[SPOILER FREE REVIEW]

If you came across this game's existence from the main Xenoblade triology (like me), you'll get a familiar yet very different experience from a lot of angles. I won't spoil anything and try to keep things concise and brief
Yeah, unfortunately i could not. The issues are so ridiculous and so many you really cannot avoid them

Let me start off by saying it features the same combat "style" as the core Xenoblade games: your character auto attacks to gain TP (tension points) which you can spend 1000 of to use certain more powerful Arts (your skills) which are generally much stronger than those who cost nothing to use. An important mechanic unique to this game is that you can target certain parts of the enemy's body, the Appendages (legs, tails, any limb really, and other regions), which can stop them from using certain arts entirely. Strategy is key!
Like in the other Xenoblade Chronicles games, you can't just spam everything and hope to win, from my experience this game is quite merciless when comes to teaching you exactly that; but not that it would come from anything but trial and error since this game will give you nearly ZERO USEFUL TUTORIALS. The intro section is more than an hour long and at least half is "tutorials" which just show you around New Los Angeles (NLA). You're not going to be taught about the most crucial mechanic of the combat, Soul Voices, which are the primary method of healing (whatever healing arts you can get are not reliable enough and have lengthy cooldowns), you aren't taught that whatever appendage you destroy has it's own lootpool (very relevant soon), among other heinous design choices i'll go over.

[GRAPHICS]
On a more positive note, this game does an excellent job of looking great on the WII U. Not that it's a low power system, instead the developers MonolithSoft completely pushed the console to it's limit to make the game look as best as it possibly could. They succeeded pretty well, and later pushed out 10.5 GB of free DLC to make the game run better (faster loading too, which was already surprisingly fast). If you purchase the game today, you won't be able to play with said DLC however, since the WII U shop has been closed down. Sad times

[GAMEPLAY]
You see, i actually decided to mention the graphics before this so it wouldn't be complaint after complaint lmao
One thing you should know if you want to commit to it is that this game is very grindy. Which is not by itself bad, because this game was actually meant to be played online for the most part! Back when the WII U servers were still up, you could join up to 3 friends or random people to do whatever you want, raid bosses included, but even in regular bounty hunts and resource gathering it would greatly speed up the process if you chose human teammates rather than NPCs, for reasons i probably don't need to explain. Some exclusive rewards were a part of this (such as reward tickets, which you could exchange for every drop in the game. very useful!), and some bosses were NOT meant to be tackled with just the NPC characters you can recruit. Now that the servers are (presumably) forever gone, you literally cannot play the game as it was once intended.
But this is not the only aspect of the grind: a lot of storyline quests have pre-requisites you must meet before you can take them on: explore 20-30% of an area, complete a story related affinity quest or two, and in some cases get to a certain level. In at least one of the chapters you need to get at least 1 heart with a certain character to do their affinity mission, which is mandatory for story progression. Really annoying.
If that wasn't enough, most of your gained experience will come from "basic" quests you can take at a terminal (or find around the city, usually), such as do some chores for someone, gather x number of y material(s), kill a certain number of this enemy, kill a Tyrant (unique named monsters), etc. It's the stuff you'd probably expect, and, again, not necessarily bad. I actually enjoyed the Tyrant quests, because these guys are hard to find stronger versions of regular enemies that can really put your party & strategy to the test. But it's almost as if whoever made certain decisions wanted to make players suffer it seems.
Unfortunately however, quests that require you to get an enemy's specific drop or find it lying around are AWFUL. I said at the beginning you aren't ever told that appendages have their own lootpool, here's where it's relevant: you aren't told which part it drops from, so you've gotta guess if you don't want to look it up. Knowing isn't everything, since targetting appendages is automatic (you can lock onto one, but not pick) and depends on where you're at in relation to the enemy, which makes it so you straight up cannot target certain regions on foot. But hey, at least they tell you the enemy it drops from.
Gathering quests which involve collecting generic items from the ground won't tell you ANYTHING. They only tell you what region it's found in, and the regions are GIGANTIC. Think of a region from Breath Of The Wild/Tears Of The Kingdom but 3x bigger, (mostly) no exaggeration. I literally could not complete any of these without looking them up unless i already had everything from exploring. Some are required for story progression btw, one of them is particularly bad since you're forced to do it solo. I was lucky i was playing on emulator, because i was losing my mind with 2h of farming a single enemy type, i turned on 100% drop rate so i could finally move on with my life

