Xenoblade Chronicles X (Wii U) Review

Xenoblade Chronicles X is a daunting, overwhelming, awe-inspiring beast to talk about, but after spending nearly four-hundred hours with the game across nearly four months, I feel like I need to say something. It is a gargantuan time-sink of a game…but was that time worth it? Mechanically, X is every bit a continuation of Monolith Soft’s previous game on the Wii, Xenoblade Chronicles, but the title of this game is also a bit misleading, and not just because X lacks a direct narrative connection to the first game. Chiefly, the soul of this Xenoblade is entirely different from its predecessor. While Xenoblade Chronicles felt like a JRPG with some western RPG elements mixed in, Xenoblade Chronicles X feels like the opposite. The differences between the two games run deeper than that and in many ways the two titles have a very different “feel” from each other, but that’s the basics. At its worst, Xenoblade Chronicles X is perhaps the most tedious and frustrating game I’ve ever played, but at its best, it is a beautiful and engrossing odyssey.

There’s still a central narrative in X, but it’s not the focus anymore. The premise here is compelling: the earth is destroyed by alien forces and humanity’s last survivors are forced to flee to the cosmos on colossal spaceship arks (a la WALL-E), one of which known as the White Whale eventually crash lands on an alien planet known as Mira. Basically this is all just an excuse to have a huge open world to explore and about a billion quests to undertake, most of which are doled out by the citizens of New Los Angeles (NLA for short), which was the White Whale’s “habitat unit” that was converted into Mira’s first human city. Instead of banding together with a small group of characters and heading out on a big adventure, traversing a sequence of new locations plot point to plot point, the main narrative is doled out in a handful of “story missions” which are all accepted from the same room in NLA. X sets the player free almost from the very start and the main story is essentially just another string of quests to undertake. Taken just on its own, the main story isn’t actually all that lengthy and since it has to fit a lot in its relatively brief time in the spotlight, certain aspects like character development often suffer, especially when it comes to the largely one-dimensional villains. In a game that stars a silent avatar protagonist, a lot of the weight falls to the supporting cast to pick up the slack and while characters like Elma, Lin, and Commander Vandham all do their best to bring some personality to the table, don’t expect much complicated interpersonal drama, at least until the very end.

*skip the next paragraph to avoid some nonspecific story spoilerage*

The narrative shows promise and contains several strong themes ranging from interracial harmony to the nature of consciousness, but it ultimately fails to live up to its potential, especially since the story ends on not one, but two cliffhangers, and leaves an uncountable number of plot points unresolved or completely unaddressed (even very major ones). This isn’t the kind of thing where a few lingering mysteries were left open, but rather the story is simply grossly incomplete and pockmarked with copious gaping holes. After spending so much time with the game, one might think this would have been quite frustrating to me, but it was more just baffling and I was so weary and exhausted I suppose I was just glad I had reached some kind of conclusion with the story. All the same, it is still a bit irritating because the game is ultimately called “Xenoblade Chronicles X” and not “Xenoblade Chronicles X: Episode 1” which is very much what it feels like in the end. I’m not sure what Xeno series creator Tetsuya Takahashi has planned, but I would have rather this story be wrapped up in one game. After investing so much of my life in X, I’m not exactly frothing at the mouth for more Xenoblade or more of this game’s particular universe at the moment.

Alas, like I said, the main storyline isn’t the focus here though, and it’s certainly not what I feel is easily this game’s main draw. Predictably, my favorite aspect of Xenoblade X was also my favorite part of the original Xenoblade: its world. In a word, the world of Mira is incredible, and it’s hard not to be swept away by its majesty on a very frequent basis. Roaming around these vast landscapes, if only to see what new wondrous sights I could uncover, was undoubtedly the greatest pleasure of my very long experience with X. Mira isn’t as overall interesting as the Bionis and Mechonis from Xenoblade, but it still stopped me in my tracks time and time again with its often staggering sense of scale, beautiful vistas, and imaginative locations. This is what I call a “screenshot game”, where my experience was frequently interrupted by the irresistible urge to capture a sight and save it to Miiverse. It’s like when I go on vacation in real life and am torn between simply wanting to enjoy a captivating sight with my own eyes or whip out my camera and capture the moment forever. Mira isn’t without its problems though. When I first set foot in Primordia, the game’s starting continent, I truly felt a sense of awe at the scope and possibility of the world, but after spending enough time with the game, the world begins to not feel quite as organic as I would like. The game’s five continents are all clearly delineated zones that all mostly adhere to one central theme (plains, forest, desert…you get it), and are even color-coordinated on the map. And while I’m usually the first to chastise the creative bankruptcy that these oh so classic video game staples sometimes represent, to simply dismiss these places as cliché would be doing this world a massive disservice. Yes, Noctilum is the “forest zone” but it’s freakin’ gorgeous, intricately and intelligently-designed, and contains a varied landscape full of interesting places to discover and marvel at (Noctilum’s my fave by the way). The vast space of each continent holds many different smaller regions full of unique flora and fauna, landmarks, and sights, so I’d never call these environments boring. Also, one of the game’s five major continents doesn’t follow any established tropes at all and is really something quite alien and unique, which I was very happy to see. Despite all this, at the end of the day, the game essentially still boils down to just five main areas that generally follow one theme and play the same musical track throughout almost their entire scope, and I find myself missing the huge variety of areas and music tracks from the first game (which, for the record, were also huge spaces in their own right).  

While the game’s art isn’t quite as vibrant as its predecessor, it has a style that often succeeds on its own merits, though it’s a bit hit and miss. While wide-open spaces truly shine, certain locations such as caves look dull and gray and don’t do the muted color palette any favors. One of my favorite aspects of the presentation is the multitude of weather effects, some unique to certain regions, which range from the usual rainstorms to floating blue particles and ruby-red auroras that can truly transform environments into something entirely different. When you’re caught in one of these unique phenomena while in the midst of a wide-open space, this is where the world truly becomes something stunning. I think Mira as a world is at its best when it demonstrates just how alien a place it can be, with its bizarre flora and fauna and multiple moons and strange structures looming in the distance, and the unique weather patterns often crank this otherworldliness up in surprising and delightful ways. Despite some questionably blurry textures here and there, some egregious texture and object pop-in especially when an area first loads (at least if you don’t have the space to download all of the game’s optional high-speed loading packs like me; although I did at least install the basic pack), and some occasional framerate stuttering, the game is quite impressive tech-wise and like its predecessor is quite an accomplishment given that it runs and looks as good as it does on an “underpowered” console like the Wii U. Ultimately, I defy anyone not to stop and marvel at that gigantic ring in Oblivia the first time they see it looming in the distance, and that’s really what this game is all about.

Mechanically, I actually found myself enjoying Xenoblade X more than its predecessor. I got a kick out of the battle system not only because of the satisfying, flashy attacks, but largely because of the game’s new class system. I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed having a customizable avatar in this game. I have little to no experience with western RPGs so this aspect was largely new to me and I found it quite fun getting attached to and building up a character that was all my own, even if I do miss having a developed character like Shulk front and center. Where the avatar concept carries over into battle is in the form of a new class system where several different combat-style routes can be selected, complete with different weapons and arts (i.e. special attacks). It feels satisfying to fully level up a class and even better to master an entire discipline, but more importantly being able to transition from one style to another and experiment with a wide variety of weapons and arts, all with the same character, kept battles from getting too repetitive and encouraged me to experiment with different arts and combat styles. Battles felt like they had a purpose besides just raising base stats, and I was always excited to learn new arts and try them out. Best of all, once a discipline is fully mastered, one can mix and match weapons and arts from different classes to customize a battle style that works for them and I found this to be very rewarding. Because of all this, I found myself appreciating the fast-paced, active system that Monolith Soft has crafted much more in X than the original. Ultimately, I still prefer turn-based battles or at least being able to have full control over all my party members (I’m not sure the AI in this game has any idea what it’s doing) or alternatively full-on active combat instead of this hybrid, but battles felt like less of a chore to me than in the first game. Plus, you can do front-flippy attacks with a lightsaber!

