Out of all the Nintendo properties, it felt like Fire Emblem had the most “edge” to it. It was niche for a reason; hard, obtuse, and the permadeath mechanic making it particularly abrasive to those who don’t play turn-based strategy RPGs. Although enjoying my time, I bounced off of Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones when I was 13 after I got a little too cocky with my favorite unit and watched him get slaughtered and removed from the rest of the game. It’s the type of thing you wouldn’t expect when you think of Fire Emblem now, and that's certainly why it was revived with Awakening.

Fire Emblem: Awakening makes a clean break from what Fire Emblem was, mostly through it’s new aesthetic and writing qualities, extra ease of access, easier difficulty scaling and gasp an option to turn off the permadeath!? More likely than not this series’ saving grace was how it shaved off its edges, embracing newcomers with its quality of life features and various ways to tune the difficulty to your liking. This is what made me more approachable to Fire Emblem as it was for many others, and it’s something I really appreciate. I’m still not the type to get a thrill out of being punished harshly for my mistakes, especially with a genre I’m still not very experienced with, and it just lowers the floor while still allowing hardcore players to have their fun. It’s nice!

The other part that caused it’s newfound success was, well, the fanservice. Fire Emblem was always “anime”, sure, but it never indulged in the excess that this game and those that came after it do. It’s not just a strategy RPG anymore, it's a Dating Sim! Marry the hottest soldiers and make little children to take into the battlefield with you! Supports are a series staple for sure, but it surely couldn’t have been given as much importance as it is in this game. Most of the paralogues are directly linked to getting S supports and collecting your unit’s future children, and a lot of the writing and character development is tied behind support conversations. I never enjoyed trying to build supports in battle, as it never felt like making clever strategy and more just sacrificing better options to make my units like each other more, or else I’d lose the benefits of stats, writing, and even an extra unit. A lot of the grinding I did was specifically to build up these supports so I didn’t have to deal with them later, and it was exhausting. In the end it wasn’t even really worth it, as all it showed me was how poor a lot of the writing was, how one-note the characters would be, and the units I would get I ended up barely ever using in lieu of the guys I already stacked up for hours before them. Also there's just an honest to god 1000-year old dragon girl who looks like she's 10.

Fire Emblem: Awakening made the best choice for preserving the life of the series. Everything it did to draw in new audiences clearly worked in its favor, thrusting the series out of its niche status into being one of Nintendo’s flagship series, even if it had to make some sacrifices along the way. The core gameplay and accessibility features kept me playing to the end, and now it feels like I’ve learned to ride a bike with training wheels and am ready to take them off. That’s probably the best thing this game could do for me... it made me feel ready to play better Fire Emblem games!

The ending sequence of the game is it's saving grace in how it uses what it taught against the player in increasingly neat ways, but a clever concept ends up being completely gutted by some of the worst puzzle design I've ever had the displeasure of playing. It turns out a mechanic that mostly makes for cool Twitter clips couldn’t service that many unique puzzle designs outside "search around a room filled with little decorations until you find the single interactable thing". The amount of pissing around I had to do, staring at chairs and tables and potted plants and other objects that looked interactable just to not do anything seriously hampered the experience, and led to more than a few groans and mutterings along the lines of “fuck off”. For how much this game wants to be Portal, it seems to have no idea that it was so minimalistic for a reason!

Xenoblade Chronicles X is the shortest Xenoblade game. If you really wanted to, you could blaze through the story content and reach the end in like, 40 hours. That’s less than half the time it took me to finish the recently released Xenoblade Chronicles 3, in fact! But you’re kinda missing the point if you play it that way.
By far Monolith Soft’s biggest and most ambitious project, Xenoblade Chronicles X aims to impress in every way it can. Soaking up every bit of the meek Wii U hardware to create a massive, gorgeous world, nearly bursting with overlaying systems and mechanics, and a wholly indulgent dive into Takahashi’s very not subtle love of Mobile Suit Gundam. This only makes it more surprising when you find that what X is trying to do, what it wants the player to do most, tends to be pretty quiet.

In the same sort of vein as Majora’s Mask, most of this game's interesting story and gameplay content is set to the side. While the giant mecha combat and gunslinging is saved for the story content, the game wholly encourages, even forces you to engage in its abundance of side content, to enrich yourself in the city of NLA and the plight of the people in it. Most of what you do is helping your potential party members and other citizens do some pretty tame stuff that still sheds light on the difficulty humanity has had adjusting to this planet. You’ll help someone in Lao’s squad get a ring for a girl he likes, find Elma enjoying her time playing with a cat, do some trivial electrical repairs, small things like this that give you a better insight into what these people think and feel.
And no matter who you talk to, the events that got you all here never stop weighing heavy on them all. Everything, in one way or another, leads back to Earth. What they used to do, how they enjoyed time off, their families… things they can only grasp at memories of now. Unlike a game like Majora’s Mask, the quiet moments don’t get filled with a dread of oncoming doom, but a sorrow of a doom that’s already passed.

Of course, these quests also get gameplay rewards too! Yay!! Let’s talk about gameplay now! On the surface, the combat system in X feels very similar to its predecessor. Aside from introducing way too many extra eccentricities to make the systems and how to build around them harder to understand, the core of it becomes a lot faster with one thing: the Overdrive system. Overdrive, like a lot of the gameplay systems in X, is really obtuse, not explained well, and given to you way too early to know how to use it, but once you learn it becomes not just the centerpiece of combat, but most of it you’ll do. Overdrive is a state that will drastically improve your attack, resistances, and speed but requires near constant attention to timing and execution; how and when to use the right arts, constantly building and using TP in a frantic dance of destruction, with only perfect precision granting you some of the juiciest damage numbers I’ve ever seen in a game. It takes a ploddingly slow combat loop into one that feels like you’re on a rollercoaster whenever you start. This on top of the expanded options to build your team, a job system that makes it endlessly satisfying to mix and match weaponry to find what will mesh, it’s far and away the best combat Xenoblade will ever see. Just a shame that Skell combat kinda sucks in comparison.

Xenoblade Chronicles X, more than any of the others in the series, is best described by being a single-player MMO. It introduces player creation, weird multiplayer kinda sorta interactions, an “open world” gated by the enemies that will splat you across the pavement if you’re too weak, and most exciting of all, tons upon tons of fetch quests!! While the story bits you get for these are really nice, the constant grinding loop of picking up shit hoping you’ll get the item you want this cycle, sometimes literally waiting for materials to be mined out for you, is what drags this game down so much. Everything I praised and enjoyed was at the expense of hours upon hours of time spent doing what felt like fuck-all, nearly always feeling like I was not enjoying my time doing this but doing it anyways for the sake of whatever story or gameplay reward I’d get. Truly emblematic of the MMO experience. Also, I truly cannot stress enough how much this game piles information and mechanics on you without ever giving you a break to digest any of it. Out of all the Monolith Soft long bad tutorials this game has the longest and the worst of them all.

This game is interesting. In the state Monolith Soft exists in now, we’ll probably never see something as ambitious or perhaps as daring as X again. Perhaps this was the catalyst that caused them to make utterly boring driveling shit from now on. It’s not by any means a fantastic game, and it’s definitely not for everyone, and even 8 years later it feels like the direction it took may still be too much for me to fully grasp as a Xenoblade 1-head; I still didn’t get nearly as much from this now as I still do from that game. But hey, it’s pretty good at the end of the day. Maybe we’ll get a Switch port once they find out how to effectively cut back on all the UI elements.

Also The key we’ve lost is Sawano’s best work.