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.

Mario and Luigi: Dream Team (3DS) Review

To preface this review, I just want to say that I love RPGs. Some, hell, most of my very favorite experiences in gaming have come from RPGs or action RPGs. A good RPG with a great atmosphere, engaging story, interesting characters, and solid gameplay has won me over time and time again. To make things more relevant to this review, the original title in the Mario and Luigi series, Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga for the Game Boy Advance, is one of my favorite games of all time, and maybe even my favorite of the nine current Mario RPG games. So when I say that Mario and Luigi: Dream Team is just kind of boring, it's not because "I'm just not into RPGs".

Mario and Luigi: Dream Team is a polished game. It looks great, it sounds great, and it plays great. It also has a really interesting concept: using a sleeping Luigi as a conduit to dive into various "dream worlds" as the brothers explore an island that was once the home of a kingdom of pillow-headed people known as "Pi'illos" (still pronounced just like "pillow" though...I think). All of the components are in place for a truly imaginative experience and a memorable RPG. There's just one problem: the game just isn't that captivating.

But let praise be given where it is due. The gameplay is tight and responsive; Dream Team uses the same sort of turn-based, contextual action-focused battle system that all of the previous Mario RPGs have employed where timing certain button presses can both deal more damage to enemies when using attacks and also allow Mario and Luigi to avoid the attacks of their foes. It feels very satisfying to pull off attacks and every sound effect and cue in battle just feels good. The feeling of impact when you jump on an enemy, the satisfaction in getting an "Excellent" when successfully pulling off a stronger attack with precise timing and execution; it's all very gratifying. The game is also very pretty, presenting a colorful world built from an interesting mix of 3D environments and 2D character sprites. Some of the character artwork is really impressive, especially on some of the larger characters in the game, which possess an impressive amount of detail and personality. The animation on all the different characters and monsters in the game is also top-notch. The soundtrack is high quality as well, with series and RPG veteran composer Yoko Shimomura returning to compose the tunes. Each track fits its environment well, and there are several stand-outs, such as all the battle themes (the standard battle theme which doubles as the main theme of the game is one of the reasons I was persuaded to pick the game up; it's just so dang catchy), and several of the area themes, chiefly those of Somnom Woods and Dreamy Somnom Woods, are very pleasing to the ears and fit their environment perfectly. Although some of the music does begin to get repetitive after a while and I found myself getting sick of a lot of the tracks in the areas that tended to drag on a bit too long (this might be more the game's fault than the music's though...more on that later).

The game also has some genuinely great moments. Most of the boss battles are a lot of fun and there are some regions on Pi'illo Island that stand out much more than others. I got a lot of enjoyment out of exploring the resort town of Wakeport, meeting its denizens and participating in a fun trading quest. I love detailed towns in RPGs and Wakeport has a very fitting atmosphere and a lot to do in it (at least upon your first visit). The highlight of the whole game for me, however, is easily the Somnom Woods region. You don't explore it until late in the game, but the developers really did save the best area for nearly last. The region has a fantastic presentation and atmosphere and the overall level design of the region is fairly engaging as well. If the rest of the game was more in line with the inspired, interesting atmosphere of Somnom Woods, this review might have been a lot different...
 

Dream Team's mix of 2D character sprites and 3D environments looks quite nice



So Dream Team is polished, it's competently made, and it has some fantastic moments. But...

Dream Team on the whole just isn't that interesting or engaging, and there are a number of reasons for this. For starters, I've seen all this before and done all this before. The overall structure of the game, as well as its plot, themes, etc. are all very banal. The game starts with a slow opening full of tutorials (there are way too many intrusive tutorials across the game as a whole actually), then Peach is kidnapped, then you proceed to go from area to area on one errand or another; there's the traditional late game fetch quest that has been in every Mario and Luigi game, and the game culminates with a long, painfully drawn-out slog through yet another lava-filled castle.