That said, I still have some serious grievances with the battle system in X. Due to the nature of every battle taking place in real-time in whatever location you happen to encounter an enemy in, occasionally the way a foe moves combined with the local terrain can create some seriously annoying situations. My “favorite” is when an enemy is positioned right next to cliff, where often either I or the enemy would get knocked off the side. I often wouldn’t care to chase after them, but the battle would still continue because the enemy was still close enough, and they would even still be able to continue attacking me even through walls, which brings me to my next problem. Evading enemies in Xenoblade X was frequently one of the most infuriating parts of the experience. If an enemy spots you and you don’t feel like fighting it, get ready to run about three-thousand miles away from it, wasting enormous amounts of time and throwing a massive wrench into one’s enjoyment of exploration. As I already said, my favorite part of this game is exploring, but the developers went out of their way to make enjoying the world of Mira as difficult as possible sometimes. High-level enemies are frequently peppered in scenic locations where sometimes I simply wanted to enjoy the view and don’t even get me started on certain enemies like the machines known as “Zigs” that spot you from miles away, often blindsiding you and pelting you with gunfire from some high vantage point that you can barely reach in time before the thing has halved your HP. Best of all are enemies that inexplicably aggro the player through walls and ceilings. It’s all often cheap, incredibly annoying, and really put a damper on exploration and my enjoyment of the experience overall (or at least on what I personally valued most about the experience). I understand that Mira is supposed to be a dangerous place and sometimes accidentally angering some enormous monstrosity is part of the fun, but I remember the original Xenoblade finding a much better balance between simply letting me enjoy exploration and throwing creatures at me every five seconds. As a quick side note, another element that soured the fun of exploration is the “field skill” mechanic, which frequently locks the player out of opening treasure boxes that they put in the effort to reach (and even out of expanding the visible map on the GamePad) if they haven’t met an arbitrary number requirement. I probably found every single treasure in the world, but wasn’t able to open a good number of them because of this BS, and the developers must be joking if they think I’m going to re-explore the whole goddamn planet to go back and open the ones I was forced to leave behind.

Beyond these irritations, while I found ground combat to be engaging, I quickly tired of Skell combat, which felt shallow and dull by comparison. Skells are the giant mechs that one is eventually able to pilot in Xenoblade X. You know, the thing on the cover and one of the main reasons a lot of people probably bought this game. The problem here is that all the time and effort put into building up one’s ground combat arts and skills doesn’t carry over to Skells, which come with largely a whole new set of rules. Gone is the branching class system and all of the arts you’ve worked to learn and you’re stuck with a set of Skell-specific “weapon arts” that are simply bought and equipped instead of earned. I suppose this makes sense, but it was frustrating having to learn a whole new set of battle mechanics about halfway through the game. Now I want to make it clear that it’s possible I’m just bad, but Skell combat usually amounted to me just spamming arts and hoping for the best; it just didn’t seem to have the same nuance as ground combat. What’s more, Skell combat was usually extremely stressful for me since dying in a Skell carries far more weight to it than dying on foot. Skells have limited insurance and will cost money to repair after it runs out (unless you have a certain special item, which I never received). Skells also run on limited fuel and while they can make short work of some enemies, other foes quickly tear through them. All of these hang-ups plus the dull battles themselves simply made me avoid Skell combat when I could, and I almost always felt more comfortable fighting on the ground. Still, I admit it’s pretty damn satisfying to completely trash certain enemies that gave me a lot of grief earlier in the game with a souped-up Skell.

Mechanics outside of combat are varied and mostly very competent. I love the slew of customization options of certain elements like how much of the HUD one wants to display, as well as the great degree of control one has over the camera, which is immensely important in this game. Control while moving about the world also feels great and your character has a welcome sprint option as well as a very powerful jump. There’s also no fall damage. All of this makes running and leaping around Mira a blast (again, when you’re not being harassed by obnoxious enemies that blindside you every two minutes). While I don’t dig Skells in battle, I adore them outside of it. The moment when I first got my Skell license and took my affectionately and cheesily named “Skelly” out for a spin in the wild was gloriously freeing and exhilarating. It also felt very earned (in other words, zero complaints here about not having a Skell right at the start; there are enough damn mechanics to learn anyway without Skells). This was all before I obtained the Skell flight module much later, which opens up the massive world completely and gives the player an exuberant and nearly boundless sense of freedom. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever played an RPG or an adventure game with such a great sense of freedom as this one. There are also several other neat features like an expansive, multi-tiered map system that makes great use of the GamePad in the similar kind of subtle but very helpful way that the The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker HD does.

While I think the mechanics of Xenoblade X have largely been even more streamlined than its predecessor, the game can also be a bit much. Ok, that’s a massive understatement. Xenoblade X has more mechanics, menus, concepts, and elements than any other game I’ve ever played, even though the bare essentials of what you actually do in the game usually boil down to one of three things: exploring, fighting, or collecting. While the first Xenoblade featured very brief text tutorials every time a new mechanic was introduced (with more expansive optional ones if you needed them), X has stripped all of that away, barring the occasional text blurb simply letting you know when a new aspect of the game is unlocked. While I appreciate the game’s dedication to giving the player freedom, this is actually a game that really needed some hand-holding. All you have for help is the game’s electronic manual, which even one-hundred hours into the game I still found myself studying like I was training to actually pilot a robot, and the good old internet, which is absolutely required if you want to find out the obtuse measures required to get many of the game’s quests to appear and things of that nature. There are whole areas of this game that I purposely completely ignored for a long time in the game because it was just too overwhelming to try to understand everything all at once, and several aspects I simply never bothered to grasp at all. This is a game that needs a preliminary briefer or a special guidebook or something, not just to teach everything, but to give advice on how to best approach this monster of a game that can easily smother the less prepared. If you’re reading this and thinking about playing the game, here’s my personal advice: don’t try to do or learn everything all at once or else you’re likely going to get burnt out and overwhelmed very easily. Also, after learning the ins and outs and getting somewhat of a handle on the experience, I would set some clear goals for your time with the game and try to stay focused, less you risk getting…distracted (unless you want to get distracted and fall down the seemingly endless hole of missions and tasks available to you in the game, but say goodbye to your year if that’s the case). I haven’t played any western RPGs and I don’t play MMOs (though I have played a lot of other JRPGs), but from my own estimation this game can be immensely, egregiously smothering at times with all of the junk it piles on your plate, and my playtime with it far exceeded what I ever would have expected and definitely what it ever should have.

