Xenoblade Chronicles review

by Piyoz on Aug 28th, 2016

I play video games. I talk about video games. I write about video games. I pay attention to the making of video games. I like to have chats with friends about video games as an industry and an art form. I don’t own every sort of gaming machine, but I try to stay informed about big releases. You know, just to keep my ear to the ground about what’s making waves or not. I like to follow discussions that are a little more big picture. Say, about how video games and our real world reflect each other. I try to be an all-around sorta gaming hobbyist. As much as anyone can be without dedicating their lives to it.

In all my travels, I have never come across a piece of interactive software so majestic and breath-taking as Xenoblade Chronicles. I was in love from the very first time I witnessed the title screen. I was enthralled by my first venture out into the fields of Colony 9. I was tantalized down into the deepest reaches of my soul on the shores of Eryth Sea. On the roaring gears and pistons of Mechonis Field, I was spellbound. I cannot outline enough how much I believe that Xenoblade Chronicles is a masterpiece of video game design. Not a flawless one. Don’t get me wrong; it has its shortcomings, but the success of its beauty and scope will stay with me for as long as I give a damn about video games.

Xenoblade Chronicles was released in April of 2012 in North America on the Nintendo Wii. Nintendo finally got around to publishing it around here one year after doing so in Europe and two years after its release in its native Japan. Developed by Monolith Soft, this JRPG made waves with Western audiences, prompting a sequel on Wii U, a port onto the New 3DS, and the inclusion of protagonist Shulk in Super Smash Bros. for 3DS and Wii U all as internal promotion for each other.

The premise of Xenoblade Chronicles is that within this fantasy world the planet that Shulk and friends call home is a mere ball of water that contains only two masses of land: the Bionis and the Mechonis. The Bionis is a gigantic humanoid form built from stone, water, trees and other similar terrain. The Mechonis is a gigantic humanoid form made of metals of all kinds. At the beginning of all things, these two gods battled to the death for eons. In the throes of vicious warfare, the two killed each other at the same time after sustaining massive injuries. They fell dormant for millennia.

As the years passed, life began to grow on Bionis in the forms of plants, animals, birds, fish, insects, dinosaurs, and sapient creatures like humans, tiny Nopon, and winged High Entia. These forms of life live on the corpse of the Bionis as microscopic beings sustaining themselves on its life energy, called “ether”. Their only real worry is Mechon, mechanical beasts from Mechonis that have been trying to invade the Bionis since as long as anyone can remember.

Shulk and his best friend ever Reyn and almost-kind-maybe girlfriend Fiora live in Colony 9, a human city located on the right calf of the Bionis. One fateful day, Mechon attack the colony in droves, this time wielding the ability to speak and think of their own volition. After much destruction and death, Shulk and Reyn grab some swords and swear revenge on the evil Mechon. At this point, the player is given free rein to advance through the world of the Bionis as they please. 

As Shulk and Reyn ascend the Bionis and eventually explore the remains of Mechonis and beyond, their party grows to seven playable characters. The world of Xenoblade Chronicles is divided into about a dozen areas to explore with these seven, each one placed on a point of the two gods’ bodies. Gaur Plain and Colony 6 exist on the Bionis’ right leg. Makna Forest grows on its back. Eryth Sea flows on these wing-like extensions from its shoulders. Valak Mountains snow perpetually on the right arm of Bionis. The sword being held by the Bionis’ right hand is appropriately named Sword Valley. The severed hand of Mechonis that lies on the sea between the two gods is aptly named the Fallen Arm. The size of each area is such that you can see the forms of Bionis and Mechonis around you, making you feel like a tiny bug crawling around in a world so unbelievably larger than yourself. It’s a magnificent feeling. It’s not an easy thing to explain in words. I whipped up a visual reference from the game’s concept art. Maybe this will help show you what I mean.

Each one will give you days’ worth of exploration. In fact, the game urges you to explore every nook and cranny that your courageous little heart can find. There are tiny caverns, animal nests, ancient ruins and all manner of hidden paths leading to secret landmarks to keep you occupied as you advance through the story and defeat enemies.

The combat system in Xenoblade Chronicles is a real-time battle system involving three active characters from the roster. You control one of them as the AI controls two others. Most of the time, the player will choose an enemy in the environment, but depending on the personality, some baddies may seek you out, attack you if you come too close, or only enter the fray if one of their kin is in danger.

In the midst of battle, all your characters will auto-attack once they are close enough. You can choose from nine Arts shown at the bottom of the screen. Performing Arts can have a whole variety on the flow of battle, from doing special damage (under special conditions), Breaking an enemy’s defenses, Stunning an enemy, locking their Arts, healing your allies, boosting defense, stealing items, and many, many more. Once an Art is performed, it takes a certain amount of time before you can use it again. Each character has a main Art in the middle that recharges by auto-attacking. The key here is to coordinate Arts among your comrades to inflict the most damage. Yeah, teamwork!

All seven of your guys and girls have their own unique Arts that can be upgraded to increase effectiveness and decrease recharge times. As your party levels up, they become stronger and can equip more and more powerful armor and weapons found in combat and through quests. In the different corners of Bionis, there are streams of ether that can be mined to find Cylinders. Cylinders can be taken back to Colony 9 to an NPC who owns a Gem Furnace. This dude’s furnace will craft them into Gems that can be equipped onto your applicable equipment to give you all sorts of stat boosts such as more physical defense, higher auto-attack, higher ether defense, resistance to Spike damage, resistance to being put to sleep, so on and so forth.

