Note: the gfys in this post are bugged due to something on the end of Gfycat. They should display at the proper crop after a loop or two.

I’m likely going to be doing a video on this later, but I thought I’d write down a couple thoughts on Xenoblade Chronicles X, since I picked it up yesterday.

So far, I’ve played four hours of the game and gotten past the first few story missions. I’ve just unlocked the main “go off and have fun on your own” portion of the game, where it lets you pick the main story back up at your leisure. It’s also just opened up the ability to do co-op missions with friends, so I’m about to dive into the meat of it.

After going through the character select screen, I basically tried to make my guy look un-anime as possible. I was a little disappointed to find out that our protagonist is silent, but I’m starting to enjoy his ugly mug.

If you’ve played the first Xenoblade Chronicles for the Wii, you’ll know that a large part of the game is the expansive environments that feel alive. This is the Gaur Plains/Bionis’ Leg intro from that title:

The same thing exists in Xenoblade Chronicles X, but things have been enhanced due to a greater draw distance and detail that the WiiU can provide. To be honest, I’m not going to hide that the WiiU is very underpowered compared to the other consoles in its generation, but at the same time I haven’t experienced any major slowdown when viewing scenes like this:

Xenoblade also boasts a “if you can see it, you can go there” system, which I haven’t quite had a chance to explore yet. This kind of exploration is a huge contributor to my enjoyment of JRPGs, as Dragon Quest VIII has a similar system and I really enjoyed that game.

While I haven’t got any of the Gundams/Skells that the cover of the games boasts, travel has been great in the sense that you can sprint without any repercussions and jump around like Spider-man due to the (presumably) lower gravity of the planet Mira. This makes traversing around the map really fun, and the speed at which you can do it, combined with the awesome vistas, gives me a number of moments where the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

This article seems a little overly-praising so far, but while streaming there were a number of moments I noticed where I was genuinely grinning ear-to-ear. I know that sounds a bit corny, but I need to highlight how absolutely rare that is with AAA titles for me these days.

I feel like I’ve fallen out of a lot of mainstream games because they just do nothing for me. There’s no sense of wonder or catching me unaware: either I know pretty much what the game has to offer, or the premise doesn’t interest me to the point I’m cool about missing out.

However, Xenoblade Chronicles X surprised me because I expected some kind of trashy anime of a JRPG. The writing is surprisingly funny and sharp at times, and the voiced characters have a decent enough cast behind them that they aren’t reduced to blob stereotypes that you’d find in a hastily-translated English offering.

The character of Lin looks like someone I would dislike a lot in a video game. As a 26-year-old dude who isn’t a complete weeb, you’d have to forgive my first negative impression:

However, despite her being a huge ball of sometimes-annoying pep, her lines have been delivered in such a way that she seems to have way more personality than a typical demure little-sister stereotype. When I figured this out I was so happy to be wrong about my impression, because it means I wouldn’t be spending the game wishing she wasn’t there.

When you can immerse yourself in all of the game, it makes it so much better than clawing through parts you hate just to get to a part you actually want to play.

Perhaps what I’m looking forward to most is the massive amount of distractions that the game seems to have set up. Expanding the map requires finding sites to bury probes in, which in turn look to make hunting monsters and mining that much easier. As someone who loves the exploration/climbing sections the Assassin’s Creed franchise has you do to expand the map, I can see this inflating my play time considerably.

It looks like Monolith Software has set up for players to experience a “single player MMO” with a lot of side elements that involve other players in small ways, like contributing to daily rewards or co-op quests. As someone who doesn’t have enough time to dive into an MMO proper, I’m definitely excited to give Xenoblade a ton of my attention.

I’ll likely be doing a video about my thoughts on this game as I get deeper into it, but for now, I’ll be happy to experience more moments like finding this huge-ass monster. I just wonder how long it’ll be before I can take it down.