Xenoblade Chronicles – Finished in 62 hours. It’s an interesting game; a hybrid between a Xeno game, an MMO, and a shounen anime. I only kind of like Xeno games and I really don’t like the other two things, so it was an experiment that was destined to fail (in my defense, I didn’t know it was so shounen anime until I actually played it).
Gameplaywise, the biggest problem that I ran into was being underlevelled. Because of the system of increasing the enemy’s stats when you become too underlevelled, the bosses become borderline impossible (for a first time player, at least) if you are more than five levels under their level. I’m not sure exactly how it works, but the enemies seem to get a 50-75% evasion (and accuracy?) boost from being six levels above you instead of five. The most striking example of this was when I fought a boss, hit around 5-10% of the time, and on a subsequent try put in a party member one level higher and magically could hit most of the time. This is such an absurdly bad design decision, particularly in a game that does a poor job of curving experience (especially lategame) to start with. I am fine with bosses being challenging because you are underlevelled, but making the enemy’s stats rise because you are “too” underlevelled is really terrible. I ended up being a few levels too low for all three of the last bosses, so I ended up grinding a bunch.
The randoms in the game are kind of dully enjoyable in a way that doing mindless activities can be, and some of them can even be interesting due to deciding where to control aggro and when to execute moves. I thought one of the best parts of the game gameplaywise was the superdungeon chain of Mechonis Field / Central Factory / Agriratha that had a lot of randoms in interesting formations. The bosses in the game are largely terrible, they mostly fall under “hit arbitrary level threshold” which I often didn’t meet or are plot fights. The game really could do with less plot fights. I enjoyed Egil and Yaldabaoth well enough as boss fights because you have to balance the multiple enemies with trying to kill the boss, which adds a bit of spice to the otherwise dull single-enemy boss fights. My biggest problem with single enemy fights in the game is that your victory seems to mostly depend on at what moment your tank didn’t mark the enemies properly and when the boss starts hammering on your squishy DPS character.
I mostly used a party of Reyn/Sharla/other person. Since I was generally understatted due to levels, I found not using both Reyn to occupy the enemy’s attention and Sharla to heal was difficult. I could get away with using a more DPS heavy party against easy randoms, but anything actually challenging I generally liked pulling out both of them. I generally used Melia for inflicting multi-target doom, including on the final boss. Her HP was a bit of a hindrance though, and if I ran into trouble with Melia’s durability (like I seemed to be in most of that big dungeon chain I mentioned) I generally used Seven. I also used Shulk for times when I felt like Shield was useful. Dunban was a bit too evade reliant for my generally underlevelled strategy, and I hate Riki and want to throw him into a fire pit so I didn’t use him.
*spoilers*
Plotwise, I think the game has some interesting ideas. I enjoyed a lot of the plot behind the High Entia, with the various conniving factions, and learning about the Mechonis and its soured relationship with the people of Bionis is quite interesting. I also enjoy the setting, it has a bit of a robot apocalypse survival feel going on, which is pretty neat. It has a lot of plot twists at the end of the game but most of them are heavily foreshadowed (with a hammer). At the end you learn about the mythos surrounding the Bionis and Mechonis, which I honestly have very little opinion on.
Ultimately, though, I think the game has too much yelling for me to take it very seriously. There are too many scenes which could be effective and could have interesting dialogue but the game opts to inform us, once again, that the characters are VERY ANGRY! at the robots / other villains, usually forcing the characters to run at the villain while yelling.
Shulk in particular seems like a character with a great deal of promise but ends up as a one-dimensional caricature of anger and tired main character clichés (we won’t give up no matter what, opposition of evil doers, has super powers which make him super cool and ~amazing~). Reyn is a nice comic relief character, not particularly deep but he is fun. Sharla falls a bit into the trappings of being primarily motivated by anger, but she’s not awful. Dunban is pretty cheesy and seems to exist mostly to provide exposition to the player and to have an anime rivalry with Metal Face. Melia seems to have a bit more emotional complexity than the other characters; while she is angry at the villains, it doesn’t seem to dominate her character interactions in the same way that I feel like Sharla’s does. Riki is a failed joke character. Seven seems to straddle this line between damsel in distress and a kind of interesting mix of flirtiness and badassness. I’m ultimately fine with her, and it allows me to talk about having a killer robot as a PC so that’s a plus.
The villains are a mixed bag. I’m very amused by the penultimate boss; not really a great character, but he is effective at making you want to punch him in the face. Egil is a bit of an emo loser but his motivations at least make a certain amount of sense, and I liked that the game points out that he is not all that different from you. Final boss is an amusingly terrible person (although what was up with his final outfits? He looked so much cooler before his transformation). His motive of wanting friendship, though… did he take friendship advice from Bender (Hey sexy mama, wanna kill all humans)? Metal Face is a hilariously bad villain, zomg plot twist he’s the evil guy from the intro that you don’t give a shit about! Now let’s yell at him a lot. He was a better villain before he talked.
*end spoilers*
The game is pretty nice looking; I liked many of the environments and found piddling around the various cities to be quite fun. I like the variable outfits for characters showing up in the cutscenes, for all that I would have liked to give Reyn some suboptimal gear so he would look less silly. I decided to make Shulk with no clothes for the final cutscenes because it amused me. The music is solid; I particularly like the overworld theme on Bionis.
I FORGOT TO MENTION KALLIAN! HE IS SO BISHIE! I WANT TO HUG HIM AND GIVE HIM KISSES~!
I’m glad I played the game, even it wasn’t necessarily my cup of tea. I’d be interested in playing the sequel if it cleans up the gameplay problems I mentioned above.
