I love me a 2d metroidvania. Something about the mix of platforming and collecting trinkets behind various locked doors appeals to me so much that, if the aesthetic is right, I'll spend hours playing even the most mechanically mid title in the genre. As proof, I will state that I had 100%'d Guacamelee not once, but twice. This is all to say that, even if The Lost Crown hooked me in like the rest of them just by virtue of sharing that core, I feel like there are genuine merits that make it worth recommending.

First off, the presentation is outstanding for the genre. The art style is pleasing and the 2d/3d perspective allows for some really cool backgrounds with a sense of depth to them. Each area has a distinctive atmosphere and they offer some visual surprises along the way. The real sauce is, however, in the cutscenes that frequently not only burst with color but also veer into shonen anime territory with its camerawork and animations. But instead of making the game look generic it forms a solid foundation for hype moments and dynamic boss battles and makes the increase in scale during the finale feel less awkward. I did not know that I needed Prince of Persia to do a kamehameha, but the devs were right. Also worth mentioning that the game is fully voiced, and we've got decent voice acting, at least for the main cast. The score is done by Gareth Coker of the Ori and the Blind Forest fame, but it sidesteps both the loud sentimental pathos of that work and the common "eastern music" pastiche, most likely due to him collaborating with an Iranian composer, Samar Rad.

The writing is a bit of a mixed bag. Some bits feel lazy (like calling a group of heroes the Immortals in a story about corrupted humans trying to ascend to godhood, a bit on the nose there), some underdeveloped (Sargon seems to experience a neat character transformation from a brash youth to a hardened wise warrior on paper, but it's nigh imperceptible in the actual game). On the whole it's just solid, but what I find truly fascinating is how it conjures up a fascinating world full of Borges-like legends and characters. It's especially refreshing to see a time travel narrative that doesn't try to spin the old tale about actions and their consequences, but rather presents you with a messy tangle of alternative threads that intersect and interact freely. The bifurcations of the garden of forking paths presented not as a rigid system of parallel timelines but as a tool of infinite possibilities.

But it's the gameplay that really shines here. Now, The Lost Crown doesn't really present that many new ideas of its own. Screenshots you can put on the map as markers is one, and I welcome this approach as opposed to the excessive linearity of the recent Metroid games. But pretty much everything else you've already seen in one metroidvania or another. We got all the hits: wall jumping, air dashing, switching between two worlds, boomerang weapon, keys as keys and movement abilities as keys. But The Lost Crown combines all of these familiar elements into a neat package combined with good level and combat design, and it's polished to the point of being one of the best feeling 2d platformers in general.

Here's an example. Your combat options initially are limited two just two buttons: one for a sword attack and one for a parry. Your sword attacks can be chained into a combo, and various directional inputs result in different moves, but that's all standard stuff. The parry, however, isn't as powerful and brain dead as you might initially think. It's not like Samus Returns where you can confidently bait an attack within a second of seeing an enemy and nuke it with a press of a button. Here it's more of a shield that you need to time with the incoming attacks to block them. You can only return damage from parrying a special color-coded attack, and those are not as frequent, while in boss fights they are mostly used as an opportunity for visual spectacle. Still, blocking attacks requires timing and learning the enemy's moveset. Some of them use feints to fake you out (including one enemy whose attack animations play out backwards). Some annoy you by being out of reach in the air. All of them have unblockable attacks that require a dodge, but, crucially, the dodge's i-frames are strict enough that you'll get punished for a misplaced or a mistimed one. So combat becomes a matter of dynamic positioning, and a group of enemies can easily overwhelm you even in the game's second half. And I'm sorry if that comes off as excessive praise for a combat system whose sole merit is merely being thought out, but coming to this after the Ori games sure feels good.

This also applies to level design. The opening section guides you along a linear path, but it does so through bits of multiple areas and actually provides enough space for you to explore even with your starting kit. Probably the most suprising thing about the first couple hours of the game is just how easy it is to choose a random exit and find out the path keeps going to some place else that doesn't seem to be the objective. You can stumble and make your way into this game's Blighttown a fair bit before hitting a wall, if you're persistent enough. Not to mention that the designers regularly put in sick platforming sequences that feel amazing to pull off. But then that's to be expected from the devs of Rayman Legends.

