Off-Topic: Xenoblade Chronicles Review

I've finally finished this monster of a game. Total time 69 hours 4 minutes. I'll leave the post written as it was in the 'in progress' state, with an addendum to deal with the final few hours. I think in conclusion though, this game has made me question when a game is too long.

51 hours in, and thinking I was close enough to the end to write a review:

I wanted to write a review of this game, but at this rate, I'm not sure if it's ever going to end. I guess I'll publish this post when I do finish it. In the meantime, I wanted to keep a diary of how things are going. I'm a bit late executing on this, as I'm 51 hours in at the time of starting this post. At this stage, I actually resent the game for not being over, but I haven't felt this way throughout.

I'll put it all behind the break, as I figure I might be the only one interested in ever looking at it again! However, I think everyone should skip to the music section and listen to some of the tunes.


Story

The first 20 hours of Xenoblade Chronicles were magical. It was like being transported back to my childhood, when JRPGs had likeable characters (mostly because they weren't voiced) and exciting lore. The world the main characters live on is the body of a dead god/titan, the Bionis, who died in battle eons ago while also delivering a killing blow to another titan, the Mechonis (another 'world'). The two worlds are connected by the titans' swords.

This game looks awful sometimes. Note the Mechonis' severed arm, which is a whole other little world map on its own. 

The game isn't pretty by gaming standards, but it pretty clearly pushes the Wii as far as it possibly can. The maps are vast and Xenoblade isn't shy about making you walk for 10-15 minutes at a time, sometimes without even a battle. It's like the designers are asking you to appreciate the finer detail in the fields that they've designed, where you might come across such landmarks as the Bionis' knee or thumb.

I'm being harsh when I say the game looks awful. It can actually look stunning at times, but mainly the environments rather than the cut scenes.  I think the two images below actually highlight that quite well. The field mechanics allow you to jump, and fall off edges (which is unlike most RPGs, if Joker has actually made it this far) which means secret areas and easter eggs galore. You can walk EVERYWHERE in this game, if you have the time for it.

Everything is traversable, EVERYTHING

The characters are initially quite likeable, particularly Dunban (the classic hero mentor / swordsman badass) and Reyn (the goofy tank). The protagonist Shulk is fairly average in every way, but after hearing him say the word "Monado" easily over 100,000 times now, he's starting to grate on my nerves.  The Monado is the real star of this story, it's (spoiler) somehow the exact same sword that the Bionis used against the Mechonis, but I haven't quite gotten to how Shulk has a smaller more manageable version of it.

"MONADO, ACTIVATE!", "BY THE POWER OF THE MONADO!",  "THE MONADO ISN'T WORKING!"

Battle (TL:DR, very complex, fun, but I don't enjoy level grinding)

Battling takes place in realtime for the most part, with auto-attacks which I understand are the norm in MMORPGs. Think of this game's battles as a more interactive version of FFXII's battles. You're constantly mashing buttons to set off Attack Arts and you when you've built a meter up you can perform a chain attack with all three combatants. There are 'statuses' which you will use constantly to wipe more HP off your enemies. 

A typical battle involves using a Break attack, then a Topple attack, then a Daze attack, which effectively keeps an enemy down and taking high damage. In short, the battle system is very complex, and I probably didn't appreciate all of the intricacies until I was over 15 hours into the game.  On top of this, you only control one character (for the most part) in battle, and changing your main character makes battles feel completely different. Every character's arts build up in a unique way. 

For example, Reyn is a tank (high HP and defence) and his focus is on attracting enemy aggro so that your other characters can attack from behind. Dunban relies on speed to evade enemy attacks. Sharla is a ranged attacker and a medic. Given that you can move around in real time, selecting any of these to be your main character means you can change the way battles play out on the fly.

However, and maybe this applies to the game generally, but I'm finding my interest in battles waning at the 50 hour mark. There are loads of special enemies which you can kill just to say that you did in your collectopaedia, and so Xenoblade does the collectable thing quite well, but I just don't care anymore. So I've started avoiding battles as much as possible, which isn't good because I now get frustrated when I come up against enemies with levels so much higher than me that I need to spend 30-40 minutes grinding up a couple of levels.

The Music (wow)

It doesn't get much better than this. Every area is scored with a beautiful soundtrack which changes depending on whether its daytime or nighttime. I spend most of my days at work listening to Xenoblade songs on repeat because they help me zone into what I'm doing. 

I'll let the music speak for itself; here is a selection of my favourite songs from the game so far (field music first, then battle music. If you only listen to one, make it either Mechonis Field or Unfinished Battle):

Hometown (so comforting):

Satorl Marsh (early field music):

Mechonis Field (I LOVE this field song from 2:16 onwards):

Time to fight (battle theme for the first ~15 hours):

Unfinished battle (probably my favourite song personally):

I think I've said all that I can say about the game so far. I need to finish it to conclude my thoughts, but as a rough idea, it's been like this so far:

• first 20 hours - amazed, what a throwback to everything I loved about JRPGs
• 20 - 30 hours - hrmm... starting to experience a lot of filler. How have I not reached where I was supposed to be by now? At least the music is good and the battles are fun.
• 30 - 40 hours - story finally progressed again and got myself excited for it again. However, battles starting to feel too easy and mechanical, so I started avoiding regular battles and having really tough boss fights as a result, which I liked.
• 40 - 50 hours - boss fights have gone from tough to impossible. I need to grind levels. Ugh. Please - no more filler, there's just so much. I don't care about that character. 
• 51st hour - big story revelation convinces me to keep at it despite my eye occasionally twitching at hearing the word Monado.

Now that its over

I think it's a bit crazy for games to expect that they can take up this much of your time to experience the plot. 70 hours is TOO MUCH TIME! As much as I enjoyed the first half of this game, the mid-section really dragged on (jesus I hope I never hear the words Juju or Monado again), and the endgame bosses were pretty much impossible without levelling up to match them.

This was only really frustrating in light of the fact that with most of the bosses in the game, clever strategy would normally prevail. I'm sure someone could tell me how my end-game strategy was too weak (didn't rely enough on buffs/debuffs) but the last bosses were disproportionately difficult compared to the build up of the rest of the game.

Xenoblade Chronicles made me think about how long a plot driven RPG game should be ideally. In most cases, my favourite RPGs clocked in at around the 40 hour mark. FF6/7/8/9, Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, I finished all of these games on my first run in between 35 and 45 hours, and felt like I did a lot of the side quests in the progress. I remember FFX being quite short by comparison, but really well developed in terms of its story, despite the linearity.

Skyrim is a great example of a game you can easily spend hundreds of hours getting lost in. I stopped following the main quest path early on while I tried to get decked out in Daedric Armour, and other little diversions kept coming up. But there was a point where, 50 hours in, I thought I'd had enough and needed to finish the game. Another 3-4 hours of focusing on the main quest and I was finished. The point is that the option to finish the game was available to me whenever I wanted it.

Being forced to play for 70 hours is just too damn long. I feel like games need to be a bit more flexible to accommodate adult players. Maybe I would have loved that sort of play length when I was in school and could put the hours in.

Anyway, lets end on a high note. This game's field music is stunning and I will probably be listening to it for years to come. My new favourite song: