Review: Xenoblade Chronicles X
Community
The Art of the Blade
If you haven’t played the preceding Xenoblade Chronicles, you’re at an immediate disadvantage. They don’t give you much of a tutorial on how combat flows. Your weapon auto-attacks at a set rate so you can focus on using on Arts—special attacks and moves that change as you upgrade classes. Since it’s not turn-based combat, you have to select the Arts on the fly. Your team mates will occasionally call out to strike the enemy a certain way, if you manage to use the right Arts at the right time, you get a nice bonus. You can arrange the Arts how you like on the menu and you can upgrade them to make them much more efficient. Getting through the battles quickly allows you more time to scout out the mysterious planet.
Human lives are precious in this new world, and therefore your main priority. One of the pieces that fell off the ship held thousands upon thousands of lifepods with enough of humanity to start a real colony. Builders of the Legacy After the Destruction of Earth (BLADE) was formed to get the remaining survivors organized and started on building a lasting life on Mira. They have eight divisions dedicated to making Mira a safer place to live—there are people to collect samples, plant research probes, take out dangerous indigens, scouting missions, etc. You select one of the divisions to join, and as you complete the main goals of your division, you gain BLADE levels in addition to your character’s level.
Suiting Up
Once you progress through the story several chapters, you’ll finally be able to pilot Skells. Not only can you walk around in a cool mech suit, it transforms into a vehicle so you can speed across Mira—hitting indigens will start a fight, naturally, so you’ll have to be a bit more careful out in the wild. After a few more chapters in the story you can even fly your Skell around the continents. Other than that, they’re a blast. It’s gratifying to take on dinosaur-sized indigen and take them down. There are a few different types of Skells—light, mid and heavy. Lights are the cheap-o suits that are on the low end of everything—armor, HP, fuel, cost—but it is easier to re-fuel them. The mid and the heavy are better on stats, but the heavy types are a little more difficult to re-fuel. Skells have levels, armor, arts and even insurance—they are giant robots, after all, and those cost a fortune.
There’s an integrated social aspect that made it feel like a community while you’re playing Xenoblade Chronicles X—it keeps you up to date about your squad and your division as you go through your own journey on Mira. There’s a lot of info on the screen at one time, so adding this into it feels a bit excessive—especially because the information that pops up is stuff like someone get through part of one of the games many chapters.
The scope of Xenoblade Chronicles X is massive and this review barely glances the surface. There’s an interesting story with great voice acting, tons of things to collect and catalogue, beasts to fight, and a brilliant, colorful world to do all of it in. It’s well done, but it’s also fun hunting down your next objective, or your next battle and it was never tedious. There’s so much to do and see that Xenoblade Chronicles X will keep you busy for months—it’s well worth your hard earned cash and precious time.