"Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition" in game photograph, taken by Ivan Arana Courtesy of The Chaparral
This Japanese role-playing title begins with a conflict between alien invaders battling against the remaining forces of planet Earth. The perfect setting for this intergalactic drama, as flying mecha (oft inspired from Japanese manga) whiz by blasting and clashing against one another. It is the perfect setup for what is a grand, arduous, yet satisfying undertaking. Soon thereafter you are thrust into the character creator with a beat of electronic music where you’ll be perfecting your character’s chosen appearance.
As a survivor of the conflict between mankind and the aliens, you are woken from a stasis by your soon-to-be commanding officer Elma. She teams up with you and gives you the details on the operatives known as Blades. As with most Xenoblade entries, combat can be divisive as it’s based on automatic attacks and special abilities known as arts. The name of the game is. strategy. While you’ll use a host of knives, guns, blasters and electric swords to slay ferocious beasts, you won’t necessarily be running and gunning in this game, despite all the action you see on screen. Battles are an exercise in patience, whittling down your enemy’s health, waiting for opportune moments to use your arts, boosting yours and your teammates attributes through buffs and weaking your opponents through debuffs.
Elma will introduce you to the crew and lives of those in your hub world known as New Los Angeles. Here you’ll gain intel on new missions to reclaim humanity’s purpose (or right atop the food chain). Doing so will enable you to plant probes into the land, gather resources and a make some decent earnings. You can redeem these earnings by investing in private companies for better gear or outright buy new gear as you see fit. Customizability is key in this game, as the options for ‘Ground Gear,’ that is armor and ‘Fashion Gear’ are nearly limitless in different combinations.
One aspect that is important to point out in “Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition” is that the world in which you travel is massive. You’ll traverse different biomes where the time of day shifts, weather conditions alter and you’ll face creatures of varying sizes with drastically different temperaments. Another thing I’d like to note is the sense of adventure captured within the title, the sense of scale and the ability to travel by foot, and eventually by mech provides a truly pure and unadulterated sense of being connected to the world and its inhabitants. All this is to say that the title is running on eight-year-old hardware while outperforming some of its current generation brethren.
The faults I find in the game are that the story can be a bit heavy handed at times and be slow to pick up as opposed to previous “Xenoblade” entries. This is compounded by the near demand that players engage in majority of side content to be able to handle the main storyline at a fair pace. Some tweaks in this department would have sufficed so as to provide players with more flexibility in how they choose to consume this content. All this said, fans of the genre will find themselves in good company with others as the game does feature some online functionality for their accomplishments across the game.