Third Remaster Is The Charm

It only took the release of the Wii version (purchased), the new 3DS version (purchased), and the Switch version (purchased) to finally complete Xenoblade Chronicles. Clearly the ability to play with the Japanese VAs was the thing that took me over the edge to finally finish this one.

There’s an interesting history to the release of this game, including the fan effort called Operation Rainfall. Given the effort it took to get a North American release, one would hope the game introduced some genre-defining elements, right?

I didn’t really get that impression. Even when it was originally released on the Wii in 2012 in North America (the original Japanese release was in 2010), other games that did the “single-player MMORPG” thing had already been released, such as .hack for the PS2 in 2002-3. Xenoblade Chronicles does have some impressive visuals and level-of-detail choices that make the idea of humans living on a giant’s body seem possible. There are definitely several moments in the game where it’s worth panning the camera around to take in the vista before you.

Plot and gameplay-wise, however, the game doesn’t seem to do much past most JRPG tropes. The combat never feels really deep, just cycles of either casting on cooldown or trying to set up a topple organically or via Chain Attack. The topple mechanic can easily lead to stunlocks, though the spike mechanic does make this harder in the late game. Either way, the combat never really excites once you get the hang of it. Shulk’s unique ability to foresee devastating attacks gets annoying after awhile, slamming the brakes on the flow of combat by showing a preview of an enemy attack, and this cannot be shut off in the settings for more advanced players. As the wielder of the unique weapon called the Monado, he has to support the party for most of the game by granting them the ability to harm Mechon, the mechanical enemies that feature in parts of the game. While later weapons can be equipped on other characters to allow them to damage Mechon without this buff, it comes far too late in the game and the compromise on damage and sockets isn’t often worth using them.

The plot, while it goes off the rails in the last act and exposes the whole world as a ship-in-a-bottle, it doesn’t really do much that’s subversive or interesting. It suffers too from a very strange kind of selective amnesia in the characters. I would liken it to what happens in Attack on Titan, where the audience needs to swallow a lot of hand-waving to believe that the state of the world is as unknown to the characters as it is at the start of the game. That couples with some typical weeb shit that I never really connected to and mostly find annoying, particularly in adult male gamers that celebrate that sort of thing.

I don’t think I’d recommend Xenoblade Chronicles. It overstays its welcome with an overlong plot, shallow combat, and doesn’t bring enough interesting ideas to the table to be worth it. I’m going to be working my way through the series, with the release of Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition next month, hoping that the sequels bring a bit more complexity and maturity to the series.