In addition, Dream Team may have a fresh coat of paint in terms of its setting and dream concept, but underneath all that, this is just Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story again (the previous game in the series). The mix of 2D and 3D environments and the idea of manipulating the outside world to affect an inner world is ripped straight from that game, as is the way the player acquires new special attacks, and as are the giant Luigi battles, which can either be an exciting highlight or a frustrating mess depending on if the gimmicky touch-screen and motion controls want to cooperate or not (the final giant battle culminates in an awful motion-controlled sequence where one screw-up means you have to start the whole sequence over). During these battles, sometimes I would go to flick the touch-screen with my stylus and I would either not press the screen firmly enough or miss altogether and while this may technically be my own fault, something like this would not be a problem if I could just press a button or use an analog stick. Also, I don't know what Nintendo's obsession with tilting the whole 3DS to perform actions is, but it's just not as fun as they think it is; at best it's mildly amusing, and at worst it's less precise than traditional controls and hampers the experience.



Most of Dream Team's core concepts, like the giant Luigi battles (below), are borrowed from Bowser's Inside Story (above), where they were brand new ideas

The generic, cliché environments in the game do little to help this overwhelming feeling of familiarity either. This is supposed to be the exciting new land of Pi'illo Island, but it actually is just another romp through "grass land", "desert land", "mountain/snow land", "beach land", "forest land", and "lava castle" in roughly that order as well. I don't mind familiar environment tropes in games as long as the area does something new and interesting with the trope or otherwise has some kind of captivating atmosphere, but lately most recent Mario games have proven again and again that they are content with not doing anything new, interesting, or captivating. With the exception of the forest region known as Somnom Woods that I already mentioned, none of these very familiar environments offer anything particularly interesting. The beach area is just your typical tropical beach area, the desert is dull and uninteresting, and the mountain region just seems to drag on forever and ever, and I was so sick of its musical theme by the end of it (at least the snowy region of the mountain has a different version of the theme, but it's still based on the same melody). The level designs themselves are decent, but nothing new for the Mario and Luigi series and nothing special really. Pi'illo Island as a whole also feels less like an organic world open to exploration and more like a bunch of levels artificially glued together, which doesn't help the game's overall generic feel much. Just compare the map from Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga's Beanbean Kingdom to Dream Team's Pi'illo Island:



The Beanbean Kingdom (above) is an open, interesting world; Pi'illo Island (below) is nine levels glued together

But the "real world" of Pi'illo Island is only about half of the total space you'll be traversing in the game. There are also dream versions of every single area. And they're even more dull. Seriously, these sequences should have been amazing; I mean, just imagine what the crazy dream worlds of the Mario universe look like (besides this, of course)! Well, whatever you're imagining is far more interesting than the lazy jumble of identical rooms that make up each dream world. These sequences just aren't interesting visually or atmospherically, which makes slogging through them a chore, especially since you are required to go through them after making it though the very lengthy real world sections. The game just isn't paced well. After exploring a large region of Pi'illo Island and fighting a boss, you feel like you should make some progress and move somewhere new, but instead you still have a massive dream version of that area to get through, with another boss waiting at the end of that. And even besides that, there are also other smaller dream sections that exist in each region in addition to the main dream section (although many of these are admittedly optional). This whole process of real world region followed by large dream world sequence repeats for every new area you visit; it's very predictable and gets very old quickly. The dream worlds possess the same environmental theme as their accompanying real world regions (just in a more abstract way), as well as an alternate version of their musical theme, so it all feels incredibly redundant. Most notably though, the dream worlds don't feel magical or special; they feel generic and uninspired, like walking through a particularly busy screensaver or something (again, the dream version of Somnom Woods is the exception because it possesses something most of the rest of the game seems to lack: a captivating atmosphere). Maybe part of the issue is also that Mario and Luigi's real world is already so fantastical itself, that there's not much contrast when entering into the dream worlds, which only seem slightly more nonsensical. But really, that's not an excuse, because the bottom line is that it just feels like not much thought or effort was put into the dream worlds' visual design or atmosphere, and if they had put more effort into this department, I'm sure these sequences would stand out more.