Okay cool and all but what about the mech on the cover????
I gotta clarify first that the only mech media thing ive ever watched/read/whatever was Evangelion which i didn't particularly like. But the mechs in this game absolutely DELIVER. I don't blame people for ditching ground combat entirely once they get a Skell license (yes, you need a license lmfao. it's optional too until a certain point), these things trivialize most combat & exploration (it can turn into a bike like a transformer) you've experienced up to that point. Nothing will ever beat walking up to a Tyrant i couldn't beat on foot and then doing 4x it's max HP in one hit. Yet again i had to put something nice so it wouldn't all be complaints
The only issue is that buying gear for it or a new Skell model entirely is comically expensive. And, of course, if just one wasn't already getting you a debt on par with the US healthcare system you have to buy 3 more for your NPC party members, and respective gear. Selection is plenty though, that's nice! You know what isn't nice? Fuel. Yeah, you can run out of fuel anytime, and using Skell arts uses fuel. Refueling is free but extremely slow, you'll probably be paying to refuel it more often than not.
You thought that was the end of annoying bs?
If you run out of HP inside a skell, it breaks. If it breaks you need to fast travel to the barracks to claim insurance on it, up to 3 times. After that you need to pay even more. Fun

There's also character equipment that you probably should replace every once in a while, also expensive and annoying. For most of the time you will have no idea what most of the resistance (physical, ether, elec, beam, etc) mean until you're already mid-late game. For some reason most equips are absolutely awful against ether for canonical accuracy reasons or whatever

The exploration
Surprisingly, it's excellent. 4 out of 5 areas have very open designs which really lets you take in the scenery. All of these areas are hand crafted to the detail with complete perfection, expansiveness, variety and always new stuff to find. Despite some area exploration being required for progression i often found myself trying to get everywhere just on my own. Very very fun

Overdrive is a mechanic introduced after beating chapter 5 where you can spend 3000 TP to make every art progressively gets lower cooldowns & does more damage by increasing your overdrive counter, which is just hitting enemies with arts. Overdrive lasts ~10 seconds base and will end afterward, so you'll be likely be spamming arts to make the most of it before it ends. You can extend it, but that's another 3000 TP you probably can't get within that time. However, i found what you'd call A Funny™
Did i mention this game is horribly unbalanced yet? Goes both ways. So, when you complete an affinity quest you get one of a character's signature Arts that only they (and now you) can use. The art True Stream Edge, obtainable around level 30, raises TP by 120 per enemy hit at max level, and hits 5 times (600 TP per use). So what do you think happens when you combine 600 TP per art use with low cooldowns in overdrive? Yeah, i beat the final boss with one single cycle of overdrive, easily capping out the counter at 100 and doing like 25k per use of Blossom Dance lol

The postgame
Easily the grindiest part of the game. Might be surprising, but the game's level cap is 60 despite often coming across enemies way higher levelled than that. Your only option for fighting the postgame bosses is grinding for stupidly broken Skells & their gear you unlock after beating the game.

[WRITING/CHARACTERS]
Without any spoilers, the premise is extremely interesting to me: the last living humans trying to survive in an alien, highly hostile and unknown planet after crashing into it, while being hunted down by other intelligent lifeforms.
Off of this very brief description you can probably imagine a million ways the story would play out, and how many different points of view you could get off of the characters living through it. Sadly, this story is easily the game's most lackluster aspect. It's very one dimensional and not so engaging up until near the end, where the writers suddenly remembered that there are a million ethical innuendos and perspectives you could explore off of the given premise, both of the Earth society and the new one. This game apparently got shafted extremely hard near the end of development to have the devs focus on Xenoblade 2, and if i had to guess this would be a result of it
They ruin a perfectly good ending with the post credits stuff too. Unreal

The characters were kinda bland, one dimensional and uninteresting for the most part. When starting every chapter after the 3rd (i think that's the one) you will have a fully voiced cutscene where a character asks you what you want to eat and then proceeds to make the same joke about eating a Nopon character literally. every. single. time.
Some optional to unlock characters are more interesting, such as everyone's friendly racist Bozé, the Murderess, Phog & Frye, and others.
Too bad you're forced to use Elma & Lin in LITERALLY EVERY STORY MISSION! If you wanted to use the unlocked from the start Irina/Gwin/Lao/Doug, they're not allowed for the most part either. If any of them are your favourites (Irina is my scrunglus) or if you don't like Elma/Lin, you can and will be dissapointed to be stuck with them
Lao is the only one with actual relevant character development, and boy is it good. Like really good