When it comes down to it, I feel like the experience of Xenoblade X is split into two sides. First is the side where you’re out exploring the alien landscapes of Mira, fighting enemies, and discovering new places. This is definitely the side of the game I enjoyed the most. The other side is the time spent in New Los Angeles, the game’s only true city and essentially its central hub. If I’m going to talk about Xenoblade Chronicles X properly, than I need to talk about NLA, which is simultaneously one of my favorite and least favorite aspects of the game. First, the good. NLA essentially takes the concept of Colony 6 from the original Xenoblade, a “home base” of sorts that is gradually built up and becomes more lively and populated as the game goes on, and puts it front and center. Whereas rebuilding Colony 6 was an entirely optional side-quest in one corner of the original’s world, NLA is much more at the forefront of the experience. Over the course of the game, if one takes the time to do the necessary quests, NLA eventually becomes a cosmic exchange of different cultures and peoples. One of the thematic cornerstones of X, as it was in the first game and I’m guessing in many of the games Takahashi has worked on, is the idea of many different races and peoples coexisting and working together towards a common goal, and many of the quests and NPC dialogue in the game deals with issues like racism and the challenges that arise from many different kinds of people living together. One could say that NLA is basically just a not-so-subtle metaphor for the USA. While I think the ability to physically build new buildings and places in NLA a la Colony 6 is a missed opportunity (and the city’s unfinished and “under construction” nature seems perfectly suited for it too so I suspect this is something that was scrapped because the game is too damn big already), one of the best parts of NLA is eventually inviting more and more new alien races to populate the city, all of which have their own quirks and cultures to bring to the table. Skip to the next paragraph to avoid some minor to major spoilers here (depending on your definition), but my favorites include the Orphe, a race that is described in the game as being insect-like, but they just look like a cross between the Chozo and Luminoth from the Metroid series to me, that are connected via a spiritual force known as the “Ovah”, and the Wrothians, a proud lion-like race of warriors that start out serving the main antagonistic force in the game but will defect to your side at the end of a series of quests.

I have to give massive props to both the game’s original Japanese writers and its English localization team; the script is absolutely massive, from minute descriptions to every collectible found in the game to the changing dialogue blurbs for even the most insignificant of NPCs to of course all of the text featured in the game’s countless quests. NLA is a bustling, lively city, and if you take the time to look and to converse with its people, almost every single character, even the ones without names, has a story. There’s seriously a random guy who sits on a bench for the whole game outside NLA’s cathedral and if you take the time to overhear his muttering, you’ll realize that he actually has a character arc of sorts. It’s absurd, and only one example of many. The dialogue is mostly competently written as well, giving personality and mannerisms to every character and often being very amusing. The varied citizenship of NLA’s collective story is fleshed out throughout the game’s numerous missions (which by habit I’ve been calling “quests”), most of which are doled out in the city itself but also can be found from the occasional wanderer out in the world, and it is here in a sense where I feel the true story of Xenoblade X lies.

While almost every mission amounts to some combination of exploring, fighting, and collecting, the true worth of a mission for me was mainly based on how interesting of a story it told. And you know what? I’m actually struggling to think of a truly boring tale here. Sure, some missions at first feel like a total bust, but even those ones usually tie into a more interesting story later on. That doesn’t mean that the tasks you are required to do during missions are always stimulating however. Emotional boss battles at the end of a particularly long and weighty series of quests are great, but spending hours grinding the same weak enemies to get ‘X’ number of some randomly-dropped material? Not so much. This game truly delights in wasting the player’s time sometimes. I appreciate that quests are actually separated into three categories (besides Story Missions), with Affinity Missions being fully voice-acted and on paper the most substantial, Normal Missions essentially being just a step below those, fairly involved but not voice-acted, and finally Basic Missions, which are your standard “kill ‘X’ number of enemies” or “collect ‘X’ number of items” (my advice? Stay as far the hell away from the “gathering” Basic Missions as possible, at least until late in the game or unless you have a guide that tells you exactly where to find the game’s randomly scattered collectibles, but even then they are simply a waste of time). I said Affinity Missions are the most substantial “on paper” because it was actually in the various Normal Missions that I found the most memorable stories, from solving a murder mystery to deciding the fate of an entire species with a few decisions to taking down an entire alien criminal faction that is behind many of the problems the citizens of NLA face.

Despite me enjoying many of the game’s missions, there was often a disconnect between myself and the game’s internal narrative. Sometimes it was hard for me to feel like a hero in this game when my mission often involved slaughtering innocent wildlife that is “a threat” or otherwise milking the wonders of Mira for frivolous human gain (“harvest some antlers from these peaceful, majestic deer creatures that look like the Forest God from Princess Mononoke”…yeah, er, no thanks…). With this in mind, it’s a bit ironic that New LA of all places crashed into Mira, potentially infecting it with human pollution and decimation just like Earth. One concerned NPC worries about these kinds of things over the course of the game, at least, but otherwise none of this is addressed in the narrative. Also, it was extremely silly when I would kill five creatures for some quest to make things “safer” and the same five creatures would just respawn in the exact same place the next time I visited; even more jarring is the fact that the optional “Tyrant” bosses that are supposed to be unique beings and even have unique names also respawn. These factors made my efforts in these regards feel laughably pointless from a contextual perspective.

NLA essentially has most of the ingredients of a great video game town to me: I love the idea of a “home” in an RPG or a place to go back to after adventuring; a place to relax that is bustling with varied people that is “built up” over the course of the game. On paper, NLA is basically all this, but it has some issues that hold it back for me; one very unfortunate one in particular. First off, I appreciate how NLA’s more banal and Earth-like nature contrasts with the outside world of Mira. It’s truly a bizarre experience to go from wandering around plains filled with gigantic dinosaur creatures and massive trees that look like coral to a casual stroll through the suburbs of NLA. I understand that NLA is largely boring on purpose or at least “ordinary” on purpose…but it’s still largely boring. The varied alien races that eventually populate it add a lot of life to the place and certain areas like Armory Alley would look perfectly at home in a cyberpunk metropolis, but it’s just such a gray, dull place compared to the rest of Mira, and whenever I spent any length of time there, I often craved the outside world again. It’s also just a huge place filled with a daunting number of people to keep track of and talk to and that’s not even taking into consideration different people for day and night, so exploring it and trying to see it all and keep track of everything can be overwhelming. But this is all beside the point, because the biggest problem with NLA is its goddamn background music.

I find the music in NLA to be incredibly, immensely, unforgivably irritating, both the day and night themes, but mostly the track that plays during the day (ONE TWO THREE FOUR!), and it makes spending time there not only uncomfortable but often a downright loathed experience. Both daytime and nighttime tracks suffer from largely the same problems, so for simplicity’s sake, I’m going to focus on the daytime track, which is the bigger offender to me anyway. It’s the kind of song that wasn’t so bad when I first heard it, it has a charm to it I admit, and when the mood strikes me is even quite catchy and enjoyable…for about five minutes. The problem is that it is an absolutely awful choice for the BGM of the main city in a massive RPG due to it being a rather short song for one designed to loop over and over again, an irritating repetitive beat that thrums in my brain cells like a jackhammer, and intrusive, extremely obnoxious vocals. Everything about it demands one’s attention, so when I’m trying to concentrate on talking to the dozens upon dozens of NPCs in the town, or scrolling through the streams and streams of equipment at the shop, I can barely concentrate on what I’m reading or decide what I should buy or equip because some hyperactive lady is screaming nonsense into my ears (WHOA OH OHHHH!!!). It’s sort of like trying to read a book while listening to loud pop music, and hey maybe that’s your thing, but I could never get past a single page. I didn’t care for it to begin with, so I suppose it goes without saying that the song had zero lasting appeal to me and the more and more the game wore on and the more time I spent in NLA, the more the incessant drum beating and obnoxious vocals began to drive me mad (I CAN’T HEAR YOU! I CAN’T SEE YOU!). I make such a big deal out of this because it is a big deal. NLA is the game’s only city, it is the beating heart of the game’s world; you will spend a lot of time there, buying equipment, talking to people, taking on quests, etc. I could tell that the game really wanted me to form an attachment to this place…but that music, man. It made me often detest my time in NLA and that’s a shame, because in concept I love NLA. Music (and sound overall) is massively important to me in RPGs/adventure games and in most video games at large. It sets a tone; it often sets the mood of a place or an entire game. And for me anyway, a song that I just can’t stand listening to can be detrimental to an experience. It would have been nice if the music dynamically changed in each NLA zone a la Skyloft and the bazaar in The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword or the shops in Splatoon, taking away or adding instruments to give a certain feel to each district. This may have at least helped to keep the music from getting too stale and would have, quite frankly, been a perfect fit here. Since Nintendo helped make this game, I’m surprised this wasn’t the case, as they are known for often implementing this kind of sound direction in their first-party games.

