This game ends on a fade to black screen with text that sasy "This story never truly ends". This is a reference to the fact that this game as so much post game stuff that it seems insane to actually 100%, and also that it ends on like 3 cliffhangers that might never get resolved.
Xenoblade X is very strange. Anyone familiar with the rest of the Xenoblade franchise knows that the games take a lot of inspiration from the MMO; obvious things like aggro being a game mechanic to just how the game map is designed, ect ect. But while XB games often feel like JRPGs that kind of feel like single player MMOs; XBX is basically just a single player mode. The single player part isn't even accurate; this game Kinda has multiplayer. Sorta.
The game's main story is... lacking. While the main setup is interesting and has some good moments it is blatantly an unfinished story and was made with a sequel that has never arrived in mind. The ending of this game's main story is loaded with what feels an endless pile of unfinished story threads or just straight up cliffhangers. This wasn't a huge deal in 2015 when there wasn't a precedent for this franchise yet and assumed that Monolith's next game would be XBX2. And then that game was acutally XB2. And then we said okay well now it's time for XBX2. Then it was the XB1 remake. And before we even got to say XBX2 XB3 got revealed. Maybe XBX2 or just a XBX remake is on the way now that the Klaus trilogy is over, but maybe the next trailer with a monolith logo will just be XB4 with some brand new shit. who knows.
While the main story is lacking I cannot say the same about this game's side quests, which are fantastic and some of the highlights of this game. While there's plenty of really generic one there's also a lot of hitters, and oddly a lot of quests branching paths that actually end pretty differently. A few examples: A quest where you're tasked with rescuing 3 people but if you rescue them in the right order you wont learn + acquire the item that lets you scare off the Giant Fucking Monkey that kills one of them. You help repair a crashed helicopter but end up in charge of picking the right wire to plug in. If you pick the wrong one (which you can figure out from main city dialogue.) the helicopter crashes again because you fucked it up idiot and they die, changing your rewards. In another someone's life is deicided by whenever or not you let them take a Anti-Stress shower. A lot of people can bite it in this game.
This does lead into an annoyance I have with this game however; this is one of the most You Gotta Wiki This Shit games ever. Many quests require you to acquire The random items that drop in the overworld, and there is no clear indicator as to where you get these items, even if you've gotten them before. Thankfully the fellas are the Xenoblade wiki are gods strongest soldiers, but the I Need To Wiki this extends well into a lot of this game; for exmaple, I didnt know that Skells overdrive bonus' change depending on what kind of Skell you use until literally writing out this review. Speaking of lets wiki this, Lets talk combat and class design.
Combat and classes are tied together. Your skills tied to what weapons you use (AKA if your class uses Knife and raygun, you can only use knife and raygun skills), but when you max out a class you are free to equip its weapons to any other class. The passives your job unlocks can also be moved onto any other job; infact the best job in there game is technically the starting blank because it has the most passive slots, but it's not good until you actually make a lot of progress and have a lot of skills unlocked.
Because of the above, this game has a really extensive build options. Probably deeper than Diablo 4. You get to pick from 8 skills from your two weapon choices (there are 12 weapons total), which have around 12-15 skills each, an additional 3-5 passives (each job also unlocks like 6~ passive options). And this isn't even considering your actual stat builds though armor and skells.
The big problem with it is that the eternity of your ground skill build should be based around a single thing; a good overdrive set up. And there is nothing more I Need A Wiki than Overdrive.
This whole franchise is full of I Need A Wiki Or Youtube video things but each game's Chain Attack equivalent I think you can figure out how to get a good result by bumbling you way through some CAs and eventually the neurons start connecting. You will probably need a video to really optimize but thats whatever.
Not the same with Overdrive. OD, the game's CA equivalent (though they are very different), is impossible to figure out on your own. You have got to pick up a video for that shit to really figure it out, and the video that's the clearest explanation of the system came out only like 3 years ago. And unfortunately, like I mentioned previously, your entire ground build should be based around being able to get an infinite overdrive. The entire game opens up once you actually understand how to overdrive, but I've spoken to a lot of people and many of them just never interacted with OD because they had no idea wtf is happening when you hit the button, and the game offers no clearance at all about what it is does. it's crazy.
In truth ground combat is pretty slow even with a good build, and you're relatively weak until you get 3000 tp and then, as long as you aren't getting 1 shot by the enemy, you can kinda just turn into an unstoppable and the game becomes really fun because you're pressing tons of buttons and there's that joy of seeing a build really click together; but if you cant figure out OD it's going to feel really wack.
On the flip side, lets talk skells. Skells, the mechas, get acquired at a later point in the story and are also a pretty important goal in endgame progression. The level 30/50 skells are acquired just through a pretty significant investment in money, while the level 60 and higher skells require going out to getting endgame materials and the alternative resources investment. The customizable skells (some 60 skells just have unchangeable skills are based on) are based entirely on the gear you ahve equipped.
