With Xenoblade Chronicles 3 and its DLC story having closed out the story that began on the Wii, it seems like the future of the series is anyone’s guess. While all three of the numbered games are available on Nintendo Switch, there was one piece of the puzzle that was conspicuously absent until today. Released back in 2015 on the ill-fated Wii U, Xenoblade Chronicles X was one of the biggest and most ambitious games on the system. Fast forward to nearly 10 years later, and its story is revitalized in Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition
There’s Something About This Planet
Sometime in the 2050s, planet Earth is the battleground of a massive war between two unknown alien factions. When it’s clear that humanity is outnumbered and outgunned, a group of selected survivors board several spacecrafts in search of a new home once Earth is annihilated. However, many of these are shot down before they could even escape the atmosphere, leaving the White Whale as humanity’s last vessel of survival. Two years pass as they search the great unknown for a new home, before some of those same aliens who destroyed Earth catch up with them, shooting the White Whale down and forcing it to crash land onto the nearby planet of Mira. Your player character is one of the few lucky survivors of the incident, having been found and awakened two months after the crash.
Found by a military leader named Elma, you head to the last bastion of humanity settled on Mira, which is otherwise home to dangerous indigenous life forms that make humans look tiny by comparison. New Los Angeles is where you’ll be settled for your journey, and where the paramilitary organization of BLADE (“Builders of a Legacy After the Destruction of Earth”) is also posted. After a few trials to prove your worth, you join up with BLADE as part of Elma’s crew, joined by 13-year-old Lin Lee Koo and the annoyingly carefree Nopon, Tatsu. Along the way you’ll meet a whole host of characters, ranging from humans to sapient indigenous life forms who you’ll either do battle with or make nice with.
Aside from the extreme hurdle of having to settle on a new planet, Mira itself presents mysteries and challenges that need to be overcome. Strangely, every species on the planet can perfectly understand each other, and no one can seem to leave it, either. Worse still, humans are stuck on Mira with a species called the Ganglion, who are hellbent on wiping them out alongside the “Lifehold”, a piece of the White Whale where many survivors are kept in stasis. It’s similar, yet undoubtedly different from the stories of the numbered Xenoblade titles. It leans far more into the aesthetic and themings of mecha and transhumanist anime like Mobile Suit Gundam (1971) or Ghost in the Shell. Even compared to the bleak Xenoblade Chronicles 3, I would say Xenoblade Chronicles X pulls its punches far less frequently.
I’m of two minds on the writing for this game. On one end. I think the overall premise is very well executed in terms of both gameplay implementation and content. However, for reasons I’ll get into shortly, I think the main story lets it down due to how haphazard it feels. I found the cast to be plenty entertaining, but the main plot leaves little room for them to meaningfully and dynamically react to the things happening around them.
Not Even A Distant Land
The biggest shortfall of Xenoblade Chronicles X’s main story is that it feels like it’s incompatible with how the entire game is structured. It’s a story that wants to convey that it’s one thing, but the reality of what’s being presented is totally different. It’s a game that begs you to stop and sniff the roses, but the main story is presented as this desperate race against time. At one point, Elma chides another character named Lao for going on what she calls a “detour” from their main objective of securing the Lifehold, but minutes before I engaged in a Heart-to-Heart where she was playing with a cat as if she had all the time in the world. It’s hard to take this sense of pressure in the main story seriously, especially not when you’re required to explore certain percentages of the map and do Affinity Quests to even unlock more main story chapters.
I generally get the feeling that the main story wasn’t really the point of this game, and I mean that in both good and bad ways. On one end, this leaves many main story chapters feeling quite short—far shorter than I remember them being up until the lategame. This, combined with the sheer amount of optional content that takes up my attention left me saying “Oh yeah, that” when I returned to the main storyline. It is lucky that elsewhere I think the writing is quite strong, especially when it comes to the optional content. Monolith Soft’s greatest writing strength, in my opinion, is their ability to create feasible yet fantastical scenarios using logistics for unordinary circumstances. In other words, it’s grounded yet still definitively manages to feel like gritty sci-fi.
