Out in the wilderness, Xenoblade Chronicles X presents seemingly endless reasons to fight and wander the planet. The system encouraged me to try different moves, making a cool-looking variety of moves more powerful than settling into a repeating pattern of spamming the same attacks over and over. At the same time, their attacks trigger opportunities for you to use complementary abilities to maximize damage and restore health. Whenever you perform a move to topple an enemy, your computer-driven comrades seize the opportunity and pummel it into dust. You only directly control one character in your four-person party, and you can easily switch between ranged and melee weapons, but but I found the energetic mix of real-time basic attacks and cooldown abilities highly engaging because of the way my AI-controlled teammates coordinated with me. The overall sense of place is weakened further by a bad soundtrack that tries to be upbeat, but just sounds like noise instead.Ĭombat is what really hooked me into this RPG for the long haul. Refugee earthlings don’t really make an impression, it seems. Passing cars clip through your party if you run through them, and few people acknowledge your presence. The city of New Los Angeles also suffers from this populated-but-lifeless feeling. Mira is a hostile world for us players, but the lack of a simulated or even faked food chain often made it felt like I was exploring a large zoo at feeding time, and I’m the only food item on the menu. Sometimes you’ll see packs of Fleet Evello, creatures that look like alien turkeys, migrate around a small sector together, or spot tiger-like Grex grazing in the sun, but they’re never trying to eat each other as you might expect. It’s disappointing that creatures rarely interact with each other as kin or prey, though. The large bestiary of different enemy sizes and species made me feel like I was constantly finding new foes to fight, even as far as 50 hours into the campaign. Roaming packs of creatures of a variety of different strengths and levels spawn everywhere, and they make the alien planet feel crowded with things to fight.
When I got my boots on the ground and explored, the enemy variety of planet Mira was immediately impressive. Noctilum's lush, sparkling jungle is a stark contrast to the dusty, mountain-filled landscape of Oblivia, and neither resembles the green plains of Primordia. You can run on foot to four of its five visually distinct, monster-filled continents right from the start, giving you lots of options.
#XENOBLADE CHRONICLES X KIRSTY FULL#
Much like Xenoblade Chronicles on Wii, this gorgeous alien world is very open and full of lively creatures. The script itself is well localized and the individual story chapters felt like condensed episodes of an anime, so it’s disappointing it’s not put to better use. The muddled presentation makes important moments feel bland, with low production value that robs emotional scenes of any dramatic weight. Most cutscenes exhibit big-budget, anime-inspired flair with great results, while others are poorly animated and limply voiced in-engine conversations that fall completely flat. It kept me interested despite some jarringly inconsistent delivery. Xenoblade Chronicles X is a harrowing and unpredictable survival story of humanity getting caught in the crossfire of a galactic war. It’s a long and sometimes grindy road, but the powerful mechs you eventually unlock make fighting and exploring in the hostile open reward of this action roleplaying game both rewarding and immersive. The tumultuous alien world is an artistically breathtaking landscape full of hostile foes to fight, terrain to explore, and a near-endless supply of quests to complete. After many hours of riding around in mech suits and exploring the vast planet Mira, the massive scale of Xenoblade Chronicles X still amazes me.