Patience is the only virtue required to crack open Xenoblade Chronicles X’s sprawling omnibus of content. There’s so much to see, so much to do, and so much to understand, the realization of not being able to inhale it all in a single breath feels out of place in a landscape of immediate understanding and instant gratification. Xenoblade Chronicles X takes time to appreciate, but it doesn’t take your time away in the process. Poking and prodding its systems is the preferred means of instruction.
This isn’t to imply Xenoblade Chronicles X teaches its lessons in the clearest of terms. Reading over its fifty-page digital manual (which I did four times during my time with the game), marginally influences competency in performance. Detailing all of these systems alone would dominate the text of this review, so it’s easier to start where it’s simple. In Xenoblade Chronicles X, like Xenoblade Chronicles and every other role-playing game before it, your primary activity is exploring uncharted territory before killing monsters and finding ways to efficiently kill bigger and more threatening monsters. This isn’t the only thing you do in Xenoblade Chronicles X, but, initially, it’s the only thing that makes sense.
In battle, you’re managing one character among an AI-controlled group of up to three other characters. Your job is to execute Arts; special techniques earned through experience in different classes and assigned as commands. Arts have cooldowns that need to be considered, but with otherwise standard attacks happen automatically in the interim. Positioning in front of or behind an opponent can have a dramatic effect on performance. Ideally, you’re intended to infect attacks that either topple or stagger and enemy, and then unleash hell with everything that you’ve got to take a massive dent out of its life bar.
A first impression doesn’t dissuade comparisons to 2012’s otherwise unrelated Xenoblade Chronicles. Slowly, however, Xenoblade Chronicles X contorts and changes into a serious revision of established ideas. One of the most present changes is the addition of Soul Voices. Customizable from a fairly diverse set of pre-determined dialogues, multiple Soul Voices can be assigned to different party members. If a party member uses a Soul Voice to tell you to perform an aura attack on the side of an enemy, for example, actually doing that will prompt a quick-time-event and both party members will receive a quick heal or a myriad of different buffs. This is intended to replace traditional healing spells that kind of bogged down combat in Xenoblade Chronicles, but it’s a significant example of how the small modification to a basic mechanic can reverberate throughout the entirety of Xenoblade Chronicles X. Everything feels reworked with the intention of creating a cohesive ecosystem.
Before we get deeper, we need to pull back and examine the engine that powers the machine. The need to fight and the will to explore is driven by the basic premise of a plot; warring alien factions have destroyed Earth. A generational ship, the White Whale, escaped only to later crash land on the planet Mira. New Los Angeles, the functional human city that broke away from the White Whale and entombed itself in Mira, serves as a basic hub. Along with the five diverse and massive biomes that compose Mira, Xenoblade Chronicles X challenges the player to combat the indigenous wildlife amid the looming threat of an antagonistic alien race.
Xenoblade Chronicles X commands an overarching plot, but it’s primarily composed of loosely connected missions throughout Mira. Either picked-up from a job board or acquired via specially marked NPC’s, Xenoblade Chronicles X’s tasks feel endless and its rewards gracious. Most of them boil down to typical RPG templates of gathering special materials and/or slaying specific monsters, but all are prepared with valuable rewards. Sometimes it’s new gear, often times it’s money, and occasionally it’s the addition of a new potential party member or vendor for specialized equipment. Again, every potential action in Xenoblade Chronicles X seems to beat with the same pulse.
Exploration is also paramount to making the most Xenoblade Chronicles X’s world. Mira is presented as uncharted territory, and it’s up to the player to map it all out. This is accomplished by finding predetermined areas to drop research probes and mine Miranium, a sort of alternate currency that can be invested in arms companies or traded in quests. Planting research probes often creates fast travel points out in the wilds of Mira, but a better utility can be explored in their potential variation. Specific probes can be planted to increase Miranium output, regular currency, or boost the player’s performance within a certain range. Similar probes in close proximity can even be linked together, granted additional percentage-based bonuses. In turn, these probes basically generate their own economy, and, by investing harvested Miranium, facilitate the player’s acquisition of stronger equipment.
Planting probes is an effective way to make measureable progress, but Xenoblade Chronicles X boasts a more natural drive toward exploration. Mira is a gorgeous place! The opening region of Primordia feels like the development team looked back on grassy arches and pre-historic landmasses of Xenoblade Chronicles’ Guar Plains and turned the volume up so high they broke the knob clean off. Primordia is enormous in size, scope, and actual traversable land, and a day and night cycle shifts around its range of roving monsters and nefarious artificial life. Primordia (and the rest of Mira) are also packed with an endless supply of regenerating blue crystals, which function as collectible items, which are either used in quests or to build better equipment. Everywhere you turn, every place you look, there’s some gigantic mountain, serene waterfall, or massive plain to scour and conquer. Xenoblade Chronicles X is also keen to populate its landmasses with enemies of every level and size; a fact carefully observed when you first exit the White Whale and spy a massive level 50 brontosaurus creature calmly drinking from a nearby lake.
