Xenoblade Chronicles X (Wii U)

[brinstar]

not sure if anyone else here has a Wii U but i just picked up XBCX while waiting for the price to come down on FO4/JC3 and it's pretty cool

background - earth got caught in the crossfire of a big war between two alien species. to escape the carnage and have a chance at survival, humans launched giant spaceships carrying people, supplies, and materials in every direction. one such ship, the White Whale, got shot down over a planet called Mira and broke apart in descent. the habitat area of the ship landed and over the course of several months was converted into a sanctuary of sorts called New Los Angeles. you take the role of a former soldier when your stasis pod is recovered by an agent of BLADE, a coalition of about a dozen different specialized factions. when you are initiated into BLADE and choose your faction, you are given a series of quests that take you all across the five different continents, where you find fantastic creatures and a handful of sentient races; all are interesting, some are hostile. the ultimate goal is to recover enough of the ship to ensure the survival of humanity on mira

quests - there are basic fetch/kill quests galore, there are "affinity" quests which strengthen your relationships with other major characters, unlock new abilities, or flesh out backstories, and there are story quests that advance the main narrative.

open world - it's fuckin massive. gamezone says it's larger than the worlds of FO4, witcher 3, and skyrim fucking combined. a large part of exploration revolves around placing data probes in new areas, and thankfully whenever you place a new probe or discover a new landmark you unlock a fast-travel node so you don't have to spend hours running to X area to kill Y or rescue Z. of course, as with other open-world games, fast travel isn't always the best option though because you are constantly gathering resources and slaying monsters on the way. if all you do is warp around you might find yourself underpowered when it's crunch time. as for the design itself, it's pretty breathtaking. huge crazy plants everywhere, distant mountains, yawning chasms - everything you see is (eventually) reachable. in other words, there's no "background scenery" whatsoever. the weather is well done and can work for or against you, and even diurnal cycles play a role. animals/enemies are well-designed and occasionally terrifyingly huge/nasty. level 90 dinosaurs peacefully drink from lakes while you engage in life-or-death struggles with level 10 pigs nearby. the sense of scale in XBCX is really pretty astonishing.

combat - you bring up to 3 NPC teammates with you, whether they are major characters or random throwaway clowns you pick up out in the wild. you can autoattack indefinitely as long as you are in range of your target, but the real action comes in the form of Arts. you can equip up to 10 arts at a time, and there are direct attacks, auras, debuffs, and heals, each with cooldowns. characters also have a sort of call-and-response thing called Soul Voices: if Bob is doing melee stuff and inflicts Topple status on the monster, he'll call out for you to do a melee art. assuming you have at least one melee art available and not on cooldown, using that art will not only throw a small group heal to the entire party, but it will increase the effectiveness of your art, whether that means intensifying an applied debuff or boosting the damage/crit of your attack. when you work with your team and stay on top of Soul Voice responses, you can take down targets you might not otherwise be able to. pretty fun.

classes - there's three overall trees, and each tree has two specialization paths with two nodes each. you can only advance beyond a certain node once you reach Rank 10. everyone starts as an outlander, but i went Outlander -> Enforcer -> Blast Fencer, and once i'm R10 Blast Fencer i'll advance on to Galactic Knight because hellooooo photon saber melee weaps are the coolest IM A JEDI LOL. each node has its own set of arts you unlock by ranking up, and arts are tied to weapon type rather than class. so theoretically even once i advance to Galactic Knight i could still use the starfall blade melee art i learned as a Blast Fencer

inventory - thankfully there's no limit on inventory, because they throw a lot of gear at you. there's the little resources you pick up on the ground (that are used in fetch quests and in weapon/armor upgrades), there are weapon/armor drops, and there are other materials you can only gain from killing things. there's a shop where you can buy a wide variety of weapons and armor, and you can directly support any of the game's half-dozen or so arms manufacturers by donating resources or by simply using their gear in your adventures.

skells - giant robots. fuck yeah, giant robots. they are insanely customizable mobile weapons platforms but they still run on fuel - and if you run out, you gotta walk. i don't have one yet because you have to get licensed first and i'm still working on the licensing exams. will update once i make the jump

social/online stuff - i haven't really delved into this area as i'm still sorta grappling with the massive scale of the planet/inventory/resource/affinity/combat systems, but as you adventure you earn points for your chosen BLADE faction (i'm a Reclaimer tasked with collecting manmade detritus from previous explorations and ship wreckage, for example) and i guess you can join global battles against massive tyrants (super-hard named mobs) or do support missions or climb leaderboards or whatever. will update once i understand more about how it works.

