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Xenoblade Chronicles X

ゼノブレイドクロス

Developer: Monolith Soft Publisher: Nintendo
29 April 2015
Xenoblade Chronicles X [ゼノブレイドクロス] - cover art
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214 Ratings / 2 Reviews
#1,154 All-time
#39 for 2015
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Title
One step forward, two steps back.
Xenoblade Chronicles launched in 2010/2011/2012 (it’s complicated) to critical acclaim, eventually getting a New Nintendo 3DS port and full remaster on the Switch, which I played and reviewed a few years prior. With Nintendo’s habit of porting over Wii U titles to the Switch (and slapping a $60 price tag on them), it’s a bit curious 2015’s Xenoblade Chronicles X has yet to receive the same treatment. With Xenoblade 3 on the horizon I felt it would be a good time to revisit X.

I played ten or so hours of X in 2016 – back when Miiverse (pbuh) was still alive – and wasn’t able to get into it. I think it was due to the initial shock of how different X is to Xenoblade proper, at least tonally. X uses something similar to Xenosaga II’s graphical engine, only updated in HD. I see a lot of people complain about the graphics of II, but I’m not really a fan of how I and III look in the first place, so it isn’t quite as egregious to me – though there are certainly trips to uncanny valley. X looks alright for the most part. Some characters like Lin (the 12 year old supergenius) have a weird doughy anime face that looks like it would melt if left out in a hot car. Otherwise it’s a decent looking game stylistically (I would have preferred the color palette of XC1), and a pretty good looking Wii U game mechanically. When you get into your Skell (the large mechs that were touted as a major selling point), the loss of detail as you ascend into the sky is still kind of impressive. I kept thinking of the flying car in Final Fantasy XV and how the world turned into a giant vomity texture whenever you got a few feet off the ground. That said, X has a really bad habit of not being able to load textures in time, to the point of distraction. In the worst cases it would take 10 seconds for some textures to fully render, leaving an ugly Nintendo 64-like model in the meantime. This especially stings considering how long the loading screens can get.

The first Xenoblade took place on two giant mech-gods frozen in time, trapped in a stalemate battle. It’s probably one of my favorite video game settings, and being able to see other parts of both mechs in the distance when you’re traveling grants a lovely sense of story progression. Though not as steeped in Philosophy 101 and random religious imagery as –saga and –gears, Xenoblade was definitely wild in its own right. It’s incredibly disappointing, then, that X sticks with a very generic sci-fi theme. Actually, I wouldn’t mind a ‘genre fiction’ kind of sci-fi story if it was well written and included memorable characters. X has neither of these traits. Here’s the gist: humans get into a war with the bloodthirsty Ganglion and Prone races, and Earth is blown up. Humanity sends out the White Whale, a colossal spaceship, to find a different planet to colonize. The Ganglion “somehow” catch up with them (it seems like a spacecraft of such magnitude would be fairly easy to follow) and damage the White Whale, causing it to make a crash landing on the planet Mira. In all of their wisdom, the leaders decide to rebuild Los Angeles of all places. I guess they missed the Lakers. At first I thought New Los Angeles was built inside of the White Whale beforehand, but I think it’s implied it was made from scratch within a few months. Maybe I shouldn’t complain about suspension of disbelief in a game like this, but it was a head-scratcher I kept thinking about.

You play as a customizable avatar; in my case the grizzled ex-merchant named Sneed, who bears a striking semblance to Geralt of Rivia. The character customization leaves much to be desired. You can choose from a template of faces (young boy A and B, boy, man A and B), but your available hair options are locked to the face you choose. Young boy/Boy had more flamboyant anime cuts, while Old Man had more subdued ‘dos. The only thing that struck me as somewhat unique was the separation of hair roots and tips. Otherwise, well, it’s no Dark Souls. Thankfully, like the first Xenoblade, you’re able to equip “real” armor while having a cosmetic layer of armor that doesn’t affect stats. The variety is lacking and most of the designs are either lame or just okay. You get some civilian gear over the course of the game – leather jackets, jeans, sunglasses, etc. – and these tend to look better, but I miss the flamboyant armor sets of the first Xenoblade.