This of course all brings me to the game’s soundtrack overall and my opinion on the subject is mixed, to say the least. On the one hand, the music that plays in the five main continents of Mira, as well as when traversing the ocean in-between them, is pretty great. While X’s composer Hiroyuki Sawano definitely has a certain style, there’s still a fair amount of variety to these themes, and they all fit their respective environments well, and feature nighttime and daytime variants as the original Xenoblade’s areas did. Additionally, the battle music, which features several different boss tracks as well as a few standard battle tracks, walks the line between being embarrassingly campy and heart-pumpingly exhilarating when the moment is just right. A track like this one kicking in at just the right moment will make you feel like the anime hero you’ve always dreamed of being. There are also otherwise some wonderfully atmospheric tracks as well as some poignantly emotional ones that perfectly suit the environment or situation they play in. Despite these accolades, unfortunately the music in Xenoblade X on the whole just doesn’t quite hit the sweet spot for me. It’s a bit difficult to pinpoint the exact reason, but I think it’s a combination of repetitive songs, annoying songs (or at least songs that can get very annoying), and simply not enough musical variety when exploring. Whatever the case, I found myself tiring of most of the game’s tracks rather quickly. While I loved each continent theme the first time I heard it, they perhaps aren’t complex or rich enough to hold up over the hours and hours spent wandering around these massive places (or perhaps the fact that such a weighty burden falls to them in the first place is actually the problem). The music that plays in the continent of Sylvalum is a perfect example; I thought the nighttime theme here was simply entrancing when I first heard it, but thirty hours later it just became repetitive background noise most of the time and eventually its predictable melodies even started to get on my nerves. In addition, a few songs either aren’t quite fitting, very repetitive, or are incredibly overused and get extremely tiring after the thousandth time hearing them (the cave music, sadly, fits all three of these requirements). I don’t think Sawano is a bad composer (definitely not), but it’s telling to me that he has almost no experience composing for a video game. In anime, TV shows, and movies, Sawano’s usual stage, songs don’t stand to be listened to on repeat over and over again, but are specifically composed for certain moments or types of moments. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I often felt that the songs that worked the best in X were the situational ones that play in certain “events” like cutscenes or other specific moments. Video game music is an entirely different art than the scores of anime or movies, and in my opinion the composers of the original Xenoblade Chronicles were a master of that art.

The area themes in Xenoblade Chronicles are complex and layered tracks; take Gaur Plains for example. I could listen to this song all day and never get tired of it; it ebbs and flows and is layered with various overlapping melodies. Similarly, no matter how much time I spent in Colony 9 or Frontier Village, I never tired of their background tracks, and only grew to love them more and love the locations more because of them. This is in stark contrast to the ear-slamming chorus of NLA’s BGM that made me want to beat my head against a wall sometimes. That’s my other main problem with X’s soundtrack: there are a large number of tracks in it that use vocals, several of which are probably not tracks that should have such prominent vocals. I’m not saying that vocal tracks in video games are universally bad or anything, but I do think that when it comes to music that stands to be listened to on repeat for hours and hours, vocal tracks are far more likely to eventually become annoying and disruptive. When it comes to offenders like NLA’s music (daytime especially) and the Skell flying theme, this was absolutely the case for me. These songs are loud, belting, repetitive choruses of nonsensical lyrics that literally made this game uncomfortable to experience a lot of the time. I’ve already expressed my feelings about NLA’s music in detail, but the Skell flight theme might be even worse. The first time I took to the skies in a Skell, the music was perfectly fitting and it was truly a magical moment, but after hours and hours of exploring via flight, listening to the theme constantly start and stop every time I landed somewhere and took off again, it became unbearable. The bottom line is that in a game as huge and long as Xenoblade X, the soundtrack really needed to stand up after hours and hours of play, and unfortunately some of these songs don’t even stand up after a few minutes of play. At its best, the soundtrack can be a joy to experience, but ultimately one that I don’t see leaving a lasting impression on me, but at its worst, it’s simply nauseating. To be fair, unless they retained the original team of composers, it was always going to be near-impossible for this game’s soundtrack to live up to one of my favorite video game soundtracks of all time in the original Xenoblade (a soundtrack I own and still consistently listen to…I’m listening to it right now, as I type this…), but all the same, it might not be an exaggeration to say that Xenoblade Chronicles X has my least favorite RPG soundtrack of all time. But hey, despite all my reasoning, at the end of the day music is just as subjective as anything else, so don’t get too in a huff if you love jammin’ out to that NLA theme.

On a related note, while my opinion on the soundtrack is mixed, what isn’t mixed is the rest of the game’s sound. Isn’t mixed properly anyway. …I’m trying to say that the sound mixing in Xenoblade X is absolutely terrible, and just one of many little issues that made this game uncomfortable to play much of the time. I was forced to turn subtitles on partway into my playthrough because the music blares at alarmingly high volumes during cutscenes, often drowning out all character dialogue (the fact that so many of these tracks feature vocals only compounds the issue). Even with subtitles on, cutscenes that were supposed to be impactful often fell completely flat because I often couldn’t tell if character voices were too quiet, the music was too loud, or both. Also, while the background music that plays while exploring is a reasonable volume, I often found the battle music to be far too loud and the enemy and battle sound effects at least are alarmingly loud. Just try fighting one of the game’s screeching “Mephite” creatures without cringing and making a mad fumble for the TV remote. This is the only game I’ve ever played that had me constantly having to lower and raise the volume depending on the situation (or in the case of certain tracks, like NLA’s music, the only time where I found myself lowering the volume because I couldn’t stand the music and sometimes seriously considering the mute button).

