Topic: Xenoblade Chronicles Definitive Edition

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Well, I asked here for advice a little under two years ago regarding Xenoblade Chronicles, and I'm happy to say that despite a false start and an extended break in-between, I've managed to finish this giant of a game. In my boredom of doing nothing at work, I wrote a piece on my experience playing it and will post it here in case anyone is interested! Thank you to all who gave me advice years ago and helped me to love this game. I'll have to get started on the sequel at some point in the future...

Xenoblade Chronicles is the first JRPG I ever bought. In the last few months of 2023, I became highly intrigued by this particular franchise due to the praise I’d been hearing for the third entry’s Future Redeemed DLC. It promised to tie up the narrative ends of the three games and mix them altogether into a glorious finale bringing this trilogy’s over-arching narrative to an end. As a fan of narrative writing in any form, I feel like it’s not that often this kind of joint resolution to three stories worth of different characters and narrative is attempted. The attempt and the apparent success of it is what ultimately got me to start it and experience the full journey, so that I myself will hopefully be able to experience the same level of delight and satisfaction by the end of it.

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Admittedly, the game and I started off on a rocky note. The underleveled nature of my party compared to the very first enemies I was coming across made the combat feel like nothing more than an uphill climb with an unhealthy dose of RNG. The near-instant deluge of nameless NPCs giving me fetch quest after fetch quest filled me with a sense of dread only modern open-world games can match. The more than occasionally questionable voice acting gave me the impression that this might not be the kind of narrative I would be getting much fun out of. And so, after a rough three hours with a rather unimpressive first impression, I dropped the game. It was as I expected… JRPGs were simply not my genre.

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Fast forward to about a year later, when I played another JRPG stealing the thunder as my first ever finished. I got along better with it to the point that I managed to finish the whole thing, which in and of itself is almost unheard of in recent years with the ungodly length of it. While the combat systems are entirely different, playing it did expose me to more of JRPG-style mechanics and the style of storytelling. And surprisingly, by the end of it, I was yearning for more. So, with my newfound appreciation of a JRPG game and a longing for another humongous undertaking, what other game could possibly fit the bill? How convenient I had a dusty cartridge of Xenoblade Chronicles sitting there just waiting for someone to plug it into a Switch.

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I got the gang back together again, or rather the three or four characters I had met by the point I quit previously. I was quick to notice that something had changed within me. Something was not the same. The enemies I had trouble with just over a year ago suddenly were a total walk in the park. It was like I experienced real personal growth instead of living vicariously through my characters leveling up and upgrading their gear. I contribute that to two different ways in which I played differently. First of all, I made sure to actually level up to the enemies I was facing.

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It might sound to an obvious fix to all of you role-playing aficionados, but as someone who had been exclusively used to playing the type of adventure or action-adventure games where keeping an eye on your level was entirely absent from the experience, going out of my way to keep my level on par was far from second nature for me. Secondly, which goes hand in hand with the first, is that I stopped trying to rush to the next big story beat and just enjoy my time with it. Long games, especially open-world games, intimidate me to the point I have often tried to limit the time spent finishing it as much as possible. Now that I had a, by my standards, ridiculously elongated playtime with the aforementioned other JRPG under my belt, I felt less intimidated by it and left myself the space to just explore and get to the next waypoint on my own time.

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The combat system itself is nothing to write home about. I appreciate that they tried to go for a different route instead of the usual turn-based mechanics of most JRPGs, but I think what they ended up with was simultaneously over- and underbaked with a sprinkle of RNG and far too many sprinkles of the same flavor. The endless tutorials you start the game with promise a probably hard to learn, hard to master set of combat mechanics, and that is how I experienced it at first. I had no clue what I was doing with any of the moves I had or what build I should even go for or where I should even stand. Add insult to injury that I absolutely hate creating builds for anything in any game and would rather just go ahead and play it. Arranging a bunch of moves out of many possibilities to create the most synergized set, deciding which armor sets fit my playstyle best, inserting my gear with the most beneficial thingamajigs to get the most power out of myself for combat situations… blah blah blah. I could not care less, and this game throws all of it in my face.

