Something something Xenoblade Chronicles.

So, while taking breathers from delving into the creative seeds that are my projects, I more often than not retreat to the land of video games. Gaming is one of my biggest inspirations when it comes to storytelling, thanks to triumphant masterpieces such as Bioshock, Journey, Bastion, Transistor, Witcher 2, Halo 4, etc. I'd cite gaming and music as my two biggest inspirations. People have told me that I won't make it far when looking up to work of this nature, but meh. Screw 'em and their closed-minded fancy words. In my mind, the world of writing has changed thanks to the developments of new mediums and magnum opuses. High literature like Ulysses has been reduced to a heavy-handed bore by modern fiction. Thanks, Vince Gilligan.

Anyway, while at last allowing myself a break from my months-long effort (yeah, it took my slow ass months to put The Crimson Sunrise together. Can you believe that crap?), I delved into the over-the-top JRPG world of Xenoblade Chronicles. I bought this game years ago when its popularity was at its peak, close to when Operation Rainfall took place. I wasn't really sure what to expect as Pokemon was the closest to a JRPG I'd played at the time, but I soon lost interest due to my short attention span. The first six or so hours didn't hook me, and I placed it in my ginormous backlog that's shared by The Last Story, Dark Souls, L. A. Noire, and a good majority of 200 other games I own on Steam.

But, as the months went by I was witness to the popular Let's Player Chuggaaconroy hailing it as his favorite game of all time, along with the announcement of Xenoblade Chronicles X and Shulk's debut in Super Smash Brothers. All this combined moved Xenoblade to the top of my "need to play" list, and I got right on that after applying the finishing touches to The Crimson Sunrise.

And, well... Where do I even begin? (I'm keeping this spoiler-free aside from character names. No main story events will be explained in depth aside from the prologue and what you can learn by reading the back of the cover.)

I finished the game just this morning, clocking in at around 80 hours. Now, let me say, I don't believe it's as amazing as Chuggaaconroy made it out to be, but granted, I'm primarily a PC gamer whereas he's not. My standards are drastically different from his, and the first thing I want to say is that the game is ugly as sin from a technical standpoint. Textures were blurry, some animations looked stilted, and the game slowed down to well below 20fps constantly when the fights got busy. This is counterbalanced, however, by the game's art style. Xenoblade Chronicles contains some of the most beautiful landscapes I've ever seen in a game, and it's a crying shame that the PC wasn't its lead platform as I felt the Wii held it back; it could have looked even better than Witcher 2, and the devs clearly wanted to do more with the combat system but couldn't due to their confinement to the controller. I constantly felt like I needed more control of the party a la Dragon Age Origins as the AI frequently stood in dangerous spots and got themselves killed, resulting in my losing of the battle. It was also difficult to shift through abilities at times as I had to use the left thumbstick to move around while using the left D-Pad to scroll between the abilities on my bar.

It got quite frustrating at times, and the graphics initially put me off big time, but I kept going with an open mind and was ultimately able to find spades of enjoyment in this world. Without further adieu, here are my in-depth, experienced, and jackass thoughts on Xenoblade Chronicles:

From what I've gathered, a huge part of Xenoblade's success is its re-defining of the Japanese Role-Playing Game; this is a fancy way of saying that it trims out a lot of bullshit that the genre is known for. Frequently, in titles such as Persona or Pokemon, you'll be stuck having to "grind" up levels in order to advance. "Grinding", in gaming terms for those not-in-the-know, is used to describe a monotonous process such as constantly fighting monsters and enemies until you've leveled up high enough to advance onward in the main story (or competitive scene, in Pokemon's case). In Xenoblade Chronicles, this isn't the case (mostly, but we'll get back to this in a bit). The game has a questing system similar to World of Warcraft; the majority of these quests solely award money, but many of them also give you large amounts of experience for their completion, in addition to "reputation" with each town (which increases your friendship with the citizens, opening up trading opportunities for collectibles which give strong equipment rewards if you can collect enough of a certain category). For the most part, none of them are out-of-the-way and can be completed while progressing in the main story. These quests could involve killing a boss, or collecting materials, or finding special items for people. You usually aren't required to go back to town to turn them in; you're often rewarded as soon as you complete all of the objectives. This whole system seems so tiny and obvious, but it molds Xenoblade Chronicles into a MUCH better experience than it could have been had it followed the traditional formula. Given how long you've got until completion, not only does the questing system make the gameplay less monotonous, but it also helps with the story's pacing. And heck, as icing on the cake, you can eventually just skip the currency-exclusive quests entirely as you'll reach a point where you've accumulated more money than you can possibly spend.

Now, this system works all fine and dandy for the first 60 hours or so, but the quests' availability lessen as the game goes on; notably right after the story's climax when you're hit in the face with exposition. To put this into perspective, I'd only skipped around three or four quests that award experience up to this point. After this huge event, you're given one quest that awards experience which involves going to a cave to find a key that some guy lost. This key is guarded by a metric shitton of level 90 enemies. At this point, on the first playthrough, there's no way in hell you'll be able to complete this quest as these guys can kill the majority of your party members in two or three hits, but this isn't the problem.

The story bosses from this point onward are level 75 and higher; there's three of them before the end of the game not counting the dozens of mini-bosses that are just as high level. By the time you get to the first of these three bosses, you'll likely be around level 71. Four levels below is quite drastic; I tried every character combination I could, and there just wasn't any possibility of getting past this boss. I did some digging and was able to find five other quests that awarded experience, but these all involved fighting level 80s. I thought I'd missed something, but it soon became clear to me that all of these quests were tuned for new game plus.