As you level up, your party will also be given Skill points to be applied to each character’s Skill Trees! Don’t you just love skill trees!? From extra running speed, to higher attack power during night time, and severe boosts to defense when all your Gems are removed, the variety and variability is great. This time around, as your party members become best of buds, they can start sharing their earned skills with each other.  The affinity between Shulk and company will affect not only their shared skills but also how they interact in battle. Team mates with better affinity will coordinate better and converse out loud, making it easier to engage in Chain Attacks. A Chain Attack is when the chemistry among your comrades is so strong that the game lets you control everyone’s attacks in a row without interruption. Assuming you have the right Arts equipped and perform the rights ones, you can deal some serious hurt on your foes without even batting an eye!

Forging the white hot bonds of friendship isn’t just for your party. Within the various civilizations of the Bionis and Mechonis, there are dozens of NPC’s named and unnamed. Everyone with a name will find a place on your menu’s Affinity Chart. Yeah, it’s the big one.

Xenoblade Chronicles does not merely just have quests. Yes, you do questing here. Talk to this NPC. Agree to find a certain number of this item. Go out and hunt down those materials in the landscape or from monsters. Return to NPC and retrieve the reward. But Xenoblade takes it so much further.

Every named NPC quest undertaken will place a little marker on the chart of that NPC and all those that they’re related to. As you take on more quests, you find out more about those other NPC’s and their own lives. As you help them out in their daily endeavors, the dialogues among all these men, women, Nopon, and High Entia build and complicate exponentially. I didn’t just help out some chef in Colony 9’s marketplace. I brought him materials to help make a toy for his estranged daughter. That unlocked new quests for his daughter, who will then introduce me to more NPC’s who will all have unique stories to tell. There’s a Nopon woman in Frontier Village whose sister was killed by big beasts in Eryth Sea. Now, only her little niecey-pon is all the family she has left. Her niece’s grief is so overwhelming that she won’t speak to anyone. This Nopon woman asks you to gather some materials so that she can make a gift as a gesture to the girl. After you do, the aunt shares her sorrow with her niece and the two are able to come together in sadness and move on toward their futures. I wasn’t just an errand boy. I was instrumental in the lives of characters who feel real. Living beings who feel emotion and have a place in this world. People who have personal schedules, meaning you have to find them at the right time to initiate and conclude quests. They are all individual bricks in a massive wall of relationships and lives affected by the story of the game.

There are over one hundred and seventy of these NPC’s. Each one has multiple relationships to people in other cities that all can take different shape depending on how you accomplish certain quests. Hardly will two players ever have the same Affinity Chart. And that blows my mind.

The main characters of Shulk’s gang fit right into this worldwide web of people. Shulk, Reyn, Fiora, the medic Sharla, fearless warrior Dunban, the brave Heropon Riki, and the Princess of High Entia Melia all feel like lifelong companions by the end of their journeys. Through such a long campaign, their characters are really given a chance to grow and develop thanks to great writing. To say much about where they end up is huge spoiler territory. Trust me, the build up to the finale is some fantastic science fantasy that ends on a truly high note.

Xenoblade Wiki contributor Bg123 went and cooked up a more detailed look at a fully realized Affinity Chart.

For all the praise I’ve been handing out to Xenoblade, in the name of intellectual honesty, I should describe at least a few of this game’s flaws. I can nitpick about some lazy writing early on. The story bits around Alcamoth are pretty dull and don’t contribute much to the overall story except for some exposition.

The main problem with Xenoblade is in the technical side of the visuals. You see, this is a Wii game. This game is running on a machine that doesn’t have nearly enough processing power to run it as it should. Frame rate falls behind sometimes in chaotic combat, sure. While the draw distance is impressive, the character models and many environment textures are painfully underwhelming. In many cut-scenes, the animations and sound effects fail to impress, just existing to tell the story. On a macro scale, the design and scale is gorgeous. On a micro scale, the graphics here are truly lacking. This is more of a hardware issue than a software one.

I have no issue with placing Xenoblade Chronicles in my top five favorite video games ever. I’ve played JRPG’s before, sure, but nothing quite of this size and imagination. There are Western RPG’s like Elder Scrolls, the Witcher and Fallout that accomplish worlds like this but not exactly in the same fashion. The art design is spectacular. The soundtrack is mesmerizing. The English voice work is top notch. The combat system never fails to be engaging even after the eighty hour campaign. Plus, there are mega-bosses out there in the field for you to fell if you’re feeling up to the challenge. The excellent writing just reinforces the sense of awe felt when you begin to realize your place as one tiny thread in Xenoblade’s world-sized fabric of NPC relationships that can leave you with over two hundred hours of content. Sure, this game has its shoddy spots in the graphical department and some bumps in the road here and there. Do not let that deter you from one of the highest rated JRPG’s of the previous generation and an absolute gem of a video game.

5/5

A Triumph

All images acquired from the lovely and hard-working contributors at the Xenoblade Wiki.

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