Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition review: A forgotten classic is back with a vengeance
'Xenoblade Chronicles X' is back from Wii U purgatory with an outstanding Switch port that makes it more approachable than ever.
I didn’t need to be sold on Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition, but after a couple dozen hours with one of the largest and coolest games Nintendo has ever made, one moment cemented this remaster as one of the very best games on Nintendo Switch for me.
It came after I decided to get a little adventurous. Following excursions into three of the game’s five gorgeous, ecologically diverse continents, I decided to take things further and go north to Sylvalum, a region defined by alabaster white sand and spherical trees that glow at night. Getting there was a journey in and of itself, requiring me to duck and weave between enemies that could kill me in just one or two hits if they noticed me.
But then I got there, and Sylvalum’s incredible theme music kicked in. By this point, I’m already locked the hell in. I ventured further into the continent, eventually finding an enormous lake shallow enough for me to walk across. Suddenly, the weather became oppressively misty, reducing visibility to near zero. As I carefully trotted across the lake, I found myself running underneath the legs of a gargantuan alien stag the size of a large building. It didn’t want anything to do with me, but seeing that thing emerge from the mist was a jump-scare that drove home how genuinely dangerous and alien Xenoblade X’s setting can be at its best.
Xenoblade X, originally released on Wii U for what felt like an audience of about 27 people in 2015, is all about moments like this, little reminders of how physically small and cosmically insignificant humans are. I’ve never played another open-world game that so routinely makes the player feel like an ant in the coolest way possible. The alien planet of Mira, on which the game is set, was not meant for our feet, and Xenoblade X reminds you of this at every opportunity.
All of that was true of the Wii U original, and remains true with this new Switch release. To leave it there would do a disservice to developer Monolith Soft, though. Rather than making a simple remaster with cleaned up visuals and some UI tweaks, Monolith Soft went about seven extra miles. Thanks to substantial and tasteful reconsiderations of various menus and systems, as well as thrilling new story material, Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition is truly the way to play this almost-forgotten classic. You can finally put your Wii U in the closet for good.
Man in the Mira
Xenoblade X, which is narratively unrelated to the numbered trilogy I’ve gushed about on this website before, has kind of a bummer of an opening. Before you can even take control of your player-created silent protagonist, Earth has been destroyed in the crossfire of a war between two hostile alien civilizations. We weren’t even part of the fight; we just got in the way of it.
To make matters worse, seemingly only one colony ship managed to slip away in all the chaos: the White Whale. After some more alien war nonsense, the White Whale makes an emergency crash landing on the uncharted planet Mira. The survivors manage to retrofit the ship’s habitat area into a half-built city called New Los Angeles. They get to work not only on figuring out how to survive on Mira, but also on retrieving the Lifehold, a lost part of the White Whale that is the key to the future of the human race.
While that is a solid jumping-off point for a JRPG story, not even a terrific remaster can save Xenoblade X from its biggest foibles. Namely, the main story takes a really long time to find its footing. Sure, it sprinkles in some interesting reveals early on, enough to keep the player invested, but this is not the kind of strong, character-driven, emotional storytelling you’d find in a numbered Xenoblade game. Monolith Soft has gotten a lot better at visual presentation in the decade since this game came out on Wii U, and it shows. A great deal of the story in Xenoblade X is delivered through wooden conversation scenes where anywhere between three and six people stand still in a circle for a while. It’s no match for the excellent cutscene direction of something like Xenoblade 3.
Luckily, there’s plenty of charming and funny writing to be found in Xenoblade X’s treasure trove of side quests, which you absolutely should take the time to do. The main story does eventually find some interesting thematic ground to cover (who gets to leave Earth before its destruction, and who gets to choose?), it just takes too long to get there.
Nintendo would probably prefer it if I didn’t spoil the new story stuff, which largely takes place after the original game’s unsatisfying cliffhanger ending. Without going too much into what happens in it, the new chapter is a more conclusive coda to the adventure than what was there before. It’s also thematically more in line with the other Xenoblade games, full of achingly sincere emotional beats about the existence of gods, angels, and even Heaven itself.
And yes, fans of the other three Xenoblades will find plenty to pick through and theorize about in YouTube essays and Reddit threads in the years to come.