However skell builds and combat feels oddly shallower than ground combat. Looking online a lot of skell builds boil down to:
1) try to oneshot with a super weapon
2) One very high power 60sec~ cooldown skill paired with 7 short cooldown skills, and fishing for cockpit mode to keep it going
3) a pure debuff build, which you probably wont play yourself but shove onto a NPC party member skell.
It often feels like there isn't much to it other than just pressing the buttons when they're on.
Skells are also just loaded with a bunch of weird mechanics that feel like baggage like Insurance, Fuel and jsut getting your skell back wehn it dies. just weird and frustrating ways to stop you from using skells 100% of the time once you get them, which is an annoyance to work with and isnt even that relevant because once you get overdrive the pilot becomes better than skells (assuming we're talking about something that wont get oneshot by a super weapon)
Other things that I can't segway into cleanly:
-I didnt super get to explore the end game/online because there's backlog stuff i wanna play, but this game is filling to the brim with content if you're a compleitionist. Tons of quest, affinity missions, late game gearing, build options yo ucan pretty freely swap between, ect. This game' online is on the way out because the wii u is shutting down all their stuff, so I wanna try going back in and really getting into it before it goes.
-A very large part of this game is having to explore through regions full of enemies that are higher level than you and it is On Sight if they spot you. Many missions really are just Go To This Place And Talk To This Guy which sounds bad... but the guy is in an area of enemies that are 20 levels over you when you unlock the quest. This is kino and it rules. Some of the funniest moments in this game is getting jumped by an enemy while fighting something else.
-just an insane soundtrack. They really just let Sawano do whatever the fuck he wants. It's not my favorite XB soundtrack but it's the most unique one, also the Overdrive song does go crazy.
-The bad fights in this game are BAD. This game is maybe the most frustrated ive gotten in a XB game; any fight with an enemy in the air is very frustrating, and the final section of the game fight where you have to fight 10 enemies that all cleave and aoe stagger had me FUMING.
-skells are cool
XBX is a weird game. It's flies way too close to the sun in its goal of being a singleplayer MMO, something following XB games dialed back on, and almost everything in this game is poorly explained to the user and the game is just not as fun if you don't take the time to figure out its inner working, and has a pretty poor main story. However, if you can dig below the surface it is a game with a ton of a depth and a brickload of content, and just a unique game.
I hope monolith does plan to do something with XBX, seeing how a large chunk of the game is about to just disappear with the Wii U online. However if the next Monolith game is not XBX remake or XBX2, I think thats just them giving up on this franchise.
Xenoblade X is very strange. Anyone familiar with the rest of the Xenoblade franchise knows that the games take a lot of inspiration from the MMO; obvious things like aggro being a game mechanic to just how the game map is designed, ect ect. But while XB games often feel like JRPGs that kind of feel like single player MMOs; XBX is basically just a single player mode. The single player part isn't even accurate; this game Kinda has multiplayer. Sorta.
The game's main story is... lacking. While the main setup is interesting and has some good moments it is blatantly an unfinished story and was made with a sequel that has never arrived in mind. The ending of this game's main story is loaded with what feels an endless pile of unfinished story threads or just straight up cliffhangers. This wasn't a huge deal in 2015 when there wasn't a precedent for this franchise yet and assumed that Monolith's next game would be XBX2. And then that game was acutally XB2. And then we said okay well now it's time for XBX2. Then it was the XB1 remake. And before we even got to say XBX2 XB3 got revealed. Maybe XBX2 or just a XBX remake is on the way now that the Klaus trilogy is over, but maybe the next trailer with a monolith logo will just be XB4 with some brand new shit. who knows.
While the main story is lacking I cannot say the same about this game's side quests, which are fantastic and some of the highlights of this game. While there's plenty of really generic one there's also a lot of hitters, and oddly a lot of quests branching paths that actually end pretty differently. A few examples: A quest where you're tasked with rescuing 3 people but if you rescue them in the right order you wont learn + acquire the item that lets you scare off the Giant Fucking Monkey that kills one of them. You help repair a crashed helicopter but end up in charge of picking the right wire to plug in. If you pick the wrong one (which you can figure out from main city dialogue.) the helicopter crashes again because you fucked it up idiot and they die, changing your rewards. In another someone's life is deicided by whenever or not you let them take a Anti-Stress shower. A lot of people can bite it in this game.
This does lead into an annoyance I have with this game however; this is one of the most You Gotta Wiki This Shit games ever. Many quests require you to acquire The random items that drop in the overworld, and there is no clear indicator as to where you get these items, even if you've gotten them before. Thankfully the fellas are the Xenoblade wiki are gods strongest soldiers, but the I Need To Wiki this extends well into a lot of this game; for exmaple, I didnt know that Skells overdrive bonus' change depending on what kind of Skell you use until literally writing out this review. Speaking of lets wiki this, Lets talk combat and class design.