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My solution was to simply ignore the thingamajigs aside from what I had collected from loot, just put on the armor with the best physical defense at any point, and stick with the default movesets the game decided for me whenever I’d receive a new character. I simply do not want to put more thought into it than that, and luckily that was enough to let me mostly brute force any average encounter without problems. The problem came in when I wanted to fight enemies slightly overleveled compared to my party, where I quickly realized RNG was a huge part of this game. You can get an enemy down to almost no health the first try, respawn, and somehow die without the same enemy having even lost a third of its health bar the second time around. That was incredibly frustrating, but luckily, I was barely ever in a situation where an enemy was notably higher in level than myself. And if they were, it usually meant I had no need to fight them in the first place.

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A certain white-haired lady ended up my go-to party leader, as I found her skill set to be the least difficult to play, in a party with a weirdly too old for his behavior furball and a bloke whose sword I’d unapologetically stolen. They dominated my party so much that by the end I would’ve probably forgotten other options existed if not for the constant reminders of them in cutscenes. None of them saved the combat scenarios from being overly repetitive, and I think none of the others would have helped on that front either, but it was a solid party to get enemies down with in a quick enough fashion that I could deal with the repetition.

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The ambush of exclamation marks on my mini-map materializing themselves into NPCs wanting me to pick some flowers felt less off-putting by now too. I figured that at this point I’d dug many a rock or slain many an enemy for people irrelevant to my saving the princess. What’s another odd job between friends? I’ll take your request and see if I get back to it within the next hundred working hours. That said, I quickly grew an entirely new appreciation for the 449 side quests (stay with me here) to the point that by the time I finished the game, I probably finished 98% of them. This part has less to do with JRPG as a genre as a whole, but with the Affinity system the game smartly implemented.

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Most NPCs in the game are named and will in some way be related to other NPCs you can interact with throughout each area, which is presented in an absolute nightmare of a statistical chart called the Affinity Chart. Through this chart, you can see the ways in which all the citizens of Bionis are connected, whether that’s through a romantic relationship or because someone stole someone else’s lollipop one time and they’re still super upset about it. The genius thing that the side quests do is that they integrate themselves with this chart, where it will update whenever you finish practically any side quest with new information or events that happened that affect the quest-givers relationship to any person.

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Suddenly a fetch quest felt less like a fetch quest and more like integrating myself into a community and happily learning more about the goings-on, even if yes, it ultimately still was a fetch quest where someone lost their favorite teddy bear on a remote island. I became invested in the people living in this city through the stories the Affinity chart and the only slightly narratively dressed-up side quests were telling. It no longer felt like a chore, but like a chore I had to do because I didn’t want to risk upsetting Dorothy by not giving her life advice after I got her shoe polished at another colony roughly weeks of traveling away. The fact that finishing certain quests and unlocking certain Affinity between different NPCs unlocked more quests that were directly tied to either previous quests or their relationship too, just added a bunch of depth to it that I couldn’t help but appreciate.

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And my final initial reservation, the quality of the narrative and the voice acting. I can’t necessarily say that I personally did anything to make either better or worse, but I can say that the way I engaged with it was less instantly judgmental and let me end up loving the narrative and characters for what they are instead of what I’d make them. The voice acting has a certain charm when you get used to it, and there’s actually a fair few moments throughout the narrative where the actors are truly giving it their best and mostly succeeding. The plot also quickly won me over and despite some pacing mishaps here and there, ended up being an emotionally resonant tale of a group of people doing the thing that they seem to always do at the end of a JRPG as is my now expert opinion after having played two. The journey to it, however, was incredibly engaging and filled with many highs to keep my commitment to it ongoing.

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I do have to say that it’s not a perfect story and there’s definitely a few things here and there I ding the ultimate scoring of the game for, which mainly is the characters. While they’re all charming in their own right and serve their purpose, with most having solidly written character arcs and some real over-arching plot importance, their personalities are nothing more than that. They’re charming and serve their purpose in the story, that’s all. Outside of the necessities of even wanting to engage with them at all, they’re rather bland and lack much depth. I enjoyed spending my time with them in the moment as virtual avatars for playing through the game, but they’re not characters I would hold on a high pedestal as being the peak of character work, because there is simply just not that much to them.

