Xenoblade Chronicles X
Argh.
So I have to be honest here. This whole GotY series is mostly just an excuse for me to write the goddamn dissertation on this game that’s been boiling in my head for the entire year I’ve been playing it. Xenoblade X is simultaneously one of the most engrossing, fun games I’ve ever played, and also one of the biggest letdowns, packed with problems, omissions, and outright awful design that makes me wonder why I keep putting up with it, if in such short bursts. I should probably begin by saying that my girlfriend and I have spent a nauseating amount of time playing and especially talking about this game, so she’s helped me solidify a lot of these opinions and can basically get a co-writing credit for this article, even though she hasn’t seen it yet. With that said, let’s dive in.
Xenoblade X is, first and foremost, a spiritual successor to Xenoblade Chronicles, one of my favorite games ever. I love that game so much that I will even defend the unpopular ending (if you haven’t beaten it, just ask almost anyone who did how they feel about it). Everything I ever thought about XCX was always going to be tied to Xenoblade, no matter how hard I tried to separate them, no matter how much I played the game and realized that it was a completely different beast.
So, let’s begin with story, or more specifically with storytelling. While Xenoblade Chronicles got a lot of flak for being a relatively low-poly game in an age where smoothness and polish are prized, its cutscenes are actually very well choreographed, something of a rarity for this type of JRPG. Take a look at this particular cutscene (timestamp 28:52, if the link doesn’t bring you to the right place):
The camera in this scene is wonderfully dynamic. It shakes as the protagonists run to their foe, it swings to create a clear sense of motion as Shulk sees into the future and jumps in to protect Sharla, and the music swells as the camera slowly swivels around our cautiously pacing heroes at a low angle, conveying the feeling of being surrounded. The whole scene is shot with care, with well-imagined cinematography and a surprising amount of unique animation, for a game this large. And, perhaps most importantly, this is a random cutscene maybe 5–10 hours into the game. In the grand scheme of things it isn’t that pivotal. Money spent on this could have been spent elsewhere, but it wasn’t. Xenoblade Chronicles was a game that understood the power of cinematography, and understood that scenes of characters standing in a circle saying single lines of dialogue with canned animations are boring as hell. And now, here’s a scene from Xenoblade X (9:35 here):
This “mission briefing” style scene precedes every story mission, but maybe 95% of all scenes in the game look exactly like this. All characters stand in a circle and spout out lines of dialogue. See that icon in the top right? That means you control the camera, and most of the time I ended up spinning it in a big circle just waiting for the scene to end. There’s no excitement, nothing to hold my attention. Even scenes that do require motion will usually have a single scene of something exploding or a camera pan over to the big enemy fort, and then a short loading screen followed by another “stand and talk” scene. Characters wave their arms and move their mouths solely so you don’t lose track of who’s talking. Everything about it just bores me to hell. To make matters worse, every main mission also starts with a running gag cutscene about Lin making dinner for the other main characters, and the joke is literally always that she wants to cook Tatsu, your Nopon sidekick. The game even presents you with a “choice” of what dinner you want, but it literally just amounts to what joke about cooking Tatsu you want to hear today.
And I could almost buy this as the “running gag” the game so desperately wants it to be if every single scene didn’t feel so cookie cutter. Having to sit through these every single time I want to advance the story just makes me wish I was playing a game that cared about its characters and its story more.
To make matters worse, the game has serious pacing issues. This is sort of intrinsic to JRPGs, since the player can choose to spend 5 hours outside the final boss door fighting random enemies if they really want to, but Xenoblade X is special. You know that point near the end of every JRPG, where the main villain has run off to his Final Dungeon to destroy the world, and you need to stop him as soon as possible, but there are also about 547 endgame sidequests that you just gotta take care of first? You know how it sort of turns the ending into a formality that lacks any sense of punch and urgency? That’s Xenoblade X. All of Xenoblade X. The main plot thrust of the entire game is that you’re under a tight time limit to locate the Lifehold™, and if you don’t find it in time all of humanity is doomed to die off. Please hurry, there’s no time, all of humanity is at stake. The game feels the need to constantly remind you what’s at stake (the Lifehold. It’s the Lifehold. We really extremely need to find the Lifehold™), almost as if it’s an entirely abstract goal and by mission 4 you can already tell you won’t make any sort of meaningful progress until the very end.
And really, it’s hard to blame it. I don’t care about the Lifehold™. The story missions basically act as giant bottlenecks, where all players are funneled into these small, pointless quests that don’t feel any different from anything else you’ve been doing, that only exist so you can unlock the next set of side missions or the tools to help you explore this large, beautiful world. The entire main storyline consists of a prologue mission, 12 story chapter missions, and an epilogue mission. In between each one you will likely spend 10–15 hours exploring the world, doing generic missions, doing affinity missions for your side characters, finding parts for your Skell, leveling artes, playing the goddamn game. By the time you get forced back into the main storyline you’ve completely lost your place, and any tension or gravity the game has tried to create has fallen completely flat on its face.
