Playing the first Xenoblade Chronicles game was an interesting experience, especially after having played some of its sequel before it. It end up giving me some new context on how the series has progressed, how the sequel improved on its predecessor – and some ways in which the predecessor was better. Now that I’ve beaten the game in my Let’s Play, it’s time to give my thoughts.
Xenoblade Chronicles is, without a doubt, one of the most ambitious RPGs on the Wii, and in ways that carry over to the version on the Switch, and probably to the 3DS version as well. It’s a game that not only gives the player a wide, expansive world to explore, but one that is deliberately designed to provide wide open vistas to view, and which also seeks to maintain a sense of continuity between what would be considered overworld environments and dungeons – functionally making them indistinguishable from each other.
Xenoblade Chronicles is set on a deliberately unnamed world (the actual name of the planet is a big end-of-game reveal) – where all life is on two continent-sized beings, Bionis (which has predominantly organic life) and Mechonis (which has predominantly cybernetic life). These two came into conflict – with our main characters being from Bionis. Our point of view character, Shulk is from a village which is attacked by Mechon, and his childhood friend, Fiora, is taken and seemingly killed. Shulk helps fend some of them off with a magic blade called the Monado that he manages to get ahold of and is able to wield. With his newfound power, and joined by some of his friends from his hometown, and some additional allies along the way, he goes on a quest to find Fiora and seek out the nature of these worlds. Also, because this is a JRPG from the creators of Xenogears and Xenosaga, odds are high that God will be Attacked and Dethroned.
Perhaps on a very interesting note compared to those other works, you control no piloted mechs in this game during combat. In addition, combat is more real-time than turn-based. Instead, your characters have a regular auto-attack, along with special abilities that can be triggered on cooldown, which can have additional effects based on your opponent’s active status effects, how they’re facing, and where you’re positioned. On the one hand, this can make combat more strategic. On the other hand, you only control the party leader once combat has begun, and can’t easily give out orders or get into granular combat algorithm programming (as in Final Fantasy XII). Consequently, your strategy is determined by what skills you equip on what characters in your party, as those abilities will determine what the computer will have them do while not under your control.
While the Switch version of the game has naturally received graphical updates from the Wii and 3DS versions, there are a lot of ways that the game shows some of its age, in terms of the game engine. Large monsters on the game’s “overworld” areas will frequently just pop in on the screen, literally appearing out of the air, and forcing you to reconsider your path in a way that you wouldn’t if they’d just been visible on the map. It’s a situation where I found myself repeatedly wishing that they’d just fallen back on the old N64 standby of dropping fog into the environments or if they hadn’t been quite so ambitious in their world maps.
The story is generally told pretty well, with voice acting done in the UK, with a cast that leans into local accents, which gives the game a different feel than the various titles from US and Canadian game studios (to the point that I wish we’d get more UK JRPG dubs). The side-quests aren’t integrated into the story as well though. They often fall into the realm of “Kill X Monsters” or “Collect X Items” and bring them back to the NPC, theoretically to build rapport with an area of the world map, to allow the purchase of additional items that will be useful later in a minigame involving rebuilding a settlement destroyed by the Mechon.
Except that whole batch of mechanics comes out of nowhere and can be potentially, and quite easily, missed. If we’d had a light version of it early in the game, after your hometown is attacked, I feel like it would have helped tutorialize the concept for later. Additionally, when it comes to accumulating various items to build upgrades for the settlement, we don’t have any way to highlight needed items. It’d have been nice if I could have selected a particular upgrade I was working towards, and have gotten settlements where I could have purchased items (or monsters who might have dropped the item) highlighted. I would have engaged with those systems more. Instead, I only ended up dabbling in them for a bit.
On a brighter note, what Xenoblade Chronicles does is recognize that people who play JRPGs want to see their characters look cool, so they make playing dress-up with your characters easier. As you acquire equipment throughout the game, you unlock the clothing style for those items when you set your character’s cosmetic style. Then, even if you sell that piece of equipment, that style remains unlocked. It’s, frankly, awesome, and something many MMOs could learn from (looking at you, Final Fantasy XIV). Additionally, equipment can have gem slots that let you equip gems that influence your build – whether it’s letting you tank more damage, resist certain status effects, get more healing, or dish out more punishment. The game also gives you options to combine and upgrade materials to get better gem abilities, which can also compensate for the weaknesses of some weapons and armor, or put more focus on a particular build concept.
Additionally, having such a tightly focused cast of characters means everyone gets well-developed – Xenoblade 2 is so focused on giving you generic Blades to send on missions, or the occasional Husbando or Waifu to join your party that a lot of characters are given short shrift. While I appreciate the variety of characters and character designs in that game, the focus of the first title serves the game far better.
I’m not going to go straight back into Xenoblade Chronicles 2 after beating the first game, I have other games I need to play first, but I do look forward to revisiting it with the knowledge and experience I’ve gotten from the first title.
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