I’m most engaged with Xenoblade X’s writing when it’s about the hard times and sacrifices necessary to create a home on a new planet. I’ll save my fuller thoughts for when I talk about Affinity Quests, but it’s nice that the player is given so many tough choices that can lead to surprising answers or outcomes. BLADE’s duties on Mira often walk a fine line in regard to the moral implications of settling down on a new planet. There’s a great, totally optional normal quest that involves making the choice to slaughter a pack of young animals because they might pose a threat to humanity later on. This isn’t some one-off thing either, late in the game it comes back and has different outcomes depending on what choice you made at the time.
While the main story in Xenoblade X is undoubtedly disappointing, I think it also creates an inviting playground for roleplaying. It’s given a distinct air from the mainline titles for how often it goes around to ask what the player thinks of a problem or situation, and how their answer will actually matter later on. The main story is rigid in this sense, but it still manages to keep my attention if mostly for the strong sense of intrigue and enjoyable characters.
Anyone Can Alter Situations
Affinity Quests are likely what you’ll be engaging with between main story missions. These are bite-sized, episodic stories that follow the day-to-day of one of the many residents in NLA. While you’ll need to have certain prerequisites fulfilled (player level, character affinity, and percentage of main story progress), once you do, you’re locked into the Affinity Quest until you complete it. These typically start and end the same, with a character having a problem to solve, you going out in the world to do some chores for them, and then the end is usually capped off with a boss of some kind. That might sound boring, but thanks to incredibly strong core gameplay and the aforementioned importance of role-playing this time around, it never actually is.
Some Affinity Quests (such as most of Lao’s) are required to complete to progress the main story, so those can be seen as extensions of it. Others are more meant to give characters who are optional or unimportant to the main story a character arc that spans the whole game. I think this is a good compromise to not having them be important to the main story. Yelv might not contribute much to the broader mission of retrieving the Lifehold, but I still find his quest to find pieces of it compelling because of how much focus his storyline gets. Similarly, while Tatsu is pretty much a nuisance in the main storyline, I actually rather enjoy his Affinity Quests since they help make him a bit more sympathetic (if not pitiable). Adding onto this is the degree to which player dialogue choices can affect how characters react or even change how the storyline proceeds.
At first, this typically amounts to characters having their affinity raised based on what you say and giving positive or negative dialogue. Later, this escalates, with player choice even going so far as to affect whether you fight entire bosses or not. Once you reach midgame, what dialogue you pick will even start to determine whether characters live or die. Oftentimes this is quite sensible, like giving a character sage advice so they don’t charge into an unwinnable battle. Other times, this will force you to remember key details about the current story, like whether a character should be allowed to take a shower or not—if you know, you know.
This would normally be the point where I call Affinity Quests an “excellent supplement” to the main story content, but I would go so far as to say that they’re actually more important than the main storyline. These are what kept me engaged and invested in the happenings of NLA and its citizenry, and what was in the back of my mind when things started to implode in the main story. These were what made me care about Xenoblade X as a story.
We’re Stuck On A Whole Different—You Know The Song…
Next to combat, exploration is one of the key driving forces behind Xenoblade X’s core gameplay. With Planet Mira being entirely uncharted by humans, it’s up to the player to pioneer the lands and see what’s out there. With this game offering what is still the biggest world map in the entire series (being roughly 5x the size of the first game), it can be a daunting yet exciting task. Indeed, if you plan on 100%ing this game, expect your playtime to smash into the triple digits with ease. Between quests and all the battles and quests I had to do along the way, Mira became like a second home to me.
Mira is broken up into five main continents, which are:
- Primordia: A vast stretch of grasslands and rocky cliff sides, surrounded by seas and beaches.
- Noctilum: Glowing woodlands filled with strange flora and fauna, as well as towering wooden structures for you to climb.
- Oblivia: Badlands filled with deserts and electric storms, as well as strange, enormous rings off in the distance.
- Sylvalum: A ghastly place covered in white sand and hostile drones that patrol the areas, surrounded by alien cliffs and strange pillars everywhere.
