Xenoblade Chronicles. Review.

Hmm, where to start? I mean, where can you start with a game like Xenoblade? The first (and best) game in the line of three Nintendo published JRPGs from different developers, exclusively released on the Wii, which would become dubbed the rainfall trilogy by some due to the huge campaign launched by western gamers to coax the games over to our non-Nippon shores. For a game of such ambition, one could hardly be blamed for assuming it would collapse with the weight of its own self-assigned task, but if you had indeed thought this, you could not have been further from the truth.
Xenoblade opens with a cinematic cut-scene detailing the plight of two gigantic gods, who had fought for aeons before both were killed the other simultaneously. These gods, named the Bionis and the Mechonis, bodies lay dead, still in battle positions, and are the world on which the game is set. The main story plays across the landscape of the Bionis remarkably well, as you take control of Shulk, the games central character who has been gifted with the ability to wield the Monado, a powerful sword with the power to manipulate time and damage the opposing force, the mechon, the robot-like soldiers and inhabitants of the Mechonis, who were thought dead and beat before launching a raid on colony 9 (your home village) early in the game. The story develops and unfolds revealing new plot twists (Xenoblade has one of the best and most unexpected endings of any game I have played, book I have read, or film I have seen) and acts as a driving force motivating you to move on and progress, although the sheer enormity of volume of side-quests the game has catalogued for you to complete is surly more than enough to satisfy even the most avid dawdler, even if these side-quests come in few flavours, with the occasional story driven and multi-path side-quest progression lines. This lack of side quest variety is one of Xenoblades very few failings, but there is luckily just enough variety to will you to carry on.
As you start the game you quickly become attached to each one of the well-designed characters, whilst in theory, the personalities they each possess should be grating and unbearably cheesy, in practice each character comes across as likeable, if not entirely believable.  This character design is also evident in combat, as you choose a party of 3 characters at a time (two of which are handled by the mostly perfect, AI), and engage in a real time battle system based on low strength Auto-attacks, which are used automatically as the name suggests, when an enemy comes into range, arts, which act as each characters unique special moves, causing varying degrees of damage, buffs, which power up your party members, debuffs, which power down your opponents, health regeneration, which simply restores HP to the target. These arts are subject to cool down and take a set amount of time after use to recharge until they can be used again. This is related to the strength and usefulness of the move and can be shortened in some cases by upgrading the arts via the menu system. It’s combat where Xenoblade divides opinion.  Some find that the combat system works perfectly and that, with the right amount of trial and error or study of different art combinations, it can lead to deep strategically in tune battles. However others find that this is often simply not needed, and battles can be won by mindless art spamming, which leads to the whole combat system melting into a hideous mess of monotonous arbitrary art selection, mind numbing stuff indeed. I myself found that the battle system was fine, nothing special and not as rewarding to crack as a turn based battle system like that of say Pokémon or dragon quest IX, but trigging a break-topple-daze combo will often induce a warm fizz in the soul of the perpetrator. The games difficultly in my mind makes up for the battle systems proposed short comings. With no intentional grinding the entire game, I found the difficulty of battles to be perfectly pitched, so that every battle was a possible death. The only upset in this was the inclusion of some ridiculously difficult bosses. This is helped though, by the fact that characters, even when not in your active party, are still given XP, so they level up with your active party members, affording you the freedom to chop and change your party to see what works for a particular battle without fear of leaving a character woefully under developed and unusable for the rest of the duration of the game.

The presentation of Xenoblade in an odd one... Whilst the environments are vast, open, varied and undoubtedly gorgeous, character models are plagued with a lack of polygons. These big blocky hands and faces are accompanied by a plethora of well-designed detailed, yet horribly flat, textures. This isn’t really evident during gameplay, but Monoliths decision to use in game cut scenes rather than pre-made ones is a double edged sword, for it both exposes the chunky character models, and allows the game to display it’s huge array of equipment, as your characters will be wearing whatever you adorn them with in game in cut scenes also, and it also makes you feel a little bad for leaving your non-used characters naked to save on funds if you happen to be running low. What the character models take away from the experience, however, is more than made up for by the superb soundtrack, which in my mind is a collection of the best sounds ever to grace a video game studios recording booth. Each piece is memorable, epic, and well suited to the feel of the scene and environment it is used in.
In summary then, Xenoblade is one of the finest games I have ever played; it really is as simple as that. Somebody purposely trying to avoid playing this game is as unfathomable to me as somebody purposely trying to avoid having fun, as they are essentially one in the same. Do yourself a favour and pick up this game; you will be a better person for it.

-93%-

-Lewis Tremaine.