If there's one word that describes Xenoblade Chronicles, it's massive. It can be applied to its general run time (114 hours on my save file when I decided I had enough and deleted the game from the Switch), to its world (two huge titan mechas frozen mid-combat), to its level design attitude (it's like as if Todd Howard never lied to us--you truly can go there), number of side quests (about 450) or to its set of systems underlying most game mechanics (affinity is everything and everywhere). It might not be the most ambitious game I've ever played, but it's up there, and it originally being a Wii title is all the more stunning. But what makes it stand out to me is that all of its parts cohere into a complete functional experience.
Let me back up for a second. Xenoblade is a JRPG developed by Monolith Soft and is part of the unofficial "Xeno" franchise that includes Square's Xenogears (1998) and Namco-published Xenosaga (2002-2006). All titles conceptualized and written by the Monolith Soft president Tetsuya Takahashi, a noted mecha nerd and Nietzsche enjoyer. Xenogears was his first foray into game directing and is infamous for having a second disc that mostly has the characters monologuing as if in a VN. Pressed for time, Takahashi just couldn't agree to releasing the first disc as a separate game. He had to preserve his vision and ensure that the story had a chance of seeing completion at least in some form, hence the compromise. Add to it the fact Xenogears was only part 5 of 6 in a potential franchise with a narrative tracing a universe from its birth to decay, and, yeah, it kind of underdelivered, right? Despite becoming a cult classic, Xenogears never received a sequel and Takahashi left to form his own company, Monolith Soft, where he tried it all again with Xenogears, a multimedia project that was announced as a 6-part game series, later shortened down to 3. Extensive rewrites were made during development so that the story could wrap up in some way towards the end of that third game.
Finally, we have the Nintendo-backed Xenoblade, a title that is not as ambitious in its scale or themes as Takahashi's previous works, but is nonetheless impressive. And it's complete. Actually finished. No compromises. There's a part towards the 50 hour mark where the story reaches a climax and then transitions into Act 2. If the game ended there on a cliffhanger with a sequel to follow, it would've still worked. But it just keeps going for 30-40 hours more, until the story is complete. And it's particularly impressive, considering the game's design started out not with a story outline or a vision for a potential series, but with just a model of the game's world, the aforementioned titans, with everything else stemming from that point.
Here's the setup: the two titans are Bionis and Mechonis. Long ago they fought each other, and after trading fatal blows both died, and eventually on their corpses life sprung up. All kinds of biological flora and fauna on Bionis and machinery on Mechonis. For years the races of Bionis (mostly the humans, called Homs) have been fighting the invading Mechons, a massive army of death machines that have no demands or motives beyond wiping down the opposing life on Bionis. The Mechons are virtually invincible to Homs weapons, and the only thing that can fight against them is an ancient sword called the Monado that, however, demands a lot of power from its wielder. A young Homs named Shulk finds out that not only can he wield the Monado but that it also offers him visions of a possible future.
The premise is very simple, but it offers a truly unique perspective on the setting. Buddy, you are literally climbing a giant mecha. The other mecha is constantly there in the distance. If you look up at any point, you can see different parts of the mecha you are on. It rules. In fact, a lot of the game's early appeal is in the vistas it often presents to the player. The game's world is, quite frankly, gorgeous. Yes, it's blurry 720p (480p on the Wii), but its scale is rendered so beautifully and is only amplified by the environmental design and the music. There's a point still early on in the game where you come into a swamp area, and as the night sets in all the lifeless dry tree branches around you light up in blue hues as if they’re sprouting tiny firefly leaves, ether currents drift in the air making you feel like you're inside the aurora borealis, and one of the best tracks in the game starts playing--a melancholy violin-led tune gently introduced by a piano figure. And seeing that for the first time is damn close to a religious experience. The next area has a giant (truly enormous) waterfall in the background, and it provides a nice vista as you cross the bridge high above the river that flows from it. Except then you realize that the waterfall is not the background, that you can jump in the water and explore the islands and beaches there. Herein lies the downside to the level design--huge scale comes with a lot of empty space, and you're in for a lot of aimless swimming around that waterfall. Granted, there are a lot of fast travel points, but going through fields with not much of note is inevitable and will not be for everyone. In fact, the level design feels very much inspired by sprawling MMORPG maps, with some parts of each area being gated by high(er) level monsters.
