So I'll start out this review by listing all the bad things I found in the game so I can let my unbridled joy run rampant for the remaining paragraphs.
The lip syncing is off 50% of the time. It's understandable since I doubt the game had a large budget, and the fact that a western release wasn't even planned originally; but it's an issue that's hard to ignore so we check this off in the negative column.
The concept of a bounty of side quests finally makes it into a JRPG, but Xenoblade Chronicles follows the World of Warcraft model of kill enemy, fetch item, find NPC template and rarely strays from it. Meaning, you'll be doing the same kinds of quests over and over again which can get tedious; but I still managed to gleefully quest for hours, so maybe that's not that big an issue.
Certain battle mechanics hamper the flow and intensity of combat. Also, in rapid succession, these mechanics can become annoying as opposed to helpful. Some boss battles and frantic normal fights can cause quite a bit of lag so it feels like everything is being fought in Matrix slow-motion.
Lag continues in menu navigating when switching gear, it's really noticeable at first but becomes less after a while. Playing another game might give you menu whiplash though.
Graphics are pushing the Wii to their limits, which isn't that far. Everything is low resolution and looks like it could've been for the Playstation 2.
Limited inventory space for collectables, normal items, gear and gems is a pain. I, again, blame this on the hardware rather than the actual game design. In fact, you'll be telling yourself 'this game should've been on the Playstation 3' throughout the game.
In battle, there's a hidden tension meter which increases with successful hits leading to more critical chances, and misses decreases the tension. If the tension is low enough, characters need a morale boost or they'll just keep missing. It's obnoxious to have to babysit characters during a battle.
And that's all folks. Let the gushing begin!
Holy crap, take a lesson here video game world on how ART DIRECTION can make up for TECHNICAL LIMITATIONS like its nobody's business. These environments are low-resolution gold. Almost every single area is dressed to impress from the start of the game to the final seconds. Some areas simply blew me away at the shear beauty the Wii can produce when some effort is put forth into making them. The color palettes, the architecture, and size of some of these areas are all candidates to be studied. Maybe then western role-playing games wouldn't look like some muddy, English countryside all the time if more people played this game. Not since Baten Kaitos (another game Monolith Software made) and Chrono Cross have I see colors this vibrant.
Going back to the size of some of these areas, this game puts Final Fantasy XIII to shame in terms of gaming environments. Instead of forcing players down a one-way corridor, the develop team at Monolith got the memo that this isn't compelling gameplay, and instead gives you a wide-open space to run and explore through. And not just having big areas for the sake of having them, there are secret vantage points and corners tucked away that offer a little something to those who go off the beaten path. This is one game where you won't be saying 'oh, it gets better 20 hours in'. The good parts of the game are all within the first 20 minutes and the good times keep rolling in from there.
Along the way, you'll run into check points. These serve an important combat purpose (which will be detailed later) but mostly serve as warp points so you can fast travel all the areas of the world you've already visited, which is given to you right at the beginning of the game, whereas most games tend to wait to give you things like this. Letting check points follow you along your journey is a great way to feel a sense of accomplishment when touring a new region of land.
You can jump without weird, blue circles telling you the designated jumping spots on the terrain (seriously Final Fantasy XIII, those were stupid). You can fall off edges and take damage that way. You can swim. This game was designed to let you explore and thankfully stays away from any platforming what-so-ever.
And while you explore, the game has items sprinkled around each area for you to collect by running into them which is constantly rewarding since these items are used in quests and completing your collection book. The game rewards you when you keep playing, a concept not always embraced for some reason.
The game also has a day and night transition along with different weather conditions. You're actually able to control the time of day, so those quest NPCs that only come out at night can be easily met.
I'll take a moment to point out the brilliant menu design. Instead of instantly going to another screen while scrolling through a menu, it just pops up and the bottom of the screen and you're free to still run around. The game waits until the very last moment to take you away from the game play. And every menu option that is in heavy use is the first option to be selected. Details like this really go a long way in a game you're bound to spend over 50 hours with.
The combat system feels like a spiritual successor to Final Fantasy XII, meaning, all battles take place on the same map that exploration takes place, using the MMO-style of combat. Everything from parties of enemies, unexpected aggro, special enemies are all present here.