Anyway, the main character (an amnesiac, naturally) wakes up from a cryosleep pod by the BLADE captain Elma. BLADE (short for Builders of the Legacy After the Destruction of Earth) is the military force of the new United Government. As you explore New Los Angeles, you’re given a choice of joining eight different divisions within BLADE – they aren’t worth going over one by one, but they all serve different functions like scouting Mira, subjugating monsters, arms manufacturing researchers, etc. Each one provides a different perk (Pathfinders, for example, have slowly regenerating HP during combat) but your faction doesn’t change the plot. I think I chose the Curator Division (essentially trailblazers) because I loved exploring the world of the first Xenoblade. While Miiverse sadly shut down in 2017, the servers of Xenoblade X are surprisingly still alive and kicking. There was some Miiverse tie-in called BLADE Reports, but I can’t really comment on them since, well, you know.

Anyway, on the subject of exploration, the maps of X focus more on openness, and you have five continents to explore as opposed to the linearly progressed but open world of the first game. On top of the New Los Angeles hub, X includes all the necessary clichés: the plains, forest, desert, tundra, and volcanic region. Not to say these weren’t also used in the original Xenoblade, but they felt deliberately designed and fun to explore. X’s continents are alright, but they don’t have much sticking power after you’re done playing.

As a BLADE operative, your overarching goal is finding and securing the Lifehold, a pod that contains the majority of the White Whale’s citizens. Shortly into the game you learn that everyone in New Los Angeles is actually an android with their consciousness transferred from the Lifehold, which contains their real bodies. Keeping this in mind, the stakes feel relatively low. The Lifehold only has so much backup power (which, for some reason, is displayed on a stock market-esque ticker in the middle of New Los Angeles, as a sort of memento mori warning I guess), so it’s urgent you find it. That being said, death isn’t a big issue since humans are able to put their consciousness into machines. At one point in the plot a character dies, and they treat it with a forced gravitas that’s kind of laughable. If you die you can just upgrade to the Gigachad model anyway.

Not that death matters much anyway, as the characters are paper-thin. I don’t know if I would call the first Xenoblade’s cast well-written or particularly interesting, but they were likeable enough (and I enjoyed the plot enough to overlook their shortcomings). With X, I found some cutscenes exhausting. Lin in particular became very annoying. Her face looks like partially melted Play-Doh, and her trite dialog (which jumps from energetic to wistfully melancholic) just made me wish her real body would suffer from a sudden brain aneurysm. Elma is alright, but she’s mostly a hardass who stands around observing the plot unfolding while saying ominous things that suggest she knows than she lets on. Tatsu, part of the Nopon race from the first Xenoblade, is meant to be the comic relief. Much of the “humor” comes from Lin attempting to cook Tatsu alive, but Tatsu doesn’t really do anything overtly obnoxious, so Lin’s threats (which are delivered with utmost sincerity) feel more like a sadistic urge to torture a sentient being. Perhaps I’m reading too hard into it.

The main cast revolves around the player character, Elma, Lin, and Tatsu (who is unplayable). There’s a supporting cast of mostly forgettable side characters that just kind of stand around and pop up when the plot says they should, with the exception of one guy who ends up becoming a traitor. The Ganglion race (along with the allied Prone aliens), have no other goal than to do a lil’ genocide. The first Xenoblade may have had you fighting swarms of mindless robots, but at least there’s some backstory to them that slowly unravels and reveals their motives (along with the unsavory secrets the humans were keeping). The enemies of X are just savage aliens who want to kill humanity because, hey, why not. I thought early on they would cast the aliens in some sort of anti-colonial light, retaliating against some human atrocities that would be revealed over the course of the story. The reason is explained near the end, but it falls flat. I suppose I shouldn’t spoil too much, but X’s plot has zero pay-off.

