Xenoblade Chronicles
I have a lot of affection for sincere games full of good ideas executed imperfectly, and that's about where I'd place Xenoblade Chronicles. I'm familiar with the earlier works under Tetsuya Takahashi's Xeno branding, so this was not a shocking discovery--Xenogears is a standard-bearer of 90s console RPGs and also a well-known victim of development time constraints. Make no mistake, I was deeply invested, and this is a very highly reviewed game in general, if you're concerned about that. But I'd feel dishonest if I didn't say that some of the biggest conceptual swings don't fully survive the translation into things the player has to do.
The zones are big and visually impressive, but in a few cases XC1 falls into the very common RPG pitfall of dungeons that wear out their welcome about halfway through. Dozens of fetch quests give you reasons to explore and tie into maybe the most interesting single mechanic, the giant relationship chart of almost every named minor NPC; on the other hand, they're dozens of fetch quests (some requiring you to collect items that aren't guaranteed to spawn or drop, which should be illegal). This all results in some incongruous moments--for example, at one point you end up in a city with a high-science-fantasy aesthetic that really does it for me, but then one of your first interactions with the place, if you're like me, is running up and down a three-mile-long airport concourse for a solid hour and a half making sure you don't miss any quests or NPCs with names. I'm guessing part of the problem is that this all feels less novel now than it would've in 2010. But, damn. At least you can change the time of day. And there's a lot to do, if you want reasons to stay in this world for a while.
I like stories that range widely in tone, particularly when stories with heavy themes aren't gratuitously, relentlessly grim. Illustrated media can be pretty good about this, which is a major reason I'm into it in the first place. But XC1 is so preoccupied with loss, the circumstances of history, and what these things drive people to do that moments of pure comic relief often land awkwardly. A few things about the game almost give it the vibe of a modern Chrono sequel (also not surprising considering the meta-series' development history), but it's like if Chrono Trigger had opened with 2300 AD rather than with stealing a man's lunch and fighting a 12-foot-tall singing robot your friend built.
XC1 also has one of the worst takes on fantasy "evil races" I've seen in a while. The animal-people enemies never get to speak, even when you'd expect them to. And while this is sort of, very briefly, given an in-setting explanation, the magic sword that can't harm "people" sure works on them. It sucks! Probably a result of thoughtlessness and priorities directed elsewhere more than anything else, but, still. It's at odds with all the stuff about the various peoples of the world coming together to combat a common threat and achieve shared goals. As is the sometimes grating heteronormativity, but I doubt you need me to tell you what to expect in that regard.
With all that said, there's a lot about XC1 that works, and the things that work really work for me. The plot is pure anime melodrama, with big maneuvers telegraphed in such a way that I was excited for them rather than anxious for them to be over. It's got a very strong visual aesthetic that sometimes contributes to the sense that this world and its problems are bigger than you realize and almost always is just fun to look at. The soundtrack is excellent, and while it's notable for contributions from some heavy hitters, all the area background music is very good as well--you've probably heard some of it if you've ever caught one of those YouTube playlists of chill Nintendo music before Nintendo took it down.
Despite some individual elements not always landing for me, they sometimes come together to great effect (this is late-game stuff, so click through to see it if you want/dare):
Discussion of late-game events in Xenoblade Chronicles
The longest chain of sidequests involves rebuilding a town that's been totally leveled. Which, yes, is a bunch of fetch quests, but this town becomes one of the last plot destinations before the endgame, and it's very satisfying to see the results of your efforts as the setting for cutscenes and so on. And when the villains attack the place, they aren't just threatening to burn down some stage backdrops. They're threatening to burn down your stage backdrops. You personally invited some of the townsfolk to live here, even.
Speaking of townsfolk, and re: the relationship chart of every named NPC: when things go bad, as things inevitably must in a story like this, characters die, and the ones represented on the chart have their icons permanently grayed out from then on. It seems like the logical thing to do if you're committed to putting a big shipping chart in the main menu of your RPG. But compared to a bunch of nameless villagers disappearing offscreen, never to be spoken of again, it's quietly devastating. You know who these people's friends and families were, and how they felt about them, and if you forget, the game leaves you with these permanent holes in the social fabric of the world as a reminder. You once could fix their relationships by fetching them three rabbit asses or whatever, and now they're forever beyond your ability to help.