The quest writing actually picks up some of that innuendo, ethics connundrums and different perspectives i mentioned early and execute them great for the most part. In some of these quests, your choices actively matter and will determine the fate of the involved characters, but for better or worse it doesn't actively impact anything (to my knowledge). Worst case scenario you'll just feel bad for getting innocents killed for being bad at your job. Shame on you

[THE SOUNDTRACK]
The soundtrack is composed by Hiroyuki Sawano, who you might know for working on stuff like the first 3 seasons of Attack On Titan, 86, Gundam, Bleach, 7DS, etc (if you're interested on the full list click here). Their signature is excellent orchestral tracks with weird names, which fits like a glove for this game. The soundtrack is absolutely excellent and most tracks bang (in my opinion anyway). It's unfortunate that tracks like Black Tar have corny lyrics completely unrelated to anything that happens in the game but i'll forgive it (may be a scrapped concept, who knows)

[MISC COMPLAINTS. THAT'S RIGHT BABY I HAVE ONE MORE IN ME]
- You can't fight in water, unlike in xenoblade 1. Why??????? You're forced to use your skell to fight any water enemies
- The minimap sucks in any area with stuff above or below you
- What's the point of the aerial cam
- During the final section, like in xenoblade 1, you can't leave the area. You need to reboot the game in order to go back and make adjustments. SO WHY DO SKELLS NOT COME BACK????? If you break your skell here, it's broken until you reset the game. I had trouble with a certain minions section and needed my skells to beat them, so i had to not break anything until that. Annoying
- Swimming noise does not change in pitch so it gets annoying fast
- Enemy visual detection is ridiculously broken. You can park your skell to their side and they won't bat an eye

[FINAL THOUGHTS]
It's a very fun game but it's also very frustrating at times. I was slogging through it until i figured out the mechanics on my own.
You should play it if you think you won't get frustrated and like the combat/exploration aspect

I give it a 6.5/10

More of a VN than a game, honestly

Fantastic character design
The story, characters and plot was pretty alright, but it's just that when you give me a turn based rpg I start foaming from my mouth and I expect the most enjoyable battles to date, while this game's challenge lies in actually losing. You can easily sail through the game with only mandatory battles (that's what i did, since this game's regular battles are all overworld enemies that you actually gotta interact with to fight, ramming into them does nothing) because the bosses have no HP or the ability to do significant damage, 3/4 of your party members have sky high HP, everyone has sky high MP and you get really busted stuff really early on. Not to mention you get free armor and weapon upgrades around every corner

The soundtrack goes hard

Overall i think it's a good experience but unfortunately not for everyone. If not for the subpar actual gameplay, i'd give this a 10/10

[NO SPOILERS REVIEW]
Often regarded as the "best SMT game", while i personally think it's a strong contender, by itself it really isn't that great of an experience


To understand better, you gotta know that this is a reboot of SMT 1. The story/plot is very simmilar with a some changes. This is important because, well, if you played that game for just a little you'll start to notice some things throughout.


__Gameplay stuff__
This game has a very unique premise and setting that really either sells it to you immediately on it or putts you off. Unfortunately i doubt most people will even get to see the main events unfold due to the horrendous difficulty curve (check it out here). If you get past the first 2 bosses, without a doubt the hardest ones in the game, you will enter the actual setting of this game and begin to wander for hours until you decide to pull up a guide or luck your way through finding where you need to go next.
Unfortunately this happens a lot throughout most of the game. You're never given any map markers on where to go next. You've got quest dialogue, you've got some NPCs sometimes to help you get directions (though you're never explicitly told about them).
A very prevalent mechanic you should be using a lot is demon fusion. Take two demons you recruit from battle and fuse them into a different demon that knows all the skills the previous 2 had. I genuinely don't know how they managed to mess it up this bad. It was completely fine in past games. SOMEHOW, someone decided that you shouldn't be able to manually select demons for fusion. You either gotta use the search function which is super janky and unpractical due to not only the way it was designed but probably the 3DS' ram limitations (if not that, then i couldn't possibly begin to imagine why there's an enforced limit, meaning the game doesn't let you go through if it exceeds 50 demons displayed per search) or you pick the usually awful 3 reccomended fusions that the game suggests you make.
Like i showed with my beautiful graph (go check it), anything after the beginning is a complete joke with no challenge whatsoever other than not getting lost. This is due to the following reasons:
- Every enemy (bosses included) has no HP at all
- Level-ups are too rewarding
- The game is fundamentally broken (stat scaling, skill power)
- Smirk