But the gameplay is the main draw right? X still uses the same sort of single player auto-attack MMO combat of its predecessor (with auto-healing after each battle), but there are a few tweaks that make it, in my opinion, superior to the combat of the first Xenoblade. Fighting enemies that are five levels higher than you no longer makes all your attacks miss. You still have to be careful – often I got too cocky only to get my ass handed to me – but with enough strategy you can outsmart, at best, enemies seven or eight levels higher than you, so long as you attempt them solo and the enemy isn’t already powerful. I generally enjoyed Xenoblade’s combat, but the arbitrary level gating of enemies was a puzzlingly bad design choice (unless the evasion stat just scaled in a really weird way and they didn’t fix it), so I’m glad the staff, intentionally or not, fixed it. X’s other improvement is its flexibility: you start in a default class that can change into three base classes, and each of these classes branch into two variations of the first class, with each branch having its own upgrade. That probably wasn’t the most eloquent way to put it. I’ll just post the class tree:


https://i.imgur.com/yPBoMre.png



When you reach level 10 of a certain class you can advance to the next class. Each level (which has a gauge unique to experience points) either grants you a new art or passive improvement skill. Each class has a certain combination of projectile/melee weapon you’re allowed to use, but somehow I found myself still being able to use dual guns/blades no matter the class. Maybe because I mastered the class that uses dual blades and guns, I’m not sure. You can’t play as different party members as you could in the first Xenoblade, but this didn’t really matter as the other characters are just fixed to a certain playable class.

Instead of Xenoblade’s skill system (that’s hard to explain on paper and is best looked up on a wiki or my previous review, for those interested), X lets you invest battle points into both skills and arts. Battle points gain slowly over time, but you can grind for them by exploring artifacts on the world map. Each artifact has a level up to five in the category of either biological, mechanical, or archaeological skills. These skills tie into your BLADE level, which grows when you complete missions. When your BLADE level increases, you can invest one point into any of the skills (up to five I think). Each BLADE level also allows you to update your barracks with new customization options (which is admittedly pretty cool).

Your barracks, located near the entrance of New Los Angeles, is where you can scout for online NPCs similar to the Pawn system of the excellent Dragon’s Dogma. Unlike DD, you can only summon characters that are your level or lower, and scouts only last 30 minutes before disappearing. No coasting on level 87 pawns your friends made! Elma and Lin are almost always meant to be in your party as you can’t accept quests without them, but outside of main story quests you’re free to change your four partners. I recommend always using Lin and Elma, with the fourth slot holding one of the NPC characters you can bring along. Initially I always had a scout occupying my fourth party slot, until learning that you need to have certain affinity levels with other NPCs to be able to take “heart-to-heart” moments, some of which are prerequisites for starting new mainline quests. The only way to increase you affinity with a character is fight in combat with them a lot, or complete side quests with them. So if you need a three-heart affinity with someone who’s level one, that’s probably gonna require an hour and a half of combat. There are heart-to-heart quest markers strewn across the map, which normally act as “substories” in the Yakuza games: You’re given a small story and dilemma, have to find X item or talk to X person X times, complete the story and get your reward. Regular quests are posted on a billboard near your barracks, and these are of the “collect X album, slay X enemy, kill X” kind. That’s all well and good but the actual rewards for these quests are pitiful. One hundred experience points is near worthless if you can earn, like, 300 exp off a single enemy. Same also goes with the credits (money) earned; though not quite as miniscule as exp, your salary usually far outweighs what you can make in that same amount of time. Salaries are earned every twenty-to-forty minutes (it appeared to be randomized) and depend on how much you do the Gamepad minigame.

