Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition review: An overly ambitious space opera
By Dave Aubrey
If you look too closely, Xenoblade Chronicles X isn’t much to shout about. The character models are basic, and the way characters pop into the environment would make Dragon’s Dogma 2 blush. Most of the missions task you with defeating a few monsters or gathering an item, bookended by a bit of dialogue. Moment-to-moment gameplay, whether exploring the world or fighting beasts, isn’t exactly thrilling. But if we zoom all the way out and look at the game as a whole, it’s quite possibly one of the most ambitious sci-fi video games of all time.
Let’s get the pain points out of the way first. Affinity and Story missions are fully voiced, which is nice, but every other mission in the game consists of characters repeating a handful of gesture animations as text plays out. When wandering the town of New LA your character still phases right through moving vehicles, and the dense Armory Alley takes far too long to load in all of the characters. These small frustrations can make the game feel “low budget,” especially in its early hours, but it’s clear that Monolith Soft’s focus was placed on the world, the paths to take to explore it, and how those paths shift over the course of the game.
Xenoblade Chronicles X’s open world, Mira, is still one of the most impressive open worlds I’ve ever seen in a video game, even a decade on from its original launch on the Wii U. The closest games since are Death Stranding, and both Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom when taken as a pair, and that’s because of how the world informs traversal, your key gameplay mechanic. You start out exploring Mira on foot, and as fast as your created protagonist can sprint, it doesn’t help much when your destination might be more than ten thousand meters away.
You begin in Primordia, where humanity’s final stronghold – New LA – crash lands after escaping the destruction of Earth. The sprint from the BLADE Barracks to New LA’s exit feels massive, and then you actually emerge into the world. Cliffs and rocky terrain force you to take the long paths around, and you can trek for incredibly long periods of time, slowly branching further away from your home base. As you explore you’ll place Data Probes and Mining Probes around the map, which will passively gather minerals and money for you, in addition to being used as Fast Travel points. Fast Travel means you’ll rarely feel like you’re repeatedly trekking across the same patch of land, and like other Xenoblade games, your health fully restores after each battle, so resource management isn’t a concern when on foot.
Like the original Xenoblade Chronicles, X is a real-time RPG where your moves are all on an active cooldown in a battle system most familiar to fans of MMOs like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy XIV. You can customize your team of four party members from a surprisingly large list of potential partners, and different combinations of Arts, Skills, and gear can lead to varied gameplay styles and builds. I managed to clear most of the game with tactical melee spam and supporting abilities, but hardcore fans swear by “infinite Overdrive” builds.
From Primordia you branch out into the forests of Noctilum and the desert of Oblivia, and eventually cross the thin land bridge which connects Primordia to the alien continent of Sylvalum and the heat of Cauldros. Taking those first steps into a brand new area is genuinely a bit nerve wracking as you adjust to a brand new set of alien fauna to hunt and sprint away from. While most of your mission waypoints will take you to areas with foes that will be an average challenge, giant post-game world bosses stroll through those same places. It does a good job of making Mira feel like a hostile, dangerous alien world, though having a world boss interrupt a fight is more than a bit annoying.
Just as you get comfortable, the game introduces the Skells. Skells are large mech suits that you can purchase and equip to all party members. The gameplay mechanics are mostly the same as when on foot, but now your skills are based on what weapons you’ve equipped to each slot on your Skell, with some incredibly powerful weapons taking up more than one slot.
The world of Mira suddenly opens up with these mech suits. Giant monsters become far less threatening, the distances you cover feel a fraction of the size, and those cliffs you’d need to navigate before becoming stepping stones. The world is the same, but with the height advantage and newfound mobility, the way you traverse and explore changes drastically. It feels revelatory, and that happens yet again when you unlock flight even later. Skells unlock at around 30 hours of gameplay, and flight at just under 50. The long periods of time you spend exploring and navigating the world in each mode makes you truly appreciate the depth and thought that went into each area to make it work from each perspective. Flight is so liberating that it’s hard not to just soar over the landscape as the emphatic OST plays out instead of actually completing missions.
The game is built around exploring this world and filling in the blanks on your map with all methods of traversal first and foremost, and unfortunately that does mean that the story can sometimes take a backseat. Story missions can only be taken on once you hit a minimum level and meet certain requirements, like completing necessary Affinity missions. Not wanting to miss out, I attempted to complete each Affinity mission as they came to me while maxing out Affinity for my various party members. At this rate, I spent most of the game playing maybe one Story mission for every five hours of gameplay, and the Affinity missions are usually low-stakes affairs centered around one or two party members. There’s a slice of life anime vibe to them, and that can frankly make the game feel quite slow at points.
The issues with the story taking a backseat came to a head in the original game’s finale, but in Definitive Edition, the game doesn’t stop here. A new Chapter 13 epilogue has been added to the game, introducing a new party member, new enemies, new weapons, and most importantly, a new ending. With this expanded content – which feels as if it was always intended to be a part of the game – Xenoblade Chronicles X’s story feels complete, while tying it closer to the overall Xeno series mythos, and leaving off on an optimistic and hopeful note that will send theorists spiralling.
Zooming in once again, I remember spending full days playing Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition and not being sure if I made any real progress. Pacing can feel glacial if you’re trying to see everything, and if you’re not, then you might find main missions to be a steep challenge. But then I zoom out, and see the game as a whole. The sweeping, endless alien landscape – which I know still hides secrets from me after more than 90 hours – the ambition behind a massive, open world, mecha RPG which works on foot, in the pilot’s seat, and in the sky, and the various substories from a variety of alien races that come to live with you in New LA — this game’s ambition and scale reaches for the heavens, and to meet those goals, cutbacks needed to be made.
Whether it’s some reasonably simple visuals, animations, or limited voice acting, it doesn’t really feel like a triple-A RPG. But then, it also feels like it’s doing so much more than any triple-A sci-fi RPG I’ve ever played. If a new Mass Effect game allowed you to board a small ship from a human settlement, dynamically take off and cruise above a vast alien open world – with no loading screens – and then touch down at a point of your choosing miles away, it would sound like a dream game. Honestly, I have no idea if the next Mass Effect will have that kind of scope, but Xenoblade Chronicles X does. For every nitpick or qualm I have about presentation, or balance, or where enemies are spawned in the world, I ask what other games are doing all of the things this game is doing. On a Nintendo Switch, no less.
Ten years on, Xenoblade Chronicles X is finally a complete game with the Definitive Edition, and it’s still one of the most bafflingly ambitious games I’ve ever played. It attempts and succeeds with so much, even if not every aspect is on par with the majesty of Mira. It can be slow and tedious at times, but even after more than 90 hours, a part of me didn’t want the adventure to end. We don’t know what’s next for Monolith Soft, but after this I’d be overjoyed to see more from Elma, Lin, and everyone in New Los Angeles.
Score: 9/10
Platform: Nintendo Switch