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Hands-On: Xenoblade Chronicles
Written by João Pedro Lopes Developed by Monolith Soft, the now Nintendo-owned company that developed games such as Xenosaga, Baten Kaitos and Disaster: Day of Crisis, Xenoblade Chronicles has been in the spotlight not because of its creators’ track record, but rather for two not-so-good reasons. First, there hasn’t been much coming out in 2011 for Wii so a big release is welcome and second, because it doesn’t seem like it’s being localized for the North American market, just like Monolith Soft’s last Wii game. But should you be excited for Xenoblade for its own merits? I’ll be honest, gauging the possible quality of an RPG that takes dozens of hours to complete from playing a bit of it isn’t advisable, so I won’t be going into a lot of depth here as it seems a very pointless exercise.  The game takes place on top of the lifeless bodies of two Gods that once waged a seemingly infinite battle that ended without victor, one of the bodies serving as home for the Human race, which is at war with the machines that live on the other body. It’s not long from the game’s start until it shows us the ropes of its battle system: you target an enemy, get close to it and the basic attacks are preformed automatically as you move around in real time giving orders to your team mates with the d-pad and choosing special techniques called arts or ultimate moves. Don’t be thrown off by the automatic attacks, there seems to be a lot of strategy involved, for example, certain arts only work if you’re behind your opponent or you may need to use a specific attack to topple an enemy, opening up opportunities to get in new attacks. Paying attention to what’s going on is essential if you want to rack up some damage and chain attacks together with the rest of the party. I only got a glimpse of the outside field, but I definitely liked what I saw: green fields, blue skies and a lot of friendly wild life you can choose to battle or not as well as enemies, making the world feel much more alive than just some ground to cover while being interrupted with random battles. The city I visited was an encouraging sight too with lots of places to explore, each new one found granting experience, plenty of characters to talk to and some sidequests to take. What little of I saw of Xenoblade’s world struck me as interesting, cohesive and alive, which is much more than can be said from most RPGs lately, but of course, the jury’s still out. Wii’s poor image quality on a HDTV was noticeable, especially because of the aliasing and some character models were frankly ugly and low-poly, but the environments looked great and the character designs were very interesting and with a lot of intricacies, not falling too deep in generic anime/JRPG territory. The battles had a lot going on with big enemies and the entire party going around fighting, but I didn’t notice any dips in the framerate. After the initial “shock” of being presented with some ugly faces (some might call them unique designs I guess), the game looked pretty good, even if not technically impressive.  The music was absolutely amazing which was to be expected, were it not the work of Yoko Shimomura (Kingdom Hearts) and Yasunori Mitsuda (Chrono Trigger) and the English voice acting actually seemed well done, although I can’t say that with certainty without playing more. Eventually I switched to Japanese voices (which can be done without exiting the game) and they sounded great, so there’s always that fortunately. I left sure of one thing, Xenoblade Chronicles isn’t a light game, made as a second thought for Wii or its expanded audience, but a full effort by Monolith Soft with lots of complexities and a rich world, or in other words, just what the RPG crowd wants. [More on Xenoblade Chronicles] Comments
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Xenoblade Chronicles
System: Wii Genre: RPG Developer: Monolith Soft Publisher: Nintendo Release Dates:  Out now 2012 Out now Out nowMemorycard: N/A Multiplayer: No MP Last updated on: Aug 13th 2011
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