I think Xenoblade X is mostly a very good game; it’s just that after hundreds of hours, all the little problems I have with the game really started to drive a hole through my brain. Perhaps even more notable than the terrible sound mixing is the microscopic text in the game. I constantly had to lean towards my TV to read text and I know I’m not the only one that has had this problem. Between NPC dialogue and the five billion menus one has to sort through, Xenoblade X inevitably becomes an eye-straining, borderline painful experience. While on the subject, this game just has so much damn equipment and so many stats to sort through and features menus upon menus upon menus, that sometimes before I knew it, I’d have turned the game on and over two hours had passed and I had done absolutely nothing except scroll through menus, leaning towards my TV, my eyes squinting to see how much a piece of armor increased my ranged attack. The gear-switching can reach near ludicrous levels in this game and if one were to attempt to grasp every nuance of the game’s systems and attempt to defeat all of its optional bosses, I shudder to think of the time spent sorting through pages and pages of weapons, armor, augments, and attributes. I know this is all partly the nature of the game, but I’ve never played a game, not even the original Xenoblade, with just so much tedious menu scrolling. I’d be curious to see what others have to say about this aspect; I love plenty of RPGs, but maybe X’s particular flavor in this regard isn’t necessarily flawed, but simply isn’t for me.

Some other grievances: I hate how non-named NPCs’ little dialogue boxes full of itty-bitty text disappear after a short amount of time and there’s no way to prompt it to return unless you run a short distance away and back again (since I struggled to read the tiny text in one go, I frequently had to do this). Why did they get rid of the ability to change the time of day at any point (instead relegating this ability only to certain “rest spots”), which was present in the first game? I usually appreciate context in games but there’s no precedent for realism here in a game with more video-gamey, absurd elements and mechanics than I can possibly hope to count. Furthermore, I felt like the game was constantly trying to one-up itself in just how tastelessly sexualized and ludicrous the female armor and equipment is. Playing as a female avatar myself (and for the most part having an all-female party), I struggled to find practical armor that didn’t do everything it could to highlight my boobs and butt or otherwise look utterly ridiculous. Sure, some of the male armor shows some skin as well, but there’s a world of difference between having some sexy beach wear and business casual for both female and male, and combat armor being practical and protective on a man and…well, this, on a woman. Owning one’s sex appeal and dressing in a sexy way can be a positive thing, but in Xenoblade X women barely have a choice in the matter. It’s frustrating, foolish, and went a long way in making me have a hard time buying BLADE as a serious military organization and investing in the game’s world at large, which Monolith Soft wants me to believe is a serious sci-fi universe. But besides all this, female or male, why is the armor just so goddamn ugly in this game? I might be able to accept impractical armor, but this stuff is just a fashion nightmare across the board as well and I rarely, if ever, felt “cool” wearing the stuff I was wearing.

And then there are the glitches. The first major glitch I encountered involved the game soft-locking while trying to view a party member’s profile in the game’s Affinity Chart. After testing this out multiple times afterwards, it seemed to be a randomly reoccurring problem. Luckily, I didn’t lose too much time to that one, but don’t worry, because this was tame compared to what happened much later on! Oh you know, that time I spent two hours exploring a decent chunk of Sylvalum, raised my characters some levels, completed some quests and then, I shit you not, the game screen abruptly went black (GamePad screen included), a message popped up saying I was “disconnected from the server”, and the game then proceeded to load and boot me back to the title screen. I hadn’t saved. There is no auto-save. This…this is inexcusable. The Affinity Chart bug was bad enough, but the game just suddenly crashing out of the blue for an unknown reason? Especially in a game as huge and time-consuming as this one, this is not a small issue. And I know I’m not only one, as I’ve read about several others that have encountered the same exact problems I have and even several more and have had even worse, more frustrating experiences. I understand this is a big game pushing the Wii U to its limits, but the fact remains that I played Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii and never had a single issue. Perhaps a lot of these bugs come from the online component of the game and this only makes it all the more ridiculous that despite the game’s extensive UI customization options, there is not an option in-game to just play the game offline entirely (which I would do, because I barely used the online features and didn’t really care about them). Of course, you can just disconnect your console from the internet, but for some reason the developers thought it would be wise to leave you with an annoying red “OFFLINE” notification in the top-left corner of the screen in this case, that while isn’t too intrusive admittedly, is still annoying to someone who prefers to play without any on-screen HUD whatsoever. To date, there have only been two updates released for the game and they did not address any of these issues.

Some of these issues might seem like nitpicks, but over the course of my extensive playtime with Xenoblade Chronicles X, all the little problems started to become big problems, and they really do have a negative impact on the overall experience. Despite it all though, all this can’t keep X from being a good game with a lot going for it. There is so much more I haven’t even touched on with this game, or have barely given mention to, like the online component that I barely engaged with. This is simply a gargantuan game with some very positive aspects and some very negative ones. To answer my question back at the start of this, about whether or not the time I spent with this game was worth it, I would say no. But make no mistake: I’m not saying this game isn’t worth playing, because I think it is if giant open worlds to explore or complex RPGs are your thing. I merely mean that I regret spending just so much time with the game. One needs to know what they’re getting into with Xenoblade X. This is perhaps one of the few instances where I would not recommend someone go into an experience completely blind. I really think to get the best experience with this game, one should be aware of things like the glitches, that they should remember to save often, get a primer on the countless mechanics that the game never bothers to tell the player about (many of which are either barely touched on in the electronic manual or simply not even mentioned at all), that basic missions are largely a garbage waste of time, and that you shouldn’t be ashamed to look up help with how to reach certain missions online, because the mission list here is a convoluted web of obscure links and prerequisites that no one has any hope of figuring out on their own, lest they set out to do every single mission and task in the game. Early on, get a basic idea of the different things you can do in the game, dabble in all the game has to offer and decide what you most enjoy about it, set some goals and keep them. I for example most enjoyed exploring the world and even though I told myself early on that I was going to focus mainly on just that besides completion of the main story, it is all too easy to get distracted and then before you know it, over three-hundred hours have passed. On that note, I admit that I am somewhat bitter that I spent so much time on this game at the expense of, well, doing anything else.

The game has some problems, but my final word is that Xenoblade Chronicles X is a mechanically-engaging RPG with an ambitious central narrative that unfortunately isn’t nearly fleshed-out enough, but more importantly it is a huge, beautiful world to experience full of majestic sights to see and intriguing subplots that tie the whole experience together. While not as special as its predecessor (which is easily the game I prefer, if that wasn’t clear enough already), it’s a solid game on its own, just a much different kind of experience. If you plan on playing it, be prepared.

Also, you get to pilot a mech and that’s pretty cool.

The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes (3DS) Review

The first thing that stood out to me about The Legend of Zelda: Tri Force Heroes is its jubilant, catchy theme song. The second thing that stood out to me is how bland the game felt…at least at first. A charming introductory slideshow (that is par for the course with Zelda games these days) tells of Princess Styla and the fashion-savvy, glamorous kingdom of Hytopia before plopping us right in the middle of it. There’s this odd feeling of absence when starting Tri Force Heroes; there’s no build-up or set-up besides that opening slideshow, and it just feels kind of cheap. In addition, all we see of Hytopia itself is its castle and town square and right away this place just felt off to me, and not in a good way. There’s a feeling of emptiness that pervades Hytopia and the designers really made no attempt to hide the fact that this place is purely a hub and the only buildings one can enter all serve a very specific function. There are a few people scattered about, many just reused models from The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds (which normally I wouldn’t mind except unlike other Zelda titles, there is no narrative justification for these clones to be here). These recycled characters are just one of several factors that just make Tri Force Heroes feel “unreal” somehow.

