Game Spotlight: Xenoblade Chronicles

Ha ha, I would have posted this entry up much earlier but truth be told I was too busy actually playing the game to spend time writing about it. Even so, here it is, my thoughts on what has to be one of the best games released this generation… one that North America is missing out on!

Xenoblade, also known as Xenoblade Chronicles in Europe and Australia, formerly known as Monado: Beginning of the World, is a game that any self-respecting gamer who owns a Wii must experience. Sure, Monolith Soft’s last game, Disaster: Day of Crisis, was so terrible that it was good in a comedic sense, but this game brings them back to their former glory they once had with Xenosaga and Baten Kaitos.

My heart goes out to everyone in North America who has to read this knowing they probably won’t be able to play this game…

Story

Generally, after you’ve played quite a few story driven games from Japan and watched a lot of anime, you tend to see a pattern of underlying themes and clichés being repeated throughout these different forms of media. They’re all present in Xenoblade just as you’d expect, however this game is also full of surprises.

When the game begins you’re launched into a battle in which a fortress manned by humans is under attack by a horde of machines, it’s a total bloodbath as the humans are being overrun and killed. It may not sound like anything special to begin with until the camera pulls back and keeps going back through the canyon and into other areas of the world until it pulls far enough for you to see the figures of two giants, one biological, the other mechanical, standing in the middle of an endless ocean.

This is a story with a hell of a lot of back-story of past history which is told over the course of the game. The more you learn about the history of the Bionis and Mechonis, the two giants, and their inhabitants, the more you’ll realise that not everything is as it seems. While some of the story does seem a little predictable, there is still enough mystery and big reveals to keep things interesting. Of course, those familiar with Tetsuya Takahashi’s work will recognise a few similarities between this game and previous titles bearing the prefix “Xeno”…

Gameplay

In an interview with Tetsuya Takahashi, Director of Xenoblade, he spoke of the initial concept of the game starting with the gameplay and general mechanics even before a story existed. The process of fine-tuning all of these different gameplay mechanics laid down a solid foundation which, together, work wonderfully and make one hell of a compelling game even beyond the truly excellent story that was created for it.

That said, much of what was come up with is strikingly like what you would find in an MMO… without the massively multiplayer online part.

Battles

Anyone who has played any number of modern-day MMOs will feel pretty comfortable with the battle system that Xenoblade uses. Depending on which of the main characters you choose to play as, your strategy during battles will vary. Your character will work with two other characters during battles to deal with the enemies you’re engaging much the same way you would if you were playing online with your friends in an MMO.

If a hostile creature or enemy is near you and notices your presence, it will automatically initiate a battle and a line of nine circles with icons at the bottom will appear at the bottom of the screen. Of course you can choose to run away if you’d like or avoid being spotted by the enemy in the first place which is always a nice option when you just want to get where you’re going.

When you do engage an enemy in battle, your character will launch auto-attacks which will do some damage, however if you really want to cause a world of hurt then using the 9 skill icons listed at the bottom of the screen is the key. When you use a skill it will have its own cool down period and depending on which character you play as these skills will be offensive, defensive, status modifiers, etc… this is all sounding very familiar isn’t it… but there are some things about this game which do set it apart.

If you or one of your computer controlled team mates lands a number of critical hits on your enemies, a three segment blue bar located on the top left of the screen will fill up. Once you have one segment of the blue bar filled this will allow you to revive a team-mate that has been knocked out or will allow one of your team to revive you if you’ve been knocked out… if you are knocked out and you don’t have at least one segment glowing blue then the battle is over and you restart at the nearest landmark with, thankfully, only your pride hurt. This game doesn’t really punish you that severely for failing to kill a group of enemies.

Continuing on, if you fill up all three segments of that bar you’ll be able to initiate a chain attack combo using all of the characters on your team provided that they haven’t been knocked out. During this combo attack you’re able to choose specific skills and depending on the skills you’ve assigned to your characters and the amount of “tension” the group has to extend the combo attack you’ll be able to deal a hell of a lot of damage with certain combinations of skills used.

The battles themselves can end up having quite a lot of flare and kick to them which is pretty standard with Japanese made RPGs… you’re going to be hearing a lot of attack names being called out and chatter from team mates encouraging you as you’re kicking ass and taking names.