Be prepared to do a lot of quests
Just like the original Wii U version, Xenoblade X Definitive Edition opens with a fairly limiting creation suite for the player character, who is a voiceless, amnesiac husk with no apparent stakes in anything that’s happening. Monolith Soft has upgraded the character creator with some new visual options, but it’s still got very rigid male/female gender options that feel out of step with where RPGs have gone in the decade since this game first came out. I understand that it’s probably very difficult to offer extensive pronoun options in a game with voice acting that was recorded more than a decade ago, but the lack of things like that does stand out now.
Regardless, once you make your little dude and go through a fairly stiff and awkward tutorial chapter, Xenoblade X sets you off on an open-ended quest to explore Mira and help humanity build a new home for itself. There is a linear series of main story chapters to complete, but accessing them (especially in the later stages of the story) often requires the player to complete seemingly optional missions or otherwise engage with its many systems.
These usually include affinity missions, each of which revolves around a different playable party member, of which there are more than 20. Affinity missions have full voice acting and even unique boss fights in some cases. These are generally the best Xenoblade X has to offer in terms of authored side material.
My one major complaint about the quest structure here is that activating a main story mission or affinity mission locks you out of doing other story/affinity missions until you complete it. It’s unnecessarily rigid and can become quite annoying if the next objective in the quest you’re locked into is something you don’t feel comfortable doing.
There are also non-voiced side missions that often at least include funny premises and objectives, such as one where you have to stop a dangerous political candidate who wants to convert the entire economy into a pizza-based bartering system from winning office in New LA. Many of the side missions involve cultural exchange between humans and several different friendly alien species who shack up in NLA over the course of the story.
I can’t lie: In times like these, I found it nice and refreshing just how much of the missions in this game involve humans embracing diversity and befriending unfamiliar immigrants who have nowhere else to go. It’s not always perfectly sensitive to every issue, but Xenoblade X carries an optimism about people and their ability to accept others that’s nice to see right now.
Beyond that, there are more basic busywork missions that mostly involve killing a certain number of monsters or collecting a certain number of items. Blessedly, these are things you can do if you want, but rarely do you have to do any of them.
When you aren’t questing, you’ll most likely spend your time running around Mira, planting mining probes to expand the map. These also double as a source of regular passive income, making it well worth the player’s while to meticulously plan out their probe network in the in-game FrontierNav menu.
As a lifelong fan of MMORPGs, Xenoblade X’s questing rhythm is familiar and comfortable to me. “Just one more quest and then it’s time for bed” regularly turned into late-night sessions that ultimately led to a staggering 96 hours of playtime before I hit the end credits. There’s no denying that Xenoblade X is a beast of a video game, but I had a good time for almost all of those 96 hours.
Stick with it, I promise
I realize I’ve gotten nearly 1,500 words into this review without mentioning that you eventually get access to fully customizable mechs (called Skells) in this game. That’s appropriate because it takes literally about 30 hours of gametime before Xenoblade X grants access to this game-changing system. It’s another 15 hours of gametime before your Skell gets the ability to fly, which alters things even further.
A lot of people will read that paragraph, say “screw that,” and go play something else instead. To each their own, but I strongly feel that instant gratification for mech lovers would make Xenoblade X a substantially less interesting experience.
Put simply, Skells alter the player’s perspective in a way that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen another open-world game pull off. Before you have a Skell, you are but an insect to the megafauna of Mira. Many parts of the world are fully inaccessible because you can’t jump high enough, and it’s not even worth trying to kill big monsters most of the time. Once you have a Skell, you suddenly see Mira at an entirely different scale. You can kill more things and go to more places.
It’s a massive change to thrust upon the player after 30 hours of gameplay, but then it happens again once your Skell has a flight module. The ability to freely fly around Mira is a profound change, and one that unlocks places you never even dreamed of being able to visit before. This is where the real magic of Xenoblade X reveals itself: Anything you can see, you can also touch. Things that would be background elements in other games are fully modeled objects that you can walk on, even if there’s no reason to do so.
I’ve just never played another open-world game that so intentionally and effectively plays with the player’s relationship to the game world itself. You experience three different versions of Mira over the course of the adventure. It’s rad as hell. It also doesn’t hurt that the environmental art direction is outstanding across the board. All five continents are beautiful in their own way, and they all manage to put at least one fun twist on familiar concepts like “green plains” or “jungle.”