Speaking of, monsters use old MMORPG aggro mechanics. Some will attack on sight, some will only be attracted by loud sounds (i.e. running), some only join in if you start attacking their friends. It's lifted straight out of something like FF XI, where a simple act of traversal between hubs could be a dangerous adventure. In this case you are just prevented from accessing certain areas early, but also occasionally a quest will push you into a cave full of giant lvl 80 spiders just to mess with you. Coming back to this world's scale, there's always something out there bigger and stronger than you. You're never truly safe, you have to deal with all the things roaming around.
But there's more. Take the combat, for example. You're exploring in a party of three. You can build your party out of anyone available at a given moment, but all the characters have a specific role to fulfill. Reyn is a tank. Dunban is also a tank, but an agility based one. Melia buffs and deals ether damage. Shulk deals physical damage and dispels enemy buffs, and so on. During combat you can use any of the abilities on your hotbar, and there's a cooldown period before you can use them again. Some attacks require you to be positioned in a specific way relative to the enemy. So basically you will have a rotation of abilities that will be influenced by your role, party synergy and enemy actions. Very much resembling a MMORPG here.
The quests also feel like those created for an MMO experience. Most of them are a simple "kill 5 wolves, bring 3 herbs" kind of affair. Some of the simpler ones will not even require you to hand in the quest when you're done. So here's the general loop: you enter a new hub, pick up all the question marks, go out and about and pick up shinies or kill marked monsters, complete some quests that way, go back to the hub to hand in the rest. Mindless? Yes. Boring? Depends on the area you're in. But I'm the kind of sicko that enjoyed exploration in FF XIV ARR, so I might not be the best person to ask.
You might wonder, if the quests are bad, why even do them? Well, they provide some exp and gold, but really you do them to build up your reputation in a given hub. In-game that's called affinity. Higher affinity unlocks more quests (including those that reward you with new skill trees), provides you with shop discounts and opens up more items for trading with NPCs. Please, bear with me. There's a map in this game that charts the relationships of every important NPC. All of them. They all have names, they are active during certain hours of the day, they have specific positions and scheduled routes. As you talk to everyone in a given town, they hint at their problems and worries or share observations about others. With this new information you can trigger additional dialogue from another NPC, and so on, until you unlock a related quest. The outcome of that quest might affect relationships between certain NPCs. Sometimes there's a good outcome and a bad outcome, sometimes both are valid. You might ruin someone's marriage or boost another person's career. Some quests are mutually exclusive for that reason. I think this is genuinely a very cool system that brings some life into these dummies, and it is used for a masterful gut punch towards the end of the game. But sadly, the system is underutilized. The scale is impressive, but grinding through a lot of it is a chore with next to no immediate reward, and I can see a lot of people getting annoyed by it and not engaging with it any further.
And then there's the party affinity, because you can build up relationships between all the playable characters as well. You can help them up when they’re down and encourage them during combat. You can initiate quests with them in party and hear the banter evolve as you get further down the relationship. You can gift the things you find in the overworld--everyone's got their likes and dislikes. And why do that? Well, some optional scenes are locked until you get to a certain affinity level between two characters. You can share additional passive skills between party members. And you get better results crafting gems--oh god, I forgot about crafting.
There's a lot of excess with these systems, I won't deny that. But it's very impressive how integrated they are into everything you do in a way that feels actually planned out in detail. Coming back to the first paragraph--these are complete meaningful systems. Grindy and underutilized, yes. But they don't feel like appendages to the rest of the gameplay. And I don't say that to congratulate Xenoblade on passing the low bar of being feature complete. The point is that this is the first time we got a Xeno title where the gameplay core and presentation match the ambition of its narrative.
And it's a good story. A wartime drama about being consumed by revenge and defying fate that's got some grit to its tone, yet manages to find some spots for levity and romance. The cast is strong, believable and brought to life by some of the best voice acting this side of FF XIV. And while it's not exactly earth shattering, the story is well presented and offers quite a few bold twists and turns. One of these occurs just a few hours in and served as a hook for me, and I wouldn't spoil it for anyone else. I can certainly see how Xenoblade could be a cherished identity forming experience for someone who played it young, like what I had with Kingdom Hearts. Even now the game's like crack to me (114 hours on that save file, may I remind you), and that's after forming an opinion on its flaws. It's comforting, it's engaging, and it won't leave my damn head.
