Xenoblade Chronicles X - This time with 100% lowered expectations

Way back when the Wii-U was a thing, I bought one because a new Xenoblade game was announced for it.  I thought the console was a little weird and clunky, and Xenoblade seemed to be the only game coming out for it that I cared for, but it was new, and there would probably be more games, right?  RIGHT?  Well, the Wii-U kind of flopped, and the only other games I ended up getting for it were remasters of a couple of Zelda Games.  It is fully backwards compatible with Wii games, though, and all of my virtual console stuff transferred over to the new system.  It also isn't region locked like the Wii was, so you can play EU games on it, both Wii and Wii-U.  So it wasn't a complete waste, buying the system.  I basically just replaced my Wii with it, and gave the Wii to my brother.  I don't regret buying it for one single game that I never actually finished, because it did offer that backwards compatibility.

The Xenoblade series, is BY FAR my favorite current series being made today.  They offer very deep and expansive stories, in huge and immersive worlds, with excellent characters.  So when I heard that there was a new game coming out, I didn't hesitate to preorder it, and buy myself the console it would be coming out for.  When it finally arrived, I was somewhat disappointed with it.  I enjoyed the gameplay.  The graphics were pretty stellar considering the Wii-U hardware limitations.  The music was pretty hit and miss.  For me, the music is always part of the experience in a video game.  That's why I always mention it.  There are some really good tracks, but the majority of it is either awful, or extremely irritating.  And the characters were kind of flat and shallow.  The character you control is an avatar that you create, never has his or her name spoken in any dialog, and never speaks in any of the story scenes.  I have ALWAYS hated silent protagonists in video games.  It's supposed to bring you more into the story by allowing you to choose a character's every response and action, but in my opinion it does nothing but take you OUT of the story when you're constantly being prompted for dialog responses that are never spoken aloud by your character.  You go from Shulk, a very deep and emotional character in Xenoblade Chronicles to Cross, a completely silent automaton in Xenoblade Chronicles X.  It kind of stung more than a little for me, with how much expectation I had coming into this game.  The original Xenoblade game set a VERY high bar, and X just didn't quite clear it.   The story was pretty weak, the characters were pretty weak, and though the world is beautiful and fun to explore, it's just so empty.  There's like, nothing in it.  You have all these places to go and nothing to do in them.  I got to a point in the game where, in order to progress to the next part of the story, I had to go out and do mandatory exploration, something I very much dislike, and several side quests, which I also very much dislike, and level up, which I find boring and tedious, and I also had to go level up affinity for characters I never use, and then gear up and use those characters for affinity missions.  I looked at all of that mountain of crap I had to do in order to continue the story and said NOPE!!!

Well, anyway, since I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and it's expansion Torna: The Golden Country (definitely worth the expansion pass pricetag, if you're wondering.  I got a good 30 hrs of gameplay out of it, and didn't even come close to 100%ing it.) I've been having this nagging feeling of wanting to go back and finish Xenoblade Chronicle's X.  I spent all that money on the game and the system to play it on, and I never even finished the game.  So, I tried to pick up where I left off.  Yeah, no, that game is WAY to complicated to play to just pick up in the middle and go back to what you were doing.  So, I started over from the beginning.  This time, with 100% lowered expectations.  I knew it was going to be a slogging grindfest of lvling up, forced exploration, and forced sidequests.  I knew the story and characters were going to be lackluster.  And I knew I didn't have a very good time the first time around. 

So, I sucked it up and plowed through.  I'm not a fan of games that say, look, and open world, go have fun.  I don't really play games for that.  I like having a strong story with strong characters.  Exploring huge worlds is okay, but just so long as there's characters I like, and exploring it is part of the story.  Xenoblade X doesn't really have that.  It's just exploration for the sake of explorations.  There's a pretty weak story reason for it, but mostly it's just exploration for exploration's sake.  But I was determined to finish this game, so I could say that I have played all of the games in the Xeno series to the end.  With such low expectations, I kind of had fun with it.  Like I said, the game is fun to play.  It has pretty cool controls and combat.  The story and characters are weak, especially when you compare it to the other two Xenoblade games, but this time around I knew what to expect, and I found myself enjoying them.  I never got far enough to get to control giant robots the first time around, so I didn't know this at the time I started over, but as soon as you have access to them, the game goes into overdrive on the grindyness.  I finished with just over 120 hrs of gameplay, I would say that at least 100 hours of that was spent grinding out money for giant robots and giant robot weaponry.  This game is literally 80% grinding out money to pay for the things you cannot finish the game without due to a pretty steep difficulty curve at the end.

So, in the end, was it a bad game?  No.   It really wasn't.  Did I treat it unfairly when it was released?  Yeah, I probably did.  Is it worth shelling out the cash for a Wii-U to be able to play today?  Probably not.  I mean, if you can find a really cheap console in good condition, yeah, go for it, but I wouldn't say it's really worth it if you have to shell out more than $50 for console+game combined.  If you enjoy the open world sort of games, you may enjoy it more than I did, but, again, the game is ONLY available on Wii-U.  Rumors of a Switch port have been debunked by Monolith Soft.  They said they thought about it, then realized that because of the Wii-U dual screen functionality, literally half of the game's code would have to be rewritten, and as they are a very small developer they just can't spare the manpower for it. 

This game deserved better, in my opinion.  It feels like what it is.  A game that reached for grand ideas, but fell short of them because Nintendo stripped away almost half of the dev team and put them to work on Zelda: Breath of the Wild.  It feels like an unfinished game, because it kind of is.  I've been reading up on what was planned for it and had to be cut because they just didn't have the manpower to get it done.  This game was gutted to give only the most bare bones of what it could and should have been, because Nintendo felt Breath of the Wild would be more lucrative.  You can really tell that there were a lot of people stripped out of the dev team.  Usually a game like this has end credits that go on over 10 mins.  The end credits for this game were less than 3.  That's how few people they had left to work on it, and because of that, the vision of what it was meant to be had to be trimmed away into what they could do with the people that they had.  Which is sad, but an unfortunate fact of the gaming industry of today.  I can see the game it might have been in the game that it is, and I can appreciate it for what it is, and what it aimed to be.  I'm glad I took the time to finish it.  And I hope that, with the overwhelming success Monolith has had with Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Nintendo will never do that to them again in the future.