- Cauldros: A volcanic area covered in tons of lava, with heated rain pelting the player at random intervals.
Each continent is gigantic, taking the player what I would estimate at around 30 hours each to clear out. While you’re free to run around the place to try and stealth around enemies that will otherwise kill you on sight, it’s best to take it slow and instead install Data Probes to learn more about your surroundings. Data Probes are connected to FrontierNav, essentially a network of information you have to manually gather by exploring and setting up each probe at the designated points on the map. Your job isn’t over once this is done, however, as this merely unlocks more tasks for you to do in each area of the map. These typically involve tasks like finding an item to collect or finding a Tyrant (an especially powerful enemy) to defeat. Other times you may instead have to scope out a hidden area or complete an associated Affinity Mission to have your exploration percentage increase.
What I find especially impressive about Mira is that, despite its size, everything feels ornate and fit for purpose. There’s little about Mira’s environments that doesn’t either prod my intrigue or tell some kind of story. Unusually large piles of collectible indigen dung is normally placed next to creatures that may tower above me, and things like wreckage left by humans is placed near areas where it’s clear that a mission was botched. These details are small, but they add up and give the place a real sense of life despite how many technical shortcuts the game takes. I feel this is taken further by how deliberately haphazard the world is. Rather than have enemy levels scale depending on how far out the player travels like other RPGs, instead strong enemies are typically mixed in with weak ones. While I might be fighting a Level 20 enemy in one area, there may be a Level 90 Tyrant just a short walk away from where I am.
This is before I get into the world’s fantastic art direction. Similar to The Legend of Zelda’s Switch titles like Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, the most important places are given a distinct shape that sticks out on the horizon. It doesn’t take long for me to pick out where I should be heading next, but hidden areas also require a lot more attentiveness to find. I could go on and on, but some things are best left discovered by the player.
Blow Through Your Tar
Combat in Xenoblade Chronicles X is a direct evolution of the original game, rather than what is featured in Xenoblade 2 or 3. Like in the original Xenoblade Chronicles, you’ll engage in real-time combat that emphasizes positioning and effectively chaining attacks or skills together. While you have both a ranged and melee weapon for auto-combos, your real driver in combat will be your Arts. You can have up to eight of these equipped at a given time, though there are many more to pick from, so picking a balanced loadout is crucial. Arts additionally have cooldowns, so you can’t spam them willy-nilly.
Arts are neatly divided into five main categories:
- Orange: Arts that deal physical damage
- Yellow: Arts that attack at a range
- Green: Arts that heal or buff oneself or the party
- Purple: Arts that debuffs the enemy through either attacking or causing a status effect.
- Blue: Arts that cast Auras (highly effective temporary self-buffs) in exchange for Tension Points (TP).
Which Arts you choose to load will depend on your build, which is additionally affected by what Class you pick. While other characters are restricted to one Class, your player character isn’t, so feel free to experiment and find whatever suits you. Some Classes may prioritize healing, while others will put you in the role of a tank, and others may have you be hyper-offensive. Classes also affect your initial Arts loadout, as well as what weapons you can carry into battle. Once you max out a class’s potential, you can mix and match these things at your leisure. While this does definitively make the player character the best in the game, other characters can come equipped with two Arts unique to them, so mixing and matching is still encouraged.
I personally went with the Duelist class, which uses a Longsword and Assault rifle to create a hyper-offensive playstyle. While Duelists eat up a ton of TP (more on that in the next section), they can deal an outrageous amount of damage with correct setups. Pairing the Arts “Offensive Stance” to dramatically buff my attack power, “Magnum Edge” to debuff enemy defense, and finally letting loose “Incendiary Edge” to deal several extra digits of damage never got old once.
I really like the combat of Xenoblade Chronicles X, and combined with the exploration and sidequests, I feel it gives it by far the best gameplay loop out of any title in this series. Exploring a new area only to get caught up in a massive scuffle where reinforcements kept coming is thrilling in a way few RPGs are able to match in my eyes. I really do feel that Xenoblade’s systems and mechanics are best suited to the kind of open-endedness provided by what X does.
