One thing I can say quite definitively about this title is that that the world designers were cookin'. Very few things coming off a Nintendo console can be considered "high fidelity" — even with the fresh coat of a remastering — but fidelity is only ever one part of a game's visual toolset. Creativity and an eye for detail are what truly make a work special, and the world designers at Monolith Soft clearly had it.

I've been into sci-fi tales from the cradle, so I'd like to think that I've seen a lot in the long list of works — both new and old — I've read, watched, and played. I have vague memories that I've seen a general setup like Xenoblade's "universe for two" before, but... there's a magic to the execution here that got even my desensitized, open-world-burned-out self to spend 30 minutes in areas just "looking around." Something I haven't done much of since I was first awed by Mass Effect back in 2008.

Original or not, it sure feels unique. Even when I knew that I had probably found all of the interesting gameplay elements in an area, I still would feel compelled to look.

So for all of the more mixed opinions I'll give after this, I will say right off the bat that I now see why this game has been held in such high regard by its fans since its original 2010 release.

I also understand why people compare it to a single-player MMO, because beyond just the combat, every technical aspect of this game feels like it was derived from that space of the industry. In more good ways than bad — I say as an occasional MMO enjoyer.

[Combat]

Combat on the surface is almost one-for-one with the likes of World of Warcraft or (more relevant to me) Star Wars the Old Republic. You can move freely and it's in "real-time," but it uses the same style of targeting and action queueing any MMO player would immediately recognize. With that said, as an offline game it's far more responsive and willing to push for tighter timings on actions. They took the liberty to add features that its online contemporaries could not, like a system that plays out a possible future action from the enemy as a warning for the player to shift their tactics.

Frankly, I find the combat very satisfying with all the little tools they give you to maximize your damage-per-second and balance that with defense. It's not too complex when you're being introduced, but over time you find added layers that can create some pretty dramatic effects when you figure them out.

My only real problem with it is tuning. The game wants to encourage a diversity of team compositions and character builds, but it has two particularly grevious misfires to that point: the "Medic" character is way too effective as a healer compared to anyone else (and the team size is a mere 3); the main character has only one set of skills and most of his variety comes from special mechanics related to his weapon which don't have as much organic interplay.

This doesn't rear its head much in most fights, but once you get to the actual challenges you're heavily pressured into taking those two and one of two effective tanks. You can finagle the system to make other things work or level over the challenge, but to me it always seemed like I was intentionally hamstringing myself to do so.

[Checklisting]

The rest of gameplay revolves around exploring the world and collecting items. There are some interesting aspects to this, but its mostly fairly rudimentary in implementation. Smooth and neuron-activating, but simple and potentially very time consuming if you're a completionist or nearly one.

On the more interesting side, there is a mechanic that tells you if a random item you pick up will be part of a sidequest that fits the plot. That's a very cool bit of QoL that I loved. Also, there's a whole system around building reputation with the named NPCs of the world, and a big ol' graph showing all of their connections, likes, and tradable items. The further you build out that graph, the more side quests you unlock. Some of which even have alternate outcomes if you talk to specific characters before mindleslly setting out.

It's just a bit unfortunate that most of these quests are piled in with token fetch/kill quests so they can be easy to miss and there's little additional presentation for them. Just the same text boxes only with more involved dialogue. Great if you notice it, but no one will blame you if you don't.

There was one aspect of this system that I feel particularly let down by (though, maybe unfairly) which is that your party members have affinity values for each other as well, which unlock passive combat bonuses and, more importantly, "heart-to-heart" scenes that give their individual relationships more development. The "unfortunate" part to me was in how much time commitment it would take to fully engage with the system and in how obnoxious it was to actually trigger the scenes. To the point where I gave up on doing them in normal gameplay and opted to watch them on YouTube.

In my 41 hour playthrough where I tried to do the significant side content I could find, I got about 3 party members to full affinity with the main character, and none of them higher than 4/5 with each other. In addition, you have to find the locations for each scene on the large maps with no option to at least fast travel back to them later, and you definitely won't have them unlocked on first visit.

So great idea, poor execution.

[Narrative]

The tale that sets the context for your long trek through this alien-yet-inviting world fittingly evoked my nostalgia for both Gurren Lagann and Final Fantasy. The broadstrokes being close to the former and the details of the characters and atmosphere closer to the latter.

I ended up liking the whole cast more than I had expected after seeing their visual designs for years (I have a prejudice against the kind of not-shorts Shulk wears, apparently). I'd even say the writing had some great moments, just not consistently. Still, the only real "negative" moments were a couple fairly repetitive beats in Shulk's character development, and I otherwise liked him. He was much more direct and brash than I expected, but not in a thoughtless way.

I can't say I ever felt "surprised" by the twists in the story, but there were some details to it that caught me off-guard at times. And in the end, like the exploration, I was always happy to just soak up the sci-fi goodness.

I do really think the game needed a proper "point-of-no-return" in the last 2 or 3 chapters and drop off the exploration elements at that point, because there was a bit too much dissonance between what the gameplay and narrative were trying to accomplish pacing-wise at that point. It's not the worst I've seen, but it let out a bit of the steam it had built for me.

[It's not 'Incredible' but it's certainly 'Memorable']

There's a lot of cool stuff going on in this game, and I'm really looking forward to catching up with the series now. It's hard to pinpoint anything other than the world design that it does particularly well, but in a "whole greater than the sum of its parts" way, I left with rather warm feelings about the whole experience.

If you're a JRPG veteran and haven't gotten to this one yet, I absolutely recommend. I think sci-fi fans who want something a bit low-key on the gameplay side will generally enjoy this as well.