So here I was, in the final hours of the game with only the conclusion on my mind, and my sole option if I wanted to continue was to spend hours partaking in the very activity that the game had done such a great job of avoiding up until this point.

It was pretty frustrating. I can't for the life of me imagine what the developers were thinking here. Why not tone down the level range to make the progression more consistent, especially considering the complete absence of quests within your level range in the final leg of the game? It took around eight hours total of grinding before my party was ready to face the final boss; I recommend getting at least to level 78 before entering that final teleporter. You can't save past that point, and there's nothing to kill for experience once you go through, so if you enter at too low a level without saving right outside, you're shit out of luck and could potentially be set back a few hours. This is a bit of a problem, but if you're saving constantly, it's not that big a deal. The minor grind is worth it.

Moving on to a more positive side, the story itself is freaking over-the-top whacked, which is to be expected of its JRPG nature. It's glorious. So, we learn right at the beginning that long ago, two humongous titans came into existence and engaged in a timeless swashbuckling battle; the Mechonis, and the Bionis. However, their powers were too evenly matched, and they soon struck a killing blow on each other at the same time. Rather than falling over, they froze in their battle stances, forever still. Years later, life came into existence on the remains of these two titans, and evolved and coexisted as we do on our humble planet Earth.

Yeah. The game takes place on the remains of two badass sword-wielding titans. Have you ever seen or imagined a more METAL setting???

Anyway, we're then told that a war is going on in present day between a race local to Bionis known as the Homs (pretty much humans), and a mechanical race local to Mechonis known as the Mechon. Through a series of events, the main character Shulk comes into possession of a super awesome energy sword known as the Monado which is the only weapon that can harm the Mechon; along with this unique trait, the Monado also lets Shulk glimpse into the future, which meshes really well with certain game mechanics and is great for keeping you teased and interested with the meaty story.

So after coming into possession of such a powerful weapon, Shulk sets out with his beefy childhood friend Reyn to combat these machines. Along the way, they're joined by Sharla, a sniper/medic, along with their childhood friend Dunban who specializes in katanas. They also meet the "Heropon" Riki who is a member of the cute little Nopon race (also local to Bionis) and specializes in "debuff" abilities such as poison and burn, and Melia whose capable of casting elemental spells. The combat system takes all of these traits into account and relies more on action RPG qualities rather than the more common turn-based system. You can have a total of three party members out at a time, and the key to success is finding the best synergy between them; Reyn is pretty much a tank, in that he can draw the enemies away from the other party members to mitigate the damage dealt to the party. Sharla can keep your team members alive with her Ether Rifle heals (she shoots her friends with a gun to heal them), Shulk primarily does a lot of damage with his backstab abilities; you get the idea. It's a very satisfying system that never gets old with all the possible skill combinations, and it's even further extended by the Affinity system. The Affinity between your party members determines how much they like each other, and subsequently, how well they fight together through both battle and how many talent skills you can link with the skill system; you can link one additional talent skill between characters per Affinity level, which can lead to some pretty strong outcomes.

Affinity can be increased through quest communication, through fighting enemies, and with use of "heart to hearts" which are one-on-one conversations that characters can have at certain locations when they reach a certain Affinity level. This system is pretty cool, as you're rewarded with more development for the characters (and in some cases more worldbuilding) if that's your thing. Unfortunately, increasing Affinity between characters involves having them both out in the party, and it becomes a pain later on as some just don't have very good synergy. To make matters more restrictive, there's so much damage being dished out later in the game that you will not be able to survive without having Sharla out to heal, and there are several parts of the story involving Mechon where you need to have Shulk out as the Monado is the only weapon that can do work against them. It would have been nice if the gameplay didn't contradict itself in this way, but since the Affinity bonuses are very much optional, it's not too big a deal.

Speaking of party members, the variety of banter during battles is absolutely insane. There's so many variations as to who says what to who and who replies what, that it's easy to tell a lot of time and care went into fleshing out these characters. Granted, some of the dialogue in the dub during cutscenes felt a bit awkward writing-wise and delivery-wise, but it didn't happen so much that it took me out of the game. For the most part, the dub was great, and the characters were well-portrayed and pretty well-developed, rivaling the cast of Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood and even Avatar The Last Airbender in a few places. It was pretty damned good.

Overall, Xenoblade Chronicles may have a few flaws, but none of them are a derailment to the whole experience. The characters have great chemistry, the gameplay is engaging and satisfying, and the story...is phenomenal. With the length of the game, you're teased with story events and little tidbits all throughout until that metaphorical bomb is dropped inside your skull, and there's several of them. I couldn't touch on it too much due to spoilers, but aside from the skewed pacing thanks to the level inconsistency, the narrative is pretty good especially for an anime-inspired plot; it contains roots in fantasy, various mythological legends, sci-fi, and religion. The ending in particular is SO satisfying, SO consistent to the characters, and SO incredible that it literally spits in the face of stories such as Mass Effect 3, Battlestar Galactica and Background Pony. It says, "THIS is how you make an ending; THIS is how you have a consistent, riveting, and satisfying conclusion."

It'll be ported to the 'New' 3DS fairly soon, and quite possibly the Wii U with the spiritual successor coming out ('Xenoblade Chronicles X'). If you like games, or just enjoy a good story, I'd advise you pick up Xenoblade Chronicles and give it a go. While RPG's in the vein of Witcher 2 or Dragon Age Origins are more my style, I can without a doubt say that Xenoblade Chronicles is one of the best games I've ever played, and easily the best title available on the Wii.

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