Xenoblade Chronicles X was arguably the most ambitious game to land on the Nintendo Wii U (you could argue that Breath of the Wild was, but then most people see that as a Switch game and forget that there was a Wii U version as well… and all this is splitting hairs anyway). It is a sprawling open world game with an epic science fiction premise, and it was quite incredible what Monolith Software was able to squeeze out of the hardware. Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition on the Nintendo Switch is… well, that game. Improved and refined, but still fundamentally the same game.
The Definitive Edition has improved character models and detail in the world, though you’d really need to put the two versions side-by-side to notice. Something that is important to note, however, is that this is a game best played in docked mode, because on the relatively small screen of the Switch in handheld, it can be a little overwhelming to look at, and I never quite found the perfect balance between having the camera zoomed close enough in to enjoy the art and detail, and zoomed far enough out to be playable without losing sight of characters and the action.
To give you some examples of the other improvements that have been built into the Definitive Edition: You can now change the time of day at will, rather than having to wait for the clock to tick around for missions and story beats with a time of day requirement. You’re also able to swap between party members at will, where previously you needed to return back to home base to do that. Party members all receive experience points, whether they’re in your team or not, meaning that you don’t have to spend all that time leveling every character you might want to use. In battle, cooldowns and strategic use of abilities have been enhanced with a “quick recast” feature that further streamlines battles and prevents you from sitting around waiting for things to reset for you.
Speaking of characters, there are a few new ones and some additional narrative to go with them. This is particularly impressive when you consider that the base version of Xenoblade Chronicles X already had 20-odd characters. There are also some new enemies to fight and some mysteries to solve. Essentially, for existing fans, this is not just a port and all the additions are thoughtful, additive, and very much a reason to dip in for another run. For newcomers, an already massive game is even bigger now. And it was a 70-odd hour game just to get through the main part of it, let alone achieve that 100% completion.
For those that haven’t played Xenoblade Chronicles X, the premise will be familiar, but it’s a good one for science fiction: The Earth has been destroyed by warring alien species that just happened to choose humanity’s homeland as the battleground. Just before the human species is wiped out, the last of them jump on giant spaceships and blast off into space, escaping the conflict and looking for a new home. One of those ships crash lands on a new planet after it is itself attacked (talk about unfortunate luck), and this is where Xenoblade Chronicles X picks up its story; with humanity just taking its first steps into its new world, and coming to terms with the alien, and quite inhospitable, landscape.
Without giving away too much, the core theme within Xenoblade Chronicles X is the kind of metaphysics that you’d expect from science fiction plots – there’s the search for what it means to be human, concepts of space, time, the relationship between humanity and mechanical entities, and all the rest. In fact, now that we have the whole Xenoblade Chronicles trilogy (when XCX originally released there was only Xenoblade Chronicles 1), this game acts as something of a greatest hits of the more thought-provoking ideas from the rest of the series.
The problem is that in comparison to those games, Xenoblade Chronicles X comes across as a more shallow treatment of the material, and I’m inclined to blame the open world nature of it. While Xenoblade Chronicles 1-3 were big, “open” experiences, they were also linear adventures, and this allowed the writers and developers to control the pace to an extent. With Xenoblade Chronicles X, meanwhile, the open world nature of it gives the developers less direct control over the experience of its story, and this limits the depth with which the creatives can build their themes. Open world games are great for facilitating gameplay – exploring, fighting, getting out there and completing missions and getting story content through sidequests and little notes along the way. It’s not a great genre for telling deep and insightful, philosophically complex narratives.
Related reading: Philosophy and the Xeno series – finding meaning in Monolith’s masterpieces.
That said, it’s by no means stupid, either – indeed you could argue that the least of the Xenoblade series is still more thematically dense than 99% of the other games out there. For example, as I noted in my review of the Wii U version:
In a world that has made humanity’s impact on the planets it exist on the dominant political discussion at all levels, it should have been incredibly poignant when just about every character finds the time to poke fun at the Nopon – a species native to the planet – for resembling a garden vegetable. Jokes about turning them into fried potato meals are oh-so-funny until you realise that humanity really is – however inadvertently – behaving like a pest to the native flora and fauna on this planet. We’re meant to sympathise with these people because, after all, crashing on the planet was not deliberate and for all they knew they were the last humans left alive, and jokes aside they do seem to want to co-inhabit the planet peacefully, but the meta-conversations that this game could have been at the centre of could have had real value, if it was better developed and explored in a greater depth than it winds up being.
There’s a hostile alien species on the planet too, which is determined to wipe out the humans. Early on, the unwillingness to engage with humans, and the insistence from these aliens that humanity is a plague on the universe almost carries with it a whiff of the Reapers from the Mass Effect universe, and that’s an appealing thought in itself, as the Reapers are one of the more complex and interesting enemies that we’ve seen in science fiction history, across all media. Puzzling out what these aliens are up to, and why they are so hostile, was almost in itself enough to keep my interest through the narrative, though the end reveals are somewhat less satisfying than the philosophically dense reality of the Reapers.
And that’s just a start. There are themes around religion, as with every Xeno- game, and the broadly metaphysical intelligence sitting at its core. Xenoblade has always been the popular JRPG for people who also like thinking, and to this day Xenoblade Chronicles X comes as close as we’ve seen for the open world format to deliver that kind of depth.
As a game to play, Xenoblade Chronicles X will be familiar to anyone who has played its sister trilogy. It uses a similar MMO-style skill bar, and rewards careful positioning to line up side-and-back attacks. There is the addition of the Skell robots, which add further dimension to the combat and world traversal alike. It’s a good combat system, especially given the frequency with which combat occurs. With that being said you do have to fundamentally enjoy MMOs and their combat systems to fully invest in how Xenoblade Chronicles X plays.
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition is much more than a port and there’s enough there to justify a re-purchase, even if you’re still one of the ten people still playing it on the Wii U. For those that aren’t existing fans, all you need to know is that this is one of the biggest science fiction epics on the Switch, and while I do prefer the intellectual depth and fantasy trappings of the “proper” trilogy, it’s hard not to be thrilled when exploring your way around this lush, unique vision and world.