And frankly, I have one question. Why? Why is the entire plot built around a completely toothless time limit when the game itself is entirely about freely exploring a massive, intricately crafted world, with individually placed treasure chests, monster spawns, beautiful hidden locations that you can get lost in for hours and hours? I’m sitting around 160 hours in this game and I still have moments where I make a left turn on a path I’ve traveled literally hundreds of times and suddenly I’m in a completely new area that I’ve never seen before, with a new location pop-up to prove it. The story didn’t need to be built entirely around a time limit. You didn’t have to plaster a giant ticking clock onto the biggest building in the only city in the game just to have it never ever actually go down unless you complete a story mission. You didn’t have to start out the game with 99.99% of all humanity being destroyed, and we’re the only hope, and oh no we’re running out of batteries but don’t worry it’s no big deal if you just wanna kill 5 grexes for me real quick.
A time limit, even a fake time limit, exists to give a story urgency, a reason to push the plot forward instead of just fucking around and getting to it later. Xenoblade X is only ever a fun, enjoyable game when you are shrugging off your sworn duty, trying to see if you can climb that cliff on foot, trying to outrun the level 55 enemy that turned around just as you had almost snuck past it. It’s a game where you can go anywhere you can see, so exploring becomes a matter of seeing something in the distance and saying “oh, that looks cool,” running out to it, sneaking through waves of monsters 40 levels higher than you, opening treasure chests along the way, and seeing somewhere else that looks totally different when you finally make it. There are over 1000 generic quests in this game, but they feel like they all exist to point out new unique places to you. Did you check out this cave over here? Did you find this Ganglion base? The world is actually big enough to withstand this many quests, to give you reason and a small reward for trying to find every nook and cranny.
One of my favorite technical tricks in the original Xenoblade Chronicles happens in Eryth Sea, a single area so large that swimming it end to end takes literally half an hour. Most of Eryth Sea is empty, but there are large islands dotted throughout it, in the air and in the water. The imposing High Entia Capital and the foreboding Prison Island float above it on either end of the massive sea. And the thing is, the draw distance on every single one of these islands is infinite. As long as you are in Eryth Sea you can see them in the distance, can plan to swim between them. The finer details like trees and enemies only load in when you get close, but the islands themselves are always there, fuzzy and indistinct, but real in a way that you never see in most games. The first time I went to the area I spent hours exploring, trying to see if I could get anything big to despawn, and I never could. It was legitimately one of the coolest things in the whole game, because it made the whole world feel so gigantic and so believable.
And frankly, X blows the original out of the water in this regard. The 5 continents that make up the game are absolutely gigantic, and every one has major features that can be seen from every other one: a giant puffball (that happens to hold one of the most powerful bosses in the game) in Sylvalum, the iconic rocky overhangs of Primordia, the gigantic mountain ranges of Oblivia. Even without the map on your gamepad, these areas are traversable through dozens of smaller landmarks that are visible for miles and miles ingame. No game world has ever felt as truly massive and as truly believable to me as Mira, where every spot seems to have some new tableau of grexes eating a dead ovis, or honky birds dancing around a wrecked helicopter.
And of course, the battle system is ridiculously intricate, with 12 weapon types, two of which you have equipped at all times, that all have unique battle artes that you have to mix and match to find an effective build. There are 6 different types of damage and every enemy has a different set of resistances and different types of attacks. And that’s just scratching the surface. There are also Soul Voices, and Skell Combat, and Overdrive, and frankly there is way too fucking much, and the game literally does not tell you about half of it. The game is vanilla World of Warcraft levels of obtuse about its core mechanics. The most you ever get in the way of tutorials in this game are static pop-ups that bring up the existence of some mechanics, but there’s so much stuff that it’s extremely easy to blow off some really important systems. Monster fights for most of the game tend to be incredibly one-sided: either you blow them out of the water no matter what you do or get one-shot by an attack that goes by too quickly for you to even see what type it was. Hypothetically you can always go equip armor with high resistance to whatever you’re fighting, gear your party extremely specifically to that enemy, but the species in this game are so intermingled that a fight with a cinicula can easily pull in 5 or 6 adescudas and a grex or two, which might completely destroy your current loadout.
And unfortunately, there’s an even bigger problem that I haven’t touched on yet: the menu system in this game is atrocious. It’s unacceptably bad for a game with so many items and subsystems. You have a skills menu, an artes menu, two gear menus, a class menu, and so may others. Everything is laid out in weird disorganized lists, and hidden behind a loading screen that costs you a few excruciating seconds every time you mis-click into the wrong menu. Even though until late game all classes can only equip one melee and one ranged weapon, when you go to the weapon equip screen it will show you every single weapon in your inventory, the vast majority of them red and useless. This even happens for your AI companions, who literally cannot ever wield more than the 2 weapon types they start with. You can filter down to these specific weapon types, but the game won’t remember filter settings so you need to click X and scroll through a dropdown menu every single time you want to change weapons on anyone.
