I’m a couple of degrees of separation you might say from what someone who has played the first XBlaze game would be. I say that because XBlaze is a spin-off of another, arguably more successful and renowned series by Arc known as Blazblue. I have dabbled in BlazBlue, and while I marvel at its technical-fighting nature, it’s too much of an investment for me to tackle right now. Additionally, while I had heard of the first XBlaze game, I never played it, so I am coming into XBlaze Lost: Memories (XLM) very green.
Last week when I was provided a review code for XLM I expected to be, well, lost, as far as the state of the story and characters. Not surprisingly, I was at first, but, XLM spends several of its opening hours re-telling events in Code: Embryo as I found out after reading up on what I was experiencing. Briefly comparing with Let’s Play videos of Embryo, XLM’s offering provides the same story but from differing perspectives than what Embryo had. If you’re familiar with the story to this point, some of this might be annoying to have to go through again, but on the same token it provides a thorough refresher, and you get to see things from a different view. In my case, it was a lot to take in, but it’s manageable; at least to start with.
What I found critical to bearing in mind with XLM as the hours went by was that it’s a visual novel first and foremost, with very light adventure gameplay elements sprinkled in. A look at the control map would about suggest as much, with several buttons not even used, and up and down on the left thumbstick mapped to quick save and load respectively (never seen that before). (Useless) control tidbit aside, the reality is that XLM is heavy on conversations and dialog between its cast. By default, the conversations move forward automatically, or you can speed things up if you’re a fast reader by changing to a manual mode and pressing X to speed up the output of text. Prepare to do a lot of reading in XLM — the first hour I thought was just a long introduction, a couple of hours later and a peek at a Let’s Play revealed that this was indeed the structure of the entire game, but hey, it’s a visual novel, right? The trick of it is, the player has to be invested in the story and the characters for this to work, and that’s where your mileage may vary considerably. If you aren’t invested, it’s tough to stick with, even though Trophies are dished out routinely.
The breadth of the story is too much to summarize, but, the gist of the gameplay is that your character, Me, gets pulled into another dimension known as the Phantom Fields. Time does not really exist here, but Me knows that her younger sister came this way and she has to find her. To her aid — and great frustration — a character named Nobody meets Me upon her arrival. She helps Me understand and navigate the Phantom Fields. You must guide Me, and thus Nobody, down floors of the Phantom Fields to reveal what happened to her younger sister.
This sounds pretty routine yet compelling, but I wasn’t getting a lot of enjoyment out of it. The gameplay parts boil down to very little, some 8 bit environments that sharply contrast with the HD anime visuals of the rest of the game, and you go around simple 2D paths in search of Memory Fragments. These Fragments, of which there are several varieties, can be viewed to showcase additional, lengthy cutscenes offering more story content. After you find enough Fragments, you can proceed down to the next floor, but not before Nobody quizzes you about story events that happened on your current floor. These questions are not very difficult if you’ve been paying attention, but you must get all questions right before moving on. The idea of quizzing players for story-awareness is not new and I don’t really mind it, I’m actually playing through Trace Memory currently and it does the same thing between Chapters. I like the idea of games doing this when there are a lot of details to a story, it helps the player stay in the moment when, for whatever reason(s) they might not otherwise be as invested or tuned into what is going on.
As far as presentation, XLM is very colorful and has that classic Japanese anime style that is visually appealing. The audio, though, can be pretty grating with screechy or whiny reactions from the characters, but overall it’s not bad. The controls and general packaging of the experience is smooth as well. Granted, these are all ancillary factors that are overshadowed by the disappointing gameplay, but XLM is better off due to the what it does offer in its presentation.
Let’s head to the summary…