When i say the game is fundamentally broken, i mean two things: how stat scaling and skill power works. I'm not gonna put up the damage formula here, but the general gist of it is that it doesn't matter what skill you use. Only stats matter. Power is inconsequential. All that matters is your stat for that skill. Unless said skill has an obscenely high base power. Not only do both the first 2 bosses posess both of those combinations, but their attacks will go unresisted by a good 95% of all demons you have available when you get to them. Yeah.
And that brings us to level-ups being too rewarding: you get to spend 5 points in whatever you want. This is a huge problem because you can hit 200 magic by level 40 without really any repercussion for neglecting other stats and just steamroll EVERTYTHING. Bosses will fall in 3 turns. You also get 10 app points to spend in additional off-battle bonuses but that's pretty cool, i like it :)
As for Smirk, a must-know battle mechanic introduced with this game, is extremely busted (though both ways). If you don't have any bad status hitting an enemy weakness has a chance to give you smirk while landing a crit is a 100% smirk chance. Smirk gives you ~90% evasion rate, next attack can't miss, and you've got extra stats until it wears off (next action). Normal attacks are a guaranteed crit in this state. This is a problem because you're heavily rewarded for either getting lucky, or... playing the game as it's intended? This problem is made worse by 2 things: proccing smirk gives you an extra turn and the fact that there are skills dedicated to critting: Critical Wave, Megaton Press, Gigantomachia and Titanomachia for example. All of these have extreme destructive power no matter what part of the game you're on with a heavily increased crit rate at the cost of low accuracy. If an enemy gets lucky and crits you once without missing (which causes turn loss), you're pretty much dead and you just gotta accept that, nothing you can do about it
Worth mentioning that sidequests in this game can be extremely annoying to execute since they suffer from the same issue as the main quests of not knowing where to go ever, but in their case you gotta manually accept on your quest menu to actually be able to do them. Can't have more than one at once, and you can't have the main story quest active while doing them either lmao who designed this
Last thing i wanna mention is the routes/endings this game has, specifically the way to get them. Most if not all choices you make can impact your alignment. Your alignment is a hidden stat that goes like this: above +8 makes you lawful, below -8 makes you chaotic and between that you're neutral. At a certain point in the game this is used to determine what ending you get (provided you haven't chosen the preemptive White ending). By concept this is fine but like everything else in this game it has a horrid execution: a lot of choices either earn or lose you a gargantuan amount of alignment, as well as the fact that there's a lot of points in the story where you're forced a loss/gain of alignment which don't cancel themselves out. And also, sidequests can impact your alignment. The cherry on top is that the only way to tell your alignment is extremely obscure (a SMT 1 reference) and you'd never know without a guide: it depends on which way your character spins in the overworld.

__Story stuff__
Like mentioned before, it's a reboot of SMT 1's story. But in a very unique way. I loved that.
It starts out EXTREMELY strong. Like i said, the setting sells you or drops you out. The characters actually feel like people who live in their world (which unfortunately doesn't happen with a lot of games nowadays imo) and they've all got unique personalities that really do their job in either making them likable, hatable, maybe both, maybe an inbetween, maybe neither. The writing NEVER falls off and only gets progressively better, at least until the alignment lock. At that point there will be one character that doesn't feel like them at all and another who only doesn't feel a little like him. Still relevant and very noticeable though. Everything before that though is so good

__Everything else__
The artstyle is unfortunately a scattered mess since this game had a handful of well-known guest artists after the main artist for pretty much every past SMT game, Kazuma Kaneko, quit. It's hard not to notice how low quality some stuff is compared to others.
As for the soundtrack (and sound design, though to a slightly lesser extent), it's probably the best one i've seen so far in all my time playing video games. It perfectly encapsulates and compliements the feelings, environments and everything else in the game. An actual godsend. And if you've played SMT 1 & 2 or heard the Law theme and the Chaos theme for those games respectively, you'll come to appreciate it way more because of 3 tracks that play in a very short segment. But it's still really cool and probably the best part of the game, so make sure to listen to those two tracks!


__Overall__
Gameplay is hot garbage, literally 0 good things to be said about it
Story/plot/characters are pretty damn good
Soundtrack is a 10/10. No exaggeration
Artstyle is very inconsistent and kinda sucks sometimes