Overdriving In Style
Tension Points are another aspect of combat that the player will need to keep a careful eye on. While many Arts are free to cast, ones with the label “TP” aren’t. Tension Points are at first gained by answering Soul Voices, mid-battle dialogue from party members that prompts the player to use a specific kind of Art with bonus effects. Once you begin unlocking more Arts, you can activate secondary effects by fulfilling certain mid-battle conditions, some of which will allow you to gain more TP. The Duelist’s “Tornado Blade” art, for example, will regenerate TP when you use it while an Aura’s effect is still active. Tornado Blade also attacks several times, and each hit by itself regenerates TP, effectively making regaining TP a non-issue if you know what you’re doing. Once you hit the maximum amount of TP (and have cleared Chapter 5), you’ll gain access to another powerful tool: Overdrive.
For 30 seconds, Overdrive will dramatically shorten the cooldown on Arts, allowing you to continuously use them back-to-back for as long as it’s active. This might not seem terribly useful since Art animations can take a while, but this is before realizing those 30 seconds can be extended by regaining max TP and spending it all to lengthen Overdrive. A seemingly tall order given the small time frame, but consider what I said about Tornado Blade’s secondary effect… See where I’m going with this? Not to say that Overdrive isn’t still hard to use, as you need to build your character in a way that can maximize its potential, but once you do? Congratulations, you’ve pretty much beaten Xenoblade Chronicles X. Combine any Art combo that easily regenerates TP along with evasion buffs like “Ghost Factory” and watch as you become an untouchable killing machine.
This seems like it might run the risk of compromising combat difficulty, but I think builds are restrained enough for most of the game to pose a solid challenge until endgame takes off the training wheels. In fact, Xenoblade Chronicles X’s difficulty is broadly quite well-rounded, with the challenge especially ramping up in the midgame thanks to some unforgiving boss fights. If you don’t pay attention to basically all of its mechanics, you’re liable to get stomped into the pavement with no mercy.
I Need A Bigger Gun
It’s at this point that you might be wondering what the heck is the deal with the giant robot on Xenoblade X’s box art. That’s a Skell, which you’ll unlock after completing Chapter 6 of the main story and doing a quest to be granted a license for one. Skells help to dramatically even the odds against enemies that are far bigger and nastier than you can hope to be on foot. While Definitive Edition lifts the original level cap of on-foot characters (from 60 to 99), Skells are still massively more powerful in both stats and Arts. They also assist in exploration, as many enemies are not hostile towards Skells, and they have a higher jump as well as a Flight module unlocked later in the game. The Flight Module in particular is required to get to several areas that are otherwise unreachable.
Skells come in three different types, each having their own pros and cons. Light Skells have low fuel needed to power their Arts and have low fuel consumption when flying. Heavy Skells have high fuel and higher HP in battle but require much more fuel during flight because of that added weight. Medium Skells, as you can guess, are a middle ground between these two. A Skell also has eight equippable weapons, four for both arms. Which weapons you equip will determine what Arts a Skell is loaded out with, also meaning you can have duplicate Arts for a bit of flavor. More Skell Arts can be acquired by investing money and items into various industries peppered through NLA. With enough patience, they can annihilate most enemies in a single attack.
Skells are just the bee’s knees, full stop. Not only are they great for what they add to gameplay, but because the fantasy of being able to fly around this giant, alien world with a mecha of my own design is awesome. They’re worth the addition pretty much just because of how cool they look and animate, but being able to go out and decimate foes that originally gave me grief is the cherry on top. The moment I got my license, I started shopping around for the best-looking ones like a kid in a toy store… or an adult who spends too much money on Gunpla.
About my only issue with it is that I wish Definitive Edition had removed the ever-irritating Skell Insurance. Rather than simply dying and respawning as you do on foot, a Skell that is defeated in battle is destroyed and must instead be repaired. While you’re given Insurance Tickets at first, which makes this free, these eventually run out, forcing you to either permanently scrap the Skell or pay an exorbitant repair fee. I get that this is to add a layer of realism to owning a giant robot, but considering all the cheap surprises that can snuff out your Skell in an instant, it’s realism that I could do without.
