At first it feels like too much to have to worry about. Imagine a relational data cube of trigger actions you can futz with, each dependent on some thing or other happening during combat. Take “Soul Voices,” the game’s way of rewarding you for interacting with teammates as you’re squaring off with opponents. Xenoblade Chronicles X works exactly the same, only with a totally different set of ideas. Xenoblade Chronicles would trot out a new idea, then lay in another, then more still, until it felt like you were playing outwards from the center of an onion, each step refiguring your grasp of all the other gameplay systems. Never mind how insanely big and dangerous Mira is, you’re busy enough just getting your hands around the periodic gameplay changeups.
#Xenoblade chronicles x insidia a free#
I noticed one player on a forum devoted to the game complaining that the planet’s hostiles were making free exploration difficult, to which another quipped: “It’s as if you’re stuck on a hostile alien planet or something!” Indigens are ubiquitous, and the most lethal often roam in eyeshot of the most benign.
The difference is that instead of working your way quasi-linearly through a world that unlocks in segments, you can go anywhere on planet Mira from the start. Xenoblade Chronicles X isn’t a direct sequel to that game, but echoes its core ideas: realtime battles where you trigger abilities (“arts”) and shoot for combat bonuses by complementing whatever your teammates are up to, and collection-driven exploration. It’s further evidence of a design restlessness that’s marked most of Japan-based director Tetsuya Takahasi’s work, best realized in 2012’s superb Xenoblade Chronicles for the Nintendo Wii. A library of interesting ideas slowly unwinds, eventually ramifying in ways that challenge not just a gamer’s ability to cleave through the next lot of refrigerator-poetry-christened “grotto mortifoles” or “echo gemivores” or “viridian monoceros,” but his or her basic grasp of how the game works at all. The twists and wrinkles lie instead in the gameplay (where they should be).
It knows what it is, and doubles down by inviting players to knock about its sprawling menageries without worrying whether the story makes sense or caring much about its characters. Xenoblade Chronicles X makes no such pretense.
Scrape it off, and you’re either fighting or looking for more stuff to fight. In other games, most of those places turn out to be facile-battle zoos under a patina of storytelling. That you can wander anywhere your eyeballs register is only the game’s surface allure, an assimilation of the Western roleplaying genre’s penchant for turning players loose in freaking ginormous spaces where who-knows-what lurks around any corner.
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