Xenoblade Chronicles review

Xenoblade Chronicles begins in much the same way as its spiritual grandfather, the seminal Japanese RPG Xenogears, did some 13 years ago. No sooner have you settled into the shoes of your protagonist, learned the layout of his pastoral neighbourhood and met the friendly faces that comprise his community in Colony 9, than everything around you is destroyed in a gigantic robot attack.

Director Tetsuya Takahashi, a designer whose credits include pivotal JRPGs such as Final Fantasy V, Chrono Trigger and Secret Of Mana, has never shied away from wrapping a player in a narrative comfort blanket before setting fire to it. And here it’s an exceptionally well-executed way of grabbing your attention while providing an immediate motivation to dive into a 60-hour winding epic, the likes of which have long fallen out of fashion.

However, Monolith Soft’s efforts to urge players to reconsider the beleaguered JRPG extend far deeper than the opening moments of the plot. No game released in the genre in the past decade has demonstrated such a concerted focus as this breezy journey to redefine and repopularise the genre by learning from past mistakes. 
It cherry-picks ideas from a variety of creative trees, taking World Of Warcraft’s moreish mission structure and coupling it with Final Fantasy XII’s clockwork battle system and Dragon Quest IX’s rewarding character customisation before seasoning these with a wealth 
of its own ideas. And the concoction blends in a coherent way, never feeling like a tribute so much as 
a bold, singular statement of its own.

In part that is thanks to the world, the handsome land of Bionis upon which your character, Shulk, and his people the Homs reside. It’s a triumph of architectural design and landscaping, the line of sight through each passageway and across every field carefully considered and injected with drama and intrigue. Monolith pushes the Wii architecture to the point that, perched atop a rocky outcrop, gazing down upon miles of terrain and a city of pinprick residents in the distance, it can be difficult to believe that this game is married to Nintendo’s console.

A carpet of tall grass covers the ground, swaying on a breeze that carries butterflies upon it, juxtaposed with the hulking Mechon, the bipedal robot force terrorising the land. By removing all invisible walls, the world has 
a sense of true place – even if freedom comes with responsibility, since you can easily plunge to your death 
over a cliff. The decision to reward the player with experience points just for happening upon new areas, while ingenious and welcome, is an unnecessary system to inspire exploration; this world does that all by itself.


Where Xenogears was a game of tortured brilliance, never quite marrying its story and world to its mechanics, Xenoblade Chronicles enjoys tight coherence benefiting from Takahashi’s singular vision for scenario and setting but also from a group of innovative systems that purr beneath the plot. In battle you control just one character. To attack, you simply need to position that character close enough to an enemy to strike, which it will do automatically. Your inputs, then, are almost entirely limited to deciding which special attacks to execute and when. These ‘arts’ can be used at any time, but have a cooling-off period before they can be reused, and knowing when to trigger offensive, defensive and healing arts, or more general buffs and de-buffs, is the strategic key to success.