The map of Mira is shown on the gamepad’s screen (or the “FrontierNav, as the game calls it), divided into hexagonal tiles. While exploring the world you come across FN sites, which can be probed for either research (your main source of revenue) or resources (which can be used to develop new gear, or just sold for moderate profit.) The time of day is only changeable from FN sites, which is an oddly bad design choice, given how you could change the time at any point in the first Xenoblade. Mining gives you a resource called Miranium, which is used for investing in different arms manufactures to make new items available in the shop (I found that a little odd, like you’re investing in Raytheon as a game mechanic). Later, when you unlock your Skell, Miranium is also used to refuel it (I’ll get to more on the Skell mechanics later). Anyway, while exploring a hexagon on the map, an FN site may show up. Once you reclaim it you’ll be able to choose what to extract from it. If you change the screen on the gamepad you’ll see a whole network of FN sites you’ve uncovered and can change the probe from there. (Some sites require a higher mechanical skill to use, so I suggest dumping all your BLADE upgrades into the mechanical stat to save you any potential headaches.) The whole FN site does add a neat idling aspect to the game (even if it makes the Gamepad screen a bit cumbersome to navigate). How much you gain is based on how craftily you’ve placed your probes, as each tile has differing amounts of revenue/mineral/Miranium and some tiles link to increase the effect of probes. All of this is fine in and of itself (I thought the SeeD salary mechanic in Final Fantasy VIII was really cool), but it also leads to what makes the endgame dreadfully tedious. Trust me. I’ll get to that later as well.

Much of the difficulty from X derives from the high-level enemies sprinkled throughout the map. Some mind their own business, but others are highly aggro-able. Whether or not this is a conscious design decision (I get the feeling it is), I thought it was kind of neat. Perhaps they take this too far – one quest basically required you to slowly chip through enemies individually if you couldn’t sneak by them, and even when roaming freely I suffered several deaths by the hands of ‘roided out enemies. This becomes somewhat less of a problem when you have access to Skells.

The flying combat mechs, dubbed Skells, were one of the major selling points of X. There’s a depressing dearth of mecha open world games, so Monolith Soft took it upon them to remedy this problem. Flying the Skell is incredibly fun, and it opens up a wealth of previously inaccessible areas to explore. It’s only then you start to feel appreciation for the verticality of the map, with secluded valleys, mountaintops, floating islands, and more. While I may have complained about the lack of originality in map designs, I will concede that they put thought into it than copypasting plains. Flying around the map is easy and intuitive, and the most satisfying feature X has to offer.

Here lies the problem: you get your Skell license thirty hours into gameplay at best, then you have to play another ten or so hours to upgrade the jump module into a flying module. I won’t hyperbolize – this isn’t nearly as frustrating as the thirty hours it took to have full control of your party in Final Fantasy XIII or anything like that – but it does feel like a tease to lock the Skell up so long, only to require more time to be able to fly. Maybe some will appreciate the delayed gratification, since Skells probably wouldn’t be as cool if you had access to them at the start. Still, 30+ hours? That’s a long time to dangle a carrot over the player’s head. What’s more, it’s not until I got the Skell that I started to get interested in the map. It’s just not nearly as exciting on ground given your limited means of exploration.

Even if a mech game sucks, like Daemon X Machina or the latter-day Armored Cores, you can usually fall back on the absurd amount of mech customization, be it stat-wise or (mostly in my case) aesthetic. Skells fumble when it comes to feeling like products of your own creation. A Skells’ stats depend solely on the weapons and parts it uses, and the parts you choose (arms, legs, etc) are only dependent on the Skell frame you’re using. This means weapons and armor colors are the only Skell parts you can customize. This may not bother most people, and honestly it really isn’t a big deal, but I was really looking forward to making a sick Skell, and I probably would have invested a few hours overall fine-tuning it.

Grievances aside, Skells are great. I haven’t played Xenoblade 2 yet (which I need to blast through before 3 comes out) but the lack of mechs is a serious bummer. There are several large enemies roaming the map that can kick your ass even if you’re over their level (naturally, these are often the enemies that have high aggro). These enemies are usually meant to be fought in Skells. Their HP and attack are usually inflated, but in turn Skells also have a large amount of health and an array of powerful arts. Your Skells’ arts are dependent on the gears you have equipped to its frame, meaning raw stats aren’t always so important (usually) if the art itself good and has a reasonable cooldown time.

Other than the way arts are set, Skell combat handles much similar to ground combat. Your Skell stats are independent of your base stats, but you still have similar gameplay with the same auto-attacking and cooldown, same positioning, (mostly) same kind of overdrive, etc. It’s much more fun than on-ground combat by sheer virtue of piloting a mech. Maybe I’ve watched too much Gundam and Evangelion.

