Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition Review

Video game remasters and remakes are coming in greater numbers than ever right now, and in some spheres even before the game being remastered has fallen out of the generational conversation. It’s easy to see a lot of these as quick trips to the content bank to make a bonus withdrawal of fans’ cash, though it’d be unfair to paint them all with such a cynical brush. Some game reissues can help in the efforts to preserve endangered classics, some can give a beloved but poorly-aged darling a more palatable voice, and others can simply represent a second chance for a misunderstood banger. Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition is a little of those first two and a lot of the latter.

If you missed Xenoblade Chronicles X the first time around, I’m going to assume it’s because you didn’t own a Wii U. But even if you were one of the dedicated few schooled in the art of the GamePad and still didn’t check it out, you’d be forgiven for skipping what was out and proud a very dense and grindy sci-fi JRPG that had a bright enough critical reception but with the consistent footnote that it was very dense and grindy. And that’s so fine. I myself, as a rabid fan of the prior Xenoblade Chronicles, managed to fall off of X before I truly got to know it. Solid chance that it’s because I traded my Wii U in at the local EB Games to buy the Collector’s Edition of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, though.

Although it exists in the same franchise as the other Xenoblade Chronicles on the Switch, X earns its non-numbered moniker by taking place (allegedly) in a universe all its own. In it, the Earth has become collateral damage in a war being fought in proximity by alien forces. As one of the only human colony ships to successfully flee Earth before its destruction, the White Whale eventually crash lands on a mysterious alien planet called Mira, where it manages to lose the Lifehold – its precious core carrying the majority of the frozen populace with which it hopes to start anew. Thus begins an effort by the ship’s crew to embed the city of New Los Angeles on Mira, establish armed operations and begin the race to secure the Lifehold before its backup power runs out.

I love them

And that’s where you come in. In a first and only for this series, X puts players in control of a custom, mostly voiceless character, and rather than give them some grand destiny or mysterious background, they’re simply handed a weapon and license to roam Mira to serve BLADE in mapping out the planet, protecting the inhabitants of NLA and locating the Lifehold. It’s a refreshing proposition, throwing you in as a grunt from the outset, though eventually you and your squad of supporting cast become the focus of BLADE’s efforts as new and catastrophic dangers emerge on Mira, and every answer seemingly begs new questions around this particular planet’s role in humanity’s present struggle. As far as core plotlines go in the series, it’s arguably the weakest, but it’s evidently not where Monolith Soft’s efforts were placed at the time.

Rather, Xenoblade Chronicles X’s crowning achievement is the world of Mira itself. As a play space, it’s easily one of the most breathtaking and convincing among its contemporaries. It’s not for any particularly impressive technical feats or rich simulation either, this is a 10-year-old WiiU game ported to the Switch after all, but instead for its strong art and more importantly some stellar game design.

If you’ve played a Xenoblade Chronicles before, you might have some idea of what to expect when it comes to X’s open world, but even against newer entries there’s something uniquely special here. Mira is absolutely massive, and save for the central city of New Los Angeles it’s completely seamless across a handful of diverse regions. It’s also biodiverse in a way that few games are, with creatures the size of small mammals all the way up to towering, dinosaur-like beasts sharing the same spaces. And while some are immediately hostile, many are passive and won’t attack until provoked, leaving you to traipse around and gawk at their incredible size and bizarre designs.

My Mira’s staring back at me

Lending the planet and your exploration of it an even more organic feel is the fact that roaming monsters can be just about any level wherever you might go, so you’ll see level five fodder in the same areas as formidable level 50 giants. It makes scouting new ground as fraught as it is freeing, encouraging you to blaze new trails across the entire map from pretty much the get-go but requiring that you stay vigilant and remember your role as a fragile visitor to this alien world, lest you get absolutely stomped.

Exploring and mapping out the planet is, in essence, the most pressing part of your mission in XCX. It’s a very video game-y loop of running around a huge map, clearing checklists and watching a percentage tick that might warrant criticism in so many other contexts, but it works so well here because, well, that’s exactly what the narrative framework calls for. Main Missions, Affinity missions with the eclectic cast of potential teammates and the more incidental Basic Missions all feed back into the loop of scouting Mira, and to a degree better getting to know the sizeable city of NLA, so it helps that it’s such a joy just to be out there getting your boots dirty.

When it does come time to hunt down or defend yourself against Mira’s myriad wildlife, combat remains a neat evolution of what had come before in the original Xenoblade Chronicles. Simple in concept but astonishingly deep once you start to consider the way these systems interact, you’ll work up from an MMO-ish dance in which you move your character around the field while they auto-attack and wait for various Arts to rotate use and cool downs. Your efforts are further impacted by your position, which of an enemy’s limbs you’re targeting, the composition of your team, status effects, and whether you’re better to strike from a distance with your firearm or get up close and personal with a melee weapon.

