankly, I find the combat very satisfying with all the little tools they give you to maximize your damage-per-second and balance that with defense. It's not too complex when you're being introduced, but over time you find added layers that can create some pretty dramatic effects when you figure them out.

My only real problem with it is tuning. The game wants to encourage a diversity of team compositions and character builds, but it has two particularly grevious misfires to that point: the "Medic" character is way too effective as a healer compared to anyone else (and the team size is a mere 3); the main character has only one set of skills and most of his variety comes from special mechanics related to his weapon which don't have as much organic interplay.

This doesn't rear its head much in most fights, but once you get to the actual challenges you're heavily pressured into taking those two and one of two effective tanks. You can finagle the system to make other things work or level over the challenge, but to me it always seemed like I was intentionally hamstringing myself to do so.

[Checklisting]

The rest of gameplay revolves around exploring the world and collecting items. There are some interesting aspects to this, but its mostly fairly rudimentary in implementation. Smooth and neuron-activating, but simple and potentially very time consuming if you're a completionist or nearly one.

On the more interesting side, there is a mechanic that tells you if a random item you pick up will be part of a sidequest that fits the plot. That's a very cool bit of QoL that I loved. Also, there's a whole system around building reputation with the named NPCs of the world, and a big ol' graph showing all of their connections, likes, and tradable items. The further you build out that graph, the more side quests you unlock. Some of which even have alternate outcomes if you talk to specific characters before mindleslly setting out.

It's just a bit unfortunate that most of these quests are piled in with token fetch/kill quests so they can be easy to miss and there's little additional presentation for them. Just the same text boxes only with more involved dialogue. Great if you notice it, but no one will blame you if you don't.

There was one aspect of this system that I feel particularly let down by (though, maybe unfairly) which is that your party members have affinity values for each other as well, which unlock passive combat bonuses and, more importantly, "heart-to-heart" scenes that give their individual relationships more development. The "unfortunate" part to me was in how much time commitment it would take to fully engage with the system and in how obnoxious it was to actually trigger the scenes. To the point where I gave up on doing them in normal gameplay and opted to watch them on YouTube.

In my 41 hour playthrough where I tried to do the significant side content I could find, I got about 3 party members to full affinity with the main character, and none of them higher than 4/5 with each other. In addition, you have to find the locations for each scene on the large maps with no option to at least fast travel back to them later, and you definitely won't have them unlocked on first visit.

So great idea, poor execution.

[Narrative]

The tale that sets the context for your long trek through this alien-yet-inviting world fittingly evoked my nostalgia for both Gurren Lagann and Final Fantasy. The broadstrokes being close to the former and the details of the characters and atmosphere closer to the latter.

I ended up liking the whole cast more than I had expected after seeing their visual designs for years (I have a prejudice against the kind of not-shorts Shulk wears, apparently). I'd even say the writing had some great moments, just not consistently. Still, the only real "negative" moments were a couple fairly repetitive beats in Shulk's character development, and I otherwise liked him. He was much more direct and brash than I expected, but not in a thoughtless way.

I can't say I ever felt "surprised" by the twists in the story, but there were some details to it that caught me off-guard at times. And in the end, like the exploration, I was always happy to just soak up the sci-fi goodness.

I do really think the game needed a proper "point-of-no-return" in the last 2 or 3 chapters and drop off the exploration elements at that point, because there was a bit too much dissonance between what the gameplay and narrative were trying to accomplish pacing-wise at that point. It's not the worst I've seen, but it let out a bit of the steam it had built for me.

[It's not 'Incredible' but it's certainly 'Memorable']

There's a lot of cool stuff going on in this game, and I'm really looking forward to catching up with the series now. It's hard to pinpoint anything other than the world design that it does particularly well, but in a "whole greater than the sum of its parts" way, I left with rather warm feelings about the whole experience.

If you're a JRPG veteran and haven't gotten to this one yet, I absolutely recommend. I think sci-fi fans who want something a bit low-key on the gameplay side will generally enjoy this as well.

