FACE TO FACE WITH GODS
Also for: -
Behind this title, that isn't pronounced in a jiffy, lies one of the pinnacles of traditional 3D JRPG experiences. Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition is a 10th-anniversary update of the 2010 Nintendo Wii original. The Definitive Edition's upgraded textures, character models and interface cannot hide its more old-school genre tropes, like endless combat grinding, getting sidetracked and spending a lot of time in menus. But why should they?
Some of these tropes serve to gamify the hero's journey. If you can't stand them, this game might not be worth playing, but that would mean you'd miss out on one of the greatest stories of the genre. Xenoblade Chronicles rests upon a fascinating mythos and contains some of the greatest world building I've seen. As the story progresses you have to come to terms with the truths and lies about that myth. What starts out as purely expansive gradually grows into a deeply personal reflection on one's inner self.
The journey literally takes you from the bottom to the top of a gigantic titan, called Bionis, frozen in motion in the middle of an endless ocean. It is large enough to harbor a few humanoid races and animal species, eking out their living from what the host provides. The myth claims that Bionis once fought an everlasting duel with another titan called Mechonis, which now stands clearly visible in the distant sky, equally frozen with the looming threat of future retaliation.
That is exactly what happens early in the game. The robotic forces of Mechonis mount a surprise attack on Bionis' Colony 9, consuming helpless humans in droves. Among the survivors is a young man named Shulk. Although you can control anyone in your party, the story revolves around him.
As a toddler, he was found abandoned in a cave next to a mysterious blade, the Monado, to which he seems somehow connected. It is the only weapon that's worth a damn against the Mechonis forces, since little else can even make a dent in their armor. Shulk seems to be the only one strong enough to wield it without coming to harm.
The Mechon assault ends in a personal tragedy for Shulk, and he teams up with longtime friend Reyn to exact revenge and stop the attacks for good. That's what initiates your journey up towards the head of Bionis, across the Mechonis blade that once struck it, and then over to Mechonis itself, the home of the robotic invaders. On the way the duo aids residents of different settlements, interacting with races like the painfully cute, chick-like Nopons and the arrogant, bewinged High Entia.
They also recruit a few colorful companions into their adventuring party. These add a lot to the plot, and the constant banter during battles starts out fun, but gets repetitive as they quickly run out of new things to say. You have to maintain their relations by solving quests and making them shower each other with gifts, and in doing so you gain great gameplay boons. It also unlocks some revealing heart-to-heart conversations at certain locations across the world.
Together they end up fighting thousands of enemies of an impressive variety. The voice cast consists of fine British actors. They do an excellent job channeling the weight of the situation, bringing forth their personalities through mostly finely tuned line deliveries. Adam Howden, in the role of Shulk, is particularly convincing, especially in moments of extreme anguish where his screams sound shockingly sincere.
In true JRPG fashion, you get sidetracked a lot, and return to each map numerous times. Depending on the time of day, new sidequests appear by the dozens. They are all of the MMORPG kind, meaning you might spend endless hours looking for items to collect, monsters to kill, and people to rescue. I've read that Xenoblade Chronicles holds up to around 800 sidequests, nearly all of them forgettable. Luckily, developer Monolith Soft are sensible enough to deem the most generic quests finished as soon as you complete the objective. You get the reward on the fly, without having to return to the quest-giver.
If you can resist the temptation to speed-click through the sidequest dialogue, you'll see that a few of the interactions are actually quite funny. Like the one that prompted me to bring two lonely Nopon insect-lovers together. One of them loved their beauty, and the other loved their exquisite taste. The former wanted me to convince the insect-eater to stop so they could unite in shared reverance of their aesthetic beauty. But the plan backfired, and they both became insect-eaters.
A lot of sidequests involve combat, which is a carefully balanced affair. Much like Final Fantasy XII, it takes place directly in the game world and occurs in realtime with your characters automatically trading blows with the enemy. A lot of things happen at once, and the pacing is frantic. It's hard to keep track of it all, but you do get a feel for the overall tide of each battle.
Your companions' poor A.I. is frustrating, but as party leader you have a good number of methods to influence the power balance. You can activate different talent arts or perform chain attacks to make the most of each one's skills. A neat novelty, that seeps over from the main storyline, is Shulk's ability to predict the imminent future. This allows you to prepare against insta-killing blows - for instance by generating a short-lasting force field - and change that scenario for the better.
Bosses and certain unique enemies (with goofy naming conventions, like the giant Immovable Gonzalez) can become really fun and stressful to fight, and sometimes fleeing might be the better part of valor. In such fights positioning, and even party order, can determine whether you win or lose. Changing equipment and playing the fun gem crafting mini-game may also provide different status boosts. All that said, however, a majority of the battles you can win by doing literally nothing. The auto-attack will deal with most random encounters.
My only major gripe is the sidequest design. It reduces long stretches of game time to backtracking and fighting the same enemies over and over. Granted, they are optional, but ignoring them can make the game brutally hard. You need the rewards, the experience and the growing affinity between party members to deal with some of the tougher encounters towards the end. Unfortunately, the game doesn't contain enough different mechanics to warrant its length.
But the drama - the story, characters and world - never fail to pull me back in, and the melodious soundtrack conducts my emotions through hell and high water. The composers even wrote two versions of area-specific tunes - one upbeat played in the daytime, and one mellow for the nights. With JRPG:s, there's often the fear that the story will eventually go overboard, but in Xenoblade Chronicles that never happens. I constantly feel like I'm in the hands of top-tier storytellers.
And once you go from overwhelmed to accepting you could very well have the time of your life. The same goes for the staggering amount of statistics running underneath the hood, affecting your combat performance. Getting over them will probably be most people's major hurdle, since numbers are not as sexy as visuals. But once you do, and the dots start to connect, you feel like you're finally put out to pasture and the real enjoyment can begin.
Love it or dislike it; Xenoblade Chronicle's ambitions never leave you indifferent. During exploration, you see parts of Bionis' structure everywhere around you - supporting beams, joints, exhaust vents, etc. - but you cannot quite comprehend its overall layout. There's always a bigger truth out there that we are too insignificant to understand. Humans are so relatively tiny that the host's body becomes abstract.
Every part of Bionis is an entire open world of its own, with its own ecosystem and the occasional city bustling with life. One particular section is called Mechonis' Arm, and when fully mapped out, you can clearly make out the shape of a hand. I spent hours exploring the exteriors and hidden secrets of that hand alone, building relations with a settlement under constant threat of invasion.
The story goes for broke, and truly delivers all the way to the end. For this review I completed an exactly 100-hour playthrough, still leaving droves of sidequests unresolved and skill trees unchecked. My characters went all the way from level one to 80, and it still barely got me past the last few main story bosses.
All that is completely fine, because the act of learning to fight gods and monsters shouldn't be trivialized, especially when your heroes start out as commoners struggling to defeat lowly bunny rabbits. And if the game is intelligent enough to reach beyond your reflexes to your thoughts, your mind tends to filter out all the tedium and elevate the drama to the sublime.
Comments
Post a Comment