Combat is in real-time and uses arts which act as special abilities, often unique to whatever character you're using. Instead of using a menu system like Final Fantasy XII, all the arts are laid out before you at the bottom of the screen and you can cycle through them with the directional pad. You're limited on the amount of arts allocated to one character which keeps the arts bar from being a hassle to navigate and let's you strategically choose which arts to take into battle. Once an art has been used, it has the MMO-style recast timer that needs to be refilled before its next use. Arts can also be leveled when a manual (a book) corresponding to that art is discovered and new arts can be learned the same way. The rest of the battle is spent auto-attacking, but doesn't feel like the controls were taken away from you.
Chain attacks can be using once your battle meter is filled up, which is done through successful uses of abilities like Shulk's behind-the-enemy art, and offers a chance to link together arts between characters for extra damage. Striking in front of the enemy with before-mentioned Shulk ability will not count towards filling the meter. There are other various methods of filling the meter, but the main one is through arts.
Some arts have different status effects allocated to them. You can break an enemy, which can lead to toppling and enemy, which can lead to dazing an enemy, which results in incapacitating an enemy from attacking. The AI is pretty good at following up with an attack that will progress the status effect to the next level, but never feels like you have to use this. It's similar to the stagger meter in FFXIII, but much more enjoyable to work with.
Like I said, arts are character-unique abilities and help define out class roles in battle. While each character has their own play style, not all characters are useful. There's really only one great tank character and one great healer, so you'll be using them most of the time, and you'll be switching out that third character mostly out of your own curiosity.
The game itself is centered around the legendary sword know as the Monado, which grants the user special abilities like being able to see into the future. Someone at Monolith Software got another memo that game play and story should go hand-in-hand which is rarely the case with JRPGs, but that foresight ability is present in battle.
The Monado lets you know if the next ability will KO a character, and let's you work toward changing that outcome by you telling your battle colleagues what ability to use to avoid it. This is the part of the battle system that can slow things down a bit, since you first have to see the enemy using the attack and how much damage will be done. Occurring once in a while is no problem, but when it gets triggered multiple times in the same fight, it can drag things down. And only enemy abilities will trigger this foresight to happen, normal enemy auto-attacks will not.
You can issue commands to your comrades like attack the same enemy as me, attack your own targets at will, and gather around the leader. I found all 3 commands to be useful and intuitive to use. It's quite startling how many games use AI partners but don't give you the means to control where they are in battle. Looking at you FFXII and FFXIII.
To further distinguish characters from each other, there's a gem system. Gems can be crafted either in-town or on the road after a certain quest which enhance your characters' stats, abilities, and traits. Everything from boosting your strength, making you run faster or leveling faster, there seems to be a gem for everything (take notes Legend of Heroes). Materials are constantly being gather from enemy drops and materials fall into 5 tiers. Higher tier materials makes for higher tier gems.
Gem crafting is done with two characters, and enhanced by your affinity with each character (I'll go into detail about this feature in a few paragraphs). You select either up to 8 materials or until a single trait gets to 100% and then start crafting with a furnace. Multiple traits can be augmented at the same time, not all have to reach 100% before the crafting begins. The quality of flame during crafting dictates the increase in trait %. Since only one trait can be augmented at a time, and you have a limited amount of turns to augment them, you'll want to select the fewest amount of traits possible since the game randomly decides which one will be augmented per turn. It's not as complicated as I'm making it sound, it's just different. If you had a trait that was only 99% after the crafting, this remains in material form. If a trait is above 100%, it becomes a gem. If a trait exceeds 200%, that trait gem get raised 1 tier higher. If the trait exceeds even higher than that, multiple gems will be produced with that one trait.
The magnificent thing about gems are, they can be attached and removed from your gear, giving you a lot of flexibility to experiment with and build your characters the way you want. It's interesting to note that the limited inventory space for gem materials will keep you crafting; I often wonder if it was intentional.
Let it be clear, there are no battle-usable items in this game at all. I'm not sure why, but I didn't even occur to me until I was already several hours in that there were no potions. The game is so balanced in combat that items just aren't needed. It's good to see a JRPG that doesn't just take the old template of gaming and is willing to try new things.
Now comes the obvious question, how do you revive fallen comrades? With the battle meter I mentioned a few paragraphs ago. There are 3 sections of the meter and you can use your foresight or revive a character by consuming 1 section. This brilliant feature keeps battles from being tedious. You'll be trying to keep this gauge up for if you're party leader falls with an empty gauge, it's game over.