Little effort was put into working the fashion theme into the game’s atmosphere as well. Only a few characters actually fit the “stylish” description of Hytopia, and outside of Madame Couture’s shop, Hytopia just doesn’t come across as the glamorous place it’s made out to be.  Like everything else in the game, the fashion motif is purely functional: it’s a mechanic, with the slimmest effort put into using it to facilitate world-building. It’s worth noting that the game contains quite a number of easter eggs and there are a decent number of little secrets to find in Hytopia if one takes the time to look, but by and large this is the blandest setting a game under the Zelda name has ever seen (except for maybe the original Four Swords). One might defend this lack of effort and Hytopia’s bare-bones nature by pointing out that Tri Force Heroes is a non-conventional, multiplayer-focused Zelda spinoff, but I would point this person in the direction of the multiplayer-centric Splatoon and the fantastic work those developers did with the lively, detailed hub of Inkopolis. Tri Force Heroes’ status as a stop-gap, filler Zelda title is just painfully obvious, and it’s disheartening to see Nintendo cut corners in a way that I have, quite frankly, never seen before.

Princess Styla and her subjects

Things get more exciting, ironically, when Link heads into the Drablands, where all the action of the game takes place. But not too exciting, because most of the locales in the Drablands are fairly generic and stock: there’s the woodlands, a volcano, a snowy mountain, etc. These places don’t even have names; the volcano isn’t called “Turtleneck Mountain” (or something), it’s literally just called “Volcano”. So actually the name “Drablands” is pretty appropriate after all. The atmosphere and look of many of these areas is very uninspired as well. The volcano is just…a bunch of lava and rocks and the desert area is just Egypt. There’s no real personality to most of it and it comes off feeling like the New Super Mario Bros. of Zelda games (it doesn’t help that there are the standard eight worlds in the game).

I tackled Tri Force Heroes first by playing online with strangers, followed by replaying all of the levels in the single-player mode. I’ll mainly be talking about my experiences online in this review, but I’ll say a few words about the solo quest at the end as well. After I ventured into the Drablands and began my journey to free Styla from a dreadful outfit she was cursed to wear, the first couple of areas went by and I found myself struggling to even remember the levels I had recently completed. Each area in the game is comprised of four “dungeons” but that word is only used on the back of the box because this game has “Zelda” in the title. These aren’t “dungeons” in any sense of the word; they are “levels” in the purest form: built, geometrically-even, linear spaces. You solve some puzzles, beat some monsters, get to the end of the straight line, and win a prize.

A basic example of cooperation in Tri Force Heroes

But here’s the thing about Tri Force Heroes: it’s not much to look at, it’s first four worlds are pretty drab, and the very bare minimum of effort was put into its world-building and narrative…but the more I played it, the more I found myself enjoying it. Tri Force Heroes ended up being a worthwhile experience for me due to its level, puzzle, and boss design being consistently strong and occasionally downright inspired, especially the bosses, and its cooperative design being very rewarding.

The more I played and struggled with countless unknown heroes, as we learned how to communicate using the basic tools the game gave us, as we failed over and over again yet persevered in spite of this and overcame a particularly trying puzzle or ferocious boss, I came to really appreciate Tri Force Heroes and what it was trying to accomplish. Even though the game’s levels are linear and basic-feeling, their design is solid throughout, and becomes a lot more interesting and creative in the later levels, featuring some clever and actually challenging puzzles that make superb use of the cooperation and teamwork elements of the game. The atmosphere and visual design of many of the later levels is also much stronger than the earlier ones. The game’s bosses across the entire experience, however, are easily the highlight of the whole game for me. I would go as far as to say that overcoming these bosses with my allies made the game worth playing all on their own. Up until A Link Between Worlds, bosses in the Zelda series had become very formulaic and by the numbers, but that 3DS gem and now Tri Force Heroes have found me actually having to think and strategize when taking on one of these giant beasts. Tri Force Heroes especially breathes new life into the tired Zelda boss structure, where three individual players, three items, and other unique mechanics like toteming (where all the Links stack up) all have to be taken into account when figuring out how to approach one of these creative boss encounters. The bosses are both puzzling and relentlessly aggressive, requiring a rigorous level of cooperation and attention; every member of the team has to be on board and has to know exactly what their role is if they’re going to stand a chance here. When, after many attempts, this level of being in sync happens and everyone works together smartly, besting a boss with my teammates in Tri Force Heroes was one of the most triumphant and exhilarating feelings I’ve ever had playing a video game.

The bosses are an exhilarating, creative, and challenging highlight

I’ve heard some decry the lack of online voice chat, but using the limited palette of emoticons in the game and finding other creative ways to communicate is one of the best parts of the game for me. In addition to the emoticons bringing a lot of personality and just being a lot of fun to play around with, trying to learn how to work together without words is a novel and ultimately gratifying challenge. That said, the limited communication can indeed lead to frustration and there were many times I found myself wishing I could just tell someone: “GO OVER THERE!”. This game is consistently challenging and can often be mercifully unforgiving. It demands that everyone cooperate and the tiny heart meter that is shared between all three Links will rapidly deplete if even one player slacks off. But even though this led to countless moments of agony and defeat, and countless replays of entire levels, like I said with the bosses, finally figuring out how to work together and ultimately triumphing is extremely gratifying and makes any prior frustration worth it. Celebrating with my comrades in a wild, hysteric maelstrom of pom pom waving and thumbing up never failed to put a huge smile on my face. This game had me moaning, cussing, smiling like a maniac, pumping my fist into the air and cheering, and finally feeling a bit melancholic when I had to say goodbye to a team that I’d made it through hell with, knowing I’d probably never encounter them again.

This is all, of course, when the damn game works properly. If you don’t care about doing the extra “Drablands Challenges” like me, Tri Force Heroes is actually a pretty short game, but the experience was extremely drawn out both by the challenging nature of coordinating with anonymous strangers (and occasionally people being uncooperative or leaving two thirds into a level) and unfortunately an abundant amount of technical issues. Awful lag, error messages, and random disconnects plagued my experience. Sometimes the lag would start as soon as I met up with other players, but occasionally it just randomly started happening after a long period of smooth play. The online is a complete wildcard: sometimes I would get two levels done in half an hour, other times it would take that long just to finally get a stable game going. My worst experience in the game came when I had made it through the entire final world with an awesome team and just as the final boss was starting the game decided to inexplicably start lagging after over an hour of stable play before crashing and scattering two allies I had built up a level of camaraderie and affection for to the ether. If I was a less patient person (and hadn’t spent $35 on it), I would have given up on the game probably before I reached the halfway point. I should note that my experience playing online was done before Nintendo released an update for the game in early December, which in addition to adding a new area and some new outfits also tweaks some other aspects of the experience, including possibly a better online performance, but I’m not sure.

A look at toteming and the emoticons

Something else that annoyed me about the online experience in Tri Force Heroes is the way that levels are selected while in the Drablands. After deciding which area to visit, a player is matched up with other players in a lobby and then all three players vote for which of the four stages in an area they want to play. The winner is selected via a random roulette. I can understand why such a system was implemented, but I hate it. As someone who just wanted to push through the main story and had no intention of wasting time grinding for materials to make costumes, I found myself constantly having to leave a session and reconnect due to a level I’d already finished getting picked. I felt bad ending the game for everyone as soon as it started, but I simply had no choice, lest I waste fifteen minutes or more of my time. The other reason I don’t like this system is because it throws the game’s pacing off. I hated when I was forced to play the fourth level and fight the end boss of each world before completing most of the other levels in that world; it just felt so backwards. Because the levels can be played out of order, it makes everything feel very disconnected, and along with the linearity and boxed-in levels, Tri Force Heroes just doesn’t feel very much like an adventure.