The one obvious blemish is that the game's more buggy that it has any right being. I've experienced falling out of bounds, zipping, lingering animation effects, scripts not working immediately after a cutscene and, very frequently, every object on the map resetting into its intended state as you enter a room. This is nothing game-breaking, and god knows new releases these days are held together by duct tape as a rule, but it is disappointing to see a smaller scale title with dozens of QA specialists still release in this state (with early access, no less).

Soul Hackers 2 has a meal mechanic. Throughout the game you can obtain various dishes: buy them in stores, get them from your companions etc. These dishes have different effects on the dungeon crawling part of the game. Some dishes give you HP regen, others give plain stat boosts or make critical hits more likely to occur. Standard stuff. But there's one more side to this mechanic that further complicates things. Every time you eat a meal you watch a short cutscene in which your party members share their opinions on it. Afterwards, you can see who likes or dislikes a particular dish when choosing what to eat from the menu. So, you are now tasked with choosing not only a meal that will suit your goals in upcoming dungeon exploration, but also choosing the right combination of meal buff and companion affinity. Obviously, every one of your party members has their own preferences and it's impossible to cater to everyone's tastes, so you usually have to make some sacrifices.

Except you don't have to. Whether or not your party members will enjoy the meal has absolutely no bearing on how potent the meal's effects are going to be. Further on, whenever you have a meal someone from your party is always absent anyway, so their opinion is not accounted for. So why does this exist, and why do I get loading screen tips on the various types of affinity each party member can have towards a dish?

I have no answer, but I think this tiny bit actually encapsulates Soul Hackers 2 as a whole rather well. It's something that tries to pose for an actual gameplay mechanic but ends up being empty gesturing towards character interaction. Appropriate for a game that feels like a bunch of concept art that got adapted into being into both a sequel to a 25-year old game and the third core pillar of the entire SMT franchise, marrying the dungeon crawling of the mainline games with the approachable nature and story focus of the Persona series. Yes, it is a sequel to Soul Hackers and it retains a lot of the concepts from the previous title, but whereas that game's cyberpunk setting was an important component of atmosphere and the story's themes (explicitly delving into society's acceptance of new invasive technology under late capitalism), here it's just familiar neon set dressing that has very little to do with what the story actually does. Yes, the gameplay does carve its own niche in the franchise, but the dungeons are disgustingly basic and boring, the combat is somehow grindier than ever, and all the narrative free estate is spent on a shonen version of The Fifth Element (1997).

Usually when I don't like something I can at least see the intent behind whatever it is that isn't working for me. It could be a lack of polish, a writing issue, a gameplay nuisance, but it's usually a particular flaw in the game's working system or creative vision that you can still glean from the final product and appreciate. Soul Hackers 2 just feels like it doesn't have anything cohesive like that beneath the surface. It's just fluff meeting the bare requirements of an RPG stretched into a 40 hour game and wrapped in a pretty full-price package. (And don't even get me started on that DLC.)

There's an anecdote I heard and can no longer source about either Arkane or Looking Glass Studios. How the games they worked on felt like complete disasters right until the very end of the development cycle, the last few months when every component finally falls into place. It makes sense for an immersive sim, where a change in a single system can drastically change the player experience. But I feel like it could also apply to Quantum Break, a game so ambitious and sprawling that only by the time the individual pieces should've fit together the seams between them became apparent to the leading team. As a result, we have a work that almost seems to be in conflict with itself, despite still showing us the ambition of its vision.