Also, one of the new things they added in the remaster is a Skell that transforms into a jet. It’s easily the most fun way to get around Mira once you unlock it.
They fixed the combat, too
Fighting monsters is, obviously, a very big part of Xenoblade X, and it’s also the part that’s most likely to make newcomers bounce off of it. Like every other game in the series, combat here is roughly akin to that of classic MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. When you target an enemy, your character automatically begins attacking while you scroll through a horizontal bar full of Arts, which are cooldown-based combat abilities, on the bottom of the screen.
While fights play out in real-time, this isn’t an action game. Your job is to properly position your character and manage cooldowns, not skillfully execute combos. The most unique thing about the combat in Xenoblade X relative to its peers is the general lack of healing abilities. While there are a handful of Arts that recover health, the main way to heal your party members is to use certain Arts at the right time whenever one of your teammates calls out for it, which recovers a little bit of health for everyone.
This system, known as Soul Voices, is something you can spend hours tinkering with, or ignore entirely, as I did. In general, this is by far the most build-crafty Xenoblade game, with lots of adjusting to be done in the game’s many menus in order to put together the perfect party for any situation. It is immensely satisfying, especially in the game’s later chapters, to carefully put together a plan and see it work just as you imagined.
Combat was hectic and fun on Wii U, but it always felt like it was missing something. Monolith Soft found it in the Switch version with the quick cooldown system. By simply hovering over an Art that’s currently on cooldown and pressing a button, you can skip the cooldown and instantly use the art again, as many times as you want. This is governed by a new meter that doesn’t really refill until a fight is over, so you do need to be careful about it, which is nice because otherwise it would be totally broken.
Quick cooldowns make fights substantially faster and more fun. Monolith Soft has hit a satisfying balance of giving players more ways to succeed without trivializing combat. It can still be very challenging, but the player now has a slightly bigger margin for error. I should note that Skell combat is very similar to on-foot fights, but you don’t get access to quick cooldowns. This is a cool disparity that didn’t exist before; combat on-foot is more agile and reactive, while Skell fights are slower and more methodical, as they should be.
They fixed everything else, too
The Wii U version of Xenoblade X was a hard game to love at times. There were certain elements of its design that made tedious grinding more necessary than I prefer, and in general, the user interface was a mess. Monolith Soft’s efforts to alleviate those problems are, by a wide margin, my favorite thing about the Definitive Edition port.
The two most important changes involve the game’s large roster of party members. In the original game, you had to manually walk up to someone in NLA and talk to them to add them to your party. The Wii U version also did not give any experience points to inactive party members, meaning you had to grind to keep people at an acceptable level. Since affinity missions have strict level requirements, this was an extremely tiresome chore.
I’m pleased to report that the Switch version allows you to switch out party members from the main menu at any time, and everyone levels up regardless of how much you use them. Affinity, a separate stat that goes up as you spend more time with characters and is usually a requirement to start affinity missions, also accumulates much faster than it did before. This makes it a breeze to complete every single affinity mission in the game, something that I would never have done before.
That’s not all, though, Not even close. Here’s just a sampling of some of the other improvements the developers made over the Wii U version:
You can change the time of day from the main menu
Character faces generally look a lot better
Objective markers for quests are significantly more helpful than they used to be
There are now multiple save slots
You can highlight specific segments of the minimap, which makes searching for things easier
Last but certainly not least, a majority of the fonts have been updated to the admittedly kinda sterile sans serif font Nintendo uses for everything now. In this case specifically, this was a great choice. The Wii U version's text could be hard to read at times. On top of that, just about every menu has been updated to efficiently communicate as much information as possible, when possible. The Combat UI has also seen massive improvements, making it much easier to read the situation and react accordingly than before.
Is Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition worth getting?
Does the sun rise? Is water wet?
Put simply, Monolith Soft has done a remarkable job updating this game without compromising on what made it so compelling in the first place. Most of its irksome little annoyances have been removed, while maintaining a fair and enjoyable amount of friction. Mira is still an incredibly dangerous planet to explore, especially before you have Skells.
I promise I wouldn’t recommend a game that took me nearly 100 hours to finish unless I really thought it was worth the time. This is the best Xenoblade Chronicles X has ever been, and I’m extremely thrilled that people who are curious can finally check it out without digging out a Wii U.
Xenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition launches exclusively on Nintendo Switch on March 20.
