I've been putting off playing Xenoblade X for a few years now. I had previously sunk about 10 hours into the game, playing through chapters 1-5 and feeling like I had played a good chunk of what Xenoblade X had to offer, and understood what the coming hours would entail. Consequently I shelved that playthrough to pursue other games on my backlog instead, and didn't think anything more of Xenoblade X. Come now to the present day of writing, and after pouring 80 hours into Xenoblade X, I'm flabbergasted that the remaining 7 chapters ended up spanning around 70 additional hours. Xenoblade X was simultaneously the longest and most bumpy game I've played in recent memory. The highs here were immense, but interspersed by 65 hours of absolutely nothing.
Xenoblade X I find fascinating in hindsight. It was an open world game published by Nintendo that released before Breath of the Wild. It was an online multiplayer questing/loot drop game before Monster Hunter had really picked up steam outside of Japan. And it was a followup to Xenoblade Chronicles, without being a sequel, before Xenoblade Chronicles was established as its own series. So this game just exists as an entry in the Xenoblade series, but it explicitly is not a Xenoblade Chronicles game, despite what the localization team wanted international audiences to think.
I've been playing through all of what I feel to be the significant Wii U releases, and I really can't imagine how anything else will top Xenoblade X. This game simultaneously feels so ahead of its time, but also fumbled so much and ended up being forgotten footnote in the library of the Wii U.
I haven't played any of the other Xeno series games, despite having so many friends who are extremely into them. From Xenogear, Xenosaga, and even some Xenoblade diehards, I'm around people who like all of the spectrums of the franchise. As far as my familiarity with the series goes, really it's just this interesting Wii U game that people were begging to have ported to the Switch. I remember vividly Japanese reviews rolling in after the initial release and seeing immense criticism about the lack of the focus on the story, and the complete divergence from Chronicles, despite still carrying the Xenoblade namesake. From my understanding, this game really has nothing in common with Xenoblade Chronicles outside of the core combat, and using some of the same species like the mascot character-like Nopon.
What I really didn't experience or expect from my initial experience with the game was just how crucial the multiplayer aspect was for getting the full experience. The initial plot hook really gripped me, and the game provided a constant drip of additional new plot points that were equally fascinating. But for some reason all of these aspects are immediately dropped and forgotten about after being introduced. It was an incredibly bizarre phenomenon to play a game constantly drip feeding me new plot-points that actively had me intrigued and wanting to learn more, but slowly realizing that all of these plot points were immediately going to be forgotten and not expanded upon or resolved in any way. And also there's 5-10 hours of running random fetch quests that consist of farming enemies for random drops inbetween each primary story beat. The opening 10 hours of the game happens so quickly, but then it just devolves into a such a massive slog for the singleplayer experience.
It's dreadfully obvious that Xenoblade X was not made for people wanting to play through a linear narrative-driven JRPG experience. Once Xenoblade X sets up its world and core gameplay loop, the game desperately wants you to just join a group with some friends and simply start running side quests for fun. The sidequests in Xenoblade X end up not feeling like sidequests at all, in reality I believe these to be the meat of the game. The story missions are supposed to truncate and cap off extended multiplayer sessions, not be the primary factor for why a player would want to stay engaged with the game. The story missions are gated off by level and exploration requirements where the only way to progress is just to grind out a bunch of meaningless content. If you were having fun with your friends online and viewing Xenoblade X as almost an MMO-like game, there's a lot of reasons to keep turning on the game every day. That's how you're supposed to meet the requirements to unlock each new story chapter. If you're just trying to experience the story by yourself it quickly just becomes a mindless list of chores.
Despite the grind required, the narrative actually had me intrigued enough to want to keep playing. But even the narrative comes with a weird caveat. I'm not sure if it's due to time or budget constraints or what, but I feel like the story not being the primary focus of the game really isn't a good reason for all of its beats to be left entirely unresolved or elaborated on. Xenoblade X introduces so many seemingly massive topics, like a tainted group of creatures that was to devour all Xeno life, and the corruption is spread. Except once you're introduced to this dire-seeming threat, and fight a boss related to it, the subject is just never brought up again. A mysterious species has polluted the water supply and is laying eggs and hatching inside of hosts that consume the corrupted water, and you resolve this singular instead of it occurring, but never again is this species or threat mentioned, despite being explicitly stated that this is still an unknown threat lingering for the future. An entire race is introduced that poses moral questions about self-identity and existence, with this race sharing a single will and multiplying through fission. After being introduced and the questions being posed... it's just never brought up again. Until at the end of the game suddenly the story asks an identical moral question about the nature of the humans. It almost feels like they had the writers come up with a bunch of fantastic prompts, they put every prompt into the game independent of each other, but then just didn't bother to finish a single one of them. Even the entire ending of the game essentially ends on introducing a new conflict without elaborating on it, that almost seems independent from everything else in the game so far.
