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.
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.
2 Comments
thank you!!
Yultimona
1 year ago