Xenoblade Chronicles is easily my favourite game, so back when X was announced I was incredibly excited. Now that I've got to the last phase of the Final Boss (I need to grind a bit to be at an adequate level to defeat it) I feel I can provide an adequate summary of my thoughts towards the game.
The Story & CharactersWith minimal amount of spoilers, you are a survivor among a group of Humans that escaped the destruction of Earth among the ship known as 'the White Whale' while two alien forces rage war over the planet. This ship was carrying the colony, New Los Angeles. On the escape from Earth the White Whale is shot down and crash lands on the planet Mira. It is now up to our heroes - Elma, Lin and your own custom character (who I will refer to as Cross from now on as that's what I named my character) to locate the 'Lifehold' to assure that Humanity can survive on this new world. You will encounter indigenous creates, and various other aliens in your quest.
To focus on the main trio of Elma, Lin and Cross I feel that they did not have great chemistry, I mainly attribute this to Cross being a silent protagonist as they opted to have you create your character and choose dialogue options when prompted. Cross wouldn't bother me as much, but after playing Xenoblade Chronicles on both Wii and 3DS extensively, Shulk was just such a strong protagonist and interesting character it is upsetting to see them regress to making you a voiceless character in this game. You do have the option to choose a voice actor for Cross (including Shulk's - Adam Howden) but it is limited to in battle quotes.
Elma and Lin are ok characters in their own rights, but I never felt that they reflected or had a natural chemistry with each other. In fact, Lin has a bond with a non-essential party member due to a similar event in their lives. Lin herself could have really been more interesting as she is 13 years old, but she doesn't seem bothered by all the crazy shit that goes on around her or the looming threat of extinction, that would put a lot of pressure on someone that young. Elma felt like she was intended to be the main character, but then Monolith decided to add a custom character for the online modes. I would like to say it is nice to have two female characters take the lead.
As for side characters, I would be a bad person to not mention Tatsu, who belongs to the Nopon species. I really enjoyed Riki in Xenoblade Chronicles, but Tatsu just feels like a pale imitation that tried to capture the same magic that was present with Riki, and while Tatsu has some funny moments he genuinely didn't do much for me as a character. There's this annoying joke that Tatsu looks like something Humans would eat and at the start of pretty much every story chapter, Lin attempts to cook Tatsu, it was only funny the first time it happens. Probably my favourite character in the game is Commander Vandham, he comes across as a gruff commander but he is very enjoyable to listen too every time he is on screen and cares about the troops.
A major complaint I have is that all the party members don't level up when they aren't in the party, while this usually wouldn't bother me any other RPG the original Xenoblade had it so party members would level up even if they weren't the three you were controlling, so everyone was always viable. However, as this wasn't the case in X I basically just used Cross, Elma and Lin the whole game, towards the end I added someone in and just grinded them up but that brought the game to a screeching halt for a while.
GameplayProbably the best thing to come out of this game is the gameplay, I already loved what was in Xenoblade and it got expanded upon pretty nicely for this game. To explain what that was like you have a set of moves (arts) that act as abilities that all have their own traits (e.g. back attacks do more damage), these will likely become your primary method of attack. You also have some basic attacks that characters will do automatically. However, the more times you hit the enemy the more aggro you will generate, which will make the enemy more like to hit you.
The first thing you learn is a change from Xenoblade, you now have two methods of attack - ranged and melee. I wasn't really too interested in this in preview material but in practice it works so well, it's really nice to be able to fall back a bit while still doing damage with your gun, let the party take the heat off you and then you come in to do more damage.
A change I'm not so fond of is the healing system - in Xenoblade you had a dedicated healer in the form of Sharla, but Shulk, Melia and Riki all had methods to heal via their arts - but in X however there are no characters with such abilities. Instead they've opted to do it so the party will call out when they are low on health and this will come with a little prompt that will correspond with a type of art (e.g. melee arts will be a red/orange colour), and using one of the arts will heal both you and your injured team member. It feels a lot more complicated than it should be.
Reviving downed teammates is reliant of something known as "TP", you need to build up the gauge fully to be able to get a downed team member up. I'm not necessarily opposed to how it's done, but I do prefer the system in Xenoblade where you would build up a party gauge and then sacrifice a portion of it to pick up the downed member (otherwise with a full party gauge you could unleash a chain attack which is incredibly powerful), but the system works fine in X.
Now to speak about the Skells - honestly I feel that if they weren't in the game I would give this game a lower score - the Skells are fucking awesome (I based the colours of mine off the Eva's from NGE)
They play similar to how you play on foot but since they run on fuel you have to be very careful with how you use them. Each use of an art will consume a certain amount of fuel, once you unlock the flight module that just eats your fuel supply but if you can balance it out the Skell hits pretty hard, it's much more durable and is all around a lot more fun. You also get the ability of binding an enemy at some points when prompted, which gives your team mates a solid 10 seconds to get in a ton of hits against a foe which can mean everything in a boss battle, or even against unique enemies.
Definitely a lot of fun to play around with and they make traversing the world of Mira a far more enjoyable experience. Speaking of which...
