Xenoblade Chronicles X is perhaps one of my favorite games in the last decade or so. It probably ranks as one of Nintendo’s most expensive games at the time of release having spent a long time in development and used as a teaser throughout the Wii U’s lifetime and hyped as the sequel to Xenoblade Chronicles which had received a lot of grassroots attention on Wii. It eventually released fairly late into the Wii U’s life and reviewed very well but it was clearly a very decisive game. To me these parts were some of the most interesting because it was very unlike a lot of open-world games of the time and in many ways since.
Unlike the numbered Xenoblade series, X is truly open world. While there are are set of chapters that setup the main plot and gate a bit of progression these barriers are relatively weak. As soon as you can leave NLA you can travel almost anywhere that doesn’t specifically require a skell. The gaps between these story chapters are not filled with any specific content, you simply tackle various types of quests that happen to be available many of which build upon each other to tell numerous side stories. And surprisingly this content is actually pretty good. I think it’s partly due to the wonderful translation by 8-4 which adds a lot of flavor to what essentially boil down to fetch quests and fighting certain enemies. I don’t know how closely it matches up to the Japanese but the dialog is rich and the scenarios have this goofy-but-also-serious tone to them. There’s a lot of saving squads that have been ravaged by monsters as part of the survival theme but you might also help a time traveler or get pizza for aliens. Some of these plot lines stick in my memory because of how weird or just unexpected they were. Fuck that water purification plant.
The main draw is systems and exploration. The game will add systems throughout the entire 100+ hours you play it. Some will be introduced earlier but it’s very unlikely you will ever feel the need to interact with them, or it will just be overwhelming. Eventually though, you will probably get stuck and have to start engaging to really make forward progress.
X makes traversal interesting by placing different leveled enemies together throughout the each zone. So early zones can have high level enemies, they are just less common or not aggressive. To traverse you will have to plot courses through enemies that can instantly kill you and this creates tension and difficulty. Conversely, even later areas have low leveled enemies too. This helps the organic feel, like that of an ecosystem, but it also means that the player still has stuff to fight even if they find themselves deep in hostile territory. The player will naturally follow paths that have enemies that are approximately their level for greatest efficiency and this means that different paths are likely to be followed at different times. It’s really an elegant way to keep a constant challenge and make old areas feel relevant without resorting to things like auto difficulty scaling which flatten the curve. You are always free to challenge yourself and get somewhere earlier than expected and the game actively encourages you to try.
One of the less expected elements to accomplish this is stealth. In fact, the game itself doesn’t really have a designed mechanic like many of its peers and despite this it actually works better. Stealth is emergent from the variance in mob difficulty. Since the player must navigate between high-level mobs you are often forced to go around the back way, or wait for enemies to patrol and walk past them. It’s never prompted at any point, if you were high enough level you could just fight them, but it’s almost necessary to progress in some places making it feel surprisingly organic despite the unintuitive line-of-sight and aggro mechanics.
With these they also sprinkle around “tyrants.” These are essentially boss enemies that patrol various areas. They generally stick to the expected difficulty curve for the area but not always. In many cases they even try to surprise the player by having them jump down from above or wander into you on a long patrol route. This often leads to amusing scenarios where you are wandering around or maybe fighting some enemies and the boss theme “uncontrollable” starts blaring, you whip the camera around just to see a boulder being hurled at you that does 10x your max HP. This effect is used in a particular quest where you fight some enemy skells in the path of a patrolling strong tyrant forcing you to either wait for rainy weather where it won’t be around or lead the group outside of the path to avoid a confrontation. While this can seem a bit trial and error because you will just unexpectedly die sometimes, but because the game is very generous to let you keep all your experience and just reset you to the nearest fast travel point, it never feels too punishing if you get accidentally ambushed or simply miscalculate your movement around strong enemies.