Let me back up for a second. Xenoblade is a JRPG developed by Monolith Soft and is part of the unofficial "Xeno" franchise that includes Square's Xenogears (1998) and Namco-published Xenosaga (2002-2006). All titles conceptualized and written by the Monolith Soft president Tetsuya Takahashi, a noted mecha nerd and Nietzsche enjoyer. Xenogears was his first foray into game directing and is infamous for having a second disc that mostly has the characters monologuing as if in a VN. Pressed for time, Takahashi just couldn't agree to releasing the first disc as a separate game. He had to preserve his vision and ensure that the story had a chance of seeing completion at least in some form, hence the compromise. Add to it the fact Xenogears was only part 5 of 6 in a potential franchise with a narrative tracing a universe from its birth to decay, and, yeah, it kind of underdelivered, right? Despite becoming a cult classic, Xenogears never received a sequel and Takahashi left to form his own company, Monolith Soft, where he tried it all again with Xenogears, a multimedia project that was announced as a 6-part game series, later shortened down to 3. Extensive rewrites were made during development so that the story could wrap up in some way towards the end of that third game.
Finally, we have the Nintendo-backed Xenoblade, a title that is not as ambitious in its scale or themes as Takahashi's previous works, but is nonetheless impressive. And it's complete. Actually finished. No compromises. There's a part towards the 50 hour mark where the story reaches a climax and then transitions into Act 2. If the game ended there on a cliffhanger with a sequel to follow, it would've still worked. But it just keeps going for 30-40 hours more, until the story is complete. And it's particularly impressive, considering the game's design started out not with a story outline or a vision for a potential series, but with just a model of the game's world, the aforementioned titans, with everything else stemming from that point.
Here's the setup: the two titans are Bionis and Mechonis. Long ago they fought each other, and after trading fatal blows both died, and eventually on their corpses life sprung up. All kinds of biological flora and fauna on Bionis and machinery on Mechonis. For years the races of Bionis (mostly the humans, called Homs) have been fighting the invading Mechons, a massive army of death machines that have no demands or motives beyond wiping down the opposing life on Bionis. The Mechons are virtually invincible to Homs weapons, and the only thing that can fight against them is an ancient sword called the Monado that, however, demands a lot of power from its wielder. A young Homs named Shulk finds out that not only can he wield the Monado but that it also offers him visions of a possible future.
The premise is very simple, but it offers a truly unique perspective on the setting. Buddy, you are literally climbing a giant mecha. The other mecha is constantly there in the distance. If you look up at any point, you can see different parts of the mecha you are on. It rules. In fact, a lot of the game's early appeal is in the vistas it often presents to the player. The game's world is, quite frankly, gorgeous. Yes, it's blurry 720p (480p on the Wii), but its scale is rendered so beautifully and is only amplified by the environmental design and the music. There's a point still early on in the game where you come into a swamp area, and as the night sets in all the lifeless dry tree branches around you light up in blue hues as if they’re sprouting tiny firefly leaves, ether currents drift in the air making you feel like you're inside the aurora borealis, and one of the best tracks in the game starts playing--a melancholy violin-led tune gently introduced by a piano figure. And seeing that for the first time is damn close to a religious experience. The next area has a giant (truly enormous) waterfall in the background, and it provides a nice vista as you cross the bridge high above the river that flows from it. Except then you realize that the waterfall is not the background, that you can jump in the water and explore the islands and beaches there. Herein lies the downside to the level design--huge scale comes with a lot of empty space, and you're in for a lot of aimless swimming around that waterfall. Granted, there are a lot of fast travel points, but going through fields with not much of note is inevitable and will not be for everyone. In fact, the level design feels very much inspired by sprawling MMORPG maps, with some parts of each area being gated by high(er) level monsters.