After completing all the levels online, I tried out the Coliseum mode as well as tackled the single-player adventure. In single-player, two lifeless, disturbing dolls known as “Doppels” take the place of human players and all three characters must be manipulated by a single player (Link literally switches his soul between three vessels). This turns Tri Force Heroes into quite a different game that at times I found to be much easier because I could take things at my own pace and only had one Link to worry about, and at other times to be simply infuriating because of certain parts that all but demand there to be three separate Links running around. I don’t think the single-player is terrible; it’s just fairly boring and feels like a chore. This game’s personality, for me, mainly came from the countless people I met online, the silly emoticons, the failures and triumphs shared with complete strangers, and like the Doppels themselves, single-player feels very notably lifeless by comparison. In addition, aspects that are absolutely brilliant in multiplayer like the bosses are far less exciting and noteworthy in single-player. It’s worth trying but can also just be safely avoided; definitely play the multiplayer first and foremost in any case. There’s also the Coliseum, a multiplayer battle arena mode where two or three players can simply duel to the death on eight different maps based on the game’s eight different worlds. I didn’t expect much going into it, but I played it for about an hour online and actually ended up having a surprising amount of fun with it. It’s simple and nothing special, but it’s nice that it’s there and could be a fun way to have a few laughs with some friends.

Link and Doppels

There are plenty of other aspects I haven’t really touched on with Tri Force Heroes. I didn’t really mention the soundtrack, which while not exceptional still has a few standout tracks and goes a long way in giving the game an identity where many other aspects of it lack one. Also, even though the game’s world-building is overall pretty poor and its narrative bare-bones, the game does have shades of untapped potential and a few characters and moments I really enjoyed that could have been something truly great if the game was given more time to blossom (for example, I really like the villain, but she’s criminally underutilized). Lastly, I didn’t really talk about the outfit mechanic, which is a large part of the game that mostly works well and also adds a good amount of charm to the experience. The bottom line is that when the game works, Tri Force Heroes works very well, and cooperating and triumphing with anonymous teammates is a wonderful feeling. Conquering challenges together only to part ways at the end of it all led to a very memorable experience and I found myself feeling sentimental as the credits rolled. Tri Force Heroes as a game and concept has a ton of potential that it doesn’t fully live up to, but I still overall enjoyed the experience quite a bit despite all its problems, more than I expected to anyway.

The Beautiful Bliss That is Mario Kart 8

I am not a Mario Kart fan. I had a lot of fun playing Mario Kart: Double Dash!! with friends back in the day and Mario Kart DS was a welcome companion when I was sick one time, but otherwise my experience with the series is limited and I’ve never harbored the fond attachment to it that many seem to have. I wasn’t even going to get Mario Kart 8 and was more than ready to write it off as just another installment in one of Nintendo’s redundant “cash cow franchises”, but I was lured in by its glossy exterior and the hype surrounding it. I do not regret my weakness for a microsecond. I love Mario Kart 8. Like, I really love it. I was playing it recently and in the middle of a race, I just started thinking about how I couldn’t believe how good this game is. The impeccable visual polish and sheer joy my eyes and brain receive from looking at this game and seeing it in motion, the ultra-refined mechanics and control, the energetic orchestrated soundtrack…this is an unbelievably delightful experience.

Mario Kart 8 is not only my favorite Mario Kart game but very likely my favorite racing game of all time. Granted, I’ve never been huge into racing games but I’ve still played and enjoyed a decent handful over the years. I think what I really love about Mario Kart 8 is that the focus is on mastering its slick racing mechanics; nailing drifts, ebbing and flowing through each winding turn, and coming out on top if you play each gorgeous track with skill. The other “Mario Kart-ish” elements of the game, chiefly items, mix things up a bit and throw an interesting curveball into the racing action, but they don’t seem to be the focus in MK8. Mario Kart 8 is a slick and speedy racing experience first and foremost. Turtle shells and banana peels are merely complementary factors here. Some people might hate this. I love it.

I love MK8 for its tight, no, perfect mechanics and sublime sense of control, not only over my kart racer but over the race itself. I don’t think I’ve ever played another game with a more fluid, exhilarating, and joyous sense of movement. I lean with each turn in particularly intense races, and I can almost feel each drift and boost. While it can be stressful at times, and this is all part of the fun, it also becomes a Zen-like trance of an experience when I get into the zone, zipping and zooming along as my heart thumps and my fingers pivot as I flow through each track. It’s pure wonder.

I often harp on about how mechanics and gameplay are not the one most important element of a video game experience and how I’ve gotten more and more frustrated over the years as Nintendo increasingly sacrifices other creative elements in the name of placing “gameplay” on a holy pedestal. While I absolutely still stand by these sentiments, I’ve also never said that mechanics, gameplay, “game feel”…or whatever you want to call it isn’t important in many experiences, and damn when Nintendo nail it they really nail it. An expertly-crafted gameplay system like the one in Mario Kart 8 can be a moving experience to behold all on its own, but this perfect feel ties in with a game that is stunning to look at, one of the most richly vibrant and beautiful I’ve ever played. Its environments are as imaginative as they are detailed as they explode with color and personality.  It is candy for the eyes in every way. No, that’s not good enough. It’s a dessert at a high-class restaurant for your retinas. And the music. It’s jazzy and jubilant and magical. Just listen to this. And this. And this! All of this ties together in a splendid ribbon that is simply euphoric.

Call this a late review for Mario Kart 8 (though if you’re looking for critique, look elsewhere), call it whatever. I’ve recently gone back to the game after not playing it for a while to finish up some Grand Prix stuff I hadn’t done yet (mainly 200cc, which is a surprisingly excellent addition that is wildly wacky and exhilarating) and as I once again raced across the slick rainbow roads of the Mushroom World as Rosalina on her speedy Jet Bike, I reflected on how much I love this experience. I never expected this title to become one of my favorite Nintendo games of all time, and just games in general. It is genuine, delightful surprise. I love this video game and I’m telling you, if you haven’t experienced it yet, find some way to nestle your hands into a Wii U GamePad and feel the beautiful bliss that is Mario Kart 8.

Three Big Problems with Super Mario Maker

As I stated in my last post, I love Super Mario Maker. I’ve had a ton of fun imagining and creating new worlds for Mario to explore myself, and tons of other brilliant individuals have dreamed up fabulous creations I never thought would be possible in this game. It’s a blast to create and play and perhaps most importantly of all, it’s easy to use. I have bountiful praise for the game, but…

It has some problems. Three glaring ones in my opinion. Now, there are a lot of things Nintendo could add to the game via DLC and updates, and sure, plenty of other elements from the Super Mario series have been left out. I could go on and on about how I’d love to see slopes be here, other power-ups, new music, new level themes, etc. etc. There are also a lot of element combinations that I wish would work in the game, but don’t. But in all honesty, I think what the package has right now is pretty great; I’ve managed to find quite a lot of versatility with the available material myself, other people have already been creating truly inspiring things with what’s here, and there’s also still so much more potential just with what the game currently offers. The three big problems I want to address are not so much about adding more stuff, but are what I feel to be glaring issues that detract from the experience in a very notable way. It’s frustrating when such a beautiful thing as Super Mario Maker is held back by just a handful of glaring issues that could possibly be remedied. So enough preamble; here are three big problems I have with Super Mario Maker, in order from least problematic to most:

3.) No Checkpoints

        

