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122) Xenoblade Chronicles X
I've done it, y'all. I finished XCX. I figured it was something that would never happen. It just didn't click with me like Xenoblade did, and it got dropped to the back burner...
...until I picked up my new TV. I wonder if some of it is having a larger screen so all that small text is easier to read. I bet it's a factor. But the other, major factor is that it finally felt like I was "playing it right". I sussed out how to play Xenoblade, and in particular Shulk and Melia, very quickly. But combat feels a little different here. You've got both ranged and melee combat, and TP to manage for more powerful Arts, passive Skills to equip... there's just a lot going on, and it's not always as clear as you'd like if you're being effective. In fact, I'd say I wasn't very effective at all. This ended up being a fair amount because of the class I chose. I was shooting for Galactic Knight, and that's a pretty advanced class to start with. But it really comes into its own when you start getting the right skills. It's basically a melee class, and by focusing on Beam damage, and pairing your combo boosting skills with Starfall Blade, Rondo, Blossom, and Stellar Ray, you can pour in some damage very, very quickly.
On top of that, I'd stopped playing just ahead of getting Skells. Skells are a bit weird. Most of the fast-travel modes don't handle well at all, but they definitely give you a huge boost over your on-foot durability. Depending on the enemy, it will help you close a 20+ level gap, although if you get mobbed you might as well hang it up. If you lose your Skell, you have to time a button press perfectly to avoid eating into your Skell insurance, which will replace your mech for free as long as you've got it. Lose all your insurance, and you've got to burn a Salvage Ticket (only obtainable through online rewards) or buck up and pay the cost. That can get really expensive. Still, Skell combat is pretty solid, more of the same but with giant mechs. And when you get the flight module, a ton of the game opens up.
Of course, once you get the flight module, it also means that the game strains to keep up with your rate of travel. It's having to load in new resources, and you might have to wait while an NPC finally spawns in. It's nothing game-breaking, though.
Mechanically, if you've played an MMORPG, you know what to expect. Auto-attacking melee/ranged combat, Arts with cooldown times, and if you wait longer, you can boost the art's power. You can also expend 3000 TP to enter Overdrive, which boosts your speed, power, and cooldown times, and lets you increase an art's ability another time. My understanding is that with the right setup the Galactic Knight is basically always in Overdrive. I didn't optimize that well, though.
Likewise, the quest structure is pure MMORPG. Talk to an NPC, get a quest, go collect some stuff or kill a monster or talk to someone else, repeat until you get a reward. The smaller quests are still somehow interesting, because they usually factor in aspects of another species' quirks, and you end up learning more about the game's world. The better, more fleshed-out quests are the Affinity Quests, which usually give bigger rewards, particularly for the class that the character in question belongs to. Most of these have properly voiced segments and whatnot, so they're almost more story missions than basic quests.
One of the biggest improvements over Xenoblade is the lack of inventory management. Gone are the days of constantly twiddling through the menu, selling and junking stuff in the field because you don't have any more space. There are some time-sapping quirks here still, though, like not being able to add party members without going to their actual physical location, and sometimes they move.
The game is pretty, overall. Definitely some impressive vistas, a good handle on art design, and most of the characters look okay. Some questionable character models (Lin looks soulless), but the irony there is that
Sound design is a mixed bag. Some amazing tunes, and a few that get really old. The New LA music is both terrible and somehow able to inflict Stockholm Syndrome and get stuck in your head.
So, speaking of story, there's a lot of spoileriffic stuff I'm about to get into, so if you ever want to play the game, don't read it!
To sum up the story bits, it's interesting enough, but not as focused as the first game. The story really pulled you along in Xenoblade, and it only really starts moving in XCX at the end, and it leaves a lot of unresolved mysteries that may or may not ever be explained in a sequel. That's my only disappointment, that there were so many dangling threads at the end.
Still, the game itself gets really, really good. I think I'm comfortable giving it an 8.5/10, which is what I rated Xenoblade as well. But each of them is good for different reasons. If you prefer MMORPG-style, open-world setups, then this is your game. The previous game had it, too, but this one doubles down on that structure. In fact, I'm pretty sure you can get online with friends and play it just like an MMORPG. I still give the nod to Xenoblade, but only by a smidge, and only because its highs get to you first and more often, whereas XCX doesn't reach quite the same highs (and indeed, takes some time to get there), but is a more consistent experience overall. I definitely recommend the game, unless you just hate MMORPG-style games (and I usually do, and I'm still recommending it).