Xenoblade Chronicles is pretty great, I think. It’s a contender for being one of the best first-party titles on the original Wii, one of the few worthwhile games to justify getting a Switch, and while it doesn’t rank too high in my personal rankings for (W/J)RPGs I've played, I still think it has a lot going for it that I can kinda understand why people regard it as one of the all-time best games ever made.

The narrative is sprawling and epic with how it deals with cyclical conflicts, fatalism, and the choice to break cycles and circumvent destiny. Taking great advantage of what’s deceptively such a cool setting of people living on two decaying giant primordial gods, frozen in the middle of some battle fought long ago, into some juicy melodrama and world-building set up for a grandeur adventure to end a war between two different civilizations.

It feels like the broad conceit of what Final Fantasy XIII was creatively about, mostly in bits of the gameplay and aesthetics, but spliced with the best bits about Final Fantasy X and what made that a definitive JRPG experience for the PlayStation 2. It’s hard to settle into the mindset of when this originally came out to understand how genuinely ambitious this was for the time because many aspects of Xenoblade Chronicles have already become too homogenized and blurred out today. The big thing is the open-world design template that I think was one of the first progenitors of which the following console generations of gaming unfortunately baked into a tired, shallow formula everyone is getting sick of now. The MMO-like open-world environments built for exploration are massive in scope but the content inside of it boils down to repetitive fetch quests and collecting materials to clutter your inventory. It’s disappointing because Bionis and Mechonis are some of the coolest settings to explore in any video game, and Monolift Soft did a lot to make traversing through the anatomy of a giant dead god feel overwhelming, maybe too much, and worth adventuring further. You occasionally may get a cute little nugget of lore fleshing out the world and characters but they’re flooded out too much by tedious filler.

To sidestep into my bigger gripe here, I think it could also do without the amount of bloat prevalent later on when you reach Mechonis and the difficulty curve gets pretty whack. Xenoblade is not a very kind game for anyone who’s, like, under-leveled by a shy short of 2-3 levels or having too low of agility for your attacks to lend while being more susceptible to enemy attacks actually hitting. There’s like 2-3 bosses right at the end which hard filters you badly to the point of grinding excessively to even out the odds with the right party combination and equipment setup to make a real difference between winning. If you can get pass that and how annoying the "change-the-future-by-avoiding-this-fatal-enemy-attack" mechanic is, then Xenoblade Chronicles’ actually has a pretty goated combat system which feels like natural evolution of Dragon Age and Knights of the Old Republic’s tactical party-based gameplay but more dynamic. I actually wish more games took cues from this because I’m surprised this is the one part about the game that never really seemed to inspire or influence the combat of any RPG outside of the Xenoblade franchise. Kinda wished that the party were more evenly developed, writing-wise. Shulk is good but the party struggles to mesh together enough until Melia joins. Even then I think it's noticeable still how the character-work in the main cast is a bit underwhelming during some cutscenes and mostly exist in these heart-to-heart segments you find in the over-world that aren’t always immediately accessible because of the affinity system. A neat idea but I'm not sure how to feel about it whenever it's put into practice for moments you need to work more to feel the vibe of this world.

Something else I took note of in my play through but I want to commend this greatly for its localization (which wasn’t an easy battle to convince Nintendo of America) and the voice-acting for being some of the best performed I’ve heard in these kinds of games by escaping the Funimation Alumni curse. The characters sound vocally distinctive and are given very good direction that gave the story more emotional resonance and weight.

I definitely didn't regret getting this, really showed how much of an important support pillar Monolift Soft is to Nintendo now, and it got me hooked enough to at least try out Xenoblade Chronicles 2 somewhere far down the line. If not that then try out everything else in the Xenoseries like Xenogears and Xenosaga.

The game's story starts with such force it's incredible how flat it falls during Mechonis, it almost felt like the script jumped off a cliff, fortunately it does pick up a bit during endgame.

Visuals are outstanding, the Music is a blast, gameplay is rough around the edges but it's good enough to stick, for the Characters only Melia was notably good, Sidequests are god damn awful I didn't bother to do them and some misc things left much to be desired (such as exploration in general and the lack of rewards other than grabbing useless boring items on the field)

All in all a pretty decent game that could have been way better.