X's soundtrack takes a large detour from the incredible OST of its predecessor. The first soundtrack was a collaboration of the ACE+ in-house soundteam (themselves game music vets), Yoko Shimomura (whose pedigree includes the Kingdom Hearts series, Super Mario RPG, and Street Fighter II), Manami Kiyota, and one song by Yasunora Mitsuda (which isn’t much, but it's still very balls-out to attach his name to the soundtrack). I think Xenoblade carved its place in the canon of JRPG soundtracks. Perhaps it’s not as iconic as FFVII, Chrono Cross/Trigger, Persona 3/4/5 (depending on one's preference), etc., but easily a third-tier classic, comfortably seated with the likes of Grandia at the lunch table. With two variations on a theme for each area (day & nights), to multiple bangers, calming ambiance, and just good ol' fashion toe-tappers, Xenoblade flexed its musical chops.

Strip Xenoblade of 90% of its good songs, add a bunch of boring cinematic white noise, and keep all of the buttrock tracks but make them worse - that's the Xenoblade X soundtrack. It's probably the third or fourth thing I dislike the most about the game, were I to rank them. I understand it may hold ironic value to some; it does indeed take some kind of inspiration to pen lyrics like "Hello? Is this thing on? Am I all alone? Is anyone there? I need a bigger gun", but I wasn't feeling it all. X can't fire on all cylinders like Metal Gear Rising, so it ends up feeling a bit limp. I can easily remember several tracks from the original Xenoblade, but other than the battle theme (which you'll hear for like 40 hours combined) the music of X eludes me. I'm sure if I heard some these tracks decontextualized I could go, “Oh, okay, this is pretty nice”, but it barely made an impression in its own context.

Xenoblade X really likes roadblacking your progress for no reason. Some storyline quests have prerequisites you need to meet before playing. Recommended level? No, you BETTER grind your ass to level 30 to take on this mission. Free exploration? No, you HAVE to explore this much of a continent to proceed. Fun party composition? No, you HAVE to have Lin and Elma in your party at all times during story quests. There were a few instances where I ended up doing 30 minutes, if not more, of dull sidequests just because the story mission felt like it. I think the last JRPG I played that had such venomous contempt for my time was Breath of Fire III…

…Which is quite baffling, considering Xenoblade X doesn't need any padding at all. You could shave off ten hours of filler and still have a solid 70 hour playthrough. They may have taken the "single-player MMO" shtick too far in this regard. I think the first 95% of X is quite decent. Despite my grievances, I found myself running around the continents and exploring them outside of quests for extended periods of time. I was leaning on giving Xenoblade X a soft seal of approval. Then I got to the endgame and found myself in a downward spiral of anger, tedium, depression, and mostly just undiluted hatred. Xenoblade Chronicles X has one of the worst endgames I've encountered in a JRPG; certainly the worst I've bothered to endure.

If I just dropped it or forgot about X right before beating it (a bad habit of mine), then maybe I would be singing a different tune. But there was something compelling me to see the madness to its end. The general goodwill the game built up throughout the first 70-odd hours was nearly destroyed by an annoying boss fight that really magnifies every flaw the game has.

After you get near the end of the game, new Skell frames are unlocked. That said, they’re all unspeakably expensive and require mountains of BLADE salary to even consider affording. I, sadly, was not hoarding money up to this point, so my pocket change was almost negligible. No problem, I thought, those are probably just Skells meant for the postgame content. Terrible mistake. The final battle of the game has four stages, and unless you have, I assume, the perfect build, you’ll have to drop money on one of the most expensive Skells in the game. Keep in mind my salary was around 75k every thirty minutes. The Skell I ended up using to beat the game was something like 4.4 million credits. I crunched the numbers, and assuming I started out with no money, this Skell would require a little over 29 hours of waiting for my salary.

