Xenoblade Chronicles

Xenoblade Chronicles is one of those paradoxical classics where critical reception is through the roof but I've never known anyone who's played the game in real life. I definitely can see why people adore this game, and why the movement to get it localized in America was so intense, because it is overall an interesting experience with a unique premise as a game set on the bodies of huge dead gods. A concept that out-there for role-playing games in 2010 was like the ultimate mystery box, which certainly helped its mystique as this nearly forgotten classic. After spending 80 hours with XC1, I will say firsthand that I don't really get the "classic" talk so much, unless you tend to grade JRPGs on a curve in the polish and narrative departments. There is a lot of content here, and most of it strays in the no-man's land of mediocrity, with some notable exceptions in both directions. This is a huge game, so I apologize in advance for my proportionately huge response. Just in case -

TL;DR: Xenoblade Chronicles is a good but not great video game that pads its length constantly and aspires to be just too much like MMOs that your time playing it feels unproductive. Top-notch presentation, a ridiculous sum of content, and a unique premise do just enough to make it a positive experience overall.

Let's get the first thing you'll notice out of the way first: XC1 is nothing short of a complete technical marvel for the Wii, with absolutely enormous environments and some of the longest draw distances in any game I have ever played. The screenshots of vast landscapes to explore and fight various alien-looking beasts throughout were no doubt the largest part of the initial hype for the game. The levels you'll traverse all take place on the overgrown corpses of two gods, Bionis and Mechonis, who killed each other at the same time, their blades creating bridges between the two bodies. The former's body spawned flourishing organic life while the latter churns out hyper-advanced autonomous machinery, with its interior looking like a demented Tick Tock Clock. Nearly every area in the game has a stunning vista of the giants from a new perspective, giving cohesion to the world and making your journey feel like it's amounted to actual progress as you slowly scale the titans. To boot, each region has distinct forms of intelligent life that fill out the JRPG tropes you might expect for the time (fragile winged mages, hardy but dumb human-types, and the tricky cute Moogle-y guys), with large numbers of each race in the hubworlds and towns. The Nopon Village in the forest stood out to me as a highlight - the building was the carved-out inside of a massive tree with 9 interconnected floors packed with HUNDREDS of bustling little Nopon with quests, stories, and items for sale... shit, there was even a pool on the roof. The scope of the world is staggering and you'll spend hours just walking around trying to visit each place and talk to each person. Most people who live in their villages have never left them, and the distance between each civilization is so vast that when you encounter other people on your travels, it feels welcoming. You'll encounter lonely, blizzarding mountains, huge mechanical towers, a series of floating islands mapping a graph over a crystalline sea, a lush forest filled with life both friendly and not, and luminescent marshes lit by the exotic wildife that found their homes there. In all, the level presentation and layout is a treat, and some of the best I've seen in any JRPG, and the technical wizardry needed to achieve it must be commended.

Exploring these areas is a treat, too, thanks to some small but refreshing tweaks to the standard RPG formula. First, and most importantly, there are no random encounters to speak of, and because the size of the enemies can range from insects and small mammals to behemoths, you'll be able to visually affirm dangerous threats from afar and make physical routes around them to avoid their attention. The game is not at all afraid to zone off areas with enemies that are way above your weight class, so you have to pick and choose your fights. While some parts of the stages bottleneck you into encounters, a majority of them are optional, to an extent. Xenoblade also has a really great take on the regeneration of your party's "vitals" - your health regenerates quickly when you're not in combat, making each fight feel insular and dynamic, and a complete lack of consumable items throughout the entire game means zero item management as you trek across the landscape. Is this less interesting than carefully managing use of your valued potions? Maybe, but many avoid the most useful finite resources in any game just out of preservationist habit, so Xenoblade's approach cuts out some non-decisions from the player in favor of a system that makes it very easy to go out and accomplish what you need to do in the environment. Additionally, all character "arts" (AKA abilities and magic) are tied to in-battle cooldowns that start pre-filled at the beginning of each encounter, so it feels like you're fighting at full strength every time.