Combat is pretty closely related to Xenoblade 1 with a few modifications. You are generally trying to build up art combos to deal the most damage. For the most part you don’t need to dig too deep. Just pick some arts that sound good and make sure you level them up with battle points so they deal enough damage for your level. Your class determines which weapons you can use and thus the arts available. You probably switch classes a dozen times in a playthrough so you can sample a bit of everything to find your style. With this you also need to decide on your gear. There’s a whole big system tied to sidequests of how to unlock new equipment and using miranium to level up Arms Manufacturers (AM) to get better bonuses. Each type of AM specializes in different abilities and different types of resistances and damages. For the most part you just pick what sounds good but the game never really gives you a list of what enemies do what damage (you can infer this from icons when fighting them but it’s not intuitive at all) and it doesn’t tell you what enemies are weak against (the bestiary does once you’ve killed it which is useless for bosses and tyrants) so unless you have a guide it’s a lot of it is just guesswork. This, I feel, makes the battle system very confusing and many fights frustrating because it might just be a change in equipment that makes it easy but you won’t know exactly how to fix the problem or have the money to trial and error. You can also augment equipment which is another large rabbit hole. But for the main game brute-force leveling up and picking the thing with a higher number will eventually get you though. You never have to engage heavily to get that far.
If you do try and beat some of the end game content you mostly get pushed into a few builds and have to customize your gear to the boss you are fighting. These builds mostly just stack large overdrive combos and can beat mostly anything as long as you can survive long enough to pull it off. This can even be easier than using a skell despite larger enemies being buffed against ground combat. The game is similar to a lot of JRPGs in that it fully wants you to break its systems. It’s just really difficult to learn them in this case.
While most of the gameplay is on foot you eventually get to pilot the heavily featured “skell” mechs. Apparently calling them “dolls” would be too emasculating (but you can still hear them referred to as “dolls” in the Black Tar lyrics). In bold move, you do not get access to this prominent feature until 30+ hours in, and you won’t get a flying one until about 70. The game weighs very heavily on delayed gratification in a way almost no modern games do. The skell itself basically accelerates the gameplay loop by making exploration faster and combat easier as well as unlocking some new areas. It also has a cool feature of changing the scope of world. On foot you see lots of massive creatures, far too strong to take on for nearly the entire game. Most of the time these are docile, they will not attack you on foot but in a skell they actually might. It adds another layer of organic feeling, that these creatures don’t care about ants but are actually aggressive to things their size. It also creates another set of paths through the world. You can just roll past small creatures but now you have to engage the bigger guys. And once you get the ability to fly another layer of the world opens up with high-level flying creatures. It’s all very thoughtfully put together.
Skell combat on the other hand is less interesting. You do get a massive array of customization options. There are tons of weapons with unique animations that you’ll probably never see because they aren’t strictly as powerful as others and there are literally a dozen super weapons that require mass grinding but can take down some of the strongest enemies in a single shot and even wholly custom skells with fixed loadouts that are also unique. I have no idea why so much customization exists other than to flex, from a gameplay standpoint most of it is junk or it literally trivializes the game because it’s so overpowered. While this level of detail is really cool for the mech lover, actual fighting is a simplification of ground combat. Each weapon becomes an art you can select but it never feels like it combos together quite as nicely. One other problem with skells is that it becomes a lot harder to gauge difficulty. Skell frames have a base level (eg level 30, 50 or 60) but you can take down higher level enemies with it and are expected to. Unlike character level which is roughly in line with enemy levels sometimes it feels a bit trial and error exactly how much you can bite off and given the expense of failure it can feel harsh.
Your skell can also be destroyed and it is extremely costly to replace. This is a cool mechanic because in many cases you might choose to bail or try an area on foot to avoid getting ambushed by something out of your league because of the risk. The game even provides insurance for the skell which is testament for just how deep the systems go. If you time it right you can revive your skell indefinitely but 3 total misses and you never have that safety blanket again and have to consider scrapping the skell as it will become a money pit. Another reason to get out of the skell is fuel which slowly depletes as you fight and slowly increases as you do things outside of the skell. However, this can feel like at annoyance at times at least until you get a solid flow of miranium going to manually refuel. Overall these conundrums basically mean that both ground and skell combat co-exist in a pretty well balanced way.
The expanded content is pretty mixed. The additional characters are fine, 2 are just more additions to the roster with some basic storylines. The final character functions a little more like a surrogate main character, the same way Elma does. Plot-wise it feels a lot like the developers were never going to get another shot at Xenoblade X. The original story left a lot of dangling pieces. They clearly did not know where the were going but they seeded them. Chapter 13 basically has to quickly tied those all up in what amounts to 3 chapters (for some reason they chose to label it as 1 chapter broken into 3 parts instead of 3 extra chapters). This already creates some headwinds but basically they solve it in the most generic JRPG stake-upping way possible. This would have worked for a numbered Xenoblade game but it feels out of place in the more sci-fi elements of X. It doesn’t appear like Sawano came back for the Definitive Edition either because most of the music is recycled and the few new tracks, including new battle themes sound more like typical Xenoblade fare.