Equipment

Part of the fun of an RPG of this type is finding equipment for your characters to use that’ll help them on their journey… and damn some of the gear you pick up ends up looking pretty awesome. Even with odd equipment matches the characters still end up looking pretty cool. One character I had went through several phases in the way he dressed, first he started out in his normal clothing but suddenly he ended up looking a little more gentlemanly than before, then all of a sudden he’s got a wild jungle vibe to him and then changes his style yet again to resemble some sort of sky pirate.

Some pieces of equipment come with embedded gems that add extra stats and modifiers to your characters abilities while other equipment come with slots you can place gems in. These gems can be crafted and depending on the materials you find which can either be mined or found with loot later in the game, you can add certain bonuses to your characters stats.

With the right use of gems you can turn help your character evade more attacks with gems that enhance agility or give you the ability to replenish a certain amount of health each time you use one of your art skills. They’re not required, but they can be very useful for your team in more difficult fights.

Oh, and before I forget, this game does follow the “less armour equals more stat bonuses” approach sometimes, but not all the time. Still, it’s nice to know that they recognise that some people want to cover their women head to toe in thick armour for practicalities sake, while others want to watch the breast jiggle physics in action… which this game does have.

The inhabitants

The world in which Xenoblade is set is filled with many different types of creatures great and small, dangerous and wonderful, so many different types of creatures you’d think Monolith Soft had actually been on location to do a survey of the creatures that inhabited each locale in the game.

You may be in a large field of long grass and spot a herd of lv10 ponies and then all of a sudden a giant creature that resembles a baboon crossed with a gorilla walks by that happens to be lv90 but not looking for a fight… unless you get too close. If you do get to close to hostile creatures you better be prepared to fight or get the hell out of there, but it’s nice how easily you can avoid fighting if you really just want to get to where you’re going. No need to press a button saying “run away” simply… run away.

On the other side of things, interacting with various non-playable characters in the game is the same as any other RPG. Every inhabited area you visit is populated by a number of named and generic characters you can interact with. Most of them will have quests for you to which involves collecting loot and killing a number of creatures or a unique creature. I’ve found taking up these quests can make you go on exploration trips which eventually lead you to some pretty awesome places you didn’t know existed until you’re standing up a ledge high up on the side of a mountain looking down at a huge lake below.

The more you interact with the non-playable characters, the more you’ll get to know them and their relationships with one another. Xenoblade has an entire section of the menu dedicated to character interactions and relationships both for the characters in your team as well as for characters you meet on your journey. It can be a fun thing to do but it can also unlock some extra things you may want to help you with your adventure.

The time and weather

When I realised the extent of how this game changed during the day/night cycle, it began to remind me more and more of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. A lot of non-playable characters in various towns and villages tend to move around during the cycle in a specific path. At 8am they may come out of their house and by 9 they’re at work or hanging around the park. Everyone is going about their business and it feels very much like a living city.

The time of day also effects what type of creatures you will find out in the wilderness. During the day you may find a herd of placid animals chewing on some grass, but at night it may be a pack of ravenous wolves ready to claw your face off. The weather can also effect what type of creatures appear and some quests will have you waiting for a thunderstorm to catch that one specific creature for your quest.

Luckily the same restriction doesn’t apply for the day/night cycle since the developers were nice enough to allow you to change the time of day at any time in the quick menu. It’s one hell of a convenient feature that is very welcome when having to hunt down creatures or the people who actually gave you the quest to hunt those creatures since they usually appear at certain times of the day.

Visuals

Despite what many people think of the Wii’s capabilities, this game is absolutely stunning in so many ways. The general visuals themselves are very well done with a great art style and excellent use of system resources to make everything in this game look gorgeous.

Environment

You start out in humble beginnings around your home town of Colony 9, it’s a pretty decent sized town with some nice scenery, however after a while you start to get a sense of how expansive this game is when you reach a cliff high above the colony and you look down upon it. It’s a wonderful view made only more beautiful by the way the day/night cycle washes the scenery with ever-changing light.,, and that’s only the beginning, as you progress through the adventure you’re witness to environments a lot more grand and majestic.

The environments in this game vary greatly and you’ll find yourself travelling to some pretty breathtaking places all of which are designed so damn well. It’s even more amazing to consider that the design of these environments are based on an ecosystem on the body of a giant which tends to make for a collection of very interesting landmarks.