I was able to sell my old Skell for a decent chunk of change, but I still had several hours of idling waiting for me. I thought maybe over time I could slightly boost my income by doing quests on the side, but this was before I crunched the numbers to see how long I needed, so that was twenty hours of grinding wasted. What’s more, I was unaware that your Skells’ stats are completely independent of your character level, so other than the brief moments I had to fight on foot, my grinding was in vain. I put a rubber band on my analog sticks to walk in a circle and idled for money while I slept. I can't say I'm proud to admit it, but I stopped caring well beyond that point. When I beat the game with a 115 hour playtime (≥25 of those hours probably spent walking in circles while I went about my day) and the credits rolled, I understood the closing monologue of American Psycho: "I want no one to escape, but even after admitting this, there is no catharsis [...] No new knowledge can be extracted from my gaming. This cutscene has meant nothing..."

If you lose your Skell, you have to pay for a replacement. You get three “insurance” tickets per Skell that waive off the replacement fee. Once you run out of tickets, you get hit with absurd money sinks. The Skell I used to beat the game had a replacement fee of over 300k (thankfully, your partners have infinite insurance). That’s a few hours of salary gone to waste. You can’t pay for the fee automatically though. You have to go back to your barracks to replace it, meaning you’re Skell-less in the meantime. This is only a minor annoyance usually (I would just save often and reset the game if I didn’t have insurance), but when you’re up against the final boss you can’t fast travel or save. This means if you lose your Skell at any point of the four phases, other than the very last battle (which forces you to fight on-foot), then you’re screwed. I had to reset the game if my Skell was destroyed and start the entire three battles over again (on top of waiting for the game to boot and cutscenes to load and [thankfully] skip).

The lock-on feature of X is completely broken. We’ve had, what, 25 years of Z-targeting and some games still struggle with locking on to enemies. If you want to lock on you have to be facing your enemy until the game registers it and allows you to zone in. I’m mentioning this so late into my review because, guess what, the final boss has multiple targets to kill. The boss summons robo-orbs periodically in the first two battles which buff the boss and attack you and your teammates. It’s a complete nightmare to navigate through. You can give orders to your teammates to gang up on whoever you’re targeting, which is almost always the best option, but once the target is killed they forget the order and just attack whatever’s closest. Even worse, your allies don’t have the foresight to abandon their Skells when they’re almost destroyed. They don’t die with the Skell, but as I explained before, you still probably have to reset the game in that case. You’re fighting an incredibly bad (almost broken) boss on top of babysitting your teammates and monitoring Skell health carefully. I have a newfound appreciation for Final Fantasy XII’s Gambit system.

In retrospect some of these issues were on my behalf, but I was still in a state of ultra-seethe while I was trying to finish the endgame. Those mental scars may fully heal. This goddamn game, I thought, has taken up so much of life that there’s no way I can leave it unfinished. But at this point I’m calm. I was going to give Xenoblade a scathing thumb down, but now I don’t think that wouldn’t be particularly fair. It’s a flawed but decent game that collapses in on itself at the end. If you’re okay with leaving it uncompleted, I think it’s worth it if you like the other Xenoblade games. Hell, maybe if you save up the entire game, getting the last Skell won’t be much of an issue. If you don’t, X may give you an aneurysm. Tread carefully, my friends.
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I was really excited for this game having played the very brilliant Xenoblade Chronicles, and so the promise of a massive open world and flying mechs seemed too good to be true. But alas, the game is out and Monolith Soft has delivered on their promises with some pretty mixed results. Mira is a massive and incredibly beautiful planet, each of it's five continents are unique and a blast to explore. This is one of the most visually stunning games I've played this year even if the WiiU's tech is being pushed to it's absolute limits. And sure; the pop-in is pretty rough, and the frame rate tends to drop frequently; but honestly Fallout 4 and Assassin's Creed Syndicate aren't a whole lot better. The flora and fauna of Mira are incredibly well designed with lots of diversity in enemy types and locations. The game runs relatively smoothly and I've never experienced any slow-down in combat (even with all of the mechs and giant foes). Obtaining a Skell license and unlocking the flight module are two very big milestones for this game that come way too late in the game given how prominently they were featured in the game's marketing materials. But the skells do feel fairly cool to use once you do come around to them.