Overall, the extra content is light, which is good because you need to play through the entirely of X to get to the main part. It wouldn’t really have made sense to do a segmented off portion like Torna or Future Connected either because it’s really about the world and building out your character, your Skell and New LA. So, if you don’t want to do the whole game you aren’t missing much. The extra area is still pretty segmented off but it’s only an hour or 2 of content, the rest is within Mira you already know.
This time playing I did want to do the original end game content. I got very far along on the Wii U version but the Definitive Edition makes a lot of things easier. The biggest is that affinity goes up fast, on the Wii U it required a lot of grind, but now you’ll basically 5 heart everyone as long as you are constantly switching them up when they get to max affinity. The definitive edition also removes the level 60 cap which can make traversing late areas easier because enemies will not start fights you are 10 level higher. It also makes some late 60+ level tyrants easier. The first thing was getting the Ares 90 skell. This absolutely trivializes most of the game because it’s so powerful. Anything under level 90 will basically get one-shotted by the Aghasura Cannon (at the cost of a lot of fuel, which means more refueling, which means more waiting for your miranium to restock). It actually takes the fun out of combat. However, it’s almost necessary for the amount of enemy grinding the game expects. Getting those last super bosses requires actually modding your equipment, and getting the best equipment.
There are item tiers higher than the shop sells and these only drop from enemies of level 60 or higher. Some are specific to certain tyrants. So for certain gear you need to be able to fight those tyrants. But to get the best Skell equipment and mods, including the Ares 90 you need to get materials. Some of these required materials that only drop from bosses and only rarely so there’s no natural way to obtain them once you’ve cleared the chapter. So instead you need to become versed in the online components.
Online is entirely optional and probably the last major system to learn. While you can technically do some co-op missions, there’s not really any reason to do them with another person but you can only access them when online. The same is true of time-attack boss fights and other small combat missions. The main point of these is that because you re-fight bosses you get a chance for them to drop their material as well as collect BP once you’ve run out of natural sources and some material tickets. Material tickets are a secondary way to get rare materials. If you have enough you can exchange them for any material so there’s always a linear (if long) path to getting things. The other way you can get them is via squad tasks. These are basically item or enemy checklists that are shared amount a group playing the game at the same time. You can actually participate which nets you more tickets but at long as the task is completed you get some. This means it’s always advantageous to play with the online enabled. It’s a nice incentive for people that aren’t interested in playing with others to engage a bit. The final component is the global nemesis. These are just bosses that have hundreds of thousands of life bars. You fight them for a certain amount of time and just do as much damage as possible and anyone else playing the game can as well. Depending on how much you do by the time they are killed by the total player group you get rewards, usually for cosmetics.
In the end I was able to clear all but 2 tiles for a near 100% survey rate. The last level 99 super boss I wasn’t able to beat. It was probably possible even with the items I had but after about 10 extra hours of grinding materials to put up a fight I kinda lost my will. I feel I might go back because I was extremely close to 100%ing the entire game. I had multiple level 60 skells and multiple unlocked super weapons and a lot of high level mods.
Xenoblade X is probably not the type of game likely to be seen again. It takes bold risks and was probably pretty costly to make. While it has numerous sharp edges, it has a ton of character. It’s polarizing in a good way. It’s a game that you can tell was made out of passion and minimal focus grouping. The Definitive Edition is the best way to play. Not only is the image quality just so much better but there’s numerous quality of life things. The game can at times be a slog but the Definitive Edition really improves the most tedious places. I still wish you could abandon mission in the middle though. This is rough edge that can literally block you for hours if you happen to pick the “wrong” affinity or story mission. It’s always better to come in a bit over-leveled to make sure you don’t get too stuck by a hard boss. It does let you lower the enemy level if you fail too many times but a bad setup or painful stealth section can be demoralizing. The new content is welcome but the sloppy end tying is a bit of a let down. But the game’s highs remain high.
It’s also interesting to think of X’s legacy. While it has it’s own place in the Xenoblade pantheon, it also highly informs Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. The sort of exploration is perfects from the first Xenoblade are in many ways transferred over. Breath of the Wild is never quite as “wild” as X but it does feature vast open world running on very similar Monolith Soft assisted technology. The go-anywhere vertical design is very much seen in Zelda. There’s little chance of it existing without learning lessons from X’s very long development cycle.
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