Speaking of, monsters use old MMORPG aggro mechanics. Some will attack on sight, some will only be attracted by loud sounds (i.e. running), some only join in if you start attacking their friends. It's lifted straight out of something like FF XI, where a simple act of traversal between hubs could be a dangerous adventure. In this case you are just prevented from accessing certain areas early, but also occasionally a quest will push you into a cave full of giant lvl 80 spiders just to mess with you. Coming back to this world's scale, there's always something out there bigger and stronger than you. You're never truly safe, you have to deal with all the things roaming around.
But there's more. Take the combat, for example. You're exploring in a party of three. You can build your party out of anyone available at a given moment, but all the characters have a specific role to fulfill. Reyn is a tank. Dunban is also a tank, but an agility based one. Melia buffs and deals ether damage. Shulk deals physical damage and dispels enemy buffs, and so on. During combat you can use any of the abilities on your hotbar, and there's a cooldown period before you can use them again. Some attacks require you to be positioned in a specific way relative to the enemy. So basically you will have a rotation of abilities that will be influenced by your role, party synergy and enemy actions. Very much resembling a MMORPG here.
The quests also feel like those created for an MMO experience. Most of them are a simple "kill 5 wolves, bring 3 herbs" kind of affair. Some of the simpler ones will not even require you to hand in the quest when you're done. So here's the general loop: you enter a new hub, pick up all the question marks, go out and about and pick up shinies or kill marked monsters, complete some quests that way, go back to the hub to hand in the rest. Mindless? Yes. Boring? Depends on the area you're in. But I'm the kind of sicko that enjoyed exploration in FF XIV ARR, so I might not be the best person to ask.
You might wonder, if the quests are bad, why even do them? Well, they provide some exp and gold, but really you do them to build up your reputation in a given hub. In-game that's called affinity. Higher affinity unlocks more quests (including those that reward you with new skill trees), provides you with shop discounts and opens up more items for trading with NPCs. Please, bear with me. There's a map in this game that charts the relationships of every important NPC. All of them. They all have names, they are active during certain hours of the day, they have specific positions and scheduled routes. As you talk to everyone in a given town, they hint at their problems and worries or share observations about others. With this new information you can trigger additional dialogue from another NPC, and so on, until you unlock a related quest. The outcome of that quest might affect relationships between certain NPCs. Sometimes there's a good outcome and a bad outcome, sometimes both are valid. You might ruin someone's marriage or boost another person's career. Some quests are mutually exclusive for that reason. I think this is genuinely a very cool system that brings some life into these dummies, and it is used for a masterful gut punch towards the end of the game. But sadly, the system is underutilized. The scale is impressive, but grinding through a lot of it is a chore with next to no immediate reward, and I can see a lot of people getting annoyed by it and not engaging with it any further.
And then there's the party affinity, because you can build up relationships between all the playable characters as well. You can help them up when they’re down and encourage them during combat. You can initiate quests with them in party and hear the banter evolve as you get further down the relationship. You can gift the things you find in the overworld--everyone's got their likes and dislikes. And why do that? Well, some optional scenes are locked until you get to a certain affinity level between two characters. You can share additional passive skills between party members. And you get better results crafting gems--oh god, I forgot about crafting.
There's a lot of excess with these systems, I won't deny that. But it's very impressive how integrated they are into everything you do in a way that feels actually planned out in detail. Coming back to the first paragraph--these are complete meaningful systems. Grindy and underutilized, yes. But they don't feel like appendages to the rest of the gameplay. And I don't say that to congratulate Xenoblade on passing the low bar of being feature complete. The point is that this is the first time we got a Xeno title where the gameplay core and presentation match the ambition of its narrative.
And it's a good story. A wartime drama about being consumed by revenge and defying fate that's got some grit to its tone, yet manages to find some spots for levity and romance. The cast is strong, believable and brought to life by some of the best voice acting this side of FF XIV. And while it's not exactly earth shattering, the story is well presented and offers quite a few bold twists and turns. One of these occurs just a few hours in and served as a hook for me, and I wouldn't spoil it for anyone else. I can certainly see how Xenoblade could be a cherished identity forming experience for someone who played it young, like what I had with Kingdom Hearts. Even now the game's like crack to me (114 hours on that save file, may I remind you), and that's after forming an opinion on its flaws. It's comforting, it's engaging, and it won't leave my damn head.