This will all make sense

It helps that your computer-controlled teammates are wonderfully efficient in battle, adept at adapting and effective at affecting appropriate follow-up moves on an enemy in line with whatever your strategy might be. That’s especially handy when using Soul Voices, a weaponised take on the random NPC barks you’d usually hear in battle in a game like this. In XCX, you’re able to assign useful bonuses to these vocal quips so that if you, or a teammate, respond to one with the appropriate follow-up move you’ll gain helpful buffs and heal a bit of HP. It’s a strange thing to wrap your head around initially but supported by enough UI indicators that you can bluff your way into activating it quite regularly, which is crucial in later segments.

That’s a very quick and not nearly thorough enough overview of what is actually a very deep and borderline confounding mix of systems, but once it all clicks it’s electric. In the Wii U original, you’d have no choice but to get a handle on it thanks to a constant need to grind and some ridiculously punishing bottlenecks around mid-to-late game. The Definitive Edition of XCX makes some pretty impactful changes to the battle system and systems surrounding it that do a great job of tucking in any rough edges and elevating all of the good bits and getting you to them faster.

The best new addition is a quick cooldown that can be activated at any time on any of your Arts and instantly readies it for re-use. Doing so costs a chunk of a special gauge, but that slowly refills in battle and new chunks are added as a reward for surveying more of Mira, so you’ll pretty quickly be in a situation where you’re firing off handfuls of the same Art in a row. It not only speeds up your efforts in battle considerably but can lead to some pretty devastating assaults in a well-honed build.

There are Wars on this Star

That effort to streamline and tighten the experience extends to your general progress through the game as well. Boldly, Monolith Soft has outright removed some systems while bolstering others, many of which dictate how you engage with basic side missions and the rewards you get for taking the time to explore Mira, which is all massively welcome. Quality of life updates like being able to manually change the time of day right and save waiting around or finding a base camp when a mission calls for it, or being able to swap party members in and out rather than wander aimlessly around NLA looking for them, are small but absolutely game-changing.

A commendable effort has been made, too, to retrofit a UI once spread across two screens on the WiiU to the Switch’s hybrid handheld viewing experience. I wondered if having to open a separate menu screen to look at the FrontierNav map might be a poor experience in comparison to having it always on thanks to the GamePad, but not only is it not intrusive, it’s become habitual for me to use it as a de facto “pause” screen, since the regular menu doesn’t stop the game from running. The UI overall, in battle and out, is exponentially cleaner and easier to read, though predictably even with text and icons sized up in the Definitive Edition it all tends to be a bit small and tough to parse on the Switch’s portable screen.

That aside though, the Switch version of XCX carries the torch held by its original iteration as one of the best-looking games to grace the hardware it lives on. The glow-up maybe isn’t as fierce as we saw with Xenoblade Chronicles: Definitive Edition, simply by virtue of the source material being a generation ahead already, but it’s a bit of a stunner on Nintendo’s aging machine. The environments and their already-immense scope and scale are intact and looking better than ever, character models are quite a bit nicer, and importantly it all runs as smooth as you could hope for (albeit at 30FPS). Scour the deepest corners and you’ll maybe find a festy cliffside texture or two, but the sumptuous lighting and soaring distant views will always make up for it.

Get in the damn mech!

Oh, and did I mention this game gives you the opportunity to own and operate a mech that walks, flies and transforms into a car? I’ve left that until really deep into the review, I hear you say? Well, that’s what it feels like to play XCX for nearly 35 hours and still be schlepping it on foot despite the big bloody mech on the box art.

It’s simultaneously one of the cruellest and greatest turning points in an RPG in recent memory, recalling the JRPG trope of generations past where patient adventurers were eventually rewarded with something resembling an airship that would suddenly open up whole new avenues of the world. It’s wild that the game manages to squirrel away some of its best stuff for essentially the halfway point, especially when these things completely shift the paradigm in combat and introduce brand-new gear and economy considerations, but it’s fist-pumping, hooting and hollering stuff when it finally comes.

Final Thoughts

Reviewing a game like this is always tough (even if a kind superfan were to email everyone with rules on how to do it correctly), with so much to talk about against an effort to be succinct. And there’s the stuff we’re just not allowed to talk about – a bevy of brand-new story and gameplay content awaits eager fans – or wouldn’t want to for fear of spoiling surprises for new and old players. There’s also so much I’m yet to even play for myself, given how absolutely enormous this game is and the amount I strolled, rolled or flew past in an effort to see the adventure through before a deadline. Luckily, there’s nothing I could say to better illustrate my verdict on this Definitive Edition of an underrated Monolith Soft banger than SKELL YEAH. This isn’t just how you do a remaster, it’s why you do one.

Reviewed on Switch // Review code supplied by publisher

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