What you actually do in these environments is unfortunately tied to the restrictive set of gameplay actions Xenoblade gets out of its systems. Almost 80% of the game's content or more is tied to side-quests that encourage you to explore the environments beyond the story-related waypoint on your map, but the major quest types are very limited. You can hunt down a bunch of a certain beast, hunt down a larger, particularly nasty beast, farm items that only certain enemies drop, farm items that are found as glowing little RNG-based collectibles (which is especially tedious as it's completely random), seek out a unique glowing collectible hidden somewhere around the area, or talk to other people to settle some kind of conflict (which usually comes with some of the aforementioned types as a subquest task). Outside of the big game quests and the hidden-item quests, the incredibly limited nature of what you'll be actively working toward at any given time gets old pretty fast, with those two exceptions permitted as they promote deep exploration of the environment and defogging the map. If something isn't tied to a quest, though, it's a fair question to ask what the point of it is, because there are hundred and hundreds of quests to do. For example, there are a couple secret environments that exist simply to be a cool view or the area; from a utilitarian standpoint, this might be filler stuff, but I think it's easier to argue those little glimpses of content-for-its-own-sake as more passionate game design than chopping up 10 wolves for 1000G. Also worth noting that NPCs have a day-night cycle of whether they are even spawned in the environment, and without waypoints back to the quest giver, it's a pain in the fucking ass to find anyone, especially if you have trouble putting the name to the face. Thankfully, a majority of the quests autocomplete at their conclusion, giving you the rewards instantly without need to track down the client, which is at least an attempt at solving that issue.

From a subjective standpoint, I mostly like the aesthetic direction of the game as well. The world continuity being the bodies of two dead gods makes many of the locales feel integrated and interesting, and you get a really consistent feeling of being a completely insignificant being in a world much larger than you, which I personally found compelling. The levels are on the whole very beautiful, with a couple feeling like generic fantasy settings. The main characters and their armor are all completely over-the-top and overly techy, but in a very endearing late-00s way that I can't help but feel fits the absurdity of the premise. The music is composed by the legendary Yoko Shimomura along with a small in-house team, but many of the pieces tried to fit the grandeur of their huge associated environments and failed, in my opinion. In comparison to Yoko's other work with Kingdom Hearts and the Mario RPGs, many pieces feel fantasy-generic or overly melodramatic. Thankfully, a majority of the music is good to great and this is more a nitpick because I adore most of her work.

Now to the meat of it - I think Xenoblade Chronicles is about 40 hours longer than it should have been, and it makes a staggering number of poor design decisions along the way that makes normal progression feel like a grind. In short: the combat system is fairly undynamic with very few ways to create interesting strategies outside of passive stuff like putting gems on armor and weapons; the story is a completely ridiculous revenge quest for upwards of 35 hours and ends in an unsatisfying way that could have been remedied immediately by simply having Fiora kidnapped to start the game instead of being "killed," to have a better motivation to fight the Mechon besides going full Anakin-on-the-sand-people, AND would have made the reveal that she is alive and working for the bad guys ten times less stupid and groan-worthy, and after those 35 hours the plot turns to standard save-the-world-and-unite-the-races schlock that Shulk seems somewhat uninterested in; the sidequests are fetch quest filler outside of around 25% of them that feel somewhat organic, and to boot these side quests are strongly recommended as without them you will be underleveled and broke; enemies that are only 2 levels stronger than you will often completely wipe the floor with your party, so there's a weird exponential scaling happening somewhere in the balancing; there are a myriad of throw-in systems meant to waste your time, such as crafting gems with gem parts in a stupidly long animation, or a full day-night "schedule" for the thousand NPCs in this game that makes it near impossible to find the person you're looking for; the fucking pointless item carrying capacity that does nothing but irritate everyone; the extensive emphasis on item collection via fighting and exploration is made tedious and arbitrary without a proper beastiary or any application for collectibles besides selling them or gathering them for a quest; and finally, towards the endgame, not being able to control the entire party or change their tendencies like in Dragon Age starts to feel grating as the CPU-controlled characters get steadily less useful.

To sum it up, this game does not feel good to play around the time you hit the Nopon village, at which point the sunken cost fallacy has already settled in and you will begrudgingly see the game through to its conclusion anyway. XC1 is a flawed game with JUST enough modern tweaks on the JRPG formula and stuff to do to still recommend, somewhat. The foundation is here to make something very special and large in scope, so I hope the sequels have more to offer and less mess to parse through.