This game is all about exploration, the more you explore the more you realise just how rich an environment teaming with life this world is. Explore enough and you’ll end up uncovering secret locations or find yourself on some peak overlooking the entire area or in a dark cave where a hidden creature is lurking that happens to be 70 levels above you.

In fact, this game encourages you to explore every nook and cranny when running through side quests and even in the main story itself. Exploration is also made easy thanks to the inclusion of many warp points around the map. Once you find a particular landmark that has a warp point, you’ll be able to go to that location at any time during the game from that point on, even if you’re not in the same area and are in the middle of some other quest.

There’s so much to see and it all looks so good, the screenshots I’ve provided in this entry show you only a small amount of the beauty of this game.

Character and creature designs

There are a lot of very interesting creature designs in the game from the biological life on the Bionis to the technological life on Mechonis, there’s a very interesting mix happening in this game. Some of the designs for certain creatures and mecha are reminiscent of some designs used in past “Xeno” games… those familiar will notice a few homages present.

As for the human characters, they are well designed however one small complaint I have is that they’re surprisingly blocky and have very low resolution textures applied to them which looks odd when viewing the characters during cutscenes. It’s not a huge complaint but it is a little jarring at first when the game begins with a cutscene containing quite a lot of close-ups of the character’s faces. Of course, as you continue on with the game any thoughts on this matter are washed away and you understand that such issues don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

Audio

The Australian version of Xenoblade comes with a soundtrack CD (EU version comes with a red Classic Controller Pro) with a few selected tracks from the game, however there is an official 4 disc soundtrack released in Japan that contains all of the games music.

Music

At first I found the music for this game to be pretty standard, but after 100+ hours of hearing the various themes, a lot of it has really grown on me. There are some really great musical pieces in the game both in cutscenes and general background music that do a great job of setting the mood.

Voice acting

Being a modern-day RPG, naturally it has a hell of a lot of voice acting, the bonus is that the version of Xenoblade released in Europe and Australia has both English language AND the original Japanese language on the same disc.

I have to be honest here, after a little time with the English voice acting complete with British accents, I ended up turning the language over to Japanese and turning on the subtitles. Many people across the net seem to think the voice acting is pretty good and a lot of people enjoy it, however I’ve never been a fan of British accents.

Of course, switching over to the Japanese option isn’t perfect either since the subtitles for the game follow the exact script for the English language version for the game and not what’s actually being said in Japanese. This seems to be a more common trait among video games and something that would be a total outrage if it were done in any anime. However, despite the discrepancies it’s fairly accurate aside from a few hiccups along the way.

Final thoughts

I’ve spent over a hundred hours playing this game so far and I’m still not finish… I’m close, but there’s still a bit more left to the story and I’m having a hell of a time playing it. I really can’t get enough of it, I want more! It’s a good thing this game has a new game+ option when you complete it because despite all of the many side quests I’ve completed and the areas I’ve explored, there’s still a lot of things I haven’t done in this game that I would like to experience.

I have no idea what Reggie or anyone else over at Nintendo of America are thinking when it comes to Xenoblade. It’s truly a magnificent game that has gotten excellent reviews all across the board and is a must for anyone who owns a Wii. Hell, Nintendo of Europe made it even easier for them to release the game since all of the voice acting and content translations have been completed for the release in PAL territories. So why the refusal of releasing this game in North America? Do they think it won’t make them any money? Or perhaps they feel the content may be offensive in some way… I don’t see how they could think so considering the proud release of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for Wii.

An outlandish theory would be that perhaps they are waiting to port the game over to Wii U… though that in itself is downright silly. Nintendo of America should have released this game and no amount of reasoning they’ve convinced themselves of or a cloak of silence can justify what they’re doing… or rather, what they’re not doing. Hopefully this will change in the near future and Nintendo of America will launch a surprise announcement or something… but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

If you can get your hands on Xenoblade Chronicles, I suggest you do. It’s a game well worth playing, a credit to Monolith Soft and to the folks over at Nintendo of Europe who had the wisdom of seeing that it is a game well worth investment they put in it.

Now that Xenoblade has been released, I await the release of two other JRPGs coming to European and Australian Wii’s, The Last Story and Pandora’s Tower.