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.