Although they have a boring atmosphere, the dream sequences do bring the game's main new gimmick to the table: Luiginary abilities. Within the dream world, there are things called "Luiginary Works" which are basically pieces of scenery that Luigi's dreamy self can combine with. After doing so, the player can mess with Luigi's sleeping body located on the 3DS's touch-screen in order to affect some change in the dream world. Again, it's an idea carried over from Bowser's Inside Story, where certain actions outside would affect the levels inside Bowser's body (and in that game, certain actions inside also affected Bowser in the outside world). These actions range from simple things like pulling Luigi's mustache to manipulate Luigi-themed tree branches that can launch Mario into the air and rubbing his nose to make him sneeze and blows objects from the background to the foreground, to more complicated abilities like manipulating the flow of time and the law of gravity. The most frequently used and the deepest of the Luiginary abilities is when Luigi splits apart into multiple "Luiginoids" that Mario can use to perform a variety of actions, from forming a giant stack that can jump super high to turning into a Luiginary tornado that can hover over pits. These abilities are fun to use and have their merits, but in the end, a neat mechanic just isn't enough to make me look past the bland dream environments. The dream areas are also very linear (as is most of the game as a whole) and just feel like monotonous trips from point A to point B across various identical-looking rooms. Usually, if I'm going to be exploring a large area or going through any kind of lengthy, time-consuming sequence in a video game, especially in an RPG, I need it to have some kind of interesting atmosphere or level design, and while the level design in Dream Team is adequate, overall things just aren't very engaging atmospherically.



The dream worlds are an uninspired mess of shapes and colors, and all sections of a given dream area look identical to one another

The Luiginary abilities also carry over to battle in the dream world, although with unique battle-specific attacks that are unlocked as the game progresses. While in the dream world, Dreamy Luigi fuses with Mario, which allows Mario to perform a bunch of interesting Luigi-powered attacks. These attacks are actually really fun to do and mastering the ones that are more challenging to pull off effectively feels satisfying. Controlling Mario as he uses a crowd of Luigis to form a massive hammer to smash foes is both very gratifying from a visual standpoint and from a gameplay one. Battles in the dream world are quite a lot of fun, if not a bit repetitive (although I never got tired of the flurry of Luigis that followed and mimicked my hammer attacks). Battles in the real world aren't as interesting to me, mainly because I just don't like most of the real world special attacks you can unlock in this game (I like all of the dream world ones though and more importantly, I found them far more manageable and usable). The easier ones get dull really quickly and maybe I'm just unskilled (even though I've been playing this series and Mario RPGs with similar context-sensitive actions for years), but I swear some of these attacks require super-human reflexes, while others rely too much on wonky motion control (of course). There is one attack that tasks the player with memorizing which order a bunch of Marios and Luigis jump out of a cannon and then with pressing the A and B buttons accordingly for each brother as they descend on a foe and then the game expects you to repeat the process with the brothers descending in the opposite order. Mario and Luigi fly out of the cannon at lightning speed and they both look identical besides their red and green colors, and all in all I just found it nearly impossible to tell which brother was which and memorize their order. Basically, this attack was useless to me because I just found it unusable, and a lot of the real world attacks follow suit; they're hit or miss and it's really lame when I just can't use certain attacks in an RPG because I either find the mechanics of them totally unwieldy or unwieldy enough that they aren't worth using in lieu of a more reliable attack. One or two screw-ups when using these attacks and they do very minimal damage, which made it far more practical for me to just stick with the ones that I could perform competently, which in turn means I was sticking to only about two or three different special attacks in real world battle for most of the game, which is repetitive and boring. To be fair, there is an option to slow the attacks down to make them easier to perform...but that's getting into Super Guide territory and I ain't havin' none of that (even though there's so much of that in this game, it's often hard to avoid all the ways the game wants to hold your hand and never let it go).

  

All in all, the action-based battles that have been present in every Mario RPG since the original on the Super Nintendo are still fun, but battles just get awfully repetitive, especially early on when your list of available actions is very limited (but late in the game wasn't much better for me because of all those attacks, Mario's in particular, I found too troublesome to use). Besides special attacks, the bros. can use items, jump on foes, or whack them with a hammer, so there's not much variety (why did they ever get rid of the awesome elemental abilities from Superstar Saga, anyway?) Battles, even standard battles with common mooks, also go on for way too long sometimes. Besides performing Mario and Luigi's attacks, there's also the lengthy process of waiting for the enemies to attack and trying to dodge their attacks (and even common grunts often have multi-part attacks). Boss battles, on the other hand, are an even worse offender as some of these baddie's attack turns seem to go on forever, with some of the bosses seeming to perform no less than three lengthy attacks in a row when it is their turn. During the last boss in particular, I felt like 70% of the battle was just waiting for my turn. The game isn't very challenging by any means, but it still feels a bit unfair when I get two chances to do something (with one chance usually being wasted on healing in the tougher fights) and then have to endure a painful three-minute gauntlet from a boss.