Quantum Break started off as a way for Remedy to bring their signature blend of action gameplay and TV drama even closer together, now using a substantial amount of live action footage to place the two media on equal footing in the overall narrative. So, on the one hand, we've got the designers going back to the frantic gunfights of Max Payne, now augmented by magic abilities that make combat more dynamic, varied and flashy. I'm gonna guess that everyone who couldn't stand the repetitive flashlight pointing of Alan Wake stood up and clapped when they saw the first slo-mo close up of an enemy falling dead on the ground in Quantum Break. On the other hand, every couple of hours the gameplay is set on pause as you are presented with around 30 minutes of television. Now, having only played the game years after it came out, I was expecting this half of Quantum Break to be awful. A YouTube short series ballooned into an attempt at prestige funded by all the Microsoft product placement. But it turned to be just... solid tv? A surprisingly okay-acted and well-paced tv series with an occasional inspired visual moment. Something in-between FX's Fringe and a CW show. But then one evening after work as I was thinking about continuing the game I remembered that I stopped right at the end of an act, meaning I had about 40 minutes of "non-gameplay" to sit through. I wanted to spend an hour by doing a fun activity, but instead I knew I'd spend most of it getting to the fun activity itself. And it's not even that I dislike cutscenes or anything. God knows these JRPGs I play so much have a ton of them these days. But there's something about the pre-defined regularity of these interruptions, the schedule you're on that makes it all out of joint pacing-wise.

And it just got worse over time as the gameplay itself became unevenly paced. If you try to look for secrets and collectibles in these kinds of games (and with Remedy's work that's usually worth it), you have a lot of additional material to get your hands on. E-mail threads, notes, diaries, most of them surprisingly well-written and engrossing. Some of them optional, yet vital to one of the game's key mysteries. Reading through them is generally a good time, but sometimes you just notice how long the reading takes you. It's especially jarring during segments when you're supposed to go somewhere and an NPC keeps calling out to you as you're trying to focus on this random e-mail. And then at some point the game throws at you a quiet level for a change. Some walk and talks, some chill exploration, light platforming. And about a dozen of these collectibles to read through in a condensed space, making what should've been a short break between the action into another half-hour of lore consumption.

You see, all of these pieces out of context actually bring me enjoyment. I like the messy chaotic combat encounters, the small platforming puzzles and set-pieces, I'm impressed by the visuals and the on-point needle drops, engrossed in the world built with thousands of optional words of text, and seeing Lance Reddick walk away from an explosion in slo-mo is the kind of cheese I live for. And I'm sure each individual team was proud of their work and hoping that when it all comes together into the final product, it would end up brilliant. But apparently, there just was no clear vision of what that final product would be in practice, and instead of peak couch time activity we're left with this exhausting mixed media monstrosity. At least as we've since seen with Control, Remedy would find a less ambitious and more effective way to iterate on the same concepts.

sauceless

Alright, as succinct and provoking as that word is, it's not actually enough to convey my frustrations with the game. Hot Pursuit (2010) is the point where I fell off the series as a teen. No particular reason, I just never ended up picking that one at the time. But it's often mentioned as the last good game in the series even to this day, as EA continues to churn out mid after mid even while working with some fun ideas. And yeah, there's some fun to be had here. The driving is as arcadey as it's ever been in the series, as Criterion seem to have taken the handling from the Burnout games wholesale, but there's still some nuance to reaching and maintaining top speed and steering is heavy enough to make avoiding crashes fairly difficult. The actual races with cops turn pretty fun as you get access to more abilities, and I'm sure it's a riot in multiplayer. The dynamic time and weather system is actually just race specific scripts, but they help the game to reach some great visual heights and leave a lasting impression.
The rubberbanding is definitely the worst I've ever seen in a racing game, but it seems to be by design as the developers wanted you to have a tense dynamic experience with every race. Sometimes it does seem like the AI is cheating you out of a win, but most of the time it leads to the feeling that there's always a competitor nearby. Someone is always ready to overtake you on the next sharp corner. So you drift around, M.I.A.'s Born Free banging out of the radio, engaging in a tug of war on a scenic serpantine route, and it feels like you're properly challenged. Everything clicks. The game fulfills the fantasy promised in the og Underground opening movie. You grab the lead on the last hairpin and nitro ahead on the straight to the finish line, clawing the win from the opponent's hands.
As you cross the finish line, you're met with a freeze frame and a deafening silence. There's no fanfare, no replay, no cool posing, nothing. Just silence as the game accepts your win, counts up your earned exp and informs you that you've unlocked a new car (happens pretty much after every race), showing it off in a nondescript warehouse, a model that you might never find any use for, as all the cars handle the same anyway, more or less like a heavy brick on wheels. You're booted back to the map menu, you select the next race over tense spy thriller music.