Primordia is an intimidating first impression of Xenoblade Chronicles X’s sheer size. It either becomes easier or worse to manage when you realize it’s joined by four other unique regions. Oblivia is a barren desert ripe with craggy mountains, rocky canyons, and the occasional abyss. Noctilum is a hyper-colored forest that looks like it was pulled straight out of the planet from Avatar, albeit with more threatening wildlife and a penchant for blooming pastels in the night time. Each region has its own quests, monsters, loot, and super-powered one-off versions of specific monster types.
While genre peers frequently showcase harsh performance and massive loading times, Xenoblade Chronicles X finds strength in the speed and ease it allows players to traverse its systems. On foot, loading times are non-existent and you can naturally travel anywhere. Expedited options are handled with the gamepad, which allows the player to teleport to a fast-travel point any time outside of battle. This makes penalties like leaping off cliffs and crashing into water miles away from anywhere else virtually non-existent, and it further reduces the risk of getting way too deep in a cave you shouldn’t be in without having to worry about finding a way out.
In fact, the entirety of Xenoblade Chronicles X’s basic movement appears to have adopted Crackdown’s everything-should-be-fun mantra. The player is instantly capable of massive superhero leaps and fall damage doesn’t exist. Clever play can allow access to off-kilter areas around Mira, although some places are only reachable once you acquire a Skell robot in Chapter 6 (or its corresponding flight pack much later). Even defeat, ever the progress-wrecking penalty, is stripped of its annoyance; Xenoblade Chronicles X removes all progress against whatever you were fighting, but everything you did before starting that battle remains intact.
Expediting or outright skipping sacred cows of design is a fairly progressive move! Game designers want the player to see and experience the world as they intended, and few games have the confidence to allow the player to break the spell and do whatever they want. The original Xenoblade Chronicles made strides in achieving this goal, but (are you seeing a pattern here?) Xenoblade Chronicles X is a functional refinement of that first step. You can ignore half dozen systems and still manage a pretty good time with the game.
Practically everything in Xenoblade Chronicles X can be leveled up. The Arts that compose your moves can be leveled up to increase effectiveness. Skills, usually passive buffs like boosting idle melee attacks or increasing Shock attack’s effectiveness, can be increased as well. You individual weapons and armor can be leveled up at a special kiosk that reflects how much you’ve either used that particular manufacture’s gear, or how much Miranium you’ve invested in that particular arms dealer. Even your base back at New LA can be leveled up and vaguely customized with different lighting or wall decals. Again, no matter what you like to do, Xenoblade Chronicles X will find a way to actively reward you for doing it.
Classes define your role in battle, and initially I struggled with the idea of switching between them. After all, I pushed my Striker class to its presumed endpoint in Duelist and then hit max level. The best idea seemed to be investing Battle Points into leveling up Arts that would work within that specific class. Eventually I shifted and moved between a variety of different classes, which did well to essentially teach me a bunch of different ways to play the game. When I started playing Xenoblade Chronicles X I would move from ranged to melee basic attacks and just whale on enemies with repeated melee strikes. Later a moved to a more tank-friendly class in Winged Viper, and even a buff-focused support class in Psycorruptor. Did higher character levels wind up costing me the Battle Points needed to level up my favorite Arts? Probably, but I think I had a better time experimenting with everything else.
Something I never quite came to terms with was what I was supposed to do with the assortment of fellow Blade members aching to be a part of my active squad. I kept Elma and Lin in almost permanently, as it seemed like a bad idea to have a rotating cast of multiple under-leveled characters. My fourth slot was in constant rotation, though I most frequently employed Murderess because she was literally named Murderess. Characters seemed to have defined (and even complimentary) roles in battle, but outside of a few difficulty spikes it didn’t often matter what assortment I had with me, assuming they were within a reasonable level.
Affinity between characters serves dual roles. Certain Affinity Missions are occasionally required to progress through Xenoblade Chronicles X’s proper story missions, but they’re also called upon the help develop its roving cast of characters. In almost every case they present one of your friends with a minor bit of conflict and challenge the player character to press through them with dialogue choices and/or combat sequence. This is the standard, and in this one regard, Xenoblade Chronicles X isn’t one to deviate from the establishment. Affinity missions, while generally well written and relatable, frequently submit to predictable tropes or other clichés endemic the Japanese role-playing games.