There is nothing more frustrating than making my way through a really special level that someone created, only to make a stupid mistake three quarters of the way through it and have to restart all the way back at the beginning. Some levels benefit from having no checkpoints. One might want to make a highly difficult trial and error level meant to be learned and practiced that delivers high satisfaction when one finally conquers it all in one go. But other levels that aren’t going for high difficulty, but merely invite players to explore and experience them at their own pace suffer greatly from the lack of checkpoints. It kills my enthusiasm for a great level of this kind when I have to start back at the beginning and speed through the earlier bits to get back to where I had died. From a creator’s perspective, the levels I tend to mostly make myself are meant to be thematic adventures that tell a story of sorts. Sometimes, I wouldn’t mind adding some amount of difficulty, but adding any difficulty at all is a risk because I often don’t want players to have to redo the whole thing (or worse, just give up when they die). With this in mind, I’ve had to either pepper my levels with a sizable amount of power-ups or otherwise pay extra careful attention to their position and number. The lack of checkpoints is such a glaring omission and I can’t imagine that it’s simply an oversight. There has to either be a technical limitation at work here (I can’t think of one, but then again I’m not a programmer) or it was fully possible but a conscious decision was made to not have them. If it’s the latter, then it is an astoundingly poor decision.

2.) The Level Sharing System

So, I already covered my sorrows as a Mario course designer in my previous post, where I tried to get across some of my frustrations with the game’s course sharing system, so check that post out for the “introduction” to this problem. I’d like to elaborate a bit further here and also provide some potential solutions. In addition to talented creators going unnoticed, I think many of them were at a disadvantage to begin with if they didn’t upload a course immediately after the game released, or if they didn’t somehow attain a copy early. Many of the top creators and top levels are from reviewers and other people who got the game early and therefore were at an extreme advantage from the get go. I’ve heard that the servers that critics experienced the game on are different than the servers the public currently use, but at the same it certainly seems like a great number of people either somehow got the game a few days early with the current servers or had levels ready to upload immediately that they had previously created and saved. Since these creators had their levels on the server right at go, they had no problem raking in the stars and being able to upload as many levels as they desired from day one. If these creators made an “automatic level” or “remake level”, it wouldn’t really matter if it was really great or not, it was bound to get a lot of stars and plays because it was the only thing available. And since these creators received so much popularity early on, they got on the charts and stayed there because most people naturally look at the levels with the most stars first, and then these levels receive even more stars and so on. I find this to be unfair to people who got a later foot in the door and whose levels are massively overshadowed by the people already at the forefront of the star ranking page, since many people will simply only play the highest-ranked levels, or other levels by those same creators. I suppose this was natural, and I’m not sure how it could be helped, but it just seems unfair to me. Many of these early popular courses are good, but some also just seemed to get ahead of the curve and in retrospect pale in comparison to what people are managing to do with the game now. It’s not really fair to creators who pour their soul into a level and it simply gets ignored because they didn’t have it uploaded at midnight when the game launched.

Mainly, however, I find the search options and organization of Course World (where all uploaded levels go to live and die) very lacking. There are only three main categories for searching for courses, and I’m still unsure of how the “Featured” courses column even works. There’s a sizable amount of courses in these three lists, but they’re only a small taste of the vast universe of courses out there. You can sort courses in these three categories by regional and global and difficulty, but how about some actual, detailed filtering options? Like searching for courses by game style or level template? How about highlighting a handful of courses each day or each week or something, courses that aren’t getting mega numbers but are gaining some traction and could use a boost? Plenty of outlets online are doing this kind of thing, and Nintendo recently started doing this themselves on Mario Maker’s official website, but it would be really great if there was something like this built into the actual game. Also, while you can look at a list of top-ranked creators and your own followed creators, there's no option to simply look up a creator by name, which would also be appreciated.

There’s a lot more that could be done here and clearly more needs to be done because people like me and thousands of others just aren’t getting noticed or played, and therefore are held back by the strict upload limitation and devious star system. While on the subject, it would also be great if the star requirements for uploading more levels was less strict. Look, obviously I think my levels are pretty decent, but even if you disagree, I mean I’m not making total crap here. I’ve poured over 150 hours into the game over the course of a month. I think I can safely say my levels were at least made with effort. It’s just very frustrating that I paid $60 for this game and have given it so much of my time, yet there’s still Nanny Nintendo wagging their finger at me and telling me I can only upload 20 courses.

1.) Asset Limits

Originally, this was number two and the sharing system was number one, but the more I played the game and the more and more I had to sigh and scale back or limit my levels in some way because of the seemingly arbitrary limits on how many given elements can be placed in a course, the more I realized that this is easily my biggest problem with the game. This was the aspect I was worried about the most before the game released, about whether or not there would be an “object limit” to courses (I was thinking of the “weight limit” in the Super Smash Bros. series stage creators and praying something like that wouldn’t be here) so naturally my heart sank the first time I placed a block and heard that “Nope, no more!” buzzer sound. While I was certainly disappointed, at first I didn’t think it was that big of a deal as it still seemed like I could place a hefty amount of objects before the game yelled at me, but the more effort and ambition I put into my levels, the more frequently it happened, and this is when I began to get sad. The bigger I dreamed, the more my dreams were stifled. At this point, I’ve had to scale back or limit almost all of my levels in some way and I’ve reached the object limit, in both the main and sub-area, on almost every level I’ve created. This game just doesn’t seem to be designed for the type of levels I want to create, which is levels with a visual consistency and that are large in scope and theme. I’m not saying that limitations of any kind are universally a bad thing; I’ve had a ton of fun working with the limited palette of elements the game provides to see how I can, for example, make a car, a toilet, and a detailed haunted village. I’ve also had fun seeing how other people get around these limitations as well and being inspired by what they’ve managed to achieve. But there should be no limits on the amount of assets you can use in a level creator, or if there is a limit, it should be so generous that one never needs to realistically worry about it. This kind of limitation stifles creativity, plain and simple.

Ideally, courses themselves could be bigger, more than one sub-area could be created, there would be the option to turn off the time limit completely (consider that my unofficial fourth biggest problem with the game, by the way), etc., but I could get over all that if I could just place as many objects as I wanted in the amount of space they’ve given me. This extends to being able to have as many warp pipes as I want, warp doors as I want, enemies as I want, etc. It’d also be nice to be able to make a warp pipe that can transport Mario to the same level instead of a sub-level or conversely a warp door that can warp to a sub-level instead of just the same level. But maybe these latter requests are getting too ambitious. If so, fine, I can even live with these limitations, but I can’t get over the limit on the amount of placeable blocks and enemies/other assets. If you haven’t gotten deep into level creation in Mario Maker, it’s likely you have no idea what I’m going on about here or at least why it’s such a big deal, but I’m guessing those that have put a fair amount of ambition into creating levels know exactly what I’m talking about. Like with checkpoints, I find it hard to believe that there’s a technical limitation at work here on a modern HD console like the Wii U, and so assuming there isn’t one and the developers really did just arbitrarily make these limitations, that’s just asinine. This game’s tagline should be “If you can dream it, you can make it”, but right now at least, that’s hardly the case.

So those are my three big problems with the otherwise terrific Super Mario Maker. I’ve still managed to get a large amount of satisfaction out of both creating and playing levels despite these big drawbacks, but it would be wonderful if some or all of these issues were addressed in future patches and updates. If that were to happen, this game would truly begin to live up to its full potential and achieve true greatness.