Definitive Edition Additions
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition is a less dramatic overhaul compared to the Definitive Edition of the original game. Especially as far as graphics go, the main things that have changed are a subtle increase in saturation to the game’s picture, and character faces being overhauled to be more expressive and far less uncanny. There are also some subtle changes to character design peppered throughout the game, mostly with the story’s main characters. Compared to the bleaker look of the original game, it’s a change I rather like. There are also boosts to performance, with the game running at 900p in Docked Mode and up to 720p in Portable Mode. It’s also undoubtedly Monolith Soft’s most polished release this generation, with far less jank and unpolished visuals compared to Xenoblade 1: Definitive Edition, 2, or 3.
By far this version’s biggest wins are in its numerous upgrades to readability, quality of life, and its user interface. The Wii U release was notorious for having a UI that was borderline unreadable, making it difficult to parse its many mechanics. To say that this version fixes that would be faint praise, I think it’s the most resounding step forward Monolith Soft has taken as far as readability is concerned. The font is big and easy to read, and all of the text that tells you what you need to know is exactly where it should be. Although a lot is going on during gameplay (especially combat), it never feels overwhelming either. Players who might get lost also aren’t without help, as tutorials have additionally been improved across the board. My one complaint is that I wish the map was smoother to access since it was originally designated for the Gamepad in the Wii U release.
It would take me all day to go over all of the little changes they made to make the experience more delightful, but suffice it to say that I think it really earned the “Definitive” moniker. They even managed to get Hiroyuki Sawano back to do more music, making my favorite soundtrack in the series even better. There’s also new story content, such as new unlockable characters and Affinity Quests during the main game. A new Flight Module was also added, letting you fly around the map like you’re playing Star Fox.
There’s also a new chapter that takes place after the conclusion of the main story, which ended on a rather notorious note. Since it’s labeled “Afterstory”, I can’t really talk about it here without spoiling everything. It does answer some of the lingering mysteries of Xenoblade X’s storyline, but your mileage may vary on whether you find these answers and its conclusion to be satisfactory. Speaking frankly, I thought the new story content was mostly quite bad, and it felt rushed. It feels like a continuation to a version of Xenoblade Chronicles X that I never saw, and at worst it actively risked undermining the themes I actually enjoyed about the main storyline. It’s the one hard-to-ignore blemish on an otherwise fantastic game.
Verdict
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition is the best version of what I still feel is Monolith Soft’s best outing yet. It’s a bang-on, quintessential example of how to create a massive, alien world that is stylish and inviting. It’s packed with imagination, and its mechanics mostly come together quite seamlessly to create an overwhelming, childlike feeling that I don’t feel any game has managed to replicate since then. With the changes made to the Nintendo Switch version, I feel this more strongly than ever. It’s nothing if not a classic in my eyes.
However, it’s hard to gloss over just how poor I feel the Definitive Edition’s story content is. It leads to a wonderful game ending on a sour note, to the point that I actually wind up preferring the original’s notoriously inconclusive ending. After ruminating on it, it’s hard to reconcile the Afterstory with what the rest of the game presents, and in some ways it’s Xenoblade at its worst. However, the Afterstory is only a small part of an awesome package. If you want to explore a massive world, gunning down obstacles in your big robot with sick beats, look no further.
XENOBLADE CHRONICLES X: DEFINITIVE EDITION IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
If you would like to see more JRPGs, you may be interested in our review of Xenoblade Chronicles 3 or Pokémon Legends: Arceus.
Many thanks go to Nintendo for a Nintendo Switch review code for Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition.
A hobbyist who took up the pen to write about their favorite pastime: games. While a lover of many genres, Isaiah Parker specializes in Platformers, RPGs, and competitive multiplayer titles. The easiest way into his heart is to have great core gameplay mechanics. Self-proclaimed world’s biggest Sonic fan. Follow him @ZinogreVolt