Xenoblade Chronicles X, at best, has a slippery grasp on its own narrative. The premise is wondrous and its call to adventure is noble, but the sheer time it takes to setup all of its pieces can feel incredibly lethargic. Fans of Tetsuya Takahashi’s work, which includes Xenogears and all three parts of Xenosaga, are used to grandiose operatic tales ripe with his own influences, so it’s a little weird to see him pull back with Xenoblade Chronicles X’s clenched storytelling. Still, it’s something different from his work, and a clever rationalist may paint it as the disconnected calamity that may envelope mankind after their literal existence crash lands on an alien planet. Society is operating as a cruel facsimile of its former self, no one has any real idea what they’re doing, and gangs of loosely affiliated mercenaries are out there collecting berries, fighting sentient robots, and grinding the local wildlife into dust. It’s a miracle they’re able to get anything done.
Grinding is one of the stranger facets of Xenoblade Chronicles X. In the traditional sense this was mostly avoided; rather than grind for levels or gear, I rearranged Arts or shuffled party members, but grinding is altogether different as it relates to mission requirements. More often than not, you’ll be challenged with gather five Something’s to satisfy Someone. The location of those Somethings are narrowed down to an entire region of Mira, and you’re never really sure if it’s dropped from a monster or randomly acquired out in the field. This can be extremely frustrating! Pouring through enemy encyclopedias and trying to find out if this Copper Cinicula actually dropped a Honey Oil was maddening, especially after I slayed like twenty of them and didn’t get one.
On one hand, I get the grind. It’s basically How Loot Works 101, but it’s a fundamental waste of my time to challenge me to go get something and not tell me where it is. I found a certain pleasure in scouring Mira, but after I had gone everywhere and seen everything, I wish I had known that a silvery rabbit fur, or whatever it was, was always going to be in the upper right portion of Oblivia scattered across a lake. These are the sort of questions that will quickly be answered through basic Googling and exhaustive wiki’s, but playing it without any of that information (which is presumably how the designers intended) can be a real drag on pacing and progress.
How Xenoblade Chronicles X respects your time is a bit of a push. A great fast-travel system, battle mechanics that gets rid excess baggage, and smart uses of the Wii U’s GamePad are among its brighter points. On the other hand, adding party members requires you to remember and revisit their physical location in New LA, the sheer amount of information constantly on screen is an unsightly mess, and Xenoblade Chronicles X is in love with the idea of tossing out terms and telling you nothing about them. For half the game I didn’t know what Reward Tickets are (they’re earned through multiplayer, I think, I can be exchanged for hard-to-find resources or items), how to get Division Rewards (visit the multiplayer terminal and find an obscured menu option), or the integral purpose of Soul Voices (see above). Nowhere was this more visible than Xenoblade Chronicles X’s approach to multiplayer, which seems wonderfully progressive in how it handles cooperative play and offline assistance, but may require an entire Reddit thread to properly understand.
I’ve vaguely referenced it here and there, but did you know you get to ride around in giant mechs after playing a third of the game? They even transform into crazy futuristic cars when you hit the run button! It’s even more impressive later when you can equip a flight pack and finally soar to all of those places your legs couldn’t take you. Getting a Skell and exploring Mira is Xenoblade Chronicles X’s equivalent of leaving the vault in Fallout 3, facing down the Colossus of Rhodes in God of War II, or a signature moment that defines the opening of other heralded games. Xenoblade Chronicles X gets away with doing this after thirty or so hours because it’s confidently been performing this action the entire time. Every new area you personally explore or moment when one of its mechanics finally clicks is the game laying its cards out on the table. Of course you get a shiny new (and incredibly expensive to replace) mech. Of course you can equip it with a myriad of parts and weapons. Of course it looks awesome inside and outside of combat. Xenoblade Chronicles X is do dense with ideas and mechanics, it’s easy to forget the times it comes up short.
Seeing beauty in the light of clearly defined flaws is either the sign of a healthy relationship or the first step on the path to a really bad one. Telling the difference takes time and, coincidentally, that’s the only requirement Xenoblade Chronicles X demands from the player. You’re not going to get it all at once, and that has to be OK. Barring the impulsive and impatient from a super fun club isn’t necessarily a negative, or at least not if it comes at the cost of a game the size and scale of Xenoblade Chronicles X. In what it aims to do and what it actually accomplishes, Xenoblade Chronicles X stands as tall as any of its closest peers.
