Xenoblade Chronicles X review

This isn't shocking coming from a follow-up to 2012's Xenoblade Chronicles, a giant Wii role-playing game (re-released for the 3DS earlier this year) that featured huge areas to explore and massive monsters roaming around them. X takes things considerably further, though, purging the game of anything that could get in the way of you exploring that wide-open world.

This shift manifests itself in dozens of ways throughout Xenoblade Chronicles X, both good and bad. It's refreshing seeing an established RPG developer like Monolith Soft take huge chances on weird ideas. But at the same time, I spent a lot of my time with the game struggling to see if or how these ideas would actually pay off, and wondering why the coolest stuff was constantly being withheld from me.

Xenoblade Chronicles X tells a stand-alone sci-fi saga that begins in a dark place: Earth has been destroyed by two warring alien empires. A small fragment of humanity manages to escape the devastation, launching themselves through space until they crash-land on a planet called Mira. There, the remains of the human race seek to rebuild and explore their new home.

While there are a few twists and turns, and a handful of aggressively lengthy cutscenes, plot is decidedly not the focus of Xenoblade Chronicles X. Rather than forcing you through a set of linear plot beats, the game lets you decide when to take on any given story progression mission for the chapter you're on. In between accepting these objectives, you have the freedom to explore the world, fight monsters and take on side quests at your own pace.

Much of your exploration will be punctuated by combat. Fights take place in real time, with your character auto-attacking while you choose special abilities from a row on the bottom of the screen. Abilities can knock enemies down, set them on fire, push them back or gain benefits based on those various status effects, leading to a bit of strategizing required to take down more powerful foes.

That world is special enough to more than make up for the lack of interesting characters, however. Mira is a gorgeous setting, split into five continents, each with its own distinct flavor. But they all share a few important details: Each zone is gigantic, full of nooks and crannies to explore and designed in a way that feels natural, oblivious to the cliches of the average video game setting.

From the moment I set foot on the first continent of Primordia, I ran into a mix of enemies representing the full ecosystem I'd expect from a real-world setting. In role-playing game terms, that means I would see level 3 raccoon-like creatures right next to level 55 giant dinosaurs. Xenoblade Chronicles X regularly sent me through areas that required carefully navigating around high-level enemies, regardless of my own level.

Initially, I got frustrated when an objective for my level 15 quest was blocked by some level 40 ape who would attack me on sight. But over time I came to recognize this as a key part of the game. My goal was to learn everything I could about Mira, and that included learning my place in it and discovering safe routes of passage around the more dangerous inhabitants of the planet.

More legitimately annoying is that Xenoblade Chronicles X holds off on providing all of the tools needed to explore Mira for far too long. If you've seen any trailers for the game, you've probably seen giant mechs flying around a colorful world. Here's the truth: I didn't unlock skells — the game's terminology for mechs — until 30 or so hours into Xenoblade Chronicles X, past the halfway point of the main story.

Even that initial unlock greatly limits which mechs you can use and forces you to keep them grounded. Gaining the ability to fly took me another dozen or so hours. I'm not against delayed gratification in games, but I don't understand what Xenoblade gains by holding off on giving players such an essential part of the game for so long.

Ways in which I figured out what I was doing in Xenoblade Chronicles X in order of helpfulness: exchanging questions with another reviewer via email, reading the game's virtual manual, emailing a Nintendo representative with questions and finally, in a very distant last place, the game itself. Even seemingly simple things are beyond the game's grasp, such as telling you where to find party members who aren't currently in your group or explaining why the game sometimes switches to an unusable first-person view while in your mech (it's a random power-up).

Xenoblade's inability to properly and clearly display information is apparent just by looking at a shot of the game's UI in action. Here's a screencap from my playthrough:

That red outline, which I added, shows the portion of the screen that's actually devoted to ... you know, seeing that beautiful world and the things happening in the environment around you. It's often, as in this case, taken up by whatever enemy you're currently fighting and trying to keep track of. Everything else on the screen is devoted to a flood of information and the third-person view of your mech, which inexplicably takes up a third of the screen. (You take up less space when running around as a human, thankfully.) You can turn off bits and pieces of this cluttered HUD in the options menu, but I never managed to find a combo that elegantly provided the information I needed in battle without also making things look messy.