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.
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.