Luiginary abilities are the highlight of the dream sections both inside battle (above) and outside battle (below)

Drag. That's what this game is: a drag. It just drags on in every department. Slogging through the real world areas, and then slogging through a drawn-out dream section, and slogging through every little battle that can drag on for too long themselves. This feeling of everything being stretched out to its limits carries over to the whole game. This game just drones on and on, and at times it feels like the developers simply didn't want players to finish the game. You should encourage me to want to delve further into your game, not push me away by artificially dragging out every aspect of the experience. There's also that drawn-out late game fetch quest I mentioned earlier which has you retreading back through every main area. I normally don't really mind this kind of thing, as I like revisiting places to cover all the ground I couldn't reach before due to lacking a certain ability, but this game was long enough already and this really feels like obvious padding to just stretch things out even more. Then there's the final dungeon, the aforementioned lava-filled castle I've seen a million times before, which is so needlessly drawn-out that it took me about four sittings just to get through it. The main part of the dungeon is basically repeating the same exact lengthy sequence three times, and fighting the same boss three different times. Why do I need to repeat all this three times? Again, do you want me to complete your game or not?

*sigh* And now there's the plot...I'll warn you right now, there's going to be spoilers. Although, I will say the general direction of the plot was spoiled for me before playing and all it really did was make the whole affair slightly less disappointing for me, because if I'd gone in completely blind, I probably would have been vocally cursing at how uncreative Nintendo is these days. So if you're like me and you like new, original plots and villains in your Mario RPGs you might want to be spoiled if you plan on playing this game. Honestly, after how bafflingly disappointing Paper Mario: Sticker Star's "story" was, you'd think Nintendo was purposefully defecating on my fond memories of the brilliance of the pre-Sticker Star Mario RPGs at this point (in fact, just stop reading this and go play Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga; it's still the best of the Mario and Luigi series).

The plot could have been something special, but it falls prey to Nintendo's recent insistence on homogenizing every single Mario game and making the plots in these games as trite and as stale as possible. Things start out intriguing if a bit unoriginal: our heroes are invited to Pi'illo Island for their third(?) group vacation at this point in the overall Mario series, an ancient place that used to be home to the now supposedly extinct race of fluffy Pi'illo folk, but which is now a tourist spot that has attracted attention from all corners of the Mushroom World. Again, not the most original of concepts in the Mario series, and I can't help but feel that this plot was just an excuse for the developers to cram as many cameos from the whole of the Mario and Luigi series into the game as they could, using the excuse that they were all either taking a vacation or otherwise heard about the island being the new hot spot, but there was still a lot of potential here. A new villain known as Antasma, an awesomely-named and awesome-looking "bat king", arrives on the scene and sucks Princess Peach into the dream world, forcing the brothers to embark on yet another quest. It's eventually revealed that Antasma was responsible for the Pi'illo Kingdom's downfall long ago before being sealed away in the dream world. Now he's making his return and Mario and Luigi have to try to help the newly-reawakened Pi'illo ruler Prince Dreambert stop Antasma from spreading darkness across the world and all that. While the immensely worn-out cliché of a kidnapped Princess Peach is groan-inducing, Antasma was still a new face and if he was anything like his very reputable Mario RPG villain brethren (the Shroobs from Mario and Luigi: Partners in Time not included), and taking into account the interesting dream-based set-up, we could have had something intriguing here. The war between Antasma and the Pi'illos should have been the focus in this story, and with some more character development between Antasma and the Pi'illos, this could have made for a fairly simple, but nice new story in the world of Mario.

But then Bowser shows up.