main complaints:
- the music is rather obnoxious. it tries real hard to be hip and exciting, but it fails hard. i am seriously considering turning it off altogether and just playing records instead.
- the plot is not terrible, but it's poorly-delivered in clunky cutscenes that feature tedious dialogue. you know how there's a difference between boring stupid anime for preteens and really compelling anime for adults? dialogue in XBCX is straight out of the former, complete with a grating little nonhuman critter providing (eyeroll-worthy) comic relief. the voice acting is okay, i guess, but i'd much rather just read/skip the dialogue instead of wait to hear it all. also, despite the fact that the cutscenes are rendered in-engine, there's still flow-breaking loading times for them. if you're going to make me wait for a scene to be loaded, just do it fully rendered!
- voiceless hero. kinda lame. about once or twice per cutscene you will get a response prompt offering two different options, but you never get any actual dialogue at all. just totally mute like Crono. i suppose the argument could be made that since you choose your gender at the beginning they'd have to include double the audio files, but that kinda falls apart when you find out how many one-shot throwaway characters get fully-voiced dialogue. not to mention, during character creation you do get to choose between about a dozen different voice profiles your toon uses to shout Soul Voice commands, so ultimately it just seems lazy to me. a Mass Effect dialogue/consequence system injected into XBCX would really do wonders for its plot delivery...
- lack of dynamics. tell me why a thirty-foot-tall apex predator bristling with teeth and claws will just walk around next to the Miran equivalent of a sheep? game devs did an amazing job making Mira LOOK like a vibrant yet perilous world where survival is a challenge, but they didn't do enough to make it ACT that way. likewise, there's not enough interactivity within the town itself: most people you see will completely ignore you and cars will clip right through you without any collision at all.

...but in all honesty, most of those complaints disappear while you're out exploring/slaying. it's hard to care about the stupid comic relief character delivering stupid lines when you're a party member down in a 15-minute fight against a 60-foot tall toothy hellmonster during an ion storm outbreak that ticks away 50 dmg to your party every 3 seconds on a dusty plain littered with wreckage from an ancient alien civilization. the fun is in the exploration and the combat and the setting, not in the plot.

final verdict: if you have a wii u, get this. if you don't have a wii u, maybe this isn't what changes your mind. but if you are interested like i am in the brand-new U-exclusive installments of zelda and starfox coming out later this year, go ahead and grab XBCX while you wait.


afterthought: i seriously considered adding "steep learning curve" to the complaints section, but upon further reflection that's as it should be. as i've said in other threads, it turns me off when game devs hold my hand for the first 10% of the game. i think XBCX gets it right: they pull you forward just fast enough to keep it fresh and to keep you improving, but not so fast that you get overwhelmed.

[Durothil Skyreaver]

I've heard nothing but good things about this game.

[Jay]

I wish this wasn't on the Wii-U. I could give 2 shits about Starfox. I am mildly interested in Zelda but not enough to have gotten a Wii-U. Splatoon is pretty fun tho.

[brinstar]

followup:

as expected, getting my first giant robot was pretty awesome, and upgrading to a better one (and handing the original one down to another party member!) was even awesomer. once you finish chapter 9, your bots gain the ability to FLY. siiiick.

what i didn't expect though is how expensive they are to maintain - as they are basically walking weapons platforms, you have nearly a dozen slots to equip guns and shields in, and those cost bucks. but more importantly, if you are in your robot and you run out of HP, the robot is junked and you can't use it until you fix it. each one you buy comes standard with replacement insurance, but it's only good for three replacements. if you fry your bot after that, you either fork over a boatload of money for repairs or you just scrap it entirely and walk away.

the starter bot repair bill is about 85k, which is not too bad. you can make that much in maybe half an hour of basic fetch quests and resource harvesting. my upgrade bot is now out of insurance tickets, though, and every time it gets whacked i have to cough up 400k.

the other major obstacle i have run into is that critical story progression fights (boss battles, in other words) are tuned for a full party of bots. i'd been cruising along with just me in my nice bot and another NPC in the wimpy entry-level bot, with the other two NPCs on foot. so when you take the unexpectedly huge repair bills that come from losing boss fights i was apparently unprepared for and combine them with the cost of buying and outfitting two more good bots, i've got a LOT of boring grinding to do.

still plugging away though, still dig the atmosphere more than anything. half the time i play with the sound off though since the music is so repetitive

[Drem]

So this is Wii only or what? It sounds fuckin sweet.

I'm about to get a Wii for my wife and my boy. Are new Zelda/Mario games still awesome?

[brinstar]

yep wii u exclusive

there will be a brand new zelda later this year i think (or early next) and there will be fresh starfox this year. i haven't really played a mario game since the N64 came out but i'm sure there are a couple of those too

[Kaemon]

There's a few Mario games. One is called Super Mario Maker, you build your Mario world. My daughter is 7 is Wii U is what we have.

Looking forward to the new Zelda game. Almost picked up XBCX last night while at Target just to have something I can play when my kid isn't.