That's the issue, right there. For some reason Hot Pursuit's chosen aesthetic is a spy thriller. It exudes infinite money and excitement, but it's also cold and distant. Its idea of cool is Jared Leto trying to sound like Chino Moreno as police lights reflect on the asphalt every single time you open the title screen. It's presenting something as goofy as an elite anti-racing police squad dropping spike strips on public roads from a helicopter as a dead serious action movie set piece. And there's little character to be found elsewhere. The Seacrest County, where the races take place, seems well designed with memorable areas from a winding mess of a highway to a snowy mountain range to a desert-like environment with plenty of options to go off-road. But all of your interaction with it is locked to either the races themselves or the map screen from which you choose the races. You can enter the free roam mode, but there's nothing to do except drive around aimlessly. You can't even go to a specific spot because there's no map to orient yourself around.
And I feel like this is emblematic of the game as a whole. While you can certainly have fun in it, it itself doesn't know how to have fun. And for a game in this series this is a huge blow.

Recently I got myself a PS5 and was somewhat surprised by how meagre its Classics selection of PS1 and PS2 titles was in the store. Well aware that these are emulated games that require high precision and stability to be sold on the official storefront, I was still shocked to see Sony offer titles like Tekken 2 and literally all the Syphon Filter games over anything else that would come to your mind were you to think about PS Classics (and what Sony themselves put on that PSOne mini machine). The point is, despite owning the current gen Sony console I have no legit option of experiencing the beginning of some of the famous Sony franchises, which just feels... wrong. And this got me thinking about games preservation in general.

Usually the discussion of the topic is focused on old and rare physical-only titles or relatively recent games stuck in legal limbo and therefore unavailable to buy or run comfortably on modern systems. But here's an example of another side of the issue. Go ahead and visit the official Need for Speed franchise page on the EA website. You will see that the earliest title EA seems to acknowledge (and sell) is the Most Wanted remake from 2012. Sure, the sheer memetic power of the original Most Wanted and the Underground series is so strong that the general audience still knows that there were other big street racing titles prior to 2012, but what about something earlier than that? One would have to dig into the wiki pages to even learn that there were NFS titles prior to Underground, and in fact the series' whole aesthetic and identity were quite different from what is maintained to this day. The number of ratings on the games in the series on this very website is telling in how well known each entry is.

So Porsche Unleashed is a relatively obscure title. Looking up the game on YouTube I was hoping to see many "hidden gem" videos talking about it or retrospectives, but there's not that much and what little there is comes from hardcore racing games enthusiasts. Needless to say, obtaining the game these days and running it on Windows 11 is another issue. I had to download a .rar with the already installed and pre-patched game from a Russian forum, and I still could only play in windowed mode. One would have better luck obtaining a PS1 disc and playing that, but that's the thing--it's the PC version that is truly special.

This game was a regular EA yearly franchise installment release. Came out exactly one year after the previous game EA Canada worked on, in fact, that being Need for Speed: High Stakes. And that alone makes it all the more fascinating that Porsche Unleashed is not an iterative sequel one would expect but a major side step in the series. This here is a full fledged car simulation game, one of the first racing titles that got a proper model calculating the impact of car damage on performance. And it's an historic game, not only letting you race on Porsche cars from the 50s all the way to year 2000 but also providing detailed stats and preserving each car's character with how it handles in-game. Of course this is all looking somewhat quaint from today's perspective, but back then there wasn't much, if anything, like it. And it was a yearly release.