Xenoblade X more than any other game I've played desperately feels like it needed a second disc. Somehow despite taking 80 hours to finish a playthrough of the main story, I feel like I only finished disc 1.
Tedium and monotony aside of trying to blast through clearly multiplayer-focused content by myself just to get to the next story mission, I found the world design to be fantastic. Xenoblade X gives you a mecha, and this mecha can fly. Despite this, the environment feels like it was meticulously crafted, rather than generated. The way every part of an area is accessible by traversal only on foot, with so many of these segments having completely unique geogrophy and set dressing makes them actively interesting to explore from a visual perspective. Almost none of this matters since past the first two regions, you'll more or less never be exploring by foot, yet they still made the environment interesting to be on while on foot. It's really respectable in a way, especially in the fifth region of the game, Cauldros. So many unique interactable objects exist within the environment such as the mining frigate teleporters, but these are never used in any mission. They just exist in the world, so the world as least makes sense by foot, even if going by foot just means a rote task will take exponentially longer. It's a nice touch of detail in the environment that actually kept me engaged despite the gameplay loop of random drop fetch quests becoming so tedious.
The combat is something I wanted to like more, but I just didn't love how it was presented. Xenoblade X suffers from a case of a game that has a ton of options and ways to engage with it, but actually engaging with it on a meaningful level requires searching for outside information. The game is entirely unclear about specific appendage attacks, how much health appendages have, elemental affinites tied to enemy offenses and defense. To really strategize requires seeking all of this information outside of the game which really feels a bit cumbersome. Top this off with a combat balance that feels very heavily balanced around gear-checks of gear that becomes equippable only at 10-level incremented thresholds and you'll find that Xenoblade X's difficulty becomes very lopsided. If you're fighting an enemy within the 10 level threshold of the gear, they'll almost always be fine. But exceed that threshold and you're going to be in for a fight that can last over 30 minutes just for random overworld mobs. Gear balancing asided, I do like the core systems a lot. Having abilities on cooldowns while placing a massive emphasis on positioning feels like an excellent take on not-quite-turn-based combat. It has a lot of similarities with Final Fantasy 13, except Xenoblade X gives the player more transparent agency over their positioning in relation to the enemy. I strongly dislike action RPGs typically, because I find so many of them to be so mechanically shallow, but takes like this on turn based combat really do a lot for me. Classic ATB in Final Fantasy never felt quite right, it just felt to me as if you were being rushed to make decisions for no real reason, and it took away from the strategic aspect of the game. But in Xenoblade X I feel as if I'm playing a turn based game where turns are just extremely fluid and rely on you keeping track of both your enemy and your own turn timers in the form of your cooldowns.
If anything it plays like a bit of an MMO, even going as far as to have your party members call out for you do use certain types of moves, which will then recieve a power increase when used. I really like the concept of soul voices as a mechanic, creating more of a multiplayer feel during solo gameplay, and it added a nice extra layer to party building. These callouts are triggered upon doing certain actions, such as destroying an appendage or toppling an enemy, and while these requirements stay the same, each party member gets a set of callouts you can choose for them to make when that action happens. So it was an enjoyable process to determine my team not just based on primary combat ability synergy, but which characters had soul voice options that would boost the primary types of actions I wanted to make.
When other aspects of combat depth were relatively obscured, such as resistance affinities, I greatly appreciated how straightforward and transparent party building based on soul voices was.
I really wanted to like a lot about this game, but the deliberately created progression gating to make sure the game is a slow, long-term burn you play for a bit every day just grinds down on the experience so much. If you have friends to play this game with, or are a big fan of the gameplay loop seen in Monster Hunter, you'll probably love this game. If you're looking for a single player RPG with a satisfying story to drive you forward, if you're not patient you'll end up miserable trudging through the dozens of hours of random drop grinding.
— Juni - June 24th, 2025 —