All monsters drop weapons and other loot, so without some aggressive management your inventory will fill up with useless pieces of gear you will never even look at. And the problem is that the game gives you absolutely no tools for effective inventory management. Weapons and armor never stack, so each one needs to be individually selected and sold. The game has a weapon augment system similar to the gems of the original Xenoblade, but I’ve almost never touched it because getting to it requires you to click into a separate sub-menu within the equipment sub-menu, and knowing what augments you even have is almost impossible because the system of what slots into what is strange and there’s no good place to just view and sort through all of your augments (the inventory menu itself is garbage, and located miles away from the equip screen). The game takes many, many cues from MMORPG systems, but seems to forget that its players don’t have a keyboard that would allow them to search through the metric fuckton of gear or do any sort of analysis to determine what’s best.
The game seems to actively fight me at every turn when I try to engage with its systems. Menus are giant walls of text with way too much information to take in and no good way for a new player to know what is or isn’t important. When you change classes the game automatically equips you with the weakest possible weapon of that class, so if you forget and go into battle you’re suddenly doing no damage and will often get steamrolled. There’s no way to save “favorite” builds and gear sets, which discourages the experimentation that this game is supposed to thrive on. Every time you want to re-equip your most powerful build you need to individually set every single piece of gear by scrolling down your bloated list for your ranged weapon, your melee weapon, your chest, your left arm, your right arm, and your legs, and each time you select a new thing the game takes a second to load in that model and makes the experience even slower and more stilted. I am trying my damnedest to convey just how tedious and painful menu management is in this game, and I still feel like I’ve barely even scratched the surface.
Your AI party members can’t be added to your party from a unified menu. You have to find them out in New LA, which is massive. When you first get them their location is marked on your minimap, but only if you select the specific hex that they stand in, so if you forget their location you’re pretty much fucked. Plus, even if you do know where they are, depending on your affinity with them and the time of day they might actually be in a completely different part of NLA, which you’ll only be able to find if you’ve randomly run into a conversation in town that marks it on your map. Sometimes it’s much faster to go to a time-changing station and see if they’ve returned to their normal spot than to just aimlessly search the city or look their location up in an FAQ. It’s just more tedious crap to slow you down in a game that already has enough content to keep you playing for well over 200 hours, if you’re interested.
And that’s really the crux of my issue: I’m interested. I’m interested as hell, because this game got me to do something that literally no other game has: care about an open world, “choose your own objective” style of gameplay. I find the exploration compelling, and there are so many generic quests (and importantly, ones that don’t break up the flow of the game, like Assassin’s Creed) that you can basically trip over them and develop a constant stream of little victories. Few things are more fun than seeing a red “?” on your map in the middle of nowhere, because you’ve just found a new, unique quest, completely by coincidence. As for combat, when your build finally starts to come together and you suddenly do a million damage Overdrive to a unit 20 levels higher than you, you feel like a god. I just wish getting there wasn’t so painful, that I didn’t just have to look it up online because finding all this out by myself was basically completely untenable.
Still, now that I’m close to the end, the whole world is my oyster, and I’ve been able to just lose myself flying around in my superpowered mech, killing giant monsters and just relaxing, really. In a tough time where most of the games I play are competitive and stressful, there’s something so soothing about a game I can experience at my own pace, with an endless well of objectives that I can pick and choose.
There are a lot of little vignettes and weird alien designs I like. Plot-wise, the game is at its strongest when it’s telling short, concrete stories about what life was like for the stranded humans before the attack, or what their driving motivations are. It’s all a bit clumsy (especially when it comes to your party members), but it’s charming, and the sheer amount of it means you’re always able to bounce from one story to the next, forming a coherent web of relationships out of everyone’s little stories. It makes the world feel alive in a way that only video games can. I really enjoyed that about Xenoblade Chronicles 1, and I still enjoy it about X.
So here we are. I could probably keep this up for every other feature in the game, but this is already more than twice as long as any other GotY article I’ve done. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game I love and hate as strongly as Xenoblade X. And all in all, that’s a good thing. I’m glad I’ve played it, because it forced me to think about what worked and what didn’t, and it really filled out what made the original Xenoblade Chronicles amazing for me. Monolithsoft set out to make an extremely ambitious game, and while it’s never going to be the Xenoblade 2 I wanted (and Xenoblade 2 probably also won’t be the Xenoblade 2 I want, either, for the record), I really admire the amount of time and love that went into crafting this incredible world. I want to see more AAA games with this kind of ambition. I want to see more hot messes that at least have some spark of passion, some really strong features that smaller companies couldn’t dream of creating for their sheer scale. And that’s absolutely Xenoblade Chronicles X.