The handling takes some getting used to. It's very easy to spin out just from nervously adjusting your trajectory on the straight. More powerful cars from the 70s and 80s can barely turn a corner, and it's worse on wet tarmac and ice. But finally getting a fast and nimble 911 '00 at the end feels most rewarding as you zoom through the familiar tracks with surprising ease. The introduction of a car damage model means that careless driving will quickly lead to worse handling and acceleration and, crucially, higher repair costs before the next race. It also means that you can cause funny little fatal accidents for your opponents that can genuinely change the race's outcome as there's not much rubberbanding going on. The tracks are also notable, since most of them are not usual circuits but point to point races set in diverse locals around Western Europe. The courses are long and intricate with several distinct stages to them and a variety of route options (which are not always shortcuts). Some of the later tracks may actually seem like a puzzle at first due to how many options you're presented with. And the simulation aspect of the game informs your tuning decisions for the races: the Alps course has a terrifying icy mid-section that could benefit from the better grip provided by rain tires, but there are also a set of hairpins at the start and a fast slalom-like dirt section at the end. Different cars with different setups will provide a different driving experience just on this one track. Granted, the same simulation shtick can occasionally make racing quite frustrating, especially as you adapt to new cars, get into crashes and spend precious money on repairs. The progression system overall isn't great. You need to buy specific cars to enter new tournaments, you also need money for upgrading the car and paying the entry fee. And you can't exactly hit restart in case you made a mistake. Thankfully you can avoid grinding previous races just by buying, repairing and selling used cars for nice profit.

The presentation is also very 2000, for better or worse. If Underground and the following titles could easily be traced back to the Fast and Furious movies, I suppose here the companion film would be Gone In 60 Seconds? Except Nicolas Cage got spiky hair and a goatee. There's that weird vibe or prestige classy racing with all the expensive cars and lush locals, but it's all set to the dorkiest trance music.

This is probably way too much text dedicated to an outdated racing title from two decades back, but it's way too fascinating of a project for me to just ignore. A major deviation in an iterative yearly series, one that is now long forgotten even by the original publisher. A part of a still ongoing massive franchise that simply ignores most of its legacy. Triple A abandonware, if you will.

Last year I played through the first Gears of War game. I was morbidly curious about how the most iconic franchise of 7th gen cover shooting would hold up and if there was any artistic or game design merit to my eyes after more than 10 years since I'd last played it. It was not a pleasant experience. The original PC port was falling apart in real time, and as the campaign progressed into neverending and indistinguishable dark caves I gradually started losing interest in the game. But I could clearly see Epic understanding the core tenets of the game's design that they'd stuck to since. It's the co-op gimmicks that got ripped off by pretty much every game that followed in its footsteps, and it's the combat fundamentals making for exciting firefights with the few elements Gears 1 has to offer. I could see the fun here and why this franchise was allowed to grow and build upon itself to further success.

Uncharted here is different. It's probably the most offensively mid seventh gen AAA title that I've personally played. It's an adventure platforming title with no memorable set pieces, a Tomb Raider clone with puzzles the solutions of which are just given to you in writing straight away. But most importantly, it's a cover shooter that is 80% combat, and it does not have good fundamentals. Guns feel weak, enemies take way more bullets to the chest than they ought to, and there's little variety present in both combat scenarios and enemy types. You'd think that having a daring acrobat protagonist would lead to some fun mobility options, but no, it would take them three more games to get there. The combat is just okay for the few hours the first playthrough will take you. In retrospect, it's fascinating how Tomb Raider Legend (the game Crystal Dynamics had refused to let Amy Hennig work on), having come out just a year prior to this, managed to avoid the cover shooter plague and ended up a far more fun and varied title despite some of its shortcomings.

But Drake's Fortune has a very particular charm to it that I can't ignore. It's your favorite early 00s jungle adventure B movie that never happened, one that would have Johnny Knoxville of all people play the main role. One that has an absurd plot involving mummies and ancient curses and twists so thin you could filter coffee through them. It is so blatantly cartoonish it's hard not to share in its earnest trashy glow. Even outside of the main story and (admittedly good) comedic character interactions the game never really lifts the shroud of shlock. I mean, there's a level in which you navigate a jet ski upriver dodging exploding red barrels which are sent your way by a lone henchman who is picking them up from a giant stack. This is a Looney Tunes gag, a classic Crash Bandicoot level concept, and the rest of the game just follows the trajectory of "what would happen if we'd given a charismatic mascot character guns". And it's a fun concept, just one that Naughty Dog could not realize in a compelling way.

(The remaster's added Brutal difficulty is hilariously broken. Bumping half a star for this video alone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q54dAYkSbwo)

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.