Yup, suddenly Bowser! People complain about Ganon hijacking the plot in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, but Dream Team is on a whole other level. Twilight Princess's inclusion of Ganon is elegant compared to Dream Team's handling of Bowser. Bowser literally just randomly shows up out of nowhere because "he heard the princess got captured and that's his gig". That's slightly humorous (if a bit of an overdone joke at this point in the Mario RPGs), and I wouldn't mind Bowser playing some kind of role in the game, maybe as a side villain the brothers encounter every now and again (similar to his role in most other Mario RPGs), but what isn't humorous is that Bowser, who has zero connection to anything going on the story, ends up being the main antagonist and final boss of the game. Bowser and Antasma team up for a while, but Bowser ultimately ends up being the primary threat. Instead of developing Antasma more and having something new and interesting, Bowser is artlessly shoehorned into the game (half the time he doesn't even seem to know what's going on and Antasma has to explain everything to him), and as a result Antasma is not given the attention he should have been given and ends being a very uninteresting villain himself. The outcome is a game with two boring villains instead of one interesting one.



Top to bottom: 1.) New villain Antasma shows promise 2.) Bowser shows up and hijacks the plot 3.) Instead of being able to develop into an interesting new antagonist on his own, Antasma now has to carry Bowser around with him (literally)

 
And the story is also boring as a result. It wasn't much to begin with, but it had potential to at least have some kind of interesting dynamic between Antasma and the Pi'illo folk. Anyway, there's a magical wish-granting MacGuffin (what is this, the 70th one of those in a Nintendo game now?) that the villains want to get their hands on and spoiler alert but they eventually do and use its power to build a big, generic floating castle, where they sit in the sky for the entire second half of the game and don't do anything until the heroes get enough power to arrive at their doorstep and beat them up. The adventure culminates with both a battle against a gigantic Bowser and one against a smaller, but still larger-than-normal Bowser, with the princess being rescued in the end (and Antasma? He gets an anticlimactic, pathetically easy penultimate boss fight before the main event with the larger-than-normal Bowser and exits the scene with little fanfare or impact). It's tired, it's boring, and I'm sick of it. It also has no business being in a Mario RPG, a series that has typically subverted the Mario stereotypes and delivered interesting new villains and situations. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars has a gang of sentient weapons. Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door has a secret society that lives on the moon. I mean, the Mario and Luigi series itself went from a game where you play as Bowser for most of the game and the villain is an insane talking bean who took over the Koopa King's castle, turning it into a giant theater and enslaving all his minions with mind control.

Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story ends with (spoilers for that game ahead) Mario and Luigi starting a fight with Bowser. Just as the battle begins, the credits begin to roll. While the outcome of the battle is shown during the credits, the player doesn't participate in it because we don't have to; we all know how it's going to turn out. It's almost as if the developers of Bowser's Inside Story knew that Mario and Luigi's fight with Bowser is cliché and predictable and thus found it appropriate to end on that note rather than deliver another in-game fight. In fact, the whole entirety of Bowser's Inside Story is playing against the tired old Mario and Luigi vs. Bowser plot by delivering a completely fresh experience where we play as Bowser trying to reclaim his castle and minions, all the while having Mario and Luigi still present for a bizarre adventure in the villain's bowels. Dream Team follows this by stupidly and lazily pitting the brothers against Bowser in the same kind of plot that the previous game thought was boring. Um, what?

Even though I'm very sick of him right now, I don't particularly mind Bowser being a frequent antagonist in Mario's main platforming adventures as long as the adventure itself is something fresh, but the Mario RPG series, which is far more story-heavy than a Mario platformer, has up to Sticker Star and Dream Team existed uniquely as a special canvas for developers to go wild with their creativity and explore unheard of new avenues of Mario's universe. Dream Team started to do this, but then for whatever reason (I have this sinking feeling that Shigeru Miyamoto had something to do with it...) they decided to tastelessly shove Bowser and a general feeling of stagnation into their creative project. What's the point in having such a generic, stale plot? How does this benefit the experience? I just don't get it.