Combat and classes are tied together. Your skills tied to what weapons you use (AKA if your class uses Knife and raygun, you can only use knife and raygun skills), but when you max out a class you are free to equip its weapons to any other class. The passives your job unlocks can also be moved onto any other job; infact the best job in there game is technically the starting blank because it has the most passive slots, but it's not good until you actually make a lot of progress and have a lot of skills unlocked.
Because of the above, this game has a really extensive build options. Probably deeper than Diablo 4. You get to pick from 8 skills from your two weapon choices (there are 12 weapons total), which have around 12-15 skills each, an additional 3-5 passives (each job also unlocks like 6~ passive options). And this isn't even considering your actual stat builds though armor and skells.
The big problem with it is that the eternity of your ground skill build should be based around a single thing; a good overdrive set up. And there is nothing more I Need A Wiki than Overdrive.
This whole franchise is full of I Need A Wiki Or Youtube video things but each game's Chain Attack equivalent I think you can figure out how to get a good result by bumbling you way through some CAs and eventually the neurons start connecting. You will probably need a video to really optimize but thats whatever.
Not the same with Overdrive. OD, the game's CA equivalent (though they are very different), is impossible to figure out on your own. You have got to pick up a video for that shit to really figure it out, and the video that's the clearest explanation of the system came out only like 3 years ago. And unfortunately, like I mentioned previously, your entire ground build should be based around being able to get an infinite overdrive. The entire game opens up once you actually understand how to overdrive, but I've spoken to a lot of people and many of them just never interacted with OD because they had no idea wtf is happening when you hit the button, and the game offers no clearance at all about what it is does. it's crazy.
In truth ground combat is pretty slow even with a good build, and you're relatively weak until you get 3000 tp and then, as long as you aren't getting 1 shot by the enemy, you can kinda just turn into an unstoppable and the game becomes really fun because you're pressing tons of buttons and there's that joy of seeing a build really click together; but if you cant figure out OD it's going to feel really wack.
On the flip side, lets talk skells. Skells, the mechas, get acquired at a later point in the story and are also a pretty important goal in endgame progression. The level 30/50 skells are acquired just through a pretty significant investment in money, while the level 60 and higher skells require going out to getting endgame materials and the alternative resources investment. The customizable skells (some 60 skells just have unchangeable skills are based on) are based entirely on the gear you ahve equipped.
However skell builds and combat feels oddly shallower than ground combat. Looking online a lot of skell builds boil down to:
1) try to oneshot with a super weapon
2) One very high power 60sec~ cooldown skill paired with 7 short cooldown skills, and fishing for cockpit mode to keep it going
3) a pure debuff build, which you probably wont play yourself but shove onto a NPC party member skell.
It often feels like there isn't much to it other than just pressing the buttons when they're on.
Skells are also just loaded with a bunch of weird mechanics that feel like baggage like Insurance, Fuel and jsut getting your skell back wehn it dies. just weird and frustrating ways to stop you from using skells 100% of the time once you get them, which is an annoyance to work with and isnt even that relevant because once you get overdrive the pilot becomes better than skells (assuming we're talking about something that wont get oneshot by a super weapon)
Other things that I can't segway into cleanly:
-I didnt super get to explore the end game/online because there's backlog stuff i wanna play, but this game is filling to the brim with content if you're a compleitionist. Tons of quest, affinity missions, late game gearing, build options yo ucan pretty freely swap between, ect. This game' online is on the way out because the wii u is shutting down all their stuff, so I wanna try going back in and really getting into it before it goes.
-A very large part of this game is having to explore through regions full of enemies that are higher level than you and it is On Sight if they spot you. Many missions really are just Go To This Place And Talk To This Guy which sounds bad... but the guy is in an area of enemies that are 20 levels over you when you unlock the quest. This is kino and it rules. Some of the funniest moments in this game is getting jumped by an enemy while fighting something else.
-just an insane soundtrack. They really just let Sawano do whatever the fuck he wants. It's not my favorite XB soundtrack but it's the most unique one, also the Overdrive song does go crazy.
-The bad fights in this game are BAD. This game is maybe the most frustrated ive gotten in a XB game; any fight with an enemy in the air is very frustrating, and the final section of the game fight where you have to fight 10 enemies that all cleave and aoe stagger had me FUMING.
-skells are cool
XBX is a weird game. It's flies way too close to the sun in its goal of being a singleplayer MMO, something following XB games dialed back on, and almost everything in this game is poorly explained to the user and the game is just not as fun if you don't take the time to figure out its inner working, and has a pretty poor main story. However, if you can dig below the surface it is a game with a ton of a depth and a brickload of content, and just a unique game.
I hope monolith does plan to do something with XBX, seeing how a large chunk of the game is about to just disappear with the Wii U online. However if the next Monolith game is not XBX remake or XBX2, I think thats just them giving up on this franchise.