I don't need a fictional setting to resolve itself into a tidy encyclopedia, so I'm not demanding answers, but I do think it's interesting that the game leaves us to speculate about why, after all, the Homs conceive of themselves as "colonists" when they were supposedly made like everybody else. Are they the descendants of the surviving Earth people we see very briefly in the ending, who settled on the Bionis for lack of anywhere else to go? It's not clear that this is technically even possible, and I'd be fine with any handwavy fantasy explanation, but "colonist" and "colony" are, let's say, loaded terms in English (and it is just the English word used in the Japanese text as well, コロニー), which makes me wonder.
The Definitive Edition also includes an epilogue chapter, Future Connected, which provides some vague setup for the third game. Or maybe more like whetting people's appetites for it. I thought I'd have a stronger opinion about how necessary it feels as a late addition to a complete story, but I wasn't the target audience for it, really. It was, at the time of its release, more for people with years of investment in the series who hadn't seen anything new done with these characters in a while. But what it did do for me was provide insight into how the Xenoblade team's approach to telling stories in these games has changed over time. It made me excited to see more--I found the party member dialogues more engaging than most of the heart-to-heart stuff in the main game, and not just because they're voiced and have actual character animation. They feel more specific to the characters and setting, and thus more like they're contributing to the whole.
Discussion of Xenoblade Chronicles: Future Connected plot stuff
You do have to excuse some disconnects if you play the one right after the other. Even after the sidequest to evacuate everybody, there apparently were a lot of people still in Alcamoth, just, hanging out with the horrible monsters roaming the streets, I guess? Though to be fair, you never see all of Alcamoth, just the airport concourse and the imperial palace. On that note, I like that we get elaboration on some things that aren't really talked about in XC1, e.g., we can guess there'd have to be Homs living in Alcamoth and/or around the Eryth Sea, but now we finally see those people. Really there's a lot about that part of the world that feels sort of truncated in retrospect (the Bionis' Shoulder zone from Future Connected is itself repurposed cut content), though it was probably for the best in the interest of XC1's pacing, given how much of the High Entia we get as it is.
It's an obvious thing, but I also like the idea that even after the heroes united literally the entire world for the climactic fantasy battle, some people would still just rub each other the wrong way. I do get the feeling that Gael'gar was supposed to come across as justified in his resentment even if it leads him to a eugenics-oriented politics that we clearly aren't supposed to be on board with. The "pureblooded" High Entia he's not fond of tended to either endorse or not care much about treating other people as second class, but nobody really talks with him about that outside of maybe one line of dialogue. Also re: Tyrea and her whole deal, the game has a tendency to say, "Well, this massive asshole was strong in their convictions, and you gotta hand it to them for that." As a wise philosopher once said, sometimes you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them," and the way this all lands is that the genocide-likers from the events of XC1 get a posthumous pass while the one in Future Connected is made to look ridiculous in a way that feels arbitrary as a result. Not that I need a game published by Nintendo to validate my real-world position that genocide is bad or whatever else, but it makes the protagonists seem not to have any kind of coherent principles, and how could they possibly not, at this point?
Funnily enough, it's in Future Connected that we get the one line (that I found, anyway) about how maybe the "monsters" aren't driven by malice and people could learn to communicate with them. So maybe they did eventually realize the chaotic evil beastmen thing sucks?
It's a bit of a shame that they don't let you import your party of max-level meat grinders, though I can understand not wanting to let people walk all over the thing you made. I'm more on the fence about getting rid of in-combat premonitions. It makes sense thematically, but then you still have to fight enemies balanced around that mechanic. The toughest fight in Future Connected largely comes down to spamming defensive abilities and hoping they're up at the right time, and while I would've liked to see how that quest resolves, I figured it was time to move on with my life.
This isn't an original observation, but the game XC1 most reminds me of is Final Fantasy XII. Maybe not everyone would mean this as a compliment, but I love FF12. It combines some of my favorite things about JRPGs in the DQ lineage and western PC RPGs, and I've had a very hard time finding anything that scratches the same itch.