Despite its relatively shallow plot, Dream Team's script is massive, with the game being full to bursting with dialogue. A fair amount of effort was put into the script, and I appreciate the dialogue of minor NPCs changing throughout the game and in response to what is going on in the story, with some humorous quips that can be easily and entirely missed by less thorough players. Unfortunately, the humor which has always been a staple in Mario's role-playing adventures is very hit or miss in Dream Team. There are some genuinely charming characters and funny moments (the Zeekeeper is a highlight and I'm quite fond of the "Elite Trio", who originally made their debut in Bowser's Inside Story), but often times jokes either go on for way too long or get irritating after they are repeated ad nauseam. The first time a character makes the silly exclamation of "Let me nap on you!", it's silly and a bit comical; the next five times the same character repeats this "joke", not so much. A lot of the dialogue just ends up being wasted time and the game isn't nearly as clever as it thinks it is, especially compared to all of its Mario RPG brethren. Also, in addition to Bowser being shoehorned into the game, there are also other characters from the previous Mario and Luigi games that just seem to show up on Pi'illo Island for no better reason than it's a popular vacation spot or for no special reason at all. I'm fine with Starlow returning from Bowser's Inside Story mainly because the plot needed someone to wait outside and mess with Luigi's sleeping body while Mario and Luigi explored the dream world and I also actually enjoyed seeing residents from the Beanbean Kingdom (the setting of Superstar Saga) such as the Hooskis and Beanish folk. But it's never explained why Broque Monsieur, a block collector who ran a small shop in the Mushroom Kingdom in Bowser's Inside Story, basically runs the entire tourist operation on the island along with his fellow Brocks, and Popple the thief from Superstar Saga shows up for a few brief scenes and one boss fight that could easily be removed from the game without sacrificing much. Altogether, I appreciate the references to Superstar Saga and the Beanbean Kingdom throughout the game, but some of it just feels forced and ultimately it all just makes me wish I was playing the superior and more original Superstar Saga instead. Dream Team as a whole just feels so much lazier than previous games in the Mario and Luigi series.


Dream Team is full of familiar faces, although some of these cameos feel forced


Between the familiar plot, terribly-handled and awkward jamming of Bowser into the story, clichéd areas, uninteresting atmosphere, and incredibly repetitive structure, I feel like I had to force myself to finish this game, and that's not a good thing. The bottom line is that Dream Team just isn't all that engaging, especially if you've played any of the other Mario and Luigi games or any Mario RPG in general. A Mario RPG about going inside of dreams should have been marvelous, but the tired plot, tired villain, tired locations, and uninspired dream areas all bring the experience down. One captivating area and one very captivating area, plus some fun and unique mechanics in the form of the Luiginary abilities just don't make up for an overall lackluster experience. A polished game does not equal a special one, and neither does Dream Team exist in a vacuum where it can avoid being compared to its superb forebears in the Mario RPG series: games like Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, Paper Mario, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, Super Paper Mario, and Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga. I had issues with Bowser's Inside Story (I'm not crazy about the 2D sections in that game either), but at least that game is clever, creative, full of new ideas, and a fresh and original experience. Solid gameplay also doesn't mean anything in an RPG if the atmosphere and plot are dull. I feel that Dream Team is mainly just a big missed opportunity; it should have been something truly wondrous, but Nintendo's current insistence on blending every Mario game together by using the same environmental clichés and the same old Bowser kidnaps Peach plot, as well as AlphaDream's (the second-party developer of the Mario and Luigi series) choice to make the game a re-skin of Bowser's Inside Story just end up making the game boring. Dream Team has more heart than Paper Mario: Sticker Star, I'll give it that, but it is still a far cry from the Super Mario RPG elite. I think it might be time for Nintendo to rethink the whole Mario RPG series, maybe retire the current Mario and Luigi and Paper Mario series and do something brand new. If the series, which was once one of the Nintendo's most creative and interesting, continues on as it is now, it will inevitably become a worn-out and empty husk of what it once was. And that makes me sad.

If my opinions in this review sound familiar to you, than you probably watched Yahtzee's Zero Punctuation review of this game. Yes, I did watch his review, as well as several others, before writing this, but his opinions didn't affect mine at all (nor did anyone else's). I simply wholeheartedly agree with most of his sentiments about the game in the review and I recommend you give it a watch. I don't always agree with Yahtzee, but he always makes an intelligent (and often hilarious) argument and sometimes he just really nails it.