Game overs aren't that bad, you get sent back to the last check point of the game with all your items, gear and exp you gathered along the way. This keeps the game moving along at a great pace and doesn't waste your time.
While most JRPGs are stingy with their experience points, Xenoblade Chronicles knows how to keep rewarding the player. Xenoblade moves away from the tradition Japanese game design philosophy of, punish ignorance; they adopt more of a western style of game design philosophy of reward players. Finding new areas, beating enemies, discovering new areas, completing quests all yield decent experience, meaning you'll be prone to actually doing these things more and more.
Another game play mechanic that should be firmly locked in on is the character affinity system. Xenoblade Chronicles takes relationship-building down the path it needs to stay on and away from the dialog-tree driven design that Bioware and Bethesda keep churning out. Raising a character's affinity is done by simply spending time with them. Either by having them in your party, or finding vantage points in the game where you can share a scene with them. It feels very natural and easy to keep tabs on as opposed to the dialog-tree method which sometimes gives you responses that weren't foreseeable. Each character also has skill trees which unlock passive traits. The higher your affinity with a character, the more skill traits you can borrow from them
It's worth noting that each character is different and memorable, but they tend to go a little too anime-inspired sometimes; and the same thing can be said about the plot. The setting is brilliant, but the plot still ends up being a group of teenagers trying to kill god... again. We've seen that formula before, but it's the setting that sets it apart here. The exposition does give you the false hope of being in a final boss moment, only to stretch the game out for another few hours, but being able to play more isn't a bad thing. The world geography and history is all explained and makes everything more believable... as far as legendary god sword plots go that is.
There's also a fair bit of terminology you'll learn along the way, but the game always gives you the right context when dropping in a new word like Monado or Homs. There's none of this glossary-driven story-telling where you're bombarded with stupid words like Final Fantasy XIII tried to make you learn just to know what the heck was going on. In Xenoblade, the meanings of terminology introduced in the game are made obvious, and even is based on a logical language structure. Organic creates are from the Bionis (note the word bio in there), and mechanical creatures are from Mechonis (note the word mech in there).
While lip syncing is laughable, the voice actors are all decent. Even if you hate them and their British accents (no one bothered to localize using American voice actors), there's an option to switch to the original Japanese cast which is a clear nod of understanding to the American anime fan, and will be much appreciated.
Regrettably, I mention the soundtrack this far deep into the review, but once again, Yasunori Mitsuda (composer from Xenogears, Chrono Cross), along with some others, put together another amazing series of songs which compliment the mood completely. You'll notice these songs for all the right reasons.
One final bonus to the game, the cover is reversible. I wish more games did this. The alternate box art is fantastic and really sets it a part from others games.
Xenoblade Alternate Box Art
Which game stands out for you?
The game lasted about 70 hours for me, and that didn't include doing even half the side quests or exploring all possible areas. There is a lot of game here. And everything can be explored again in new game plus which carries over a decent amount of stuff for you to make everything ridiculously easy; and there are achievements to unlock while playing through the game. Another sign of adopting a modern, gaming concept I'm glad to see a developing group take note of.
It's sad to think that Monolith games have a bad sales track record, rarely getting over 150,000 units sold in North America. Xenoblade really should be put into the gaming spotlight for its achievements. It successfully combines the ideas from the last decade and changes tradition. If you love JRPGs, do yourself a favor and buy this game. There's classic controller support and no motion controls.
This game is what Final Fantasy XIII should've been, and it gives other developers a map to better game design based off of old and new ideas. And it did it all on the Wii of all things.
You used this entire article to proclaim how good you thought a game was by comparing it to what you felt the weaknesses of ONE game were. Not only are you remaining narrow-minded in your search for sources, but you're making it sound like a hate speech that is entirely opinionated. Which, you know, when you're trying to exhibit the art of video game critiques, you should probably avoid being so vastly opinionated.
ReplyDeleteI actually took a stab at quite a few games during the review, but not by name. Mostly I was trying to convey that this relatively low-budget JRPG had more ideas worth emulating than the triple-A titles (like FFXIII, Dragon Age, Tales of Graces F, Mass Effect, etc.).
ReplyDeleteBut I do realize that I used this game as ammunition to vent a lot of frustration I've had with RPGs from this console generation. I'll try to avoid doing that from now on. Thanks for the feedback.