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The Heart-to-Hearts, which are events meant to deepen the relationship between two characters in your party, do some lifting to add a bit more to the characters, but are too few and far between to have any meaningful impact. They also, as a side note, are very annoying to complete as the game will lock them behind a certain Affinity if you have not yet achieved it when you first find them, and afterwards will refuse to let you know exactly where this Heart-to-Heart was when you eventually do reach the threshold and search for it in your menu. I’ve heard the Definitive Edition makes a lot of quality-of-life changes to the map in regards to quests, but this is seemingly an area where a change would’ve been highly appreciated yet was skipped over.

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Something that I never got far enough to explore my first time around was the exploration of the maps you’re given to freely roam around, which turned out to be one of my favorite activities in the game. My issue with many modern open-world games is that they don’t truly encourage you to explore for the sake of exploring outside of putting a god-forsaken number of markers on your map telling you there’s some bandits to beat up here or another insert time period-appropriate tower to go up there. I never find exploration satisfying because even if I do decide to explore for my own sake, many of these open-world games feel quickly repetitive in their locales or the architecture they decide to put on the map. This is where Xenoblade Chronicles does a way better job at keeping the exploration interesting.

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The game is divided into many different maps you’ll be traversing through to reach your final destination of the narrative. Each one feels incredibly different and new, making it so that you won’t quickly be bored of the type of environment you’re currently exploring. The maps have hidden landmarks you won’t be able to find other than deciding to explore yourself, and more importantly… it has the most serotonin-inducing visual and audio cue that happens any time you reach a new area the game deems noteworthy. Sure, it serves the main purpose mechanically of being a new waypoint to fast travel to, but the instant gratification I feel when this visual and sound pops up made exploring in and of itself worth it. Maybe I’m just easily entertained, I’ll concur. But in a world where Survivor-like serotonin simulators are now a genre themselves, I feel like this was likely intentional more than anything.

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This brings me to the finale of the game and my thoughts alike: Future Connected, a little side-campaign added as a bonus for long-time fans in the Definitive Edition. I was pleased to see that my favorite white-haired lady returned as the main focus on the campaign’s narrative, as I’d gotten most narratively invested in her arc. And also, because I would’ve hated to get to grips with a new moveset this late into the experience. At this point I want to hear nothing other than summon Earth and summon copy and many blasting sound effects while characters are constantly screaming catchphrases out of the poor Switch’s speaker. It served as a satisfying finale to some of the plot points left untouched by the end of the main game and ended the full experience on a positive note. It doesn’t reach the highs of the game at its best, as I don’t imagine it was intended to, but it never drops into the worst of the main games’ weaknesses either.

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The most notable thing I found mechanically in Future Connected was the removal of the Heart-to-Hearts in favor of the so-called Quiet Moments. They serve the same purpose as the Heart-to-Hearts, but are simply locked behind story progression instead of Affinity. Unlike the Heart-to-Hearts, they also include full voice acting, which I believe was both a blessing and a curse. I often resented the lack of voice acting for the main game’s Heart-to-Hearts. These are supposed to be building blocks to the characters’ personalities, which felt cheapened by the fact that they weren’t even given full resources to bring the best out of them. Here they receive it, but the Quiet Moments often felt lacking in their writing and overly long due to it. There are a few stand-out ones involving a sister that really do a lot to develop that relationship, but it ultimately just made me wish that the same level of effort and attention was put into the main game equivalent. Oh, and the Nopon inspectors were delightful.

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93 hours later and I’m left with an incredibly positive impression of the whole game. It has its faults, surely, but the journey was narratively impressive at its best and mind-numbingly engaging at its worst. I ended the game with full-star Affinity for each of the areas, and some real investment in some of the NPCs I met along the way. I can’t name a single other game with that many different NPCs and quest-givers that worked together to actually form a believable community of people that I actively went out of my way to help out. And isn’t that ultimately the whole point of the game? Rejecting the old and finding new ways to co-exist and thrive together? I can’t help but feel it mirrors how my experience went exactly. I rejected what I thought I wanted from the game and let me teach me how to love it instead, and along the way created the kind of parasocial relationships that made me want the best for this world and its characters to be able to thrive. Enough with the “narratively”. It was personally satisfying, and that is the mark of a great game.