The WorldThe Bionis and Mechonis is Xenoblade are
easily my favourite game worlds, they were just so unique and looked gorgeous for such a large Wii game
So I was pretty excited to see what X could offer and it's just alright really. Sylvalum is my favourite area for sure, it has some nice weather
All the other continents (Primordia, Noctilum, Oblivia and Cauldros) just feel like generic plains, forest/swamp, desert and lava areas and that's not necessarily a bad thing but no area stands out as well as Mechonis Field, or the Fallen Arm or Valak Mountain in Xenoblade.
I would like to say that New Los Angeles is a very nice location though, it reminded me a lot of Colony 6 in Xenoblade Chronicles as to where you would build it up over the course of the game an they really do make it feel like 'home'. After exploring and hunting enemies it's really nice to go back to NLA, walk around each district, sell the spoils of my adventure, etc.
QuestingThis is an essential part of the game, whenever you see an orange question mark on your map, make sure you go and speak to the person who wants your help. Quests will offer you a ton of XP and feel like a very important aspect to make you care about the world. You will also want to do "affinity quests" that will unlock when you meet certain criteria, this could be having a good relationship between Elma and Cross for example, they are more intricate and interesting than regular story quests and have an improved production value.
When it comes to story quests you need to return to the BLADE Barracks to accept them, but they may require certain criteria like having a certain amount of an area surveyed or being at a certain level, I very much dislike that you can't progress at your pace.
MusicXenoblade has my favourite soundtrack of any game, ACE+, Yoko Shimomura and Manami Kiyota all did such fantastic work on it - with Engage the Enemy being my favourite game piece.
People seemed pretty excited for Hiroyuki Sawano to compose the soundtrack in this game, but I didn't recall being familiar with his works so I came in with no expectations, it is pretty alright as it has a lot of cheesy rap which I thought I would hate, but it has a charm to it, with NLA having a particularly neat track
None of the battle tracks really stand out to me, but I do think it has a charm
However, in one of the final boss fights I did just put headphones in and listen to Xenoblade's Engage the Enemy instead.
ConclusionsI'm going to speak about the Wii U gamepad integration now as I dislike it
a lot. Ok so in Xenoblade you could easily open up a menu and select the location you wanted to go to for Fast Travelling, while in X you need the gamepad, there is no option on the menu to fast travel. So you need to look down, leaving you very open to be attacked by the creatures and enemies of Mira. And there's this probe system that is also dependent on the gamepad, you need to use it in the quest to get your Skell making the gamepad mandatory to finish the game. I had the misfortune of accidentally breaking my gamepads screen, leaving X nigh unplayable. What baffles me is that the game supports the Wii U pro controller so you will need to have the gamepad on standby.
The story telling has certainly taken a huge plunge in quality, Xenoblade had a fairly standard story (girl killed, by opposing force, guy sets out for revenge, ends up being more than it seems) but the way it was written, the way it had characters interact and the overall world just lent itself a lot to the story. X has a fairly interesting premise with the colonisation of a planet but it never really feels like it ever manages to do anything interesting with it, most of the characters are dull or useless. Everyone in NLA seems to happy despite the looming threat of death if BLADE don't find the Lifehold, there's literally a countdown as to how much longer humanity can survive.
The villain is fucking awful, Luxaar and the Ganglion are so uninteresting and their motivations aren't really explained until the final phase of the final boss. As far as we know he hates us because fuck humans, but even with the reason they gave I'm still kinda mixed on whether it was good or not. Egil and the Mechon in Xenoblade had a perfectly good reason to try and eradicate the life on Bionis (and the game really makes you feel for him), comparing Egil to Luxaar is actually sad because Luxaar is Saturday morning cartoon tier awful.
Oh and something I had completely forgot about until I read Tatsu's wiki page while double checking a detail for this review is the "Follow Ball" for finding objectives for quests. Yeah, it's fucking useless when the minimap and map on the gamepad screen both tell you where your objective is.
The world design really isn't that interesting, they just feel like large open areas for you to go and run around in, and it's also littered with high level enemies which can get really annoying when you're trying to go somewhere.
The quests are interesting and some will continue on so you can really see your way through certain plot lines (like helping out some Nopon children to find a sword so they can finally get out of poverty).
There are cool references to Xenoblade:
- Previously referenced sword resembles the Monado 2 and references the Monapon that came from a bug from Xenoblades development where an enemy in a Nopon questline would drop the Monado -
http://xenoblade.wikia.com/wiki/Monapon
-Tatsu saying Hom Hom references what the Nopon in Xenoblade called the Homs, Shulk's species
And many more such as Lin's Monado hairpins
ScoreXenoblade Chronicles X is a game that has decent presentation, with a fair amount of flaws. It can be fun to play but enemy encounters feel more plentiful than its predecessor, this may be because the player can go to any location they want whenever they want (bar areas that require the Skell to fly) which also leads to higher level enemies being placed around in all continents, while in the original Xenoblade they designed it in a more linear manner leading to less frustration while playing. The Skell's are a huge redeeming factor for me and renewed my interest when I had other games like Fallout 4, Elite: Dangerous and Star Wars Battlefront to play.
The story is weaker but there is also a greater emphasis on sidequests.
6/10 - Above Average
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