.story
Monolith develops further the Xenoblade universe concept with this spin-off for Wii U, Chronicles X. They can't stop producing mastodontic JRPGs and XCX is probably their biggest and ambitious of the whole lot. Yes, I am including even the newest installments, 2 and 3. XCX has deep sci-fi tones with modern cities, space ships, even more alien races and fully fledged Skells: staggering giant mechs, playable exclusively in this title. Our adventure begins with the White Whale, a colossal spaceship inhabited by the last humans, survived from a massive alien attack on Earth by hand of an alien coalition called Ganglion. I said "with the White Whale" and not in because while fleeing we are intercepted and the ship land on the planet Mira. Mira is one of the most gorgeous, fully explorable open world I ever played in my gaming life. It gives that feeling that only Breath of the Wild gave to millions of people a few years ago. After some story events Mira will be completely navigable vertically and it just blows your mind for the beauty, and attention to detail. I kept on pushing my character at max speed and that sense of freedom and exploration of a wild land are limitless. This is without a doubt a milestone for the genre. After this short digression, yes, we find ourselves and other survivors on Mira looking for the Lifehold, the last remnant of humanity, containing the remaining humans, still in deep sleep...seems a very accurate reference to the Laplace's Box. This is a short premise for the story. I will avoid any big spoiler. That said XCX is divided into 12 chapters. Unlike Xenoblade Chronicles that featured macro-areas and became a corridor in the final phases of the game, here we have a big open world with missions that progress the storyline. These missions are relatively short and poor of insight content of the world, characters and enemies we have around us. Basically the classic problem of open world games: they can't tell a story. This said I found most of the main characters very intriguing and I would have loved to know more of them other than trivial and childish affinity quest that adds little to nothing. XCX features more than 16 playable characters but the story covers around 1/3 of them; I deeply appreciated this aspect because they could focus more on specific ones while giving a wide choice for the combat aspects. Our main character is silent a la Dragon Quest with the option to interact via multiple dialogue choices that won't change a thing. This to reflect the fact that despite him/her being our avatar is not really the protagonist of the story...which is, in fact, Elma, one of the woman that finds us at the beginning of the story. Also I understand that they probably focused more on the social and online aspect of the game than the single player story itself. It was probably one of the flagship simil-MMO title for Wii U at the time and Monolith tried to make both type of players happy so I can't complain if developers wants to evolve themselves and practice new things.
.gameplay
Xenoblade Chronicles X is the most ambitious yet convoluted JRPG of the last 10 years in this aspect. It wants to appeal drammatically to that range of players that likes loot and heavy customization of every aspect of the game. The characters have 6 pieces of armor, 2 different weapons: close and ranged...all with augments to power them up beyond the level cap, 60, a requisite to have a chance on defeating the strongest optional bosses that let me say are HUGE and in scary locations; going on with the gear subject we have the mechs, fully customizable in their equipment like our character plus their colour palette. Going even further there is our base for missions and online features. To this let's add more with 3 different kind of currency: money, miranium (that is automatically collected from collection point over the map at set amount of time, a feature I find despicable) and tickets and myriads of enemies drops. As you can tell this is too much even for die hard fans of the genre in an era where there should be some simplifications. Let's talk about the main hub: NLA or New Los Angeles is mankind's home. At first is going to seem disorganized and chaotic but with the many, many fast travel point everything is gonna makes sense and be at easy reach to the player after just few hours thanks to being always available on the map in our second screen in the Gamepad. Of course all this loot makes sense in a JRPG that wanted to be more an undercover MMO than the usual single player story driven game. It remembers me the old White Knight Chronicles on PS3 but to work out they both had to be much more popular. This way is just a huge grind festival, and I am not joking, it could require over 300 hours just to gear up for the optional bosses and around 60 hours for the main quest. The first Xenoblade was as huge as this game in relation to main quest longevity and there were plenty of cut-scenes; here you are gonna spend most of this time grinding and working towards the requisites to unlock the story missions before being able to play them. XCX has 4 different kind of mission: story, squad, basic and normal. All of them have requisites before we can attempt them. Story missions are self-explanatory. Squad are relative to the online multiplayer and required to collect tickets, a currency to buy material for the best weapons. They are mini raid to bosses or Tyrant, more powerful version of normal enemies. Basic mission are basically fetch quests, even the game doesn't hide this term and uses it to introduce these to the player. Finally normal missions are the ones that gives some sort of good reward and worth doing despite having lame dialogues and story. We also have affinity quests with out party but even here they lost the chance to dive into these characters and instead we got the usual go back and forth type of quest or kill x enemies or the worst, find x of this/that item. Yes because the playable characters are more than 15 and everytime we want to add one of them we have to go find it in his spot in NLA. This is probable the most frustrating feature of the whole game. Also most of the main game requires you to have Elma and Lin, the only two characters involved in the main story, which makes all the others silent and playable only in side stuff. Mira is divided in segments with each of them hiding a piece of gear, tyrant monster to kill and side-quest to complete in order to raise the survey rate of the planet. Basically is the percentage of completition of the game and seems impossible at the beginning but once the Skell is available won't take long to cover most of the map quickly. There is also a nice feature about the camera, completely customizable in the distance. So we could play with it very close RE4 style or far, far away and see how our Skell is so tiny compared to the magnificent world and some enemies!. The combat system is an enriched version of what we saw in XC1. Chain attacks are now Overdrive and they work in real time rewarding with damage and cooldown multiplier for our Arts...yes, we can do broken things in the endgame. Arts are back with a wider selections and classes are introduced to the game allowing Cross (our avatar character) to be anything you wish, from a high DPS to a support/buffer type of player, each comes with different weaponry, yours the choice. Of course the other playable characters have pre-set classes. They also introduced Soul voices, our companions are going to speak out different dialogue lines during combat and we can chain various buffs using the respective coloured art. Of course we have Skells... they come at a later point in the game and they are a huge help to navigate and they simply deal heavy amount of damage at that point in the game. As you can see the gameplay requires some amount of study to be mastered and before the post-game you will ave just scratched the surface.. so just do yourself a big favour and read the manual if you don't understand something. Trust me, there is no tutorial.
.sound
Xenoblade Chronicles X has a simple but beautiful composition that reflect the charming world of Mira. There are many tracks with great lyrics while they used to do it only for the ending. The way is the leading track with the classic Xeno- tones of sadness and hope. Going with Melancholia, a full track available just for the squad selection menu! This is more hip hop/ rap song. They navigated through multiple genres following their inspiration and because this is what XCX is: a vision of freedom and breathtaking nature. Going foward there is So nah, so fern (Lao's Theme) even character theme songs have their own weight and tell the story that the game couldn't. After listening to the full soundtrack my only question is how they didn't hire Hiroyuki Sawano, main composer for XCX, for the next installments. Same man behind the Spectacular Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn composition by the way. Most of the game is dubbed well, especially Elma and Lin, who has very funny humour moments along with Tatsu, the fellow Nopon of the crew.
.graphics
The graphic jump from XC1 is steep but what is simply outstanding is the verticality of each of the 5 maps. Noctilum especially, a deep forest environment goes deep in the roots and up to the fearsome foliage of an unexplored peak, land of colossal monsters. Flying along "Don't worry" vocals in the background just wishing this game had a 4K rework to enjoy even further the stunning art direction. Monolith declared they had to make a step back from the story development to focus more on the graphic and world setting. Well, if these are the results I can easily say they are beyond every expectations.