Let's talk about the narrative; this game's narrative is both shorter and less character driven than in the first Xenoblade Chronicles. I can't think of a single likable and interesting character from this game period. And your own avatar is essentially a lifeless vessel that never talks outside of combat. The voice acting work is poor and the script can be painfully corny at times (such is the fate of most localised games). I really like the themes of isolation on an unknown alien planet, scrambling desperately to save the human race from extinction, and creating diplomacy between yourself and other cool alien races. But it's honestly a hard sell when I'm bored to tears by the performances and alien races. I got a kick out of the adorably hilarious Ma'Non people (despite the HORRIBLE vocal effects used for them) and I was so delighted to see the Nopon race make a come back (even if Tatsu is an annoying Riki wannabe). The villains in this game were mega lame and totally one dimensional, I don't even remember their names for f***'s sakes.

This game has way too much going on in terms of micro-managing, it can actually be quite intimidating if you don't take your time and read the instructions carefully (like... you pretty much need to spend a solid 30 minutes reading through this game's 50 page manual!). Thankfully I was very familiar with the combat system which has stayed relatively untouched since the last game, except for making health regeneration more confusing. Things get a bit heavy when you start getting into combat arts, skills, field skills, choosing classes, class ranks, choosing divisions, choosing squads, choosing data probes, choosing soul voices, and creating augments for your weapons/armour/Skell equipment.... yeah it's a lot to wrap your head around and most of it's complexity is pretty needless tbh. There's a different array of missions in this game as well, like I said earlier there aren't too many story missions to plough through so to supplement for that there are "Affinity Missions" that are just as "cinematic" as story missions but focus instead on inter-character relationships. Most of these missions fell flat because these characters are so uninteresting to begin with, and a lot of the party members you unlock are straight up a**holes who I'd never want to have in my party anyway! There are also tons of "basic missions" that are more along the lines of standard fetch quests and bounties, pretty good EXP boosters but nothing you'd actually have any fun doing...

Perhaps my biggest complaint with the game is it's cruel habit of asking you to find certain items in the world (for the purposes of completing a mission) WITHOUT TELLING YOU WHERE THE GOSH DANG ITEMS ARE! This world is freaking huge!!! I don't have time to run around aimlessly for hours looking for this s***! I actually had to look this stuff up online which is perhaps the biggest sign of a game not doing it's job properly. Unlike the previous game; party members don't level up unless you're directly using them in your current roster which is a pain since certain missions require specific characters that you'd really have no use for otherwise. And finding party members is a hassle too because in order for you to equip them you have to speak to them in-game instead of using a menu, so it's needlessly time consuming AND they constantly move around in the hub area depending on the time of day so I didn't even know where to find them half the time... Oh yeah and this game also has a terrible and corny soundtrack too which is tragic considering how wonderful the last game's soundtrack was. There's a lot to do in this game and places to explore, things to unlock; this game kept me pretty busy despite it's MANY flaws, and for that I give it a little bit of mercy. Try this game out ONLY if you're crazy for JRPGs, otherwise this game is pretty lame.
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gasolinekisses ゼノブレイドクロス 2024-03-21T11:19:08Z
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Raising_Heart Xenoblade Chronicles X 2024-02-29T09:31:05Z
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CERO: C
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  • Previous comments (17) Loading...
  • Molten_ 2022-11-27 12:10:54.288506+00
    the majora's mask of xenoblade. this will probably be higher rated than the original in 5~ years.
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  • Aurochz 2022-12-03 01:42:03.652573+00
    I remember the visuals of this being uncharacteristically bad even for the Wii U, but I only played through it once and it was years ago now.
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  • Turton 2022-12-04 03:26:36.918912+00
    definitely a lot cooler in retrospect after getting proper sequels to Xenoblade
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  • ... 2022-12-07 01:40:13.777098+00
    the majora's mask of xenoblade [2]
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  • polarbearpatrol 2023-06-26 17:01:46.603609+00
    Best open world level design ever, especially Noctilum. It’s no wonder the Zelda team poached Monolith Soft’s best level designers for BotW and TotK
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  • jdcomix 2023-10-19 12:50:39.771923+00
    The fact that this game will forever be trapped on the Wii U is such a shame
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    • jdcomix 2023-11-03 02:26